Essay 1

Jess Renaud

Does the mass media have a significant amount of power over its audience, or does the audience ultimately have more power than the media?

One of the biggest debates about the social impact of the media is weather audience has more power over the media or the media has more power over the audience.

There are many different theorists that have studied this question. I have chosen to look at Adorno and Fiske.

Theodor Adorno attended a school for social research, a group of mostly German, Jewish intellectuals. Their antipathy towards the media may have been increased by the observation that Hitler had apparently been able to use the media organizations as a tool for widespread propaganda. They had a sudden encounter with American popular culture. Even worse for them was that a revolution of the workers predicted by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century didn’t happen. Marx predicted that the workers would become so annoyed with their exploitation in the factories that they would overtake the factory owners. Adorno was worried that the mass media had great power over the population. He was worried that as we are all watching and learning the same things we would be disadvantaged. John Fiske has a completely different view on this and says that as we are a wide range of individuals and we all have different tastes in media that this will not be a problem. Fiske’s work represents the opposite views of Adorno’s. He is a fan of popular culture and was one of the most influential media scholars in the world from the 70’s to the 90’s.

Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer wrote a book called ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (1947). In this book Adorno talks about their views on the mass media and its impact on society. It contains the essay ‘Enlightenment and Mass Deception’ showing that the media had such a damaging effect on the audience and we are all being sucked into the first thing we hear, watch or learn. They referred to the mass media as the ‘culture industry’ to indicate its nature. Today when this is referred to as industry we are not surprised as we recognise most media products as industries, such as the film ‘industry’ and the music ‘industry’.

Fiske wrote a book called ‘understanding Popular Culture’ in his book he argues that the power of the audience is much greater than the power of the media institutions. Fiske wanted to show that the people are not drones and they don’t exist as a mass audience. Fiske agrees that our choices are limited to an extent but, he argues, audiences interpret different meanings from texts. He argues that audiences are not merely consumers of texts, they produce meanings and pleasures from the texts, to make sense of their existence. Fiske understands that the audience views the media how they want too, their personality plays a massive part in what they listen too. Where as Adorno argues that the culture industry can mass produce one product or a set of familiar products and successfully flog it into an audience of passive customers. Fiske is the reverse; he believes that units sold at an individual level are a unique item which its purchaser attaches with his or her own set of meanings.

Fiske’s work represents a view diametrically opposed to Adorno’s. Near the start of ‘understanding popular culture’ he tells Adorno fans bluntly:

‘Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture’

Madonna is a case study that can be argued by both sides. The famous song artist is said to be able to ‘connect with the audience’ by Fiske, that is why she is able to sell many albums that reach top of the charts. On the other side of the argument, Adorno says that Madonna only is able to release many high chart songs because the audience are only used to ‘the same old entertainment’. We all settle for the same things without exploring different media. Adorno is saying that we don't seem to mind what the final manufatured product is, we just settle for it and move on, this is Adorno's main concern.

Although some people disagree with Adorno’s theory, we don’t actually know how we get pulled in by the media, as it is all the same. Fiske argues that we may change our own views towards the media, we aren’t being sucked in as Adorno says, we chose our favourite genre of music, or favourite films and the media make more of it because they know as an audience we like it.

To conclude, i have realised that Adorno and Fiske have both got completely different views on the media. This could be the reason to them being the most popular theorists the world has ever seen. When it comes to my opinion, i say that they both have a good point, most media products are similar in some kind of way but with technology changing all the time the final product is different every time. Finally, answering the question, we view the media in our own way, nobody can say weather people have more power or if the media has more power as this is something that is exclusive to us.