In 1960, there was no 'Media Studies'.
In 1970 there a few courses at Postgraduate Level
In 1990, it had exploded in the universities, and the explosion carried on.
By 2000 it had become both one of the most popular courses in schools and universities, and the butt of endless jokes.
But there has never been any doubt in my mind that the mass media need to be put under the spotlight of serious investigation. That this investigation will reveal not only many harms, toxic ideas and bad practices, but also some surprising moments of beauty, truth and goodness.
This mass culture was the 'culture' I grew up in, which shaped my feelings and attitudes, and I wanted to understand a number of things about it in order to live a more intelligent and good life.
But this interrogation needed to be carried out in clear, inclusive and democratic language. This would enable the discussion to be deep, accurate and useful to all of us. For the last 40 years, careerist Media Studies’ academics have ignored this democratic aim, and have used language and 'theory' that is at its best obscurantist truisms, at its worst, gobbledegook .
My studies of the media have confirmed over and over three very basic points that I think everyone should meditate on:
1) The Mass Media are not 'communication.' The mass media carry messages and orders from an elite to large numbers of people (the so-called masses) who have no opportunity to respond on an equal level. (Communication is the two-way, mutual, face to face sharing of experience, intentions, feelings, etc, wherein each affects the other on an equal level, each participates on an equal level. This is done in all daily practices of 'survival', work, play, ritual, religion, romance....This creates benign 'relationships' that last over time, which creates community - true society.)
2) The Mass Media can never be trusted unconditionally even to attempt to tell us the truth about the world outside our direct experience.
3) Even if they attempt to tell us the truth about this world outside our personal direct experience, it is always open to doubt, as normally we have no way of checking this except by looking at other mass media.
From these follow other important points, none of them esoteric or dependent on specialised research techniques and complex theories.
1) The mass media are only possible and necessary in large 'pseudo-societies of strangers'.
If you live in a true society, a community of people all of whom have strong mutually dependent, and trusting relationships with each other, the mass media are not needed.
2) The mass media carry messages sent to us from rich, powerful and privileged elites whose full intentions motives and plans we can never know certainly: they live and act outside our direct personal experience.
3) The mass media enable mouthpieces or front-men for the elite to impersonate friendliness and relationship to each of us, so that our instincts to trust others with whom we have a real and strong relationship are activated here. If the medium can carry the voice and/or the face in Close Up of the Front-Man, this impersonation of being 'our friend' becomes overwhelmingly powerful. Very few of us exposed to the mass media escape the mistake of confusing these images of strangers with real friends who can be trusted. This confusion has been called a 'para-social interaction' or 'relationship, as if it was abnormal, unusual. No. It is normal. Most people seem to have at some level para-social relationships with their favoured media Front Men.
Having taught various forms of media studies in universities for 50 years - I helped to write one of the first BA programmes in 'media studies' - I can say that it has almost completely given up its original aim, which was to stimulate 'ordinary people' to inform themselves about the media and use this technology wisely. To think and debate with each other what uses should be made of it; who should own it and who control it. Even the writer who more than any other inspired the development of media studies in Britain said towards the end of his life that by making it a formal 'course' with a syllabus and curriculum that needed assessments of each student, etc., that this would destroy its original democratic intention. (R Williams, 1989, p.156).
Williams has described how there was a group of university graduates from the 1930s onwards teaching evening adult general education courses that broadly responded to the students' questions as to how the 'subject' being taught, eg English Literature, could be used to answer broader questions about life in general and their work and lives in particular , their histories, their tastes, and how this related to the wider world they lived in, and its historical origins. These 'courses' were typically not formally assessed with grades etc. Most of the 'students' were either working people or retired working people.
Williams goes on to say that these face to face non-examined classes with 'ordinary people' could stimulate a type of discussion and debate that could not happen in what was seen at the time as an extension of the adult education movement - the Open University.
"This project [the Open University] would bring enormous advantage but it lacks to this day that crucial process of interchange and encounter between the people [lecturers] offering the intellectual disciplines and those using them [students], who have far more than a right to be tested to see if they are following them...when in fact they have this more basic right to define the questions. These people [the adult 'students'] were in a practical position to say "Well if you tell me that this question goes outside of your discipline, then bring me someone whose discipline will cover it, or bloody well get outside of the discipline and answer it yourself. " (R Williams, 1989, p. 157)
These adult students were in the 'practical position' to say that because they could drop the course at any time with few if any direct adverse consequences for themselves - it was not tested, you could not fail the course, it was there to enable ordinary people to have access to informed discussions about life, and the course fees were very low and sometimes non-existent. If too many students dropped the course, the lecturer lost their contract to teach that term, and maybe future terms.
This was how I began teaching - adult education classes. You answered the students' questions adequately as you could, or else you got fired. Very often the best 'teaching' happened in discussions with students during the break in the canteen over tea or coffee. As most of the 'students' were retired or much older than me, I cannot be accused of 'getting down' with the students. They were respectful of my specialist knowledge, and wacky ideas, but I did not dare to claim to have knowledge where I did not have it, and often deferred to their knowledge, experience and sound logic.
