The Uses of Media Literacy

Pete Bennett, Julian McDougall, John Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429575877
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: History of Education

Revisiting Richard Hoggart's classic work The Uses of Literacy (1957), this book applies Hoggart's framework to media literacy today, examining media literacy's various uses, the tensions between them and what this means for people, communities and the contemporary configurations of social class.

In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about how his working class community, in the North of England, were at once using the new 'mass literacy' for self-improvement, education, social mobility and civic engagement and, at the same time, the powerful were seizing the opportunity also to use this expansion in literacy, through the new popular culture, for commercial and political ends. Working in the intersection between education, cultural studies and literacies, the authors write about media literacy as a contested, under-theorised field through Hoggart's 'line of sight' to provide a perspective on media literacy and working class culture today.

This reimagining of a classic work, piercingly relevant to studies of class in Britain in 2019, will be of key interest to scholars in Media Studies, as well as interested readers in Communication Studies, Literacy Studies, Cultural Studies, Politics and Sociology.

1 Who are the ‘working classes’?

Julian McDougall, Pete Bennett and John Potter

Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy was a foundational influence on the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. It was an attempt to examine the changes that were taking place in working-class communities such as that of Hunslet in Leeds, where Hoggart grew up. Hoggart wanted to avoid romanticizing life in those areas, but he was clear that the changes that were taking place in them – particularly the impact of new forms of media and entertainment on more traditional ways of life – required serious attention.

(Connell and Hilton, 2014: 9)

This is taken from a retrospective exhibition and conference on CCCS 50 Years On.

It is widely agreed that the international field of media literacy has two foundational legacies. One is the established, rich field of the new literacies and the other is Cultural Studies and its development into Media Studies.

We are immersed in the field of media literacy and have, in our work, returned to Hoggart and his interest in ‘uses’ many times. In our discussions about Hoggart’s book and its significance for media literacy, the question of class endures – why does media literacy sidestep this kind of ‘serious attention’? Is it just because Hoggart’s ideas are now out of date, is it in favour of an intersectional lens or should we be returning to his kind of examination?

Questions of approach

One of the challenges of any reimagining of Hoggart is the renegotiation of ideas about social class, which appear in Hoggart, as much clearer assumptions about how things were. And one of the significant early problems and/or opportunities of using Hoggart’s organising principles and chapter titles is that there is no way forward save by way of this challenge since Hoggart sets out to define ‘the working classes’ before he starts, though for him this is an unproblematic clearing of common ground whereas for us it is more of a provocation, more ‘who might they be?’ than ‘who they actually are.’

In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Hoggart set out ‘questions of approach’, his anxieties more concerned with avoiding a romantic or sentimental view of the past when assessing the ‘debased condition’ of working-class culture at his time of writing. His ‘rough definition’ was born of necessity – in finding a focus and to justify his experiential approach. This has since been celebrated as a form of auto-ethnography, to recognise, as a methodology, his interest in the thick description of ‘less tangible features’ – manners of speaking, clothes, habits and aspects of the social practices of community. We can’t reproduce such an approach, nor would we want to or claim any value to either a general readership nor for the generation of ‘new knowledge’ for academia in so doing. But the transition point at which Hoggart made his contribution might be similar – from literacy to mass literacy then and into media literacy now – another set of appeals and encouraged attitudes, in a similar way, “The distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ attitudes, whilst it cannot be clear-cut, seems to be firm enough to be useful” (1957: 12).

