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.