Media Culture - as an effective tool in Cultural Studies.

Media Culture - as an effective tool in Cultural Studies.

Introduction

     The Media and Cultural Studies emphasizes on the study of media in their historical, economic, social and political context. And it highlights the cultural forms created and distributed by media industries and the way in industriesandthe ways in which they vibrate in everyday life, on theindividual, national, and global level. It focuses primarilyon Sound and screen media radio, television, film, popular music, and internet, but reaching out across boundaries. Media culture clearly reflects the multiple sides of contemporary debates and problems. It   is for this reason that any reading of the media must always be a political reading.  Moreover, Cultural Studies investigates culture as the ordinary and often unnoticed practices and relations through which social life is ordered and made meaningful. This includes research in top patterns of everyday life, Consumption and markets; changing distinctions between public andprivate; identity, race andcultural difference; cultural engagements with the environment; celebrity, gender and popular culture; and material Culture.

Before proceeding further, we have to know about the definition of cultural study as given below.

What is Cultural Studies?

A culturalstudy is an academic field grounded in critical theory. It generally concerns the political nature of popular contemporary culture, and is to this extent distinguished from cultural anthropology. Now, let’s have a glance on the on-going debate that is about media.

What is Media Studies?

 A Media study is an academic field that deals with the content, form, history, effects, and political implications of various media and technologies.

Difference between culture and Media

Culture           culture is a mirror or reaction of any society. In literary text, manuscript we can find full description of that society which gives glimpse of that era.

Culture Providing specialization in the history, theory, and methodology of Cultural studies

Culture is the characteristics of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Today, in the United States as in other countries populated largely by immigrants, the culture is influenced by the many groups of people that now make up the country.

Media             Providing a specialization in the history, theory, and methodology of Media Studies.

Popular culture and the mass media have a symbiotic relationship: each depends on the other in an intimate collaboration."

By - K. Turner 

Films are often referred as mass media or mass communication. In mass media the source is central and usually single, and the audience is total number of human beings far away from the source. Thus mass media like films affect and influence a large number of people, and are integral to culture. Media studies and its role in the construction of cultural values, its circulation of symbolic value, and its production of desire is central to cultural studies. Primarily on Sound and screen media, radio, television, film, popular music, and internet, but reaching out across boundaries. Media culture clearly reflects the multiple sides of contemporary debates and problems.

Media culture is also representing religious and their view. Now a day we can find many mythological TV serials on it. Media culture, in its mass marketing, has been compared to the role of religions in the past. It has been considered as taking the place of the old traditional religions.

Here, we can say that Media culture is an effective tool which helps to understand the culture of society. It also gives brief reflection of society. All kinds of multimedia tools helpful to understand present situation of contemporary time. There are many types of multimedia tools like: TV, Radio, Internet, Books, Music, Projector, Computer, Advertisement, Hording board, Mobiles etc. All tools of Media is representing the ideology and psychology of people. All gadgets are based on scientific steps stones but they reflect the people and their view. Let’s see in brief that how the Media is representing the background of society and their culture. Cultural Studies and Communication and Media Studies research rated at the highest level – well above World standard.

Cultural Studies investigates culture as the ordinary and often unnoticed practices and relations through which social life is ordered and made meaningful. This includes research into patterns of everyday life, consumption and markets; changing distinctions between public and private; identity, race and cultural difference; cultural engagements with the environment; celebrity, gender and popular culture; and material Culture. Researchers are internationally recognized for their contribution to cultural studies as a leading interdisciplinary Field. Their work has generated new thinking and methods that foregrounds culture as a dynamic process rather than a fixed set of traditions or elite forms. It has had significant impact on major policy and delivery bodies, from, for example, the Australian Privacy Commission to the Special Broadcasting Service, and has often led to innovative research partnerships that have shifted policy and public wariness.

Now a day we see the more number of Advertisement of Shampoo and Fairness cream. So we can say that Media is useful to understand wish and desire of contemporary people. So we can say that their attraction towards Long and Silky hair and Fair cream. So media can be torch bearer of present society and their perspective.

