Race and Gender in Electronic Media

Content, Context, Culture

Rebecca Ann Lind

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317266129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume examines the consequences, implications, and opportunities associated with issues of diversity in the electronic media. With a focus on race and gender, the chapters represent diverse approaches, including social scientific, humanistic, critical, and rhetorical. The contributors consider race and gender issues in both historical and contemporary electronic media, and their work is presented in three sections: content, context (audiences, effects, and reception), and culture (media industries, policy, and production). In this book, the authors investigate, problematize, and theorize a variety of concerns which at their core relate to issues of difference. How do we use media to construct and understand different social groups? How do the media represent and affect our engagement with and responses to different social groups? How can we understand these processes and the environment within which they occur? Although this book focuses on the differences associated with race and gender, the questions raised by and the theoretical perspectives presented in the chapters are applicable to other forms of socially-constructed difference.

Chapters 5, 10, 12, and 19 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

RACE AND GENDER IN ELECTRONIC MEDIA

Perennial Challenges and Opportunities

Rebecca Ann Lind

The average person aged 18 and above in the US spends just four minutes shy of 12 hours per day with electronic media (Nielsen, 2015). Close to five hours per day is spent with television; in addition, we spend just under two hours per day with radio and close to another two hours per day online via PCs or smartphones. Given these figures, it is clear that for the average American adult nothing else can approximate the time we spend with electronic media. Using this average, people who get a minimal six hours of sleep per night spend two-thirds of their waking lives with electronic media. For people who get eight hours of sleep, this average represents three-quarters of their waking lives. Concerns about this can’t be alleviated by saying “most of this is probably multitasking”; the fact remains that most of us are spending the vast majority of our waking hours with the electronic media. We have long been concerned about the effects of such media use. Fears of how audiences are affected by entertainment (and other) content extend at least as far back as the fourth century BCE to Plato, who argued, as Heins put it, “that the government should censor unsavory or unpatriotic messages” (2001, p. 2). These concerns are hardy perennials,¹ indeed.

Constructing and Responding to Difference

At its core, this volume is concerned with issues of difference. How do we use media to construct and understand different social groups? How do the media represent and affect our engagement with and responses to different social groups? How can we understand these processes and the environment within which they occur? Although this book focuses on the differences associated with race and gender, the questions raised by and the theoretical perspectives presented in the chapters are often applicable to other forms of difference. Indeed, the primary focus on race and gender is complemented in this book at times by chapters which also incorporate other differences such as social class, able-bodiedness, or appearance.

Considering race and gender in the context of difference is important for two main reasons: these differences are socially constructed, and these socially constructed groups experience very different realities. One need not look farther than arrest and sentencing records or healthcare disparities (such as presented by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, n.d.; Federal Bureau of Investigation, n.d.; United States Bureau of Justice, n.d.) or employment and salary data (such as presented by the United States Department of Labor, n.d.) for evidence of the latter. The former is less amenable to statistical verification, but the socially constructed nature of raced and gendered differences nonetheless remains significant.

According to Boas (1945/1969), “the existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority” (p. 20). Boas further argued that “the belief in organic differences between [races] has come to appear as so fundamental that social and political relations are determined by it,” and that we do not “demand any careful examination of the reasons for the feeling of difference, but accept it” (1945/1969, p. 20). Thus, Boas challenged biological theories of race, foregrounding the reality of race as a social rather than a biologically meaningful construct. Sixty years later, however, Smedley and Smedley (2005) said that “recent advances in the sequencing of the human genome and in an understanding of biological correlates of behavior” (p. 16) have reinforced the conflation of biology and race. They argued that these developments “have fueled racialized science, despite evidence that racial groups are not genetically discrete, reliably measured, or scientifically meaningful” (p. 16). They stated that “race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real” (p. 16) and advocated instead for approaching race as a socially constructed phenomenon. The race-based social and political determinations originally noted by Boas in 1945 continue in the new millennium. According to Omi (2001, p. 254), “the idea of race and its persistence as a social category is only given meaning in a social order structured by forms of inequality—economic, political, and cultural—that are organized, to a significant degree, by race.”

