READINGS MS113 MIDTERM

Crick

• 5 characteristics of modern democracy

  • The power in the hands of the people

  • Social contract between citizens and state (Rousseau’s idea)

  • Mobility between class distinctions

  • Institutions of government and their types

  • Media as a communication/diffusion method

Crick

• Difference between Greek Polis and Rome

  • small-scale direct democracy/oligarchy versus large-scale representative expansion

Marshall

• 3 Pronged Rights and Evolution of Citizenship

  • 1. Civil rights (18th) - individual freedom, included freedom of speech, right to own property, right to justice (to assert one’s rights)

  • 2. Political rights (19th) - expansion of franchise and universalization of political rights, like electing representatives into the Parliament

3. Social rights (20th) - economic, living standards, the right to material resources and access to health care, education, housing, welfare

Marshall

• Worker’s Power on Citizenship

• He believes citizenship (making people ‘equal’ by definition) is antithetical to a society where social class exists

• Citizens are sovereign objects, hold the ultimate authority over the state and its governance

Giroux

• Neo-fascism Argument

  • Trump government has created a war culture through labeling BLM as marxism, weaponizing racism through white nationalism, and scapegoated Mexican migrants

  • Mainly, he (1) highlights anti-immigrant racism and use of the media to criminalize minorities. (2) Normalizes violence and militarism through masculinity and LGBTQ backlash. (3) Invokes neoliberalism, taking things from welfare to warfare. (4) Resists civil society and preexisting social movements (5) The Prison Industrial Complex

Giroux

• Trump and Twitter/Applications

  • Using “US” vs “THEM” rhetoric, law & order discourse

  • Chicago and Los Angeles using immigration patrols, renaming it the “Department of War,” social media memes trivialize fascism

Schroeder

• Comparing Trump, Modi, Sweden, China

  • Agenda-setting: Twitter used by journalists as a major source for Trump’s antics, who bypassed mainstream media by use of digital media. Social media has been used to circumvent gatekeepers of traditional media and circumvent party standards

  • India: Typically large rallies in election strategy, but Modi subverts this expectation through social media, posting messaging online, and mobilizes a pre-existing nationalist population

  • Sweden: party-centric, Swedish Democrats turn to alternative media although parties depend on other alliances and blockages

  • China: Although decentralized and diffused due to censorship, right-wing populism used alternative media

Schroeder

• Who voted for Trump in 2016?

  • Obviously, economically disenfranchised, less educated, rural males, white people

Schroeder

• Defining Populism

  • Believe they are the virtuous people against corrupt elite, anti-Pluralist, complain of elitist media, nationalist

Monbiot

• Ideological invisibility

  • Neoliberalism rules our life, but nobody can name it or define it. This issue is a symptom and a power. It’s become such a neutral force, that opposing it would be seen as antithetical to our fundamental liberty.

McChesney

• Political economy of US Media System

  • Corporate control of media is detrimental to democracy, it prioritizes profit over public interest and limits the range of perspectives. The media reports so much on government welfare and social programs, but never critiques intelligence, military and bad stuff.

  • The FCC regulates telephone, telegraph and radio communications, the 1980s saw a shift from liberal free market to neoliberal monopoly capitalism, Telecommunications Act of 1996 accelerated media conglomeration

  • He believes we need a strong news media system and a healthy way of public education.

  • This leads to closure of local newsrooms or scaling back by conglomerates. Also, Western power in the media leads to erosion of traditions and cultures.

Marx

• Marxist definition of ideology

  • Ideology is an instrument of social reproduction of group values. Naturalizes the power structure, upheld by elites

Marx

Base and Superstructure

• Base: economy, means of production

• Superstructure: institutions, consciousness, cultural ideologies

Gramsci

• Hegemony and normalization of ruling class

  • Manipulation of culture in a society - beliefs, perceptions, value so that this imposed worldview becomes the accepted norm, allowing a ruling elite to achieve dominion through consent of masses

  • Hegemonic consent - persuades a subordinate class that its rule is legitimate

Herman + Chomsky

• Propaganda model as structural marxism through 5 filters

  • Through selective sourcing of news, reliance on advertising revenue, marginalizing dissenting viewpoints, and framing the problem affects public perception

  • Ownership

  • Advertising

  • Sourcing

  • Flak (organized criticism against dissent)

  • Ideology

Herman + Chomsky

• Example

  • During the Gulf War, false reports spread just as weapons of mass destruction developed for Iraq. Propaganda uses recontextualization to keep it alive and effective.

Herman + Chomsky

• Bread and Circuses - Agenda-Setting

  • Media serves agenda of privileged groups to regular people, robbing the public of a chance to understand the real world through selection of topics, concerns, framing of issues, filtering, emphasis, and choosing what’s “acceptable”

Eco

• Selective populism

  • the claim to represent ‘The People’ as a monolithic body while suppressing actual pluralism, Giroux applies this to Trump  - Twitter that bypasses tradition

  • Among these features of fascism, irrationalism, obsession with plots, contempt for the weak, disdain for women, and choosing a leader make eternal fascism pervasive.

Habermas

• Rational-critical deliberation, journalism as public good

  • Commercialization of media results in mob mentality and populism and lack of media literacy. Civic participation is the only way we can create a critical sphere.

Habemas

• Dimensions of Political Sphere

  • Social place where civil society and state power can have a moment to discuss and debate

Dahlgren

• beef with the public sphere - structural/institutional aspects of the public sphere

• Media Representational aspect - mass and mini media output vs. online public sphere, pluralism of views

• Media Social interaction - producers, audience, users, deliberation, which the internet blurs.

