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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781841501109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect, Limited |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2004 |
| Series: | Changing Media, Changing Europe , #1 |
| Pages: | 315 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.75(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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European Culture and the Media
Changing Media â" Changing Europe Series Volume 1
By Ib Bondebjerg, Peter Golding
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2004 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-111-6
CHAPTER 1
Supplementation: On Communicator Control of the Conditions of Reception
Elihu Katz and Mihaela Popescu
'New Media/New Europe' conceals a paradox. The new media are media of segmentation and individuation while the new Europe cries out for media of unification. Unification was the achievement of the era of mass communication beginning with the newspaper (Tarde, 1901; Anderson, 1983), followed - all the more effectively - by classical broadcasting (Cardiff and Scannell, 1987). These were the media of national unification, and might have served European unity well if they were not being undermined by the new media of divisiveness - the satellite, the cable, the internet and the cellphone.
This chapter offers some consolation. On the eve of this new era, we want to argue that the effect of broadcasting - including the effect on social integration - was not as automatic as we tend to think. The 'wise communicator' did not rely only on the broadcast message itself, or on the scope of its diffusion, or on the power of technology, but invested additional effort to ensure that the message would be 'read' as intended. By now, it is a commonplace observation that most messages are not distributed at random but are targeted, implicitly or explicitly, to marked audiences. We will argue that this targeting is not just an epiphenomenon of the new media technology, but has always been present, even in the one-hundred-and -fifty years of classic mass communication.
In doing so, we are trying to recalculate the balance of power between senders and receivers, arguing that the time has come to return some of the power that 'reception theory' has taken from communicators and given to audiences. We are not, however, calling for 'return to a theory of powerful effects.' Rather, we are arguing that communicators have restricted audience autonomy by gaining control of those contexts, relations and identities that will reinforce the 'dominant' reading.
The Argument
This argument came to life while reading John Peters' brilliant Speaking Into the Air (1999). Peters offers us two competing models of communication - the Socratic model of dialogue, and the Jesus model of broadcasting. The dialogic formula is a well-tailored effort to influence a carefully selected alter, clinically so to speak, i.e. in a manner that is perfectly calibrated to the receiver's reactions and resistances. No overhearers are allowed, because the message might be misinterpreted. For the same reason, it would be better not to write the message down, lest it fall into the wrong hands. The broadcast model is attributed to Jesus, whose messages were cast as widely as possible, fall where they may, in an all-embracing gesture of universalism and equal access. Peters' argument is that broadcasting is an altruistic gesture, a generous reaching out, and less occupied with effectiveness.
This assertion led us to wonder whether other broadcasters - in the generic sense of senders of messages to an anonymous and atomized multitude - surrender their messages so readily. Do they really abandon all hope of influencing the decoding and reception? One wonders even about Jesus who is perfectly aware that there are special people who 'have ears to hear,' and that some of these hearers were given a share in relaying the message and perhaps giving it organizational form (Matthew 28:19-20).
We are alluding here to the general category that Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948) called 'supplementation,' arguing that a message has a better chance of diffusion and acceptance if it enlists others to carry it forward and/or if the receivers are appropriately situated and primed. Lazarsfeld and Merton refer to the listening groups who gathered to hear Father Coughlin's rabid radio talks prior to World War II, but it is equally true of the Rabbi of Lubavitch whose associates organized speaker-phone listening posts around the world, or to evangelists who, not content simply to count the people who raise their hands for Christ, refer these penitents to the church nearest their homes. Nor is it different from Lang and Lang's (Lang & Lang, 1990) discovery that the posthumous reputation, and price, of an artist is a function of whether her name and work were given into the hands of a faithful spokesperson. In short, we are arguing not that the two-step flow of communication works - provided that it supports the message and its source - but that communicators, even altruistic ones, are as smart as we are. Or are they? Do they know about the second step? Do they try to co-opt it? What other things do they do to enhance the reception of their message? To say it another way, we are asking whether the International Olympics Committee, or the networks that broadcast the Olympics or the Superbowl, have not actively intervened in the construction of living-room fans (Real, 1977; Rothenbuhler, 1988).
What Broadcasters Know
That communicators are concerned about the situation in which their messages are received, is documented by Paddy Scannell in several places (1996; 2000). He refers, for example, to the nervous reaction of the Royal Family to the BBC's early proposals to produce live broadcasts of royal occasions, first on radio, then on television. To the initial proposal in 1923, the Family said no, arguing that listeners who happened on the transmission of the Wedding while in a public house 'might not even take their hats off.' On another occasion in 1953, when the Royals were reluctantly agreeing to allow television into the Abbey for the Coronation, the BBC protested that the newsreel cameras were being given a better vantage-point than the TV cameras to the more ritualistic, more intimate, moments of the ceremony. The official reply was that the newsreels had agreed to submit their film for possible editing, and more important for our purposes, that the decorum of the viewers in a cinema would surely be appropriate. But 'what can we expect of television viewers in their homes?' they worried. In other words, they feared that home viewers of the solemn ceremony might view the event in their underwear, so to speak.