As with race, considerations of gender have evolved from what were once primarily biological understandings into a recognition of the importance of the social context in which gender functions, and seeing “gender as systems of status and power relations” (Shields & Dicicco, 2011, p. 496). In a special anniversary section in Psychology of Women Quarterly, Shields and Dicicco reviewed some of the “massive transformations” that have occurred in our understanding of gender, and introduced a set of retrospectives highlighting “turning points in the social psychology of gender” (2011, p. 491), which include a focus on gender in a social context.

The social context was powerfully highlighted by Berger and Luckmann (1967), who in The Social Construction of Reality argued that “social order exists only as a product of human activity” (p. 52, emphasis in original). Our actions—no matter how mundane—are both the genesis of social order and the impetus by which it continues to exist. In short, through our interactions, we create our world. Our actions generate and perpetuate shared mental representations; reality and knowledge are socially relative and contextually situated. Subjective meanings become objective facticities. As we engage with others in processes of reciprocal habitualized activity, we create and maintain institutions which ultimately serve to control us by “setting up predefined patterns of conduct” (1967, p. 55). As Lind interpreted Berger and Luckmann,

Even as we create our world, therefore, we create, recreate, and legitimate institutions, and we begin to see these socially constructed institutions—which restrict, limit, and inhibit us—as objective realities. Institutions are continually reified, the symbolic universes (belief systems) underlying them reinforced, and their supposed objective status augmented as they are passed on to subsequent generations.

(2015, p. 2)

Equally important is Berger and Luckmann’s concept of typification. Typifications are knowledge structures, cognitive frameworks, or sense-making structures that we use to help us understand and respond to the world around us. As we approach our interactions and dealings with others, we are guided and affected by typificatory schemes; as Berger and Luckmann put it, “I apprehend the other as ‘a man,’ ‘a European,’ ‘a buyer,’ ‘a jovial type,’ and so on” (1967, p. 31). However, Berger and Luckmann acknowledged that only face-to-face interactions provide direct evidence regarding a particular person’s actions and attributes; further, they argued that “the typifications of social interaction become progressively anonymous the further away they are from the face-to-face situation” and, further, that “every typification . . . entails incipient anonymity” (p. 31). During face-to-face interactions, our always potentially anonymizing typifications are, as Berger and Luckmann described it, “‘filled in’ by the multiplicity of vivid symptoms referring to a concrete human being” (p. 32). In the process, the person with whom we are interacting—despite continuing to be seen as a member of the potentially anonymous and anonymizing category or group being typified—becomes less anonymous and less typical, that is, unique and individualized.

Typifications are similar to what have been called schema, schemata (Bartlett, 1932), or social schema, defined by Fiske and Taylor as “knowledge about a concept or type of stimulus, including its attributes and relations among those attributes” (1991, p. 98). Pennington (2000) argued that social schemas are important in understanding stereotyping, even though they are conceptually distinct. According to Dovidio and Gaertner, stereotypes contain information about qualities such as social roles [and] traits,” and “reflect beliefs about the qualities that distinguish a group from others, that characterize the typical member of a group, and that indicate the consistency with which members of a group share a quality” (2010, p. 1084). As several of the chapters in this book will show, stereotypes are alive and well in the mass media.

The chapters in this volume, as mentioned above, are concerned with how difference is constructed and responded to in an electronically mediated environment. Several chapters use social scientific methods to document the under-representation or stereotypical representation of minorities in media or to build theory or taxonomy to guide research investigating the effects of those representations on audiences. These are complemented by chapters engaging rhetorical or critical perspectives to analyze how raced or gendered media texts serve to perpetuate or challenge the dominant ideology—whether these texts are produced by media conglomerates, independent media producers, or the users themselves. Yet another approach is represented by authors who investigate the impact of regulatory, legal, and policy decisions on the extent to which different socially constructed groups have access to media.

Media Content, Context, and Culture

The two main pleasures in compiling a collection such as this are working with the contributors in developing and expressing their arguments, and organizing the resulting fruits of the authors’ labors into a coherent whole. How best to arrange these individual stories?

