The popular conception of mediation refers to the reconciliation of two opposing parties by a third, and this is similar to its meaning in both Marxist theory and media studies.
As James Arnt Aune has reflected, questions that arise concerning this problem include: "How do institutions, practices, and messages shape class formation?
In this way the subordinate classes are said to be mediated by the effects of ideology, or "false consciousness" or a belief system that doesn't allow them to see the oppression they are enduring for what it is.
The problem with this idea, as many Marxists have noted, is that it doesn't leave room for members of the subordinate classes to act on the world around them through alternate forms of mediation.
Perhaps it may take sacrifices, and expose itself to an uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power, reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and disperse his leading cadres.Unfortunately, Gramsci died before he could completely articulate how hegemony mediates the subordinate classes in periods of relative calm or how to work against the powers of the ruling classes as exerted in this way.
Importantly, however, he had vastly complicated the ways that later Marxists would think about mediation: as a means of persuasion utilized by the ruling classes, rather than as complete control of the available ideas within a given culture (ideology).
The "unity" which matters is a linkage between that articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected.
Beginning perhaps with the Frankfurt school's theorization of the "culture industry," particularly in the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, theorists have tried to understand how mass audiences are both affected by and can affect the massive, corporatized media establishment that we see in countries like the U.S. As Adorno and Horkheimer reflect:[10] The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions.
As he continues, however (on p. 171): Like any other extension of man, typography had psychic and social consequences that suddenly shifted previous boundaries and patterns of culture.
3–4): After more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.
Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society.This has resulted in a hybridization of media forms (p. 53): Media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves.
TV caused drastic changes in radio programming, and in the form of the thing or documentary novel.It has also resulted in the translation of human consciousness "more and more into the form of information" (p. 57): By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions… of our bodies… will be translated into information systems.
Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.
Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs.McLuhan has been critiqued as being alternately utopian, deterministic, and Eurocentric about the ways that media mediate between human beings and their natural world, but no one would deny the effects his work has had on the study of media.
This is not normally accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution's policy.This model focuses mainly on "structural factors" of the mass media, including "ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (such as advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news and have the power to define it and explain what it means".
As McChesney says:[14] The corporate domination of both the media system and the policy-making process that establishes and sustains it causes serious problems for a functioning democracy and a healthy culture.
It is difficult to imagine much headway being made on the crucial social issues that face our nation given how poorly they are covered by the current U.S. media system.At the same time, however, McChesney, unlike early thinkers in this vein, is interested in mobilizing popular resistance against this domination.
McChesney is well known as an outspoken advocate for this public participation, engaging in speaking tours around the country and lobbying against corporate control of the media.
The validation of the concept of remediation — "the representation of one medium in another"[15] — is a principal aim of the book, in order to illustrate how new and old media forms continually inform one another.
These interrelated processes highlight, what Bolter and Grusin term the "double logic of remediation"[17] that pursues the proliferation of media while trying to erase all traces of human and/or technological mediation.
[28] Bolter and Grusin provide insight into the interdependency of media and its integral role in understanding how "the remediation of reality has been built into our technologies of representation".
[28] Many thinkers are now working at the intersections of Marxism and media studies, and are attempting to tease out the various interrelations, contradictions, and possibilities inherent in these two conversations.
Many of these thinkers see as their project the rehabilitation of Marxist theory and cultural studies in light of new forms of media and parallel social and historical developments and vice versa.
As Deepa Kumar puts it, regarding aspects of Marxist theory such as dialectical materialism:[30] ... the method of analysis developed by Marx and Engels, is more relevant to media and cultural studies scholarship today for at least two reasons: the crisis of neoliberalism and the collapse of Stalinism….The time has come for critical scholarship to shake off the yoke of TINA (there is no alternative), and start to take seriously the bankruptcy of capitalism and the possibilities of a socialist alternative.Thus, Kumar sees the task of scholars of media and culture as twofold: "to explain and critique the state of culture and society, and then to act upon the world to change it.
A dialectical method of analysis would involve studying all these factors within a concrete historical context so as to explain the multiple mediations that infuse a product of culture".
For Graham, in order for a theory to "establish the historical significance of a global, digitally mediated knowledge economy," the approach:[31] must grasp the relationship between language, privilege, and the perceived relative value of different classes of knowers and knowledges; to grasp the effects of new media and their relationship to changes in conceptions about the character of knowledge; and—since knowledge, new media, language, and value are perennial and dynamic influences in human societies—to identify what marks the current transition in social relations as historically significant or unique, if anything.In order to do this work, then, Graham is adopting a "process view of mediation", ... that sees the movement and transformation of meanings across times, spaces, and social contexts; which acknowledges that, yes, there are technological aspects of mediation that cannot be ignored, and there are substantial issues surrounding what is generally understood by the term "content".