Media Critique

Media critique derives from two major concerns: the content of the media and its impact on audiences. It is no surprise, then, to find that the social sciences and the media share a great deal of history and a number of preoccupations to do with modernity, technical innovation, and the complexification of daily life. The social sciences have divided and refashioned people and societies, as have media practice and critique, and frequently in related ways. Each operates in the context of divisions of labor and commercial and governmental determinations.

In the twentieth century, with the maturation and standardization of social science method and its uptake by the U.S. military, commercial, and governmental worlds, media audiences have come to be conceived as empirical entities that can be known via research instruments derived from sociology, demography, psychology, and marketing. Such concerns have been coupled with a secondary concentration on content. Texts too are conceived as empirical entities that can be known via research instruments derived from sociology and literary criticism. Critiques of the media have come from within discourses of the social derived from the psy-complexes (psychoanalysis, psychology, and psychiatry), sociology, economics, communication studies, anthropology, and the humanities (literature, cinema studies, media studies, and cultural studies). The six principal forms of critique are (1) the borrowing of ethnography from sociology and anthropology to investigate the experiences of audiences, (2) the use of experimentation and testing methods from psychology to establish cause-and-effect relations between media consumption and subsequent conduct, (3) the adaptation of content analysis from sociology to evaluate programming in terms of generic patterns, such as representations of violence, (4) the adoption of textual analysis from literary and critical theory, Marxism, and linguistics to identify the ideological tenor of content, (5) the application of textual and audience interpretation from psychoanalysis to speculate on psychic processes, and (6) the deployment of political economy to examine ownership, control, regulation, and international exchange.

Following an illustration of the shared history of modernity, social sciences, and the media, certain developments across methods and disciplines that have both exercised the media and been exercised by them are summarized, prior to the focus on two key components of media critique: audiences and texts. For the most part, first world theory will be referred to, albeit in a way that depends on, and feeds into, third world media practice and theory.