Marshall McLuhan on YouTube

I'm going to show some of these videos in tomorrow's session on theories of the information society. I thought I'd put them here so I can find them more easily tomorrow

Graeme Turner on celebrity and Princess Diana

Next Wednesday we're going to be looking at the rise of celebrity coverage and the subsequent response of media theorists (and journalists) to that rise.

We'll look at the whole debate over dumbing down. Many traditional press watchers argue that increasing celebrity coverage (part of larger trends - tabloidisation and the the rise of infotainment) has led to a dumbing down of the news media and, by extension, the public that consumes it.

We'll also look at some ideas from the growing area of celebrity studies - the efforts by different theorists to define celebrity and to explain/analyse its increasing hold over the public...

If you dip into celebrity studies, you'll learn that Princess Diana, in particular her death and the public reaction to it, is a key case study for media theorists who want to explain what celebrity is and how it's changing/changed our culture.

If you want a taster, try 'Diana and The Cult of Celebrity', a recent web forum hosted on the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. Held to mark the tenth anniversary of Diana's death, it features various mini-essays by journalists, academics and theorists on royalty and celebrity.

One essay that's worth a look is 'Diana and the Celebrity Culture We Enjoy' by Graeme Turner, who's a professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia and author of Understanding Celebrity, which is worth looking at if you're interested in this subject. (The library has a couple of copies).

Turner's essay for the EB forum introduces some of the ideas he develops in more detail in his book. Here's a couple of quotes from Turner's essay:

"Interest in celebrity is driven by the desire to find out what these prominent people are really like. For the celebrity to feed that desire, there has to be more than just a catalogue of successful professional activities – hit movies, successful albums or a TV show. There must also be some element of an invitation to investigate their private life: a hint at the existence of another, usually more ordinary and familiar, persona beneath the public face. One of the defining features of celebrity, then, is the capacity to sustain interest in their private life. When the audience for a prominent person becomes more interested in their private life than in the activities which made them prominent in the first place, then that person has become a celebrity"

"There has been plenty written by academics about the way that celebrities such as Diana provide opportunities for people to do what has been called ‘life work’: that is, to think about their own behaviour, ethics, and relationships through a continuing engagement with the narrative of their favourite celebrity’s life. Others have pointed to the usefulness of celebrity gossip as a form of common social currency in communities where personal connections are reduced or attenuated. Still more have pointed to the changing structure of communities today, where social networks seem to be less cohesive and where the circle of friends and relations may well have shrunk as the extended family becomes a less common component of everyday life. In all of these accounts, the celebrity becomes a kind of proxy for earlier and now less available forms of social relations."

Turner goes on to talk about the fact that celebrities are, in some sense, socially useful to the people who consume endless coverage about them and describes the connection some feel with celebs as a 'para-social relationship'. This isn't the same as a relationship with a friend you can phone up, but it does have some sort of reality and is invested with real emotions.The essay's worth a look if you want a quick intro to some of the ideas we'll talk about on Wednesday.

(BTW - the pic is from EB's forum page - where you can find the credits)

Female Chauvinist Pigs

In the lecture on feminism and media theory, I talked a bit about 'Female Chauvinist Pigs' by Ariel Levy, which came out in 2006. I think we talked about it as an example of third wave feminism or as a response to/critique of the way post-feminism had developed/been trivialised and commercialised over the last decade.

Levy's target in her book is 'raunch culture', the hypersexualised in which, as she suggests, genuine liberation for women has been sidelined by the freedom to be sexually provocative. Post-feminism pushed a view of women as 'sex subjects', not sex objects. It celebrated female desire and pleasure. But Levy argues this has been co-opted and commercialised, that women now feel they have to go along with this attitude or risk being labelled prudes.

There's more to it all than that, of course. You can get a flavour of her argument in a short comment piece she wrote for The Guardian when the book came out. That paper also ran a good interview with Levy, in which she defined 'female chauvinist pigs' as "women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves" and suggested that the big thing driving raunch culture was consumerism. Here's a quote from the piece:

"When you talk to people about raunch culture in terms of a specific company or corporation they just say: 'Oh, well, sex sells.' That's our justification for everything." And Barbie-doll images of women - long legs, fake breasts, blonde hair - are a glossy advertising shorthand that simultaneously appeals to everyone and no one, shifting units in a way that more complex, varied and substantive sexual images never could. "My book is not an attack on the sex industry," says Levy. "It's about how the sex industry has become every industry."

The Observer ran a more critical review of the book and The Guardian commissioned Kate Taylor, who used to write the Sex Life column for men's mag GQ, to argue against Levy. Taylor's argument is that raunch culture is not about feminism; it's about fun and fashon. Another Gurdian columnist, Madeleine Bunting dismissed Taylor as 'naive' and agreed with Levy that money and consumer capitalism are driving raunch culture - we're all sex slaves to the market now, she suggested.

Clearly, there's a debate going on within feminist circles about the arguments of post-feminism, about invididual sexual empowerment vs collective political liberation. Others have picked up on Levy's general point.

Late last year, The Observer's Amelia Hill interviewed Carol Platt Liebau, an American academica and editor of the Harvard Law Review, about her new book 'Prude'. Here's a quote from the beginning of the piece.

"Women have fought for decades to be treated as men's equals. Yet today's girls are being told that female empowerment simply comes from being 'sexy', according to a new book by the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review. In Prude: How The Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls, Carol Platt Liebau says popular culture is undermining girls' sense of worth in their most vulnerable, formative years and glorifying destructive behaviour . 'The overwhelming lesson teenagers are now learning from the world around them is that being "sexy" is the ultimate accolade, trumping intelligence, character and all other accomplishments at every stage of a woman's life,' said Liebau, a political analyst and the review's first female managing editor."

