Hartley J. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts

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charges, lease-purchase arrangements and tax reduction to stimulate

private sector investment.

Developments within the telecommunications industry highlight

the issues surrounding privatisation. Economists originally believed

that telecommunications was a ‘natural monopoly’, meaning that one

‘telco’ would be able to provide infrastructure and services more

efficiently than competing providers. As the infrastructure costs of

telecommunications are high, government was called upon to ensure

that infrastructure was provided to remote locations even if it was

considered economically unattractive. In the US the telecommunica-

tions provider was privately owned and heavily regulated. In most

other countries, it was government owned and ran telecommunica-

tions.

In 1982 this began to change. The US introduced legislation that

would allow the telecommunications monopoly AT&T to participate

in the new ICT markets if it agreed to allow new players into the

telecommunications industry. In the UK, British Telecom was sold to

a private company and a new competitor, Mercury, was allowed to

enter the market. Whereas the US was instituting competition policy

and deregulation, the UK was implementing a policy of privatisa-

tion.

In the case of telecommunications, technological change had

altered the way that the market was functioning causing the ‘natural

monopoly’ model to be called into question. It was assumed in the UK

that private industry would be motivated towards greater service and

product innovation. Competition, it was expected, would bring prices

down, resolving market failures. This both did and did not happen, in

different contexts.

However, there is doubt about whether privatisation on the whole

resulted in greater efficiencies (Barr, 2000). Further, many on the left

believe that the up-front money derived from the sale of public assets

would be less than the long-term dividends that could be spent on

public infrastructure and services if the government were to retain

ownership and profits.

Privatisation is not the same as deregulation; nor should it be

assumed that privatisation results in less regulation. In many instances,

governments have set up regulatory authorities to ensure that

privatised industries continue to meet public needs; for instance,

meeting universal service obligations (USO) in the telecommunica-

tions industry. As a result, regulators have taken on a greater role in

governance following liberalisation policies and, as Collins and

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Murroni (1996) point out, are often intervening in operations and

management to a greater extent than governments have in the past.

Privatisation has been a driver of globalisation. This raises

concerns that we will experience a scenario whereby a handful of

privately owned global corporations with the capital to buy publicly

owned utilities will replace national publicly owned enterprises.

Government, in this scenario, would be forced to bargain increasingly

with private companies.

See also: Anti-globalisation, Deregulation, Globalisation

PROPAGANDA

‘Propagation’ – derived from the organisation set up by the Roman

Catholic Church in 1622 to propagate that faith in the aftermath of

the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism; propagation in

adversarial or competitive circumstances. This sense of propaganda

was later deployed by totalitarian regimes of both left and right –

communist and fascist – who took pains to make the ‘propagation’ of

state ideology a matter of policy, not chance. Where communist

governments had not been established, the task of ‘agit-prop’ –

‘agitation and propaganda’ – was assigned to trustworthy militants.

Small wonder that liberal democracies, especially those founded in

Protestant countries, regarded propaganda as a ‘term of reproach

applied to secret associations for the spread of opinions and principles

which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion’

(OED).

But the governments protested too much. Soon everyone was at it.

Propaganda under the guise of ‘government information’ is a staple of

contemporary life, and its privatised form, PR and advertising, is a

mainstay of the contemporary economy.

Propaganda is still controversial because it suffuses the media of public

enlightenment, especially news. It may take the banal form of PR

handouts that get reproduced verbatim in the local give-away paper or it

may take a much more expensive and sophisticated form – political and

commercial campaigns, for instance. So much so that wise readers and

viewers regard everything they see and read as propaganda for

something, always in someone’s interest, whether in the factual or

fictional media. There is a continuing need to ask, ‘Who says?’

Scepticism about news and fictional realism is healthy, and requires

some work by the reader or viewer, but simply to dismiss propaganda

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out of hand or to seek to ‘ban’ or control it, or to purge it from the

media, would be to miss the point. For all communication has some

sort of spin, especially communication addressed to a large,

anonymous public from across demographic boundaries. The wise

reader might prefer to see propaganda as a genre rather than as an

infestation; it is better to know it than to knock it. The generic

characteristics of propaganda (compared to realism in both fact and

fiction) include the following.

. News and fiction draw attention into the text, seeking to resolve

conflicts diegetically, within the story. Propaganda directs attention

beyond the text, seeking to provoke conflict in the reader.

. News and fiction are images of the past, in which the action is

completed. Propaganda aligns the reader with the future, towards

actions yet to occur. News and fiction continue existing meanings.

Propaganda seeks to change the future.

. News and fiction position the reader as uncommitted, even passive

recipients or consumers. Propaganda calls the reader towards

participation.

. News and realist fiction seek to convey the impression that they are

true, unauthored, real. Propaganda seeks to produce faithfulness in

a relationship between addresser and addressee.

. News and fiction employ transparency and verisimilitude to

produce the effect that techniques used in the communication are

‘not there’. Propaganda can experiment with a much broader

palette of rhetorical and visual techniques, and draw attention to its

own communicative status.

. News is diegetic. Propaganda is dialogic.

Propaganda can still be politically controversial, especially in its

clandestine form. After the events of September 11, 2001, the US

Defense Department set up an ‘office of strategic influence’, which

planned to feed information, some of it false, to foreign news agencies,

in an attempt to influence public opinion across the world (especially

the Islamic world) in favour of the US-led ‘war on terrorism’. The

plan caused outrage within and beyond the US when it was revealed in

February 2002, and the ‘office of strategic influence’ was ‘restruc-

tured’.