We are not the first to attempt a reappraisal of Hoggart for the digital media age. Hartley (2012) considered the uses of, specifically digital literacy, but his approach differs to ours in that we are working so closely with Hoggart’s themes, whereas Hartley offers a close reading of ‘Uses’ in order to repurpose and re-appraise more directly for the working practices and societal influences of the creative industries. Viewing digital media as a comparatively more dynamic locus for productivity than industrial vision, Hartley offers up the literacy shifts to be about algorithms, risk and innovation and the threats to mainstream media from ‘the writing public’ (2012: 216), amounting to the uses of digital literacy being understood not only as a transition point but as a ‘creative wrecking ball’, but writing this before the moral panics over ‘fake news’, which offer another layer to our own context here. Seven years is a long time in this field, so the sands have already shifted, as they undoubtedly will another seven years from now. Nonetheless, Hartley’s rationale for his ‘Uses of Hoggart’ is in keeping with our own:

Hoggart’s importance lies not so much in the examples he chose, and certainly not in his judgement of individual items, but in his attempt to connect the inner life of the individual with the growth of mediated meanings in democratising and commercial societies.

(2012: 1–2)

Kate Pahl (2014b), too, turned to Hoggart for her own ethnographic socio-material literacies research in Yorkshire communities, both as methodological influence and for a similar (re)framing to ours. Pahl lends her voice as a critical friend to our book in an afterword. As she notes (2014b: 3), Hoggart himself ‘used’ literacy to include cultural material and its manifestations in home and place, relations and life – a socio-material account of literacy. In 2019, a sense of crisis in these ways of being in the world seems to pervade in public discourse – “the world we have made for ourselves, the experiment seems to be on the verge of complete and utter collapse” (Byrne, 2018).

In Lynsey Hanley’s (2017) personal account of the experience of social class, cultural reproduction and the habitus clash in moving between social mobility and divided identity, she describes The Uses of Literacy as the ‘intellectual backbone’ for her book and this gives us confidence in the experiment to apply Hoggart’s framework to media literacy in 2019, notwithstanding all the problems with so doing:

When he writes about the ‘fine topcoat’ of empty salmon and fruit tins on the Hunslet middens at Sunday teatime in the nineteen thirties, I’m instantly transported back to my parents’ kitchen in Birmingham in the late eighties, sticking on Radio 1 to hear the Top 40 countdown, getting out the can opener, mashing the salmon with vinegar and plopping Dream Topping on the peaches. I felt kinship with Hoggart’s essential loneliness as every exam he passed took him further away from his working class neighbourhood and closer to a place that was more comfortable in every way except for the emotions that accompanied him on his journey.

(2017: xiv)

There is some irony in Hanley ‘Doing Hoggart’ to theorise her own experience when, writing in old age, he reflected on his own evasion of an ‘ism’ as a feature of his own class consciousness:

I have no general theoretical approach of the sort which in other people can produce adherents; instead, only pragmatic observing and assorted connections. It now occurs to me that this may be why, unlike a few other writers on culture and society of my generation, I have never attracted an identifiable group of like-minded people, or wanted one.

(2005: 73)

This chapter will set the scene for our experiment. First, we present our own positions, in keeping with Hoggart’s partial auto-ethnography. Second, we move on to a thematic ‘vivid analysis’ to a set of responses to this chapter’s question, posed to 20 key thinkers in the field of media literacy in England, coming from a broad range of perspectives and a diverse demographic. This intervention aims to put another frame of reference alongside Hoggart’s in the chapters that follow, so we will look for the uses of contemporary media literacy, but at the same time give voice to a plurality of informed and agentive perspectives on what we mean now by ‘working class’, to ensure a rich and nuanced conceptual and intellectual understanding of the category, perhaps more so than Hoggart was either able or willing to offer, depending on how you see his intervention. In that regard, we are reminded to accept Paul Long’s appraisal:

The images of working class life in The Uses of Literacy have been weighted with the ‘burden of representation’, subject to value judgements questioning their adequacy and authenticity based upon a priori (and indivisible) aesthetic and political criteria. And yet, at base, and at work on a larger scale, in this kind of project, is the assertion of a democratic entitlement in the enunciation of working-class life, that its experience and culture is worthwhile, has integrity and a rationale.

