An overview of learning so far - by no means definitive but a good basic for revision.

1. ‘We Media’ & Democracy

2. Topic Points:
• What are ‘We Media’?
• Where / how has ‘We Media’ emerged?
• In what way are the contemporary media more democratic
than before?
• In what ways are the contemporary media less democratic
than before?

3. In The Exam:
• Historical – dependent on the requirements of
the topic, candidates must summarise the
development of the media forms in question in
theoretical contexts.
• Contemporary – current issues within the topic
area.
• Future – candidates must demonstrate personal
engagement with debates about the future of the
media forms / issues that the topic relates to.

4. Theorists/Theories
• Marxist
Theory/Gramsci/Frankfurt
School
• Chomsky – Media Control
• Habermas – Public Sphere
• David Gauntlett
• Dan Gillmor
• Fourth Estate
• Clay Shirky
• Chris Anderson – The Long Tail

5. • Let’s start at the very beginning…

6. Cultural Effects: Marxist View
• The dominant ideology of a society is the
ideology of the dominant or ruling class
• The mass media disseminates the dominant
ideology: the values of the class which owns
and controls the media
• Notion of domination

7. Gramsci: Hegemony
• The supremacy of the bourgeoisie is
based on economic domination and
intellectual/moral leadership
The American Dream?
• A class had succeeded in persuading
the other classes of society to accept its
own moral, political and cultural values
• However, this consent is not always
peaceful, and may combine physical
force or coercion with
intellectual, moral and cultural
inducement

8. Can the working class achieve
hegemony?
• If the working class is to achieve
hegemony, it needs patiently to build up a
network of alliances with social minorities.
• These new coalitions must respect the
autonomy of the movement, so that each
group can make its own special
contribution toward a new socialist society.
• The working class must unite popular
democratic struggles with its own conflict
against the capital class, so as to strengthen
a national popular collective will.

9. The Frankfurt School Modernist
Approach
• Mass audience as passive and gullible
• ‘hypodermic needle’ effects model
• Pessimistic claims about media indoctrination
• Mass culture disseminates the dominant
ideology of the bourgeoisie
• News media controls our ideas and
views, pushing their views onto us, creating a
false class consciousness – Marxist view

10. Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent
• The main aim of a media company is
to make money
• Newspapers achieve this through
advertising revenue
• This has an impact on the news
values and news selection
• Can lead to editorial bias
• News businesses that favour profit
over public interest succeed

11. Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent
• Further distortion through the reliance of newspapers on private
and governmental news sources
• If a newspaper displeases, they may no longer be privy to that
source of information
• They will lose out on stories, lose readers and ultimately advertisers
• news media businesses editorially distort their reporting to favour
government and corporate policies in order to stay in business

12. Editorial Bias: Five Filters (Chomsky)
1. Size, Ownership, and Profit Orientation
2. The Advertising License to Do Business
3. Sourcing Mass Media News
4. Flak and the Enforcers
5. Anti-Communism

13. Size, Ownership and Profit Orientation
• The dominant mass-media outlets are large
corporations which are run for profit
• Therefore they must cater to the financial
interest of their owners

14. The Advertising License to do Business
• Media outlets are not commercially viable
without the support of advertisers.
• News media must therefore cater to the
political prejudices and economic desires of
their advertisers.
• This has weakened the working-class press

15. Sourcing Mass Media News
• The large bureaucracies of the powerful subsidise
the mass media, and gain special access to the
news, by their contribution to reducing the
media’s costs of acquiring and producing, news.
• The large entities that provide this subsidy
become 'routine' news sources and have
privileged access to the gates.
• Non-routine sources must struggle for
access, and may be ignored by the arbitrary
decision of the gatekeepers

16. Concept: Fourth Estate
• Is a societal or political force or
institution whose influence is not
consistently or officially recognised
• Print Journalism
• The concept that the press is an
instrument of democracy providing
a check on the abuse of
government power
• It is the myth that the press is a vital
defender of the people? – think
about Chomsky!

17. Editorial Bias
Anyone?!

19. The state of the fourth estate…
• Relationships between powerful people e.g. Murdoch
and Cameron mean that their agendas are pushed
forward in their publications
• Journalists are not as free because they are controlled
by the conglomerate
• Chomsky: believes journalists were not representative
of the population but instead influenced, hired and
fired by power corporations
• Newspapers will print stories that sell, leading to more
untrue and fabricated stories to grab the attention of
the audience; this is mostly true of tabloid papers
which focus on celebrities.