If you're interested in feminist media theory, you could perhaps look at Levy's book and the debate it's sparked and perhaps link it to ladette magazines like More or the new lad's mags and the debate over whether they represent something positive for women or just the same old sexist attitudes.

Chris Atton on alternative media

If you want to do some reading in advance of Rod's lecture next week on alternative media, look for books by Chris Atton. He's one of the leading academics covering the field. The library should have copies of his standard text, Alternative Media, and also his book on the net, An Alternative Internet. You can get a flavour of his ideas from this review of his book on the net (PDF). Victor Pickard's attempt to define alternative media is also worth a look (PDF)

Glenn Close or Rocky - which one is Hillary Clinton?

In the lecture on feminism and media studies, I suggested it might be a good idea to look at some of the press coverage of Hillary Clinton's current campaign to win the nomination as the Democratic candidate in this year's US Presidential election.

You may not like Clinton or approve of some of the dodgy moves she, Bill and her campaign team have pulled in the campaign. Even so, it's hard to disagree with those who suggest that she gets a certain level of criticism/vitriol from some press commentators merely because she is a woman running for high office.

As I said in the class, the general assumption behind some of this coverage is that it's ok for a man to be ambitious, to want power, but when a woman wants the same thing then there must be something wrong with her - she must be scheming, untrustworthy, unnatural...

A monster even - that's what an aide in the Obama team called her a while back and it's the line taken by Andrew Sullivan, a political pundit/blogger and long time critic of the Clintons, in a piece he wrote for The Times in early March.

Sullivan compares the Clintons to a horror movie monster you can't kill, to zombies, to Glenn Close at the end of 'Fatal Attraction'. Remember that, for some media theorists, that film and its representation of a career woman as unbalanced and dangerous is a key part of an argument about attempts to roll back the gains made by feminism in the seventies.

Initially, Hillary Clinton's campaign against Barack Obama stressed policy. She was all about the nitty gritty details of politics, about experience, whereas he was about mythical imagery (inspiring speeches, first black man to run for President etc).

But over the last month, Clinton's campaign has gone symbolic too - first she started to play the feminist card, perhaps spying an opportunity in some of the sexist stereotyping flung her way by press pundits.

More recently, she compared herself to Rocky Balboa from the Rocky films. Not sure if that latter is that good an idea. Perhaps she should have tried to refer to a Hollywood film that portrayed a battling woman in a positive, sympathetic way. But are there any, besides those that show heroic mums?

Journalism, Science and the MMR panic

Looking at the health panics sparked by media coverage of medical issues could make for a good subject for a dissertation. Journalists are often accused of simplifying complex issues when it comes to science. Journalism's habitual suspicion of authorities can also lead to a kneejerk rejection of what scientists and doctors say and a rather over-eager desire to unearth conspiracies and embrace maverick outsiders.

Case in point: the panic a few years back over whether the MMR vaccine (the jab to protect children against Measles, Mumps and Rubella) in some way caused autism. This story has been back in the news recently because the General Medical Council is currently hearing the defence of three doctors accused of serious professional misconduct in allegations made against the safety of the MMR vaccine. The best known of these doctors is Andrew Wakefield, whose claims about MMR and autism in the medical magazine The Lancet led to massive media attention and a major ongoing panic.

These days, the prevailing media opinion is that the vaccine is safe and that Wakefield has been discredited (though he still has his supporters). But a few years back the media took the opposite view, which led to lots of parents refusing to vaccinate their kids, which led to a resurgence of measles in particular (and measles can be a very dangerous disease).

Last Thursday (March 27th), Radio 4's Today Programme did a good follow-up on all this, interviewing Neil Dixon (chief exec of the medicial charity The King's Fund) and Fiona Fox (direct of the Science Media Centre, a group set up to press for better coverage of scientific issues in the media). You can listen to it again (until Thursday 3rd April) - the report's about six minutes long.

The basic angle of the report was - what have we (i.e. the media) learned from the whole MMR fuss. Dixon made the key point first - that prior to the panic we were getting to the point where measles in particular might have been eradicated in Britain, but because so many people stopped vaccinating, the disease was able to regain ground...

Fox has an interesting take on the whole thing. She criticises the media for simplifying issues but she also says scientists should have made more effort to engage with the media and correct mistakes and misapprehensions. She says that many avoided the media because they 'didn't like the way they framed the issue'. Her organisation sets out to get scientists in the media and to brief journalists on key scientific issues.

She makes one other interesting point which is very relevant to some of the issues you've been looking at with Rod. She criticises the journalistic approach of balance, suggesting that it mispresents things. For example, covering MMR and autism, journalists would give equal space to Andrew Wakefield and a scientist who disagreed with his conclusions.

Fox says that given that 99% of scientists thought the MMR vaccine was safe, balancing reports 50/50 is not appropriate. Instead, she says, out of 100 reports, one should feature Andew Wakefield and the other 99 should feature the more accepted view. That would be more representative.

If you want to look into all this further, the Science Media Centre is a good place to start. Six years ago now, they published a report (PDF) on the whole MMR panic, which is worth a look. There's a book length analysis of the whole affair, 'Health, Risk and The News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media' by Tammy Boyce, which is definitely worth reading if you're interested in this area.

(BTW - the pic is of Andrew Wakefield and is from the BBC site)