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 main debates in the media society is whether the audience has more power over the media, or do the media have more power over the audience?
There are many theorists that argue this statement but two I am going to focus on are Adorno and Fiske, these two theorists argue opposite sides.
Theodor Adorno was particularly worried that the mass media had great power over the population. He saw that this could be very damaging as we are all watching, listening and learning the same things. Adorno attended the Frankfurt School for social research, as he was in a group of German and Jewish intellectuals that moved from Frankfurt to New York when the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s. Adorno had a great dislike for American pop culture because German culture valued high art they felt that Americans were quite happy with their everyday lives as they were almost being told what the best media was. Whereas John Fiske is a fan of the ‘Popular culture’, he was one of the most influential media scholars in the 70s and 80s. He wants to prove Theodor Adorno wrong and show him that the population is more than a group of drones, that there is a range of individuals and we all have different tastes in the media, we just reflect what is popular at the time.
Adorno and Horkheimer were distraught to find out that a revolution of the workers predicted by Karl Marx did not happen. Marx predicted that the workers in the factories would be so fed up they would overthrow the rulers and the factory owners, whereas when Adorno arrived in America, he noticed that the workers, although they didn’t have the best were reasonably happy as they had the media to keep them happy.
Adorno and his colleague Max Horkheimer, a German philosopher – sociologist who is also famous for his work in critical theory wrote a book called ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ in 1947 that contains the essay ‘Enlightenment and Mass Deception’. Their book captured the mass media and how it had such a damaging effect on society, nobody was an individual, we were all following each other, therefore the media was referred to as the ‘culture industry’ – meaning that media was just being produced exactly the same each time as the producers knew it would make a profit before it was even released!
Fiske, on the other hand wrote a book called ‘Understanding Popular Culture’ in 1989. At the beginning the book quotes that ‘popular culture is made by the people not 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 the on-going process of producing their popular culture.’ Fiske agrees that we live in a capitalised society but doesn’t think it is right to suggest that popular culture is a manufactured thing.
All products of the ‘culture industry’ are ‘exactly the same’ (Horkeimer and Adorno, 1979:122). ‘Products may seem different but it is all an illusion’ (1991:87). For the Germans on the other hand, this was devastating for them to realise that the ‘culture’ was reduced to manufactured products as they were all being sucked into believe something that wasn’t real. An example of this is the comedy act ‘Axes Of Awesome’. They produced a song called ‘The 4 Chords Song’, this illustrates that all songs use the same chords, allowing anyone to create music and make a profit. The comedy band makes a full six minute song including up to date pop music using just four chords. I was shocked to see that as I have never really thought about how similar all songs are. It is the passivity of audiences that Adorno is so concerned about.
Fiske argues that not all audiences are consumers of text, they produce meanings from texts and they decide what they like as individuals. Madonna for example is a famous pop singer, for Fiske she has sold many albums as she is able to connect with the audience well and understand what they want, whereas Adorno argues that the audience settle for the work of a manufactured icon, they don’t seek out their own entertainment.
Adorno’s theory suggests that even if you disagree with him, you wouldn’t ever realise that you are being sucked in by the media, as it is all identical. Fiske says that ‘Culture is a living, active process. It can be developed only from within, it cannot be imposed from without or above’ meaning that as an audience, we view the media how we want, from our own identity, which is unique to us
