All Media Are Social

Sociological Perspectives on Mass Media

Andrew M. Lindner, Stephen R. Barnard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317749370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From TV to smartphone apps to movies to newspapers, mass media are nearly omnipresent in contemporary life and act as a powerful social institution. In this introduction to media sociology, Lindner and Barnard encourage readers to think critically about the power of big media companies, state-media relations, new developments in journalism, representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in media, and what social media may or may not be doing to our brains, among other topics. Each chapter explores pressing questions about media by carefully excavating the results of classic and contemporary social scientific studies. The authors bring these findings to life with anecdotes and examples ripped from headlines and social media newsfeeds. By synthesizing research on new media and traditional media, entertainment media and news, quantitative and qualitative studies, All Media Are Social offers a succinct and accessibly-written analysis of both enduring patterns and some of the newest developments in mass media. With strong emphases on theory and methods, Lindner and Barnard provide students and general readers alike with the tools to better understand the ever-changing media landscape.

Section 1

Overview

Chapter 1

All Media Are Social

These days, we encounter media in the form of our Facebook feed on smartphones while we eat breakfast, on our laptops throughout the day, and on podcasts as we fall asleep. American adults spend an average of 12 hours per day using various forms of media (see Figure 1.1). As sociologist Todd Gitlin has noted, “In a society that fancies itself the freest ever, spending time with communications machinery is the main use to which we have put our freedom.”¹ Media are the primary means by which we learn the decisions our politicians make, but mass media play a role in socializing us about how we ought to dress, what we ought to eat, and how we see ourselves in relation to others. In other words, the media—the sum total of the organizations and the people who work for them, the users, and creators, the technology undergirding it all—are an incredibly important social institution in contemporary society. Media are essential to socialization, identity-construction, but also the dissemination of news in democratic societies. This book explores the landscape of the diverse field of media sociology. In this chapter, we will attempt to better understand both of those terms (“media” and “sociology”) and what it means to think about media in a sociological way.

Figure 1.1 Average Media Use by U.S. Adults, 2017

[Source: Statista]

All Media

Given how central a role media play in our lives, it is not surprising that the term, “media,” has taken on a variety of different meanings. Technically speaking, “media” is the plural of the word “medium” (i.e., “mediums”). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “media” is defined as “the main means of mass communication, esp. newspapers, radio, and television, regarded collectively; the reporters, journalists, etc. working for organizations engaged in such communication.”² By this definition, “media” include technological platforms like books, social media web sites, TV, computers, and smartphones, but also specific TV shows, apps, and movies as well as the people who contribute to making these things.

Black Panther is an example of media. So are The Washington Post and Reddit.com. So are all the books in your local library and your favorite fitness tracking app. Journalists, coders working for Google, and the Hollywood movie stars are all members of the media. This one word means all of those different things. As the mildly pedantic title of this book suggests, the grammatically correct way of conjugating the word “media” is “the media are” because media are plural.

Nonetheless, language has a sneaky way of changing when the grammatical purists and dictionary writers aren’t looking. Occasionally, students will think of media as referring to just the digital tools that facilitate social interaction like text messaging apps, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Since the late-2000s, we have tended to refer to these web sites and apps as “social media” because they allow us to engage in some forms of mediated social interaction. But the truth is that social media are just one type of media and all forms of media, including ones that feel solitary, have profoundly social dimensions. For example, reading a book can connect you with the experiences of people in very different places and points in time, deepening empathy and understanding, even if you are sitting in a room by yourself. Hence, the title of this book and this chapter, All Media Are Social.

Another more narrow use of the term comes from the realm of politics, in which “the media” is sometimes used to refer to mainstream news outlets, journalists, and other members of the press. Ironically, in this usage, the definite article (“the”) in front of the word “media” seems to imply a singular entity—not just any media, it’s the media. It may be obvious to point out, but news organizations like CNN and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), reporters like Maggie Haberman and Bob Woodward, and pundits like Sean Hannity and Chris Matthews are most certainly not a single entity. But, perhaps, this shortcut reflects a sense that “the media” are a sort of chatty, homogeneous social club with shared cultural and ideological assumptions. Therefore, it is not uncommon to see grammatically incorrect claims that “the media is” one thing or another.

Todd Gitlin also sees the grammatical error (“the media is”) as linked to the view that media are monolithic, but argues that it extends far beyond just politics. Gitlin claims that our sense of “the media” as a singular entity stems from a deep homogeneity across entertainment media, news media, the Internet, TV, etc. As he writes, “something feels uniform—a relentless pace, a pattern of interruption, a pressure toward unseriousness, a readiness for sensation, and anticipation of the next new thing.”³ While Gitlin’s interpretation is both critical and expansive, the underlying point is that part of the reason that people sense a unity across all the various types of media is because they tend to share cultural and aesthetic qualities and often links of ownership and shared financial incentive.