To take a related example from the coverage of the Royal Wedding in 1953, we know that the American networks sent their anchors to broadcast from London for a whole week in advance, in order to rehearse their audiences in the symbols, the route of march, the Church service, etc. in anticipation of the roles they would be expected to take as awe-inspired 'witnesses' to the event. In effect, they were preparing their audience to dress up and seat themselves properly on the day, as Members of the Wedding. Mutatis mutandis, consider Victor Klemperer's (1998) diary for 11 November 1933, at the crucial moment of the plebiscite. 'During the thirteenth hour,' he writes, quoting the radio announcer, '"Hitler will come to the workers." The language of the Gospels exactly,' Klemperer notes, 'the Redeemer comes to the poor.'
The basic problem of modern broadcasters - sources and transmitters - is the separation, in space, between themselves and their audiences. This compounds the problem of one-to-many. In Jesus' time, there were many but they were present physically; in the era of broadcasting, the problem of many is compounded by the problem of non-presence. Then, as we have just seen, there is the further problem of 'home,' that is, not just that the audience is at a distance, but that it is typically (not always) dispersed in an infinite number of nuclear cells. As a footnote, we should recall that there was a moment when German TV was being designed for reception in the streets, not in homes (Uricchio, 1989), and this was true for a time in Italy as well. Communal reception used to be the norm in Indian villages - maybe still is - for economic reasons, but the communal assembly was also thought to be reinforcing of developmental communications.
But since broadcasting has moved us all inside, we must face up to the question of whether broadcasters are able to 'situate' home viewers in arrangements that are conducive to reception of their messages-as-intended. In a word, can broadcasters rearrange the furniture to suit their messages? Do they even try? Scannell tells us that they do try. Quoting the first Head of BBC Talks, Scannell (2000, p. 10) reports that 'she realized two things: First, that the unknown audience should not be thought of as a mass but as a constellation of individuals, with individual interests, needs, tastes and opinions ... Second, that the design of talk for absent listeners should take into account the context within which listening took place. (She) realized that the broadcaster must consider where listeners were situated as they listened, and adapt what was said to those circumstances.'
Scannell is pessimistic. Citing interviews conducted with listeners to the 1937 coronation of George VI, 'What shows up quite clearly,' says Scannell, 'is the impossibility, as the Dean of Westminster foresaw, of controlling the behaviour of listeners to a solemn, sacred event. They could listen, if they wished, in pubs with their hats on or in their bath with nothing on, for that matter.' In spite of his awe for the powers of radio, Klemperer was similarly surprised, observing audience behaviour at the Long Distance Lorry Drivers' Restaurant near Leipzig (11 September 1933) 'The customers all came and went,' he notes, 'taking their leave with "Heil Hitler." But no one was listening, I could barely understand the broadcast because a couple of people were playing cards, striking the table with loud thumps, talking very loudly. It was quieter at other tables. One man was writing a postcard, one was writing in his order book, one was reading the newspaper. And landlady and waitress are talking to each other or to the card players. Truly, not one of a dozen people paid attention to the radio for even a single second, it could just as well have been transmitting silence or a foxtrot from Leipzig'. Are we wrong, then, in thinking that they can surmount such obstacles? That's what this chapter is about.
What Researchers Know
Before returning to what broadcasters do to supplement their message, let's reconsider what we know, in communication research, about enhancing the likelihood that a message will be received as intended. A good place to start is Michael Schudson's (1989) 'How Culture Works' which lists five mechanisms for assuring the success of a piece of culture - whether a speech, a person, a message, a ritual, an advertisement, or an idea - where success is measured (implicitly) in terms of salience, longevity, and so on. Using a rhetorical device of his own, Schudson calls attention to the five 'r"s of 1) retrievability, or providing easy access at a low price; 2) rhetoric, in which he includes the compatibility between messages and medium; 3) resonance, which refers to the compatibility between message and receiver's values and concerns; 4) institutional retention, whereby a piece of culture is incorporated in a textbook or a holiday or a prayer; and 5) resolution, or what might be called 'instructions for use,' that engage the society in active response.
Schudson is speaking not as an advice-giver but as an observer of what works. As in the case of 'supplementation,' if the communicator gets to these mechanisms before the audience does, he can press what he has learned into the service of the message, rather than stand by, idly, waiting for the receiver to misunderstand or to decode oppositionally, or ignore. Applying his idea of pseudo-gemeinschaft, Beniger (1986) asserts that broadcasters do get there first and have been there for a long time, citing, as an example, the calculated use of the personalized rhetoric of sincerity and authenticity, as in Merton's (1946) Kate Smith. In other words - in yet another restatement of our hypothesis - we are suggesting, with Beniger, that broadcasters strive to incorporate dialogic elements to tailor their broadcasts.
In his famous paper 'Encoding/Decoding', Hall (1980) expresses the same idea in different words - namely, that audiences are not free to 'decode' a text as they want, but restrained in their decoding by the normative and performative rules according to which the text is constructed. This is the job of broadcasting.
