Reviews

The Return of Media Sociology

James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society, 4th edition (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005).

In its different editions this book has mapped the emergence of media studies in Britain. In the United States the field developed mainly after the Second World War as a mostly conservative social science or as professional education for journalists. The first edition of Mass Media and Society on the other hand included a classical essay from Walter Benjamin in the 1930s and a discussion of theories of ideology by Stuart Hall.

I looked forward to this new edition as eagerly as a boy getting a weekly comic book from a newsagents shop (in Britain) or a comic book store (in the United States). I found many of my own lines of thinking represented. What is most noticeable is the return of media sociology and especially of comparative studies of mass media in different countries. After two decades of postmodern theory and an emphasis on audience research-symptoms rather than adequate answers to neo-liberal media policies, the book is distinguished by the return of the social. These are the chapters I enjoyed the most.

There is a good discussion of theories of representation by Geraghty that offers an excellent summary of semiotics. It is no longer the potential science of sign systems promised in the 1960s but a much more modest contribution to examining meanings (the examples are from photographs and television). Geraghty argues that semiotics must be accompanied by other research methods such as an attention to media institutions. It is interesting to see semiotics put in its place, but Geraghty does not go on to the more radical argument made at the time by Raymond Williams that the a-historical method of semiotics is itself ideological and takes the stance of a privileged and aloof observer, rather than a participant in culture.

Many claims were made twenty years ago for theoretical work about ideology and consciousness. Much of this has faded. What has survived, are more grounded statements about media institutions. Many chapters in the book validate Herman and Chomsky's finding that especially foreign news in the United States is indexed to the worldviews of the policy elite. Research topics here include the Iraq War, 9/11 and Al Jazeera broadcasting in the Middle East.

After the first excited claims for the future of the Internet, actual research is now showing the importance of social structure in shaping the so-called information society. Miller and Slater's chapter in this book on mobile phones (big in Jamaica) and the Internet (big in Trinidad) makes the point effectively. The magic is gone. The Internet is mainly dominated by commercial interests and bloggers overshadowed by public relations from corporations and governments. There has been a push for some time to internationalise media and cultural studies. The wrong way to do it is to collect apparently miscellaneous chapters on different countries. Why should students care about the world of the Yoruba taxi driver or gender-crossing in Japan? Isn't this a kind of tokenism? This book does it better by introducing comparative material in a coherent framework that tells the reader why the comparison matters and what is to be learned from it.

Like the participants at an academic conference, users of this book will pay attention to different presentations. A chapter that for me only summarises well-known information or arguments could be exactly what another reader needs. New people have to be continually educated on the issues and that is the purpose of a book like this. In general I found the descriptive and comparative chapters more useful than the introductory overviews. A student new to the field might find the reverse.

But is this a book for students or a review of the field for researchers? A textbook salesman once told me that a certain book was popular with university teachers but not with students. An interesting comment since the teacher and not the students select the course books. The level of difficulty here seems to be about second or third year undergraduate. At least part of the reason for many simplistic media textbooks in the United States is the lack of political and historical knowledge of many college students. Journalism textbooks almost have to ignore issues of corporate power to prepare students for their future employers.

The collapse of most of the claims by semiotics, psychoanalysis, theories of postmodernism and cultural globalisation is welcome. We can look back on Stuart Hall's article on ideology in the first edition of this book, not as high theory but as a response by a radical activist to Britain in the 1970s. So not the claims about theory of the 1970s but the actual social relations of a field of intellectual work (universities, publishers, editors, researchers) and one that raises issues of ethics: the relation between a researcher and the world that she writes about. It is a field that unfolds in time. Claims by feminists are now widely accepted. The shape of a neo-liberal world is now clear but the struggle against it will not be a matter for the next five years, but for decades.

So what of the book then as a document of a field, at this time, after twenty years? Well, the contributions are mixed, as in any book of this kind. Some apparently take more radical positions than others. But on the whole what is most welcome is the return of the sociology of mass media, not just in Britain and the United States, but in a comparative way for many parts of the world; it is a step forward for us all.

Alan O'Connor
Trent University, Canada