 

Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed. Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forget our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and “them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest Values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture.

Cultural studies are valuable because it provides some tools that enable one to read and interpret one's culture critically. It also subverts distinctions between "high" and "low" culture by considering a wide continuum of cultural artifacts ranging from novels to television and by refusing to erect any specific cultural hierarchies or canons. Previous Approaches to culture tended to be primarily literary and elitist, dismissing media culture as banal, trashy, and not worthy of serious attention. The project of cultural studies, by contrast, avoids cutting the field of culture into high and low, or popular against elite. Such distinctions are difficult to maintain and generally serve as a front for normative aesthetic valuations and, often, a political program (i.e. either dismissing mass culture for high culture, or celebrating what is deemed “popular" while scorning "elitist" high culture.

Media culture as well as Cultural studies allows us to examine and critically scrutinize the whole range of culture without prior prejudices toward one or another sort of cultural text, institution, or practice. It also opens the way toward more differentiated political, rather than aesthetic, valuations of cultural artifacts in which one attempts to distinguish critical and oppositional from conformist and conservative moments in a cultural artifact.

            Because of its focus on representations of race, gender, and class, and its critique of ideologies that promote various forms of oppression, cultural studies lends itself to a multi culturalist program that demonstrates how culture reproduces certain forms of racism, sexism, and biases against members of subordinate classes, social groups, or Alternative life-styles. Cultural studies of the media begin with the assumption that media culture is political and ideological. Sometimes it highlights its existing social values, oppressions and inequalities.

In day to day life media culture helps to represent the social as well as political life and economic groups. Many times this representation can be found in the media which are enlisted below:-

1)      Suggestive

2)      Provocative 

By these two points media can suggest in some ways in ideology. For example when we see an actor who is wearing clothe of particular brand. So it presents as well as suggests the marketing strategy for the products.

Apart from that, we can also find out media culture can be provocative as it is indicated above that it is provocative and we still believe in it that whenever the incident happens in the movie or in our everyday life at time media culture is provocative, because media is reacting suddenly. Therefore, it can be classified that media is provocative, for example in the movie “Gadar” Pakistan is shown or portrayed as a country of Islam or as terrorist state, while in the literature this kind of image of Pakistan is the same like In “A Train to Pakistan” which has been written by famous writer ‘Khushvant Singh’ in which the social image of Pakistan is shown very well. Hence we can clarify media as suggestive and provocative too.

Media culture is studied through an analysis of popular media culture. There are four kinds of analysis of popular culture as enlisted below.

Therefore, with the help of these four types of analysis, the emphasize of Media Culture can be observed in the Popular Culture.

Being a Media Culture, It many times helps us to know about the ideological and political power. So, due to popular and media culture, we may know about the culture of various fields in which media is now emerged as a popular culture. And in literature also media culture is shown for the example the article by Shashi Tharoor, In which he presents about the freedom of media and says  Should we give liberty to Media of not ??Therefore, mass media can be regarded as a popular culture, which deals with the literal and educated people. Hence, in the era of globalization, Media culture is penetrated as a mass communication.

As far as media culture is concerned, it is also known as popular media culture. Media culture can be highlighted as an analysis of the forms of symbols. Cultural studies give more stress to media culture, which connection with the political ideologies has embedded in these representations. On one side media culture examines sponsors of the representations (For examples – COCA COLA) and on the other hand it propagates the ideology of the people. For examples Amir Khan conveys his message to remain away from the Coca – Cola by doing some patriotic movies such as Lagan, Mangal Pandey and Rang De Bansanti.

   

 

Here, we can say that how Medial Culture one identity in different perspective. It can show one person in different types of personality, now those evident are useful to understand History and Contemporary time. Hence Media culture is effective to study Cultural studies.

Functions of Mass Media

There are five kinds of functions of Mass Media in which first three are very important.