20. Concept: Fourth Estate – The Radical Press
• Early 1800s the printing press became accessible to all
• Radical journalists starting addressing vital issues through the press
• Challenged mainstream editors
• Poor Man’s Guardian linked to National Union of the working
classes
• Independent of established political pressure and still free from any
commercial influence
• A working class movement
• Libel prosecution
• Press taxes
• It was agreed among the elite that it was dangerous to social order
for the working class to have a printing press

21. Key Thinking Points
• Do we have a free press?
• What constraints do journalists face when
working for a corporation?
• How far is news media controlled or
constrained by those in power?
• Are newspapers really the Fourth Estate?

22. David Gauntlett: Web 2.0 (Making is
Connecting – key text)
• Tim Berner’s Lee invented the Internet with the vision that
people would be connected and creative
• “He imagined that browsing the Web would be a matter of
writing and editing, not just searching and reading” –
Gauntlett
• Web 2.0 invites users to play
• We are seeing a shift away from a ‘sit back and be told’
culture towards more of a ‘making and doing’ culture

23. Web 2.0
• Includes a social element where
users generate and distribute
content, often with freedom to
share and reuse
• Has resulted in an increasing
‘globalisation’
• The birth of a more
‘participatory culture’
• Moving from a communication
model of ‘one-to-many’ to a
‘many to many’ system

24. Keith Bassett: Cyberspace Democracy
• “The public intellectual of
today must now be much
more alive to the
possibilities for
participating in what could
become a new ‘cyberspace
democracy’ – an expanded
public sphere which is less
academic and less elitist”

25. David Gauntlett: Web 2.0
• In the case of the media, there is
obviously the shift towards internet-
based interactivity
• At least 3/4th of UK population are
regular internet users
• More than 1/3rd of people have a
Facebook account
• More and more people are writing
blogs, participating in online
discussions, sharing
information, music and photo, and
uploading video.

26. New Media
• Increased interactivity of audiences
• Poststructuralist theory sees the audience as
active participators in the creation of
meaning
• In a postmodern world consumption is seen as
a positive and participatory act
• An increased ‘democratisation’?

27. Citizen Journalism
• Theorist Mark Poster says the internet
provides a ‘Habermasian public sphere’ – a
cyberdemocratic network for communicating
information and points of view that will
eventually transform into public opinion.
You will need to know Habermas’
Public Sphere theory!

28. Dan Gillmor: Citizen Journalists
• ‘Big media’ have enjoyed control over who gets
to produce and share media
• Effect on democracy
• Who owns these companies?
• Are we represented?
• Gillmor sees the Internet as a catalyst for a
challenge to this established hegemony
• Gillmor calls bloggers ‘the former audience’:
news blogs a new form of people’s journalism

29. Citizen Journalism in Iraq
• Blogs offered an alternative to the Western
media’s accounts
• Collaboration of wikispaces, children’s news
blogs and Persian networkers using the Net for
a collective voice in a country where free
speech is curtailed
• But is it all as rosy as it seems?

30. Clay Shirky
• Focuses on the rising usefulness of
networks, using decentralised technologies for
social creation and open-source development
• New technologies are enabling new kinds of
cooperative structures to flourish

31. Chris Anderson: The Long Tail Theory

32. Chris Anderson: The Long Tail
• How the Internet has transformed
economics, commerce and consumption
• Revenue from niche products now adds up to
the same as from blockbuster products
• Internet allows people to look for and share a
wider variety of products
• Range of filtering services
• Broadband allows us to behave in ways that fit
our instincts

33. Is New Media Equal?
• Not a symbol of ‘participatory culture’, the
Internet is regarded by some as a dangerous
and out of control technology that
undermines civil society
• An instrument of repression?
• ‘Digital divide’
• ‘Myth of interactivity’
• China?

34. Utopians
• One side sees the internet as a technology
of freedom that is empowering humankind
• making accessible the world’s
knowledge, building ‘emancipated
subjectivities’, promoting a
new progressive global politics, and laying
the foundation of the ‘new economy’.
• The other sees the internet as an over-
hyped technology whose potential value
has been undermined by ‘digital capitalism’
and
social inequality

35. Dystopians
• The internet came to exhibit
incongruent features.
• It is still a decentralised system in which
information is transmitted via
independent variable pathways through
dispersed computer power.
• But on top of this is
imposed a new technology of
commercial surveillance which enables
commercial operators – and potentially
governments – to monitor what
people do online

36. For The Exam
• Explore both sides of the argument that media
is becoming more democratic
• Explore the difference that ‘we media’ makes
to citizens
• You must explore two types of media e.g.
news and social networking
• At least two detailed case studies including
The Leveson Inquiry