(2008: 136)

The views we capture here will be in dialogue with Hoggart and also with recent accounts of this more complex ‘habitus clash’ experienced by ways of being across and between working-class and middle-class identities in the UK. Clearly, the question of who is the working class is contested in 2019, as is the field of enquiry into the uses of media literacy and so we will need to address both problems. Our answers to this question come from writers who have made a notable contribution to the field of media literacy in England in the three years preceding this book. So, rather than another ‘rough definition’, we want to provide a way of thinking about literacy and class in England from the community of practice we are writing for.

A rough definition

First, our own responses.

What needs to be established in any attempt to discuss the ‘who’ (or indeed ‘what’ or ‘where’) of the Working Class (capitalised here as an object of study) is what Rancière calls “a debate’s conditions of intelligibility” (Rancière, 2006: 10). When E.P. Thompson set himself such a task with the extra protection of significant historical context, he consciously used the not entirely satisfactory ‘making’ to allow sufficient ‘give’ in his developing accounts. However, rather than explore this variation on a theme, we’d rather construe a variation on the set question, which might also be the explication of another important implication of Hoggart’s writing about class. Hoggart writes of a class that he clearly believes exists and which, while we might differ in our understandings, we accept as a class that is existing, though their consciousness even as agency is largely implied or co-opted. His account is forgivably nostalgic though rarely sentimental. Thinking of class in 2019 is made problematic by the remarkable persistence of this caricature, picked up so pertinently by Owen Jones in Chavs. And it is this that is causing us problems when we turn to reconsider class in what Giles Lipovetsky describes as our ‘hypermodern times’, typified by the triumph of “the ideology of hedonistic individualism” (Lipovetsky, 2005, 10). Eduard Rix, for example, has argued that “The triumph of instantaneity signifies the end of any progressivist vision” (Rix, 2011). We cite this not as an argument to accept or even pursue but rather as evidence of a significantly more conflicted and complex set of contexts. Though Lynsey Hanley can argue for Hoggart’s “defence of working-class people’s agency” (2014) there is little sense here of a class consciousness, let alone the potential to be a revolutionary class.

Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle picks up in a very different key Hoggart’s concerns about massification, insists that the originality / distinctiveness of the proletarian project ‘can achieve nothing unless it can carry its own banners and recognise the enormity of its own tasks’ (Debord, 1977: 34). Hoggart, writing in 1989 in an introduction to The Road to Wigan Pier, recognises that ‘Class distinctions do not die: they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves’ (Hoggart, 1989: ix) but the tension remains over whether this is an active or passive project and whether Hoggart is interested. Without an active political agenda, beyond installing a critical literacy in as many working-class subjects who can effectively receive this, the ‘Working Class’ becomes inevitably a category, employed to both recommend and denigrate.

In 2016 a British Social Attitudes survey reported 60% of respondents identifying as working class but, in seeking to explain clear discrepancies between this self-labelling and the demographic profiling of the same participants, the researchers interpreted this as ‘working class of the mind.’ Hoggart had a sense of this, but it’s probably safe to say there was a higher level of consistency between mindset and stratified lived experience.

Hoggart’s “middle-class Marxist view” (5), in 2019, can easily be repurposed to take account of the noble savage’s detectable scraps of ‘genuinely popular’ culture, but it is far from profound to observe that the very aspects of the ‘new mass art.’ Hoggart worried about will now appear as such remnants to admire – long-form television drama, ideally from continental Europe, it is suggested, will replace the novel and thus the worthy reader becomes a worthy viewer from this line of sight. His own categorisation is regional, where people lived – Hunslet, Ancoats, Brightside and Attercliffe and ‘off the Hessle and Holderness Roads in Hull’ (8). Class is manifested in types of house, both their physical structure and their ownership status, and in education – the elementary school. None of us writing this book are from as far north as Hoggart. There is ambiguity in ‘Uses’ over whether we are to read this transitioning class community as deeply situated in geography, the ethnographers’ claims to Hoggart evade this question, touched upon by Paul Morley, reflecting on summer holidays in Kent, which “made me feel something I could never quite put my finger on, until I read Richard Hoggart describe how, to George Orwell, the north was a stranger place than Burma” (2013: 66).