Looking toward entertainment, one cannot fully grasp the Madonna phenomenon without analyzing her marketing strategies, her political environment, her cultural artifacts, and their effects. In a similar fashion, younger female pop music stars and groups such as Mariah

Carey, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez also deploy the tools of the glamour industry and media spectacle to make certain stars icons of fashion, beauty, style, and sexuality, as well as purveyors of music. Furthermore, in an era of globalization, one must be aware of the global networks that produce and distribute cultural in the interests of profit and corporate hegemony. Yet political economy alone does not hold the key to cultural studies and important as it is, it has limitations as a single approach. Some political economy analyses reduce the meanings and effects of texts to rather circumscribed and reductive ideological functions, arguing that media culture merely reflects the ideology of the ruling economic elite that controls the culture industries and is nothing more than a vehicle for capitalist ideology. It is true that media culture overwhelmingly supports capitalist values, but it is also a site of intense struggle between different races, classes, gender, and social groups.

Thus, in order to fully grasp the nature and effects of media culture, one needs to develop methods to analyze the full range of its meanings and effects. Looking toward entertainment, one cannot fully grasp the Madonna phenomenon without analyzing her marketing strategies, her political environment, her cultural artifacts, and their effects. In a similar fashion, younger female pop music stars and groups such as Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez deploy the tools of the glamour industry and media spectacle to make certain stars icons of fashion, beauty, style, and sexuality, as well as purveyors of music. Furthermore, in an era of globalization, one must be aware of the global networks that produce and distribute cultural in the interests of profit and corporate hegemony. Yet political economy alone does not hold the key to cultural studies and important as it is, it has limitations as a single approach. Some political economy analyses reduce the meanings and effects of texts to rather circumscribed and reductive ideological functions, arguing that media culture merely reflects the ideology of the ruling economic elite that controls the culture industries and is nothing more than a vehicle for capitalist ideology. It is true that media culture overwhelmingly supports capitalist values, but it is also a site of intense struggle between different races, classes, gender, and social groups. Thus, in order to fully grasp the nature and effects of media culture, one needs to develop methods to analyze the full range of its meanings and effects.

 

Advertisement through social media is very useful to understand Cultural. Now days we can find many writers and critics are using social site to connect with people. And they also write their books and blogs. So people can stay in touch with them. Many social media like: Face book, Twitter, You tube, E - mail etc. so we can read them. Now a day’s, writer like Amish Tripathi is using “VIDEO TRAILER” to introduce his books like ‘MELUHA’, ‘NAGAS’ AND ‘VAYUPUTRA’. He propagates his writing his books and tries to stay on Media.  Advertising corporations like Nike and McDonalds, through analysis of references to them in the media. Likewise, there is a new terrain of Internet audience research which studies how fans act in chat rooms devoted to their favorite artifacts of media culture, create their own finites, or construct artifacts that disclose how they are living out the fantasies and scripts of the culture industries. Previous studies of the audience and the reception of media privileged ethnographic studies that selected slices of the vast media audiences, usually from the site where researchers themselves lived. Such studies are invariably limited and broader effects research can indicate how the most popular artifacts of media culture have a wide range of effects. In my book Media

Culture, I studied some examples of popular cultural artifacts which clearly influenced behavior in audiences throughout the globe. Examples include groups of kids and adults who imitated Rambo in various forms of a social behavior, or fans of Beavis and Butt-Head who started fires or tortured animals in the modes practiced by the popular MTV cartoon characters. Media effects are complex and controversial and it is the merit of cultural studies to make their study an important part of its agenda.

A Few words more we may say that there are many ways and different perspectives which help us to rethink about our social life through Media and Media Culture. That’s why media culture plays a vital role as an effective tool in cultural studies.

Ecocriticism - concept and critical view

Ecocriticism - concept and critical view

Introduction

Criticism

Criticism is also known as or famous as a Literary Criticism. This tern is generally attached with the study of any literary piece. It is a theory which evaluates the any form which is in written form. This tern is for studies with defining, classifying, analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating.

Example: -       If we take a piece of any written form, our great epic “RAMAYAN”. Then let’s
see how Criticism functions.

