Comments on d i a p s a l m a t a: "Mass Media" --> Pack Media

well i would say the material grounding for what z...

2010-06-15T14:49:45.565-04:00

well i would say the material grounding for what zizek is talking about is the mass audience as a commodity -- his own writing is useless for historical work, it's true. i'm in agreement with you that 'mass culture' as an analytic term is also useless. the development of 'the audience' as a commodity supported by attendant ideologies (rather than any technology or 'culturally' determined worldview) is the only reading of mass culture i've ever found that has any heft, and approaches the question of 'what.'

- traxus4420

Hi! Thanks -- great points and pointers. I think t...

2010-06-15T11:54:15.158-04:00

Hi! Thanks -- great points and pointers. I think there's a danger in appealing to Zizek, though, since the effectiveness of work on "mass"ness lies in explaining how it proliferates and is reproduced within sites that already take it for granted. In other words, if the question is *why*, he's got a good answer that negotiates the active/passive consumer barricades. But if the question is *what* -- if, for instance, an historian of the late nineteenth-century is looking at the *emergence* of so-called mass media, asking what's different between a British reader in 1890 or in 1590 -- appealing to ideological messages is not much help; there's an ongoing problem of grounding, only exacerbated when we conflate explanations of persistent (constantly being reproduced) phenomena with their historical emergence.

hi! one way to look at this issue of the 'mas...

2010-06-15T11:17:56.958-04:00

hi!

one way to look at this issue of the 'mass audience' rather than arguing over whether it really exists or not is as both an ideological fiction and a market commodity -- the mass audience is a subject position constructed by the corporate media that no individual ever really embodies, but which every individual helps to produce. ideologically this means something like zizek's claim that production and consumption of ideological messages rely on a naive other 'supposed to believe' while the individual thinks of him or herself as outside this belief, not convinced, etc. beavis and butthead's critical viewing of mtv is a good example of a self-conscious production of the naive other in that it parodically doubles the viewer's own 'ironic' position toward TV content (the ironic/knowing viewer is the one who doesn't believe but keeps watching anyway). with the vogue for 'interactivity' and appropriating 'amateur' content, media corporations are slowly getting better at tailoring their messages to appeal to different demographics.

and in terms of political economy, this means that the mass audience is a commodity traded on financial markets -- Nielsen ratings are used to value shows and companies and attract advertisers, who also need to quantitatively measure their audience in order to value themselves, etc. chomsky and herman's analytic is still a good guide for what can and can't be said in the 'mass media,' not in order to brainwash people but to maintain the value of the 'mass audience' as a commodity/currency.

jon beller's 'cinematic mode of production' is good for this, though a bit old (1999) -- it follows some earlier theorists of the 'attention economy' like herbert simon in treating attention as a form of exploited labor.