So while the original book departs from this profiling in physical place to explore ‘ways of being’ working class in culture, habit and performance of identity – his “less tangible features” (9) – nevertheless he has these things to depart from in the first place (literally).

Hoggart himself was cited by the establishment as a ‘working class hero’, an exemplar of social mobility via grammar school, so his use of this ‘ticket’ to write about the background he was assumed to be ‘improving’ out of – and thus subject to his classes’ ‘ambiguous regard’ (1957: 57) – was an act of considerable resistance:

One Saturday afternoon in 1960, sixteen year old Robert Colls read ‘The Uses of Literacy’ in his family’s small terraced house in South Shields. He was surprised to read about the people whom he could see from his bedroom window, and was astonished to find a writer saying that the lives they lived were cultured, and worthy of attention. ‘I saw that what I was looking at from the window was indeed a ‘community’’. It was fairly big news for a grammar school boy who, at the time, was being trained to purge himself of where he was and where he came from.

(Todd, 2014: 244)

And now, 60 years on:

A tension between success for the individual at the expense of failure for many is a key motif in the narratives of many of the socially mobile. Social mobility is often presented as a straightforward linear process from one occupational category to another, but when we look at the lived experience of social mobility it is full of doublings-back, loops and curves, cul de sacs and diversions.

(Reay, 2017: 115)

This is a book about media literacy. The relationship between the uses of media literacy and changes to working-class culture is clearly more difficult to understand for us than it seemed to be for Hoggart when the ‘newer mass art’ arrived. We used to think about the notion of cultural capital as carrying within it a critique of the apparently offensive idea of it. Now, when we read the Great British Class Survey (see Savage, 2015) – albeit an exercise founded on a white, Eurocentric notion of class – and look at media literacy projects across Europe, it seems we’ve moved away from the more political impulses of Bourdieu and the writings of Stuart Hall to see cultural value hierarchy as ‘just a thing that’s there’:

Emerging cultural capital is therefore not about liking popular culture per se, but rather demonstrating one’s skill in manoeuvring between the choices on the menu through one’s ability to pick, choose and combine the ‘very best’ of popular culture.

(Savage, 2015: 115)

The problem with seeing cultural capital as somehow neutral in this way is that it fails to acknowledge the very hard work that the powerful put into the construction of the menu and the anxiety created by any serious redistribution of diet. So, should the question be recast – who is working class in relation to media? Media, of course, ‘do culture’ on people who they are not.

In April 2018, Owen Jones tweeted:

The main thing I’ve learned from working in the British media is that much of it is a cult. Afflicted by a suffocating groupthink, intolerant of critics, hounds internal dissenters, full of people who made it because of connections and/or personal background rather than merit.

This polemic was a response to the Sutton Trust research into ‘The UK’s Professional Elite.’ The data shows that there has been very little change to the educational background profiles of mass media professionals in the last 20 years, for example:

Of the Sutton Trust’s top 100 journalists that were educated in the UK, 51% attended private schools, 30% grammars and 19% comprehensives. Of the same sample, 54% attended Oxbridge, just under a quarter (24%) ST30 u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Who are the ‘working classes’?
• 2 Landscape with figures: a setting
• 3 ‘Them’ and ‘us’
• 4 The real world of people
• 5 The full rich life
• 6 Unbending the springs of action
• 7 Invitations to a candy-floss world! the newer mass art
• 8 The newer mass art: sex in shiny packets
• 9 Unbent springs: a note on a scepticism without tension
• 10 Unbent springs: a note on the uprooted and the anxious fear and loathing in an age of anxiety
• 11 Conclusion: the uses of media literacy
• 12 Afterword
• References