Of course there were teachers who could spin such captivating yarns, and who displayed such extensive expertise and knowledge that their students just sat back and listened contentedly. The best of these lecturers had integrity, and rarely knowingly claimed expertise which they did not possess. But the occupational hazard of lecturing is to pontificate when one should express uncertainty, or ignorance. One of the most dangerous phrases emanating from academia, and adopted by the chattering classes is "We know...".
One of the main reasons I wanted to examine the mass media and popular culture was my low social class origins. Although our father was an artist, his parents were working people (his Dad a jobbing tailor and dry cleaner and his Mom a typist), who had both come off of their family farms after they reached adulthood. Our father's grandparents, grand uncles and aunts, many cousins were what our Dad called 'dirt farmers' - they could't afford hired hands, so the family on its own had to work the farm.
Because Dad had become a well-known commercial artist, his class position shifted to that of Bohemian lower middle class. A kind of limbo class - he could fit in to some degree to with artist/writer circles in Paris - we lived for several years in Montparnasse, ate at Le Dome Cafe where many famous writers and artists used to or did still hang out - Picasso, Hemingway et al. and across the street of course JP Sartre in his favourite cafe. Dad also lived for periods in Key West, and drank in the same bar as Hemingway.
But he never left behind his basic working men's culture, though his former rank as a Commissioned Officer in the Navy and his occupation as an artist pushed him into the lower middle class. But all of us could see, could feel how the respectable lower middle and upper middle class looked down on us. And though Dad taught us some 'High Culture', he taught us some science and mechanics, and his own art taught us something about Art, me and my siblings grew up with popular culture via the mass media. Dad and Mom swore in street slang when they got mad or drunk. We watched popular tv and went to popular movies. And they got on best with working people and disreputable lower middle class fellow bon viveurs and drinkers. Dad's art appealed to working and lower middle class people, including Mafiosi who loved his work, and much of our income came from Dad doing applied art work for gangsters' hotels, bars, nightclubs and homes.
Two of us were sent with the help of a scholarship-fund to a private school in England, and there we came under the influence of a teacher who taught us to look down on the popular culture we had grown up with. For the first time, my brother read a book. For the first time, I could read a book and not be called a queer by many of my school mates (only queers and girls read books according to many of the people I went to school with).
It was only when I had a complete breakdown that I realised that I had to express my vulgar tastes, and be honest - I was a vulgar person according to the standards of the intellectual culture I had tried to enter by going to an English university. At that time, even most Hollywood films that had formed me were considered vulgar and ephemeral - junk culture. Soft core porn - I had no access to hard core. Comic books. The signs of a 'low person', vulgar, bad if not 'dirty' tastes, and lack of insight and intelligence.
When I came out of the breakdown, I wanted to make films and to investigate the mass media for their toxic effects as well as their occasional beauty. To bring into my films the beauty and skill of the classical traditions in art and literature while retaining the best of the mass culture I grew up with. To make films that could move ordinary people into a deeper feeling for reality and themselves, and to enable the media to stimulate democracy. To 'study' the media was to attempt that aim. So when I was asked to help design a Media Studies course, that was not only my motive, but of all of us who wrote the course
Media Studies as it exists now and has done for the past 40 years has trampled into dust that aim or rather eradicated it. Nothing of it remains. My life-work has been shown to be the adolescent, snobbish pipe dream of the son of a redneck family trying to elevate himself above his station. In so far as I had pinned much of my 'identity' to that dream, I have lost much of myself.
And then when Toby committed suicide. Although I am still a hypocritical, comfort seeking, self absorbed hypochondriac, if I had no family to be present for, even to try to help, just by not committing suicide, I wouldn't be here now writing this. Of that I am pretty sure.
References
Williams, R. (1989) The Politics of Modernism London: Verso
Note: As a student and after I looked up to Raymond Williams as one of a few academics who had enough wisdom to guide me to an accurate understanding of life. I was wrong. Williams was a strict atheist materialist-socialist, and I now see that his attempt to square a materialist socialism with wisdom distorted his central insights, making many of them in my terms inaccurate, close to useless. His attempt to deal with death is depressingly inadequate for me (see Williams' Problems of Materialism and Culture, 1980 - for the relevant section on death, see it quoted pp. 65-66, J Palmer and M Dodson, Design and Aesthetics, 1996)
I felt this decline in the veracity of 'media studies'. Wasn't it McLuhan who coined the phrase 'media'? I remember being inspired to investigate media after seeing Chris Morris's news spoof The Day Today and subsequent other productions. It was later on I read McLuhan and listened to many hours of his lectures & discussions online. He really opened up my mind in approaching this new technological world of media. Neil Postman was my next discovery with Tecnopoply & other books. But trying to find anyone after Postman continuing this line of enquiry into the world of the Internet sort of disappeared. As the world of media surround became more pervasive & all encompassing the less insight seemed to exist in scrutinising it. Where are the great minds now to expose this technological tyrany?