Sociology of the Arts. Victoria D. Alexander
for its inevitable decline. For the working classes, however, culture inculcated a humbleness and an acceptance of the authority to which they were to submit.
Mass Culture Theorists
The ideas sowed by Arnold in the 1860s bloomed into the theories of cultural highbrows in the 1930s and beyond. These authors believed that as much as high art was beneficial, mass art was harmful. By this time, the concept of “high culture,” especially in its contrast to popular culture, had become firmly institutionalized (the distinction was not as sharply drawn in the nineteenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 12). While intellectuals still sung the praises of fine art, they now worried, in addition, about the deleterious effects of the popular arts. For instance, Q.D. Leavis (1978 [1932]) was concerned that the masses were rejecting the great books chosen for remembrance by intellectuals and professors, who know best, and were instead reading popular fiction, to the detriment of themselves and society. Leavis believed that consuming pulp fiction was like a drug addiction. She was also concerned about the harmful effects of Hollywood movies and advertising. This literature marks the shift from an emphasis on the uplifting effects of fine arts to the “cultural critique” of the mass arts.
A number of theorists writing in the 1950s developed a specific critique of mass culture, relating the rise of mass culture to changes wrought by the industrialization of society. These writers focused on the broadly distributed popular arts (especially television, but also popular music, fiction, and movies), arguing that this “mass culture” is standardized, homogeneous, and puerile in its appeal to the lowest common denominator, implicitly suggesting that it is consumed by an undifferentiated, passive, mass audience.
These authors make firm distinctions among types of art:
Folk art grew from below. It was a spontaneous, autochthonous expression of the people, shaped by themselves, pretty much without the benefit of High Culture, to suit their own needs. Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its audiences are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and not buying… Folk art was the people’s own institution, their private little garden walled off from the great formal park of their masters’ High Culture. But Mass Culture breaks down the wall, integrating the masses into a debased form of High Culture and thus becoming an instrument of political domination. (MacDonald, 1957: 60)
They suggest that mass culture is “parasitic” in that it feeds off ideas generated by the fine arts, without returning a single new thought to them. At the same time, they argue, mass culture strangles folk culture and displaces it. They develop from this analysis a “Gresham’s Law” of culture—the bad drives out the good—whereby mass culture replaces the fine arts and the folk arts. Further, the mass audience spends too much time on unedifying mass art, and in consequence spends less time on useful, educational and productive pursuits. Moreover, beyond filling time, mass culture actively harms those who consume it by inculcating in them a passivity that erodes their critical faculties and makes them prone to manipulation and exploitation.
The similarities of the mass culture critique and the Frankfurt School are evident, especially in their analysis of its pernicious effects, but there are important differences. Writers from the Frankfurt School agreed with the mass culture critics that mass culture was dangerous, but not because it undermined the cultural authority of intellectuals. They worried about almost exactly the reverse. They argued that mass culture strengthened the hand of the elites. Leavis, for instance, thought that the masses had become strong enough to “outvote” intellectuals on the merits of popular versus “quality” fiction. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, saw the masses as powerless and the cultural industries as all powerful.
Media Effects
The media effects literature examines the impact of mass media on society.1 There is no single “media effects” approach, but certain themes are common. For instance, the media are seen as powerful because they are pervasive. Media present models of behavior that citizens (especially children) might emulate, they set the agenda for political and civic debate, and they do these things in a way that may well be biased. Similarly, the media can distort the audience’s views of the world when the information they provide is selective. This literature focuses particularly on the news aspects of the media (e.g. Philo, 1990), but some of its insights draw from, or can be applied to, the fictional media output that is part of the popular arts.2 The theme of crime and violence is strong in the media effects literature, where fictional violence is seen as carrying the potential to increase violence in society (see Case 3.1).
Media effects can occur at two levels, in single individuals or in society as a whole. For instance, advertisements operate both at the individual level (by convincing people to buy particular products or by encouraging in them a desire for certain lifestyles)3 and at the societal (by fostering the ethos of consumerism).4 The literature is divided, then, between work on individual effects and work on societal effects. A second division revolves around studies that focus on the effects of the content of media texts and those that focus on modality. The former looks at what is portrayed in the media, for instance, the effects of stereotypes relating to gender, sexuality, and ethnicity that are embedded into the stories in movies or television shows. The latter suggests, in McLuhan’s (1964) phrase, that “the medium is the message.” In this argument, the characteristics of a medium (print versus televisual, for instance) has an effect over and above the content of the material that is transmitted, and therefore the effects of the medium should be studied. In this argument, books are seen to affect us differently than television (Postman, 2010), and the Internet is said to affect us differently than earlier media (Couch, 1996; Carr, 2008). In this chapter, we will focus on the effect of content rather than modality, looking particularly at cultivation theory and framing effects.
Cultivation Theory
Gerbner (1998) puts forward the notion of cultivation, which describes “the independent contributions television viewing makes to viewer conceptions of social reality” (p. 180). He argues that television became the central storyteller of the twentieth century (displacing communities and religious authorities). The stories matter, he argues, because they shape people’s perceptions of the world. He writes, “What is most likely to cultivate stable and common conceptions of reality is, therefore, the overall pattern of programming to which total communities are regularly exposed over long periods of time” (p. 179). Studies that use cultivation theory tend to compare people who watch a lot of television to those who watch much less television, looking for differences between the two groups.
Gerbner and his colleagues tracked the content of American television drama from 1969, including the number of violent incidents depicted to support their contention that how violence is depicted is very important:
The cultivation perspective has shown that television violence illustrates and provides lessons about power. Violence shows who’s on top and who’s on the bottom, who gets hurt and who does the hurting.
(Signorielli, 2003: 42)
American television drama suggests that white women are more likely than other people to be victims of serious crime such as murder; however, in the real world of America, men are more likely to be murdered than women, and black men more likely than white men (Parrott and Parrott, 2015). Gerbner and his team argue that television viewing (and the consequent consumption of skewed information in television stories) affects viewers’ perceptions. For instance, Gerbner (1995) argues that heavy television viewing leads people to feel insecure in their social environment:
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