The BBC's notion of ‘public service broadcasting' was based on a number of cultural, political and theoretical ideals akin to modernism. In particular, its first director General, John Reith, argued that broadcasting should be used to defend ‘high culture' against the degrading nature and influence of mass culture. This is one of the reasons why he argued so strongly that the BBC should be financed entirely by taxation, thereby avoiding the heavily commercialized nature of the American media. Although he would have been politically apposed to the Marxist beliefs of The Frankfurt School, Reith would have shared their concern for the corrupting influence of mass culture on a powerless and uneducated audience. ‘It is occasionally indicated to us', he famously wrote, ‘that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need - and not what they want - but few know what they want and very few know what they need'.
This perception of a mass audience as generally passive and gullible was reflected in media analysis during the modernist period, particularly in the ‘effects' model of audience research. Sometimes referred to as the ‘hypodermic needle' model, this way of approaching audiences tended to conceive them as wholly defenceless and constantly ‘injected' by media messages, as if it were some form of mind-altering narcotic. Audience research carried about by The Frankfurt School was clearly part of this ‘effects' tradition, simply aiming to validate its pessimistic claims about media indoctrination. In terms of textual analysis the school pursued a similar trajectory, critiquing the means by which mass culture disseminated the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie. The work on popular music, the studies of popular literature and magazines and the studies of radio soap opera, all revealed similar preoccupations with the ‘standardization' of mass culture and the media. Despite the pessimistic approach of The Frankfurt School towards the media, it can still be praised for at least taking these new Media forms seriously and worthy of academic study. This project was continued and developed by the Structuralist movement which became increasingly popular in the 1950s and 1960s. Partly growing from a belief in the power of science and rationalism, structuralism argued that the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which they have little control. This belief in the power of rational thought also informed a methodology that could be used to uncover these structures by using quasi-scientific methods of investigation. Semiotics played a central role in this endeavour, being applied to all manner of cultural texts from the cinema to advertising and from photography to comics.
Based on Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce's work on linguistics, semiotics set out a clear and coherent methodology by which the meaning of any text could be read objectively as a system of ‘signs'. By ‘decoding' these ‘signs', semioticians could gradually unravel the means by which an audience were being manipulated. Deconstructing and contesting the realities of signs can reveal whose realities are privileged and whose are suppressed. Such a study involves investigating the construction and maintenance of reality by particular social groups'. Mythologies famously used structuralism and semiotics to analyse all forms of mass culture including wrestling matches, the Citroën car, Greta Garbo's face and soap-powder. Yet, as a Marxist, the conclusive nature of the textual readings supplied by the likes of Barthes left little doubt that structuralism still saw mass culture as primarily propagating the forces of a dominant and all-persuasive ideology. One of the most famous examples of this process at work was his semiotic analysis of the photo on the cover of a Paris Match magazine in 1955. Showing a young black soldier saluting the French flag, Barthes argued that this was an example of the media giving French Imperialism a positive image in a moment of national crisis. So while the quasi-scientific methods of structuralism helped to further legitimate the study of mass culture and the media after the war, its conclusions still tended to suggest that audiences were powerless to resist its hidden meanings. In this way, then, we can begin to identify some of the major components by which the media and its audiences were conceived and analysed during the first half of the twentieth century.
In particular, the context of modernism gives us a theoretical insight into the way in which the media was understood and the ideological impulses which inevitably influenced its critical theories. This type of theoretical approach generally distrusted the media, arguing that its audience needed to be protected from its standardized and debasing influence. It therefore differs profoundly from the theoretical ideas that have now come to define ‘digital theory' and the role of New Media in the twenty-first century.
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