                        The cannon of the evaluation must be there in Criticism with the use of that cannon we can define. First we have to classify that in which form it is written, for example whether it is in Poetic form of narrative form or in any other for. We have to define its form. The classification of the epic would be just like that is it a religious, social, political???  Then the branch of criticism analyzes and gives interpretation of it. The cannon of criticism interpreting and evaluate it.

Eco-criticism

   

William Rueckert may have been the first person to use the term ecocriticism in 1978, Rueckert published an essay titled Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. His intent was to focus on “the application of ecology and ecological concepts to the study of literature.”

  

Eco criticism is defined by Cheryll Glotfelty as: - 

Eco criticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment

"Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment….takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.

            We can also know this theory as a Green Studies.  It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies. Eco criticism reflects the role of natural environment which we can see in imagination. It is also gives the concept of “nature” can be related in the life of “human being”. How life of human being is reflected with nature. How both are interwoven with each other. “Life without nature and life without literature is almost impossible.”  So life is reflection of nature and nature gives life to live. So Nature and Culture are related with each other.  So Eco-criticism is study of relationship between literature and physical environment. Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation.

More specifically, it investigates how nature is used literally or metaphorically in certain literary or aesthetic genres and tropes, and what assumptions about nature underlie genres that may not address this topic directly. This analysis in turn allows ecocriticism to assess how certain historically conditioned concepts of nature and the natural, and particularly literary and artistic constructions of it, have come to shape current perceptions of the environment. In this branch of criticism - Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of languages and literature. Most of literary works gives introduction of nature and Literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the non-human. Eco criticism is differentiated from literature, as a different term with the gradual development of branch of criticism.

            Ecocriticism is separate branch of criticism. Other branch of criticism evaluates the relations between writers, texts, and the world. In most literary theory "the world" is synonymous with society-the social sphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner's first law of ecology, "Everything is connected to everything else," we must conclude that literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system, in which energy, matter, and ideas interact."Eco critics examine human perception of wilderness, and how it has changed throughout history and whether or not current environmental issues are accurately represented or even mentioned in popular culture and modern literature. Ecocritics checks  such things as the underlying ecological values, what, precisely, is meant by the word nature, and whether the examination of "place" should be a distinctive category, much like class, gender or race.

As Michael P. Cohen has observed, “if you want to be an Ecocritics, be prepared to explain what you do and be criticized, if not satirized.” Certainly, Cohen adds his voice to such critique, noting that one of the problems of ecocriticism has been what he calls its “praise-song school” of criticism.

Ecologically minded individuals and scholars have been publishing progressive works of eco theory and criticism since the explosion of environmentalism in the late 1960s and 1970s. However, because there was no organized movement to study the ecological/environmental side of literature, these important works were scattered and categorized under a litany of different subject headings: pastorals, human ecology, regionalism, American Studies etc. British Marxist critic Raymond Williams, for example, wrote a seminal critique of pastoral literature in 1973, The Country and the City, which spawned two decades of leftist suspicion of the ideological evasions of the genre and its habit of making the work of rural labor disappear even though Williams himself observed that the losses lamented in pastoral might be genuine ones, and went on to profess a decidedly green socialism.

Another early ecocritical text, Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival (1974), proposed a version of an argument that was later to dominate ecocriticism and environmental philosophy; that environmental crisis is caused primarily by a cultural tradition in the West of separation of culture from nature and elevation of the former to moral predominance. Such 'anthropocentrism' is identified in the tragic conception of a hero whose moral struggles are more important than mere biological survival, whereas the science of animal ethnology, Meeker asserts, shows that a "comic mode" of muddling through and "making love not war" has superior ecological value. In the later, "second wave" ecocriticism, Meeker's adoption of an eco philosophical position with apparent scientific sanction as a measure of literary value tended to prevail over Williams’ ideological and historical critique of the shifts in a literary genre's representation of nature.

