Marxism & Pluralism - homework essay

Marxism & Pluralism - homework essay

'The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. Discuss the arguments for and against this view.'

The rise of new and digital media has been so impactful in the sense that it can be argued that it has either empowered or restricted audiences, if not both since the very creation of the Internet. However it's looking at these from both a Marxist and pluralist perspective, which really give a deeper insight into these effects, with the former taking the more cynical approach to things in saying that the Internet is working to just reinforce the status quo and the latter suggesting that things like freedom of speech are promoted through it.

A Marxist perspective would argue that the so-called “information revolution” has done little to benefit audiences or to subvert the established power structures in society. Far from being a “great leveller” (Krotoski, 2012) as many have claimed, it has merely helped to reinforce the status quo by promoting dominant ideologies. The most popular news website in the UK by a considerable margin is the ‘Mail Online’, which receives more than 8 million hits every month and is continuing to expand rapidly – with forecasts that it will make £100 million or more in digital revenues in the next three years. Similar to its tabloid print edition, the website takes a Conservative, right-wing perspective on key issues around gender, sexuality and race and audiences appear to passively accept what the Marxist theorist, Gramsci, called a hegemonic view. When one of their chief columnists, Jan Moir, wrote a homophobic article about the death of Stephen Gately in 2009 there were Twitter and Facebook protests but, ultimately, they did not change the editorial direction of the gatekeepers controlling the newspaper.

A pluralist perspective though, would take up the viewpoint that audiences have been empowered in terms of consumption and production in the sense that citizen journalism has become increasingly more prominent. With this being the the collection, dissemination, and analysis of news and information by the general public, especially by means of the Internet, we can see that audiences have a good level of things like freedom of speech which they can utilise relating to either 'conforming, accommodating or rejecting' (Gurevitch). We can see this represented through the widespread use of blogs or even social media by audiences but also more importantly, in reporting cases to do with injustice. For example in the case of the death of Ian Tomlinson, without the recording of a stander-by, perhaps no prosecution would have been made to the police officer who struck him down and it's cases like this that make you realise that 'the internet has given readers much more power' (Murdoch). This newfound power is something that can be said that makes the internet the great tool it is today.

Marxists would also suggest that in reality, the internet is just a continuation of newspapers in the sense that the websites that most people access for things like news are from the same 'minority of (media) producers. While the internet does allow for people to create their own news sources, at the end of the day it's still the ones from leading organisations that are going to be gaining the most traffic since 'global media firms will be able to incorporate the internet and related computer networks into their empires' (Herman and McChesney, 1997). This can even be displayed with the top 5% of all websites accounting for almost 75% of user volume (Lin and Webster, 2002), representing that even if users do have the capability of producing their own news content, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be accessed on a mass scale. With this established, these organisations may simply provide audiences with content that is 'dumbed down' to solely generate mass audiences, helping them in achieving their motive of increased profit. Stories like Kim Kardashian being robbed at gunpoint link to this, since they seem to gain more clicks than stories about actual important news, relating to Alain de Botton saying that there is a 'yawning divide between news that is important news that is fun.' These dumbed down articles can also be linked to the hypodermic needle model, in which the media producers 'inject' information into audiences that can have adverse effects on them, like perhaps them not valuing news that actually matters.

However pluralists would rebut this, saying that audiences are more active in receiving news than is often suggested. McQuail said that the relationship between media institutions and audiences is 'generally entered into voluntarily and on apparently equal terms.' Rather than go with what the hypodermic needle model was putting across, that audiences just consume media without any thought behind it, as mentioned before they have the ability to 'conform, accommodate, challenge or reject' content according to their prior needs and dispositions according to the plural values within society. One of the standout examples of this manipulation by audiences is with the Brexit and Trump victories. More dominant ideologies that exist such as government being more centreground in their nature to please the most amount of people are now being challenged, a plural value. Polarising, more extreme views seem to be what appeal to the public the most and what's particularly interesting is the fact that most newspapers were more on the side of Bremain in the UK. This view wasn't shared with the audience though, and we see this through Brexit's victory which is representative of how audiences aren't these passive receivers that they may be made out to be.

In conclusion, it can definitely be said that new and digital media has empowered audiences in making them a lot more active and allowing them to manipulate the content that they get to their own ideologies. At the same time though, aspects like how media empires will simply incorporate the internet into their empires shine a light on the fact that at the end of the day, they'll still most likely be the more dominant player within the media.