Media and Social Change

Guest Author: Mark Hobart

Media Anthropology has proven a refreshing presence in recent debates in media studies. Before we crack open the celebratory champagne, we might reflect on some potential dangers. Working between disciplines creates exciting new possibilities, perhaps most obviously proper attention to non-Western media. The drawback is epistemological confusion often masquerading as intellectual emancipation. Media studies was already the site of struggle for ownership between political economy, sociology, psychology, mass communications, cultural studies, literary studies and others, even before anthropology joined the fray. Each brings its own history of disciplinary debate over theoretical frameworks, objects and methods of study, often organized around hidden metaphors. And they are more or less incommensurate, because each frames reality differently from others. Cultural translation is not then just an issue of distant peoples. While some confusion or even misunderstanding is creative, inherent incoherence is not. While a thousand flowers may bloom briefly, almost all wither. How durable arguments are depends in large part on how theoretically rigorous they are rather than how fashionable their metaphors. Media Anthropology enjoys the added excitement of trying to bridge two such constellations of work.

How do we establish that social or political change has happened independently of its rival articulations, notably in the mass media? The Neoliberal attack on directed development was that the market, not intervention, was responsible for growth. With innumerable factors, variously interpretable, appealing to ‘reality’ offers no quick answers. Issues of development are inseparable from who represents what as what to whom on what occasions for what purposes. This is precisely where media studies is relevant with its analysis of the political and epistemological implications of articulation, and anthropology with its sensitivity to the circumstances of social practices, including those of representing.

Perhaps we should remember the risks of RUP (Residual Unresolved Positivism), the assumption that we have some privileged access to reality independent of frames of reference. We should not mistake features of discourse for features of the subject of discourse (Goodman 1972: 24).

If I ask about the world, you can offer to tell me how it is under one or more frames of reference; but if I insist that you tell me how it is apart from all frames, what can you say? We are confined to ways of describing whatever is described (Goodman 1978: 2–3).

How we conceive of knowing—and by extension, reading, viewing and engaging with the media—involves cultural frameworks, which are shot through with figurative imagery (Salmond 1982; Hobart 1995). Several implications are relevant.

First, a semantic analysis of representations is revealing. The difference between the action- and goal-oriented language of development projects, as against anthropologists’ criticisms of development studies’ failure to recognize the complexity of situations, roles and local understandings, fits eerily with Fiske’s distinction between the narrative structure of television action series and soaps respectively (Hobart n.d.). The terms development and modernization are teleological and Eurocentric. In principle, anthropology should be well placed to reflect on bi-discursivity: how to address how other people engage with the world and variously assert, claim, question or deny knowledge or understandings of that lived world. The difficult is doing so without reducing it to the hegemonic language of the dominant party.

Second, disclaimers notwithstanding, most studies presuppose a mechanical metaphor, the infamous ‘transmission model’, rather than cultural, relational or practice-based accounts of communication. If knowledge is for a purpose, the transmission model suits telecommunications corporations, governments and development agencies, as it sounds ‘scientific’ and avoids worrying about the circumstances of audience engagement. Few pay attention to Weaver’s caveat that mathematical models are ill suited to even the simplest social communication (1998: 4-28). The sheer elusiveness—or indeed undecidability—of what people do with and make of what they read, hear and watch encourages one of two trends. Either audiences are surveyable as ‘masses’, which naturalizes cultural and class assumptions about the ‘normal’ (Hacking 1990) or ‘ordinary’ (Roberts 1999). Or else a privileged few, imagined through ‘a philosophy of the subject’ (Baudrillard 1998), are made to stand for the whole. Suppose we inverted the usual assumptions. Rather than presuppose the necessary connectedness of production, dissemination, reception, reflection and use, no such connections need, or should, be assumed in terms of practice. Two null hypotheses follow. The SETI hypothesis (after the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project, see SETI Institute staff in photo) would go: the purposes of production should be sought in the circumstances of production, not of reception. The second runs: the producer’s ‘preferred meaning’ has no direct or determinable effect on audiences’ understandings or actions. This tack invites us to rethink what communication as social practice is about and to stop—collusively—treating the models that underpin industrial interests as natural.

Third, the notion of ‘information’ in the social sciences is largely figurative. Information is mostly meaningless until people do something with it. We use metaphor to domesticate over-abundant information (‘deluged’, ‘overloaded circuits’) in ‘a world where all bits are created equal and information is divorced from meaning’ (Gleick 2011: #1011.1). Where did the idea come from that information in itself is not just valuable and a sine qua non, but inherently emancipatory? The utopians who repeat such verities usually fail to note that their promulgators, the hardware and telecommunications’ companies, are among the world’s largest corporations. The obverse face of emancipatory technologies is the link between capital, surveillance and power. Nowhere is such techno-utopianism more evident than in exaggerated claims for new media in development. One response is from anthropologists who study the social practices and relations of knowledge/power through which information becomes meaningful, and from cultural studies scholars who analyze how articulatory practices produce hegemony. (The power that corporations like Google exercise over the global articulation of information is striking.) Different social formations stress different visions of knowledge. So what figures suit the ‘information age’? What leaps to mind is hunting and gathering, a mode of survival that requires judgement and experience. Neophytes who gorge themselves on everything to hand quickly fall ill or die. I find this image instructive about present simplistic claims about the new media and the Middle East. Thirteen years on, after similar hype over the fall of Suharto, the infrastructures of capital, power and privilege are little changed. Indeed thoughtful Indonesians argue that, in the long run, media claims about reformation have disarticulated accounts that run counter to the dominant ones. We should be careful of confusing our metaphors with the world.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, J. 1988 The masses. In Jean Baudrillard: selected writings.  Oxford: Polity.

Gleick, J. 2011. The information. HarperCollins e-books.

Goodman, N. 1972. The way the world is. Problems and projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

—1978. Ways of worldmaking. Hassocks: Harvester Press.

Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: Univ. Press.

Hobart, M. 1995. As I lay laughing. In Counterworks.  London: Routledge, 49-72.

—nd.  Is Development really part of Media Studies? Unpublished paper; available at www.criticalia.org/Articles.htm.

Roberts, J. 1999. Philosophizing the everyday. Radical philosophy 98: 16-29.

Salmond, A. 1982. Theoretical landscapes. In Semantic anthropology.  London: Academic Press.

Weaver, W. 1998. Some recent contributions. In The mathematical theory of communication. C. Shannon & W. Weaver, Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press.

Image credits:  Clive Goodard, Private Eye (24 June 2008) and SETI Institute