In the mid 1980s, scholars began to work collectively to establish ecocriticism as a genre, primarily through the work of the Western Literature Association in which the revaluation of nature writing as a non-fictional literary genre could function. In 1990, at the University of Nevada in Reno, Glotfelty became the first person to hold an academic position as a professor of Literature and the Environment, and UNR has retained the position it established at that time as the intellectual home of ecocriticism even as ASLE has burgeoned into an organization with thousands of members in the US alone. From the late 1990s, new branches of ASLE and affiliated organizations were started in the UK, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand, India, Taiwan, Canada and Europe.

 What is the main function of Eco critics?

             

Ecocriticism looks back on a long tradition of criticism that approaches nature as an aesthetic and not a scientific object, and that often sees scientific analysis as detrimental to aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, literature and art, in this framework, easily come to be perceived as bulwarks against science and technology (a view that goes back at least as far as the Romantic era) rather than as sites of encounter between different types of knowledge and discourse. Even where science is not rejected, it frequently functions simply as a means of reconfirming the beauty and complexity that the author already assumes to be inherent in nature, without any real conceptual bridging between scientific description and aesthetic valuation. Ecocriticism looks back on a long tradition of criticism that approaches nature as an aesthetic and not a scientific object, and that often sees scientific analysis as detrimental to aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, literature and art, in this framework, easily come to be perceived as bulwarks against science and technology (a view that goes back at least as far as the Romantic era) rather than as sites of encounter between different types of knowledge and discourse. Even where science is not rejected, it frequently functions simply as a means of reconfirming the beauty and complexity that the author already assumes to be inherent in nature, without any real conceptual bridging between scientific description and aesthetic valuation.

A different kind of problem for the construction of eco-bridges between literature and science is pointed up by the shift in terminology from "nature" to the "environment." "Environment" is a more abstract and also a vaguer concept than "nature," since it can (and sometimes does) encompass both natural and man-made habitats. This change in terminology is indicative of strong doubts, particularly--though not only--in the Humanities, about where one should draw the line between nature and culture: although we all have an intuitive grasp of this distinction, it is not at all easy to formalize. Most of the natural environments Westerners encounters in their own societies, at any rate, are anything but "wild" or untouched by man--even though they may continue to strike the observer as irreducibly nonhuman and other. Since the advent of deconstruction,

New Historicism and Cultural Studies, literary critics are justifiably wary of drawing precise boundaries between such concepts as "nature" and "culture" that seem to exclude each other but turn out upon closer analysis to be entangled with each other in multiple ways, whether these entanglements be semantic, historical, or power political.

Green literary criticism, therefore, is confronted from the start with a spectrum of different and not always compatible approaches to the environment: the "discursive construction," which foregrounds the extent to which the very distinction of nature and culture is itself dependent on specific cultural values; the "aesthetic construction," which places value on nature for its beauty, complexity, or wildness; the "political construction," which emphasizes the power interests that inform any valuation or devaluation of nature; and, finally, the "scientific construction," which aims at the description of the functioning of natural systems. Any specific ecocritical analysis has to situate itself in relation to these various discourses and to critically interrogate their contribution to ecological projects. One of the central questions that necessarily emerges in such an interrogation is the question of how the value of the natural environment can and should be assessed in relation to human needs and goals. "Social ecology" generally insists that it is ultimately human needs and societal well-being which must determine our approach to nature, whereas "deep ecology" emphasizes on the contrary that nature has value in and of itself, independently of its functions for human society (this opposition has been discussed by Michael Bennett in American Book Review's recent Urban Culture issue). The goals and methods of an ecocritical project will be crucially determined by how it defines itself in relation to these broader divisions within environmental thought. In a time of intensifying ecological crises and increasing social conflict over the management and distribution of natural resources, as well as a growing number of engagements with environmental issues in literature and other art forms, literary criticism is only beginning to think through the implications of "green thought" for its own practices. Science, in one form or another, has formed a central part of ecological debates to date, and green criticism risks condemning itself to irrelevance if it ignores the contributions as well as the challenges that the scientific description of nature holds out to aesthetic articulations. With a scientifically informed foregrounding of green issues in literature, ecocriticism is likely not only to contribute significantly to the interdisciplinary dialogue between literature and science, but also to the broad rethinking of the relations between humans and nature that is currently taking place in Western societies.