This observation should not come as a surprise. The media are many things, but the media is a social institution. Just as the family is an institution, but individual families are different from each other in many ways, so, too, the media are an institution with norms that constrain the action of individual actors and organizations, but there are also real differences across various types of media. Media sociologists are interested in all the different component parts that make up “the media,” including different technologies, organizations, media workers, ownership models, cultures, and the ways that audiences respond to and are affected by media.

Are Social

What does it mean to study media sociologically? Many different disciplines, including communications, media studies, technology studies, law, historians, and literary studies, are interested in examining media. Some of these disciplines, like literary studies, are fundamentally humanistic in nature. They tend to approach a given media artifact, say, Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror movie Get Out and interpret the various meanings in this “text.” For example, one fairly apparent reading of that movie is that it acts as an allegory for race relations in the contemporary U.S. However, scholars with differing emphases might read the text for its innovation in the horror genre, its gender politics, and so on.

Unlike these humanist disciplines, sociology is a social science, meaning we use systematic methods to collect various forms of data. In sociology, these data could be quantitative (e.g., surveys, experiments, count-based content analyses, etc.) or qualitative (e.g., interviews, ethnography, observation, etc.). While some sociologists specialize in developing social theory that informs and is reinforced by empirical findings, one characteristic that separates sociologists from some disciplines studying media is that we rely on social scientific methods to answer questions.

Substantively, sociology attempts to understand the dynamic relationship between individuals and society.⁴ How do social structures, or stable patterns of routines and relationships organized through institutions and individuals within a society, enable or constrain individual behavior? How do individuals use their agency or free will to reinforce or change features of society? Media sociology tries to ask these questions within the context of the social institution of mass media. For example, an important question in media sociology involves the underrepresentation of women and people of color in Hollywood movies (more on that in chapters 8 and 9). Many people see underrepresentation as a problem, but who actually has power over deciding who stars in movies? Many casting agents and even studio executives, who seem pretty powerful, claim they would like to have more diverse casts, but feel constrained by the structure of a capitalist marketplace and audience preferences.⁵ But if it is the system to blame, where did that system come from? What continues to hold it in place? And how can things change?

The deeper questions undergirding this example are about power. Who has it? When do they get to use it? Sociologists, in general, tend to be interested in how power works both through social structures, but also through culture. It’s not just laws, job titles, access to resources, and other structures that constrain behavior. It also happens through social norms, cultural tastes and preferences, and ideology, or a system of beliefs people hold. For example, relatively few people even in a wealthy society like the U.S. earn most of their money from the stock market, so why does the nightly TV news broadcast give us a daily stock market report? There’s no law saying they have to. Rather, it is reflective of an ideology that the overall well-being of major companies is important. For that reason, most journalists and producers working on these broadcasts probably feel unempowered to change it because there is a strong social norm to report what the Dow Jones did today. The point is that culture and structure are often linked and both exercise great power over how media work.

Even though structure and culture shape behavior in powerful ways, there is such a thing as taking an idea too far. In 2017, The Atlantic ran a story with the headline, “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”⁶ This headline is a perfect example of technological determinism or the view that social outcomes stem directly from the introduction of new technologies. Smartphones are invented and, BOOM, a generation is destroyed. Media sociologists tend to be critical of such arguments for a few reasons. While new technologies can shape behavior, people also have agency. More importantly, as sociologists Jennifer Earl and Katrina Kimport argue, “[I]t is people’s usage of technology—not technology itself—that can change social processes.”⁷ Rather than thinking of technology as determining some outcome, media sociologists increasingly think of technologies in terms of technological affordances or “the range of functions and constraints that an object provides.”⁸ For example, compared to a printed book, one affordance of e-reader devices is that the user can search for a particular word or phrase. We need not make the assumption that any outcome must occur simply because a technology offers particular affordances. Researchers have elaborated their theorizing of affordances by observing that people must perceive that an affordance exists in order to make use of it, and that technology’s affordances may not be equally available to all users. For example, people with physical disabilities may lack the dexterity to make use of all affordances of touch-screen devices.⁹ Viewed from this perspective, it is obvious that to the extent that young people’s behavior is changing, it is probably not caused by the devices themselves, but by some of the ways that young people use them.

Media sociologists are not alone in asking questions about power, structure and agency, culture, and technological affordances. Many researchers in communications and media studies are interested in the same questions. Some of the most fruitful collaborations have come from researchers who collaborate across disciplinary lines. Moreover, many communications departments have incorporated more courses with a sociological perspective into their curriculum. But what makes a question about media inherently sociological is if it considers how structure, culture, and agency interact to place limits or create new opportunities for people.

Despi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• SECTION 1: Overview
• SECTION 2: Production
• SECTION 3: Content
• SECTION 4: Audiences
• Recommended Resources for All Media Are Social
• Index