Researchers know quite a lot more, something which we will repeatedly illustrate as we move along. Specifically, we will attempt to devise a (preliminary) typology of ways in which communicators try to shepherd their messages in order to increase their likelihood of success. That is, we will try to take a step beyond Beniger, Schudson and Hall in cataloguing examples of 'supplementation' which include, but are by no means not limited, to rhetorical devices.
A Typology of Supplementation
We think that there are two kinds of communicative intervention, which we call Constructing and Exploiting, and a number of targets of these interventions, which we call 'space,' 'time,' 'frame,' 'identity,' 'trust,' 'practice,' 'feedback,' and 'feedforward.' These targets seem to collapse into four major categories of control - of the context (space, time and cognitive frames), of roles and relations (identity and trust), of action or implementation (practice), and of reaction (feedback and feedforward).
By constructing, we mean that the communicator tries to constrain the audience to enter a space (real or virtual), a time, a frame of reference, a role, a routine which reinforce the intent of the communicator. By exploiting, we mean that the communicator tries to take advantage of pre-existing spaces, times, cognitive frames, roles, routines, etc. Manipulations of space, time and frames refer to the situational contexts of reception; identity refers to a role which is induced in the receiver, trust refers to the relationship proposed between sender and receiver; practice refers to habitual action; feedback alludes to reactions, intended or not, transmitted by receiver to sender; and feedforward implicates the receiver in transmitting a message to others. Notice that these are echoes of elements in the dialogic process, something that we would find quite familiar in a laying-on of hands - that is, a ceremony of ordination, for example. If you will bear with us, we would like to invite you to walk through these boxes, which, for the time being, may serve as a reservoir for sorting ideas rather than as a responsible statement.
1. When the communicator attempts to create an environment that will help assure the proper reception of his/her message, we call this constructing space. Constructions may be made of bricks and mortar, but they also may be made of words and symbols - what Austin (1962) calls performatives. God telling Moses that he is standing on Holy Ground, in case he hadn't noticed that the bush was burning, is such a symbolic construction, designed to enhance the message. So is the gathering at the foot of Mt. Sinai, the thunder and the lightning, and the injunction to keep away from the opposite gender for three days. God knows how to do these things, or used to.
In keeping with media events, consider the contrast between Memorial Day ceremonies in Israel which are broadcast from the enclosure of the Wailing Wall, and Independence Day ceremonies - on the very next day, broadcast from the top of Mt. Herzl, the one to underline the familistic togetherness of the depths, the other to advertise civic openness and outward-orientation (Handelman and Katz, 1990). There can be no doubt that these loci influence those in actual attendance. But can television deliver its audience to these places? Is there a theory to suggest that broadcasters can accomplish this? Cinema theory says yes. And media research is increasingly attentive to the different ways in which audiences write themselves into the script, and there is even some experimentation to prove it (Messaris, 1992; McQuarrie & Mick, 1999). Normative theories that portray public opinion as supportive of a message - as in the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1984) or in health-information campaigns (Hornik, 2002) have this quality of constructing (or exploiting) an environment of true or false consciousness.
Space may also be constructed by controlling decorum, as in keeping tourists out when the church service is in progress, or proscribing the reading of sacred texts in the toilet. Farrakhan's 'Million Man March' took on its meaning by excluding women, just as the Florida ballot box intimidated or misled potential voters who would likely have cast their votes for Gore. Thus, there are constructions - physical or symbolic - that reinforce messages for those who are admitted, by keeping others out.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from European Culture and the Media by Ib Bondebjerg, Peter Golding. Copyright © 2004 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
ForewordIntroduction
Elihu Katz and Mihaela Popescu
Supplementation: On Communicator Control of the Conditions of Reception
Part A: Media, Globalization and the European Imaginary
Stig Hjarvard:
From Bricks to Bytes: The Mediatization of a Global Toy Industry
Máire Messenger Davies and Roberta E. Pearson:
To Boldly Bestride the World Like a Colossus: Shakespeare, Star Trek and the European TV Market
Kirsten Drotner:
Disney Discourses, or Mundane Globalization
Daniel Biltereyst:
Media Audiences and the Game of Controversy. On Reality TV, Moral Panic and Controversial Media Stories
Part B: Citizenship and Cultural Identities
William Uricchio:
Cultural Citizenship in the Age of P2P Networks
Sabina Mihelj:
Negotiating European Identity at the Periphery: Media Coverage of Bosnian Refugees and ‘Illegal Migration’
Kim Christian Schrøder:
Mapping European Identities: A Quantitative Approach to the Qualitative Study of National and Supranational Identities
Peter Ludes:
Eurovisions? Monetary Union and Communication Puzzles
Part C: Media Institutions in a Changing Europe
Taisto Hujanen:
Public Service Strategy in Digital Television: From Schedule to Content
Gianpietro Mazzoleni:
With the Media, Without the Media. Reasons and Implications of the Electoral Success of Silvio Berlusconi in 2001
Karol Jakubowicz:
A Square Peg in a Round Hole: The EU’s Policy on Public Service Broadcasting
Index