Let’s see some examples of Eco criticism: -

v   In 1915 the aging Thomas Hardy overwhelmed by a sense of the collapse of civilized values as the great war dragged on, wrote a brief poem called in time of ‘’The Breaking Of Nations’’

1.

Only a man harrowing clods

                      In a slow silent walks

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

     Half a sleep as they stalk.

2.

Only thin smoke without flame from the heaps of couch-grass

    Yet this will go onward the same though Dynasties pass.

3.

Yonder a main and her Wight come whispering by: war’s annals will cloud into night ere their story die.

                                                           

Let’s take a familiar example from our epic and mythology that how Criticism use the textual content of any literary piece of art, then the Eco criticism can apply on that particular  work. After evaluating by Eco criticism the result came in different way.

                        We know Ramayana as a epic of Indian mythology. Here description of writer is available. We generally read it as a holy book. But we can also apply ecocriticism here. Let’s see how?? It was clear that “Ramayana” has story of one prince who fought against monster and bring his wife back to his kingdom. But here from the perspective of eco – criticism we can see. In the forest they lived happily. During their residential time, one day Sita saw a “GOLDEN DEER” – she asked for that golden deer. And Rama went on haunt Golden Deer. Now the branch of eco – criticism works.

Ø  What was the description of golden Deer?

Ø  How it was looking like?

Ø  What kind of other animals were there?

Ø  How the Nature described and what was was the effect on that animal?

Ø  Remove history and see How Nature narrated in Piece of Literary work.

 if we look at the example of below poem, easily find that the branch of Eco-criticism has a center of theme of Physical environmental element. 

 केदार नाथ सिंह की एक बेहतरीन कविता- “विद्रोह”

आज घर में घुसा तो वहां अजब दृश्य था सुनिये- मेरे बिस्तर ने कहा

यह रहा मेरा इस्तीफ़ा मैं अपने कपास के भीतर वापस जाना चाहता हूं |

उधर कुर्सी और मेज़ का एक संयुक्त मोर्चा था दोनों तड़पकर बोले

जी- अब बहुत हो चुका आपको सहते-सहते हमें बेतरह याद आ रहे हैं

हमारे पेड़ और उनके भीतर का वह ज़िंदा द्रव जिसकी हत्या कर दी है आपने |

उधर आलमारी में बंद किताबें चिल्ला रही थीं खोल दो-हमें खोल दो हम जाना चाहती हैं अपने बांस के जंगल और मिलना चाहती हैं अपने बिच्छुओं के डंक और सांपों के चुंबन से |

पर सबसे अधिक नाराज़ थी वह शॉल जिसे अभी कुछ दिन पहले कुल्लू से ख़रीद लाया था बोली- साहब! आप तो बड़े साहब निकले मेरा दुम्बा भेड़ा मुझे कब से पुकार रहा है और आप हैं कि अपनी देह की क़ैद में लपेटे हुए हैं मुझे |

उधर टी.वी. और फोन का बुरा हाल था ज़ोर-ज़ोर से कुछ कह रहे थे वे पर उनकी भाषा मेरी समझ से परे थी -कि तभी नल से टपकता पानी तड़पा- अब तो हद हो गई साहब! अगर सुन सकें तो सुन लीजिए इन बूंदों की आवाज़- कि अब हम यानी आपके सारे के सारे क़ैदी आदमी की जेल से मुक्त होना चाहते हैं |

अब जा कहां रहे हैं- मेरा दरवाज़ा कड़का जब मैं बाहर निकल रहा था |

So, Green Studies or eco-criticism is paying attention on nature, animal, human being and about to Nature. It is different from other branch of literary criticism. It is not highlight the Diction of literary work. Language complexity, rhyme scheme, forms of narration. So we can say that ecocriticism gives the concept of “nature” can be related in the life of “human being”.