Zuboff

• 3 stages of surveillance capitalism

  • A new economic order where private human experience is a free source for production. Gathering data, using AI, predicting buying behavior and changing modification.

  • Exploits one’s personal data, sells people as a product, profiles citizens, blurs boundary between advertising, allows for sharing of misinformation

• Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Street

• Has the internet transformed democracy? Is it neutral?

  • Post-democracy - forms of democracy remain in place, but government is slipping back into control

  • For democracy: citizens can gain views, access information, talk about politics, brings affordability to more people, tech is shaped by cultural norms and values, politics shape the policy of media technology

  • Against democracy: can the majority even do anything? Data and information isn’t in-depth analysis, democracy is just more of the market

  • Social Construction: Social forces, norms, economics, and politics shape media development, content, and distribution

Street

• Sociological Perspective of media technology

  • The media is a key site of socialization of citizens, a segment of the public sphere, but politics can control it. So it’s just a double edged sword

Street

• The politics of journalism

  • Manipulative power of spin doctors - biased coverage to candidates or group’s advantage

  • The rise of “churnalism” - prepackaged news, infotainment, celebrity culture, not original

  • The decline of investigative journalism

  • The transition of journalism into satire, blogs, citizen journalism, good

  • What influences news-making? Training, ratings, political economy, institutions, PR

Zollmann

• Algorithms as filtering system

  • Algorithms function as automated gatekeepers, shaping visibility, creating or mitigating echo chambers

  • Active content personalization, filter bubbles, disadvantaging groups

Bonilla Silva

• 4 colorblind frames

  • Abstract liberalism - masks reality of racism, like opposing affirmative action while ignoring structural inequalities

  • Naturalization - explaining away racial phenomena as preference, like dating preferences as “natural”

  • Cultural racism - using culturally based arguments to explain inferior status, like “French people are rude!”

  • Minimization of Racism - discrimination is no longer a significant factor anymore, saying modern days we’re all equal

Daniels

• Alt-right uses colorblind language to launder white nationalism

  • Using language, memes like Pepe, to exploit young people and the internet in order to procure white supremacy

Connell

• Hegemonic masculinity

  • All groups of men aspire to hegemonic masculinity, ways of being a man in a given society to access the resources

• Example

  • Manosphere

Croteau & Hoynes

• Journalistic objectivity

  • A doctrine that perceives the separation of fact and value as messy that requires a method to fix objectivity. But it’s socially constructed.

  • Ideology is a powerful mechanism of social control where elites impose their worldview. Ideology defines what being “normal” is (racism, christianity, americanism, etc)

Croteau & Hoynes

• 1980s Hollywood

  • Action-adventure films, Vietnam films hold up US Nation/State propaganda system, masculinity and whiteness are constructed as an invisible norm, villainizing of Arabs, etc

Cammaerts

• UK culture war

  • Anti-woke discourse that uses moral panics and populist strategy to make social justice goals appear radical or deviant. Weaponizing “free speech,” portraying Brexit as “the people” overcoming a cosmopolitan “elite”

Butler

• Phantom ‘gender ideology’

  • Gender ideologies shape all institutions (family, religion, nation-state, media industry, military)

  • Gender has become a strategy for emerging authoritarian regimes and fascism, gender is a dangerous threat to families and man.

Butler

• Gender performativity

  • Gender is a social structure

Butler

• Examples

  • Anti-abortion, right-wing Christian nationalism, anti-trans campaigns and the shooting in Colorado Club Q

Hall

• Moral panic, folk devil, moral entrepreneur, disproportionate response

  • The story of national culture is told through stories, events, rituals, continuity, tradition, myths, and specialness, superiority, and eugenics, leading to nationalist identities

Active Audience Theory

• Active Audience Theory

  • Media consumers are not passive recipients of information but active participants who engage with content based on their own decoding.

Walby

• Constructs of women’s exclusion from citizenship

  • The mind as masculine and the body as feminine, the woman becoming a disembodied individual

  • Economy, employment, politics perceived as masculine and public

  • Home, bringing children up, caring & emotions as feminine and private

  • Unpaid care by women under the power of the male breadwinner, late criminalization of marital crimes, treated as dependents on men

  • The state doesn’t see informal care as a contribution worth paying

  • Welfare state is important for women too, so class relations play a part

De Beauvoir

• Femininity is socialized, not innate

  • In 1949, she posits that femininity is a social construct imposed, not biological. Women are manufactured to become women

Citizenship

Deciding who or what can constitute a sovereign state legally, granting the person specific rights

Liberalism

Individual rights, freedoms, and equality before the law, limited government, personal freedoms

Civic Republicanism

Tradition emphasizing active citizenship, civic virtue, and prioritization of common good over private interests, freedom not subject to power (Aristotle, Machiavelli)

representative democracy (compare direct and indirect democracy)

Indirectly, citizens elect officials to make choices on their behalf. Directly, citizens vote on issues

Oligarchy

Form of government where power is concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite, defined by wealth, family, religion, etc, causing high income and liberty inequality

Populism

Dividing the people versus the elite, representing the authentic will of ordinary citizens against establishments

Authoritarianism

Concentrated power, limited political pluralism, suppression of dissent, disinformation, relying on fear

Technological Determinism

Tech controls and shapes society but society doesn’t influence tech.

Social constructivism

Society influences technology and contributes to the rise and fall of technology, broader is that all social reality is socially constructed

“Lapdog journalism’

Journalism that uncritically accepts and promotes the agendas of politicians or media owners, sacrificing journalistic independence