Media Studies

The relationship between media studies and identity can be mapped over the four major areas of an interdiscipline derived from a large range of cognate areas, all of which coalesce as they contribute to the study of media. In the contemporary historical moment when nearly everything is mediated and the centrality of media is crucial to globalization, media remains a central area of study. Moreover as Melissa A. Johnson observes, media overlaps with identity studies in at least three ways: identity is self-defined, partly through the media; identity moves from the local to the transnational as does the media; and identity is situational and shifting as charted by the media.

Media studies derives from different traditions in different geographical locations. In the United States, the Ferment in the Field issue of the Journal of Communication in 1983 signaled a field with an incoming bifurcation between qualitative and quantitative approaches. By the mid-1980s, the dominant approach was quantitative and the cultural or critical components were so marginal, in power in the field, that they were reinscribed as newcomers. As James Carey had written, however, the study of culture could be traced back to John Dewey in the 1920. The famed exchange between Paul Lazarsfeld and Theodor Adorno in the 1930s gave rise to the division between administrative research—that took the status quo as given and critical research that challenged the premises implicit in much administrative work. The Frankfurt school ushered in the study of cultural industries that infused concepts of power and the economy to the study of media. Decades later following the rise of British Cultural Studies issues of ideology, working-class culture and the popular would further enrich the interdiscipline of media studies especially as it overlaps with identity studies. Although many see these as competing paradigms, it is far more productive to understand that they actually inform each other though they enter the study of media at differing levels of analysis based on divergent theories and methodologies. The inclusion of major concepts such as identity promises to link and enrich the many areas of media studies. For example, while one scholar might be asking questions about global media conglomerates in relation to capital flows and national sovereignty/identity, another might ethnographically explore a community in Peru to see the individual and community ramifications of local cultural production in relation to the global concentration of intellectual property among a handful of transnational media corporations and how national and regional identity can be asserted, preserved, and globally marketed to ensure survival of a community. The remainder of this entry focuses on the analytical components of media studies.

To facilitate the study of media, scholars separate four analytical components: production, content and representation, audience and interpretation, and effects and psychology. These are all experienced as one by those involved in the circuit of culture and are all related to issues of identity: Produced media reach audiences in symbolic form that they, in turn, interpret and that might have a range of effects on them. This media might be produced by those who explicitly or implicitly hold and may want to promote certain identity positions. Representations draw on a long history of stereotypes and other signification practices that rely implicitly or explicitly on identity components. Audiences are composed partly by identity positions. Effects have been found to occur based on contact with or proximity to people from different identities. Nonetheless, it helps to separate out these analytical moments.

...