One option is to arrange the contributions according to whether they consider race, gender, or a combination or intersection thereof. For example, the contributions by Dixon (Chapter 10), Brookey and Ecenbarger (Chapter 11), Campbell (Chapter 12), Napoli and Obar (Chapter 17), and Albarran and Warncke (Chapter 20) focus on issues related to race and ethnicity in electronic media. The works by Billings, Moscowitz, and Yang (Chapter 3); Finklea (Chapter 6); and Light (Chapter 14) focus on issues related to gender. The rest of the chapters—the majority—study both race and gender. Of these, some focus more on race than on gender (Mastro & Sink, Chapter 9; Florini, Chapter 19), whereas others focus more on gender than on race (Baker, Chapter 7; Steiner & Eckert, Chapter 13; Byerly & Valentin, Chapter 16; Massanari, Chapter 18; and to a lesser extent Vavrus, Chapter 5). Still others consider race and gender equally: Signorielli (Chapter 2); Yep, Russo, Allen, and Chivers (Chapter 4); Corsbie-Massay (Chapter 8); Peterson (Chapter 15); and Lind and Swenson-Lepper (Chapter 21).

Another option is to arrange the chapters according to the type of media being considered. For example, both Vavrus (Chapter 5) and Finklea (Chapter 6) study films (either documentary or fiction) to learn more about gender in our society. A number of authors study broadcast television to interrogate race or gender (or both): Signorielli (Chapter 2); Billings, Moscowitz, and Yang (Chapter 3); Yep, Russo, Allen, and Chivers (Chapter 4); Baker (Chapter 7); Byerly and Valentin (Chapter 16); and Albarran and Warncke (Chapter 20). Some chapters are not medium-specific: Corsbie-Massay (Chapter 8); Mastro and Sink (Chapter 9); Lind and Swenson-Lepper (Chapter 21). The largest subset of chapters is that investigating what may be called new media, emerging media, or social media, as enabled by digital communications technologies: Dixon (Chapter 10); Brookey and Ecenbarger (Chapter 11); Campbell (Chapter 12); Steiner and Eckert (Chapter 13); Light (Chapter 14); Peterson (Chapter 15); Napoli and Obar (Chapter 17); Massanari (Chapter 18); and Florini (Chapter 19).

The chapters could also be organized according to whether they primarily considered entertainment media or news/public affairs media, by theoretical paradigm employed, or by some other potentially equally interesting metric. Ultimately, I have used none of these possible organizational schemes, although I have presented them to facilitate alternate approaches to the material in this volume.

The chapters herein are grouped into three main sections, which represent three of the major components of our complex contemporary media environment. Part I covers media content, or the messages which are disseminated via mass media; Part II considers the media context, including audiences, effects, and reception; and Part III looks at media culture, including media industries, policy, and production.

As I have argued elsewhere (Lind, 2013), an organizational scheme based on audiences, content, and the production environment is consistent with both social scientific and critical models of communication. Social scientists have long been informed by the work of Laswell (1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949), and many empirical studies of mass media can be understood as addressing (at least in part) questions of who says what to whom and with what effect. The work of critical/cultural studies scholars can be organized similarly around what is being said to whom, by whom, and with what effect, although these studies take a more overtly political stance and approach these focal points as what can be called “points of intervention”: text, audience, and production. Thus the tripartite division of this book aligns well with multiple paradigms, and allows for a rich confluence of perspectives from the social scientific to the humanistic to the historical to the critical.

In this book, questions of “who says,” or message production as a point of intervention, are in the media culture section (Part III), which focuses on how, by whom, and in what sort of culture (including organizational culture and policy/regulatory culture, and historical as well as contemporary perspectives) mediated messages are crafted. Questions of “what” is said, or the media text as a point of intervention, are in the media content section (Part I), and include content analysis, framing analysis, narrative analysis, and critical analysis. Questions of “to whom and with what effect,” or reception as a point of intervention, are in the media context section (Part II), which includes how individuals receive, use, understand, and are affected by mediated messages; this section contains research employing experiments, discourse analyses, analyses informed by actor network theory, and more.

Despite the value of organizing this book according to the works’ focus on content, context, or culture, it is important to acknowledge that some chapters cross the content-context-culture boundaries. At times they span the boundaries because even though there is a predominant focus on one or another of the three main sections, the authors have taken a wide enough view of their topic that they expand beyond that section. For example, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Race and Gender in Electronic Media: Perennial Challenges and Opportunities
• Part I Content
• Part II Context: Audiences, Effects, Reception
• Part III Culture: Media Industries, Policy, Production
• Index