Further reading: Hartley (1992a: 51–55)

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PROXEMICS

The semiotics of space. E. T. Hall (1973) posited that space may be

intimate (near), social (middling) or public (distant). People’s proximity

to one another will communicate their mutual status – lovers will

‘naturally’ stand nearer each other than strangers. There are reputed to

be different proxemic standards in different countries, resulting in some

nationalities gaining a reputation for aloofness (their relaxed social space

when standing is longer than an arm’s-length: ‘Swedes’) or for over-

familiarity (they habitually stand closer than arm’s-length: ‘Latins’).

Adhering to proxemic standards in a given context is a good test of

politeness; failing to do so can cause offence (invading one’s personal

space; being stand-offish) or it can be exploited (politicians and sales

reps). Proxemic codes can be observed both in behaviour and in the

organisation and architecture of public spaces, which can be

manipulated for public or commercial ends. VIPs tend to be surrounded

by more space than regular folk, a truism exploited by the organisers of

public spectacles from Nuremberg and the Olympics (think of the

winners’ podia) to Oscars night and the Presidential inauguration.

PUBLIC

Pre-dating the use of the terms nation and nationality, the ‘public’

described the population of a city-state in classical times. The people

comprising the public could gather in a single space within sight of

each other (in Greek: agora, in Roman: forum). It was here that free

citizens argued, legislated and adjudicated, both in their own interests

and on behalf on others who were not free – slaves, women,

foreigners, children.

With the growth of polities to many times the size of these classical

antecedents, the public was ‘abstracted’ or virtualised – it was either an

imagined community or could gather together only by representative

means. However, the notion of the public has survived, sustaining

public governmental, media and academic interests, among others. For

the existence of the unseen public is the warrant that allows such

institutions to speak and act on behalf of unknowable audiences,

construed as the public. They seek to represent public opinion, public

service (broadcasting), the public interest, etc.

As Bonney and Wilson (1983: 77) have argued, the idea of a public

interest presupposes that there is ‘a single public with a unified set of

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interests’. Public interest, like the construction of the public, is based

on inclusion and exclusion. Those who have not been included as part

of the contemporary mediated public may include youth, gays and

lesbians, and the disabled. It is groups such as these that are recognised

by newer theoretical paradigms such as cultural citizenship that

involve a move from the conception of a unified public to a notion of

publics. But even then, in many countries the line of exclusion is still

drawn at migrants, especially those fleeing zones of turbulence in the

Middle East and Africa. They ‘belong’ to no public and are treated as if

that status made them not migrants or refugees but criminals.

See also: Cultural citizenship, Public sphere

Further reading: Murdock (1992)

PUBLIC SPHERE

rgen Habermas’ theorisation of the public sphere, most thoroughly

explored in his work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere

(translated 1989), was an attempt to find possibilities through which

democracy could be realised. Influenced by his experience of fascism

and his apprenticeship with the Frankfurt School as Adorno’s

research assistant, Habermas held little hope of being able to identify a

political philosophy that could resolve the consequences of capitalism

or state control (Calhoun, 1992). As such, the public sphere is not an

attempt at a prescriptive political theory, but a conception of the

conditions within which healthy and just political conditions may be

realised.

The public sphere is the arena within which debate occurs; it is the

generation of ideas, shared knowledge and the construction of opinion

that occurs when people assemble and discuss. Although real and

experienced, the public sphere cannot be located in particular place or

identified as an object. It ‘cannot be conceived as an institution and

certainly not as an organisation’, writes Habermas, rather it is ‘a

network for communicating information and points of view’

(Habermas, 1996: 360). The public sphere is where ideas and

information are shared. It is where public opinions are formed as a

result of communication.

For Habermas, the public sphere was most constructive when not

influenced by commercial interests or state control. In its original

conception, the public sphere must be insulated from the interests of

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such dominant powers if it is to be a corrective to them. Only in this

way can it effectively produce democratic conditions. This was a

weakness, for it allowed no function of the public sphere to be

assigned to commercial organisations and media (whether the latter

were public service media owned by the state or private commercial

media).

Media theorists (for example, Garnham, 1986; Price, 1995) have

used Habermas’ public sphere to explain the importance of

communication for the processes of democracy. If we accept that

communication is important for democracy, Garnham points out, the

next question is how to position this goal within ‘the conditions of

large-scale societies in which both social and communicative relations

are inevitably mediated through both time and space’ (Garnham,

1986: 365). This is the democratic nature of the media in today’s world

– they exist as an arena for knowledge exchange on a large scale, from

which people are able to gain the information necessary to participate

fully as citizens.

Feminist perspectives on Habermas’ work have highlighted the

exclusionary, elitist nature of the public sphere’s original conception.

Habermas’ public sphere was based primarily on the process of debate

and knowledge exchange. The participants’ status was not a factor in

the success or character of the public sphere. In response, Fraser (1992)

asserts that it is unrealistic to assume that the historical exclusion of

women, or the racial and property criteria needed to participate in the

public sphere, can be overlooked. Rather, the likelihood is that

ignoring group differences will lead to the exclusion of some groups

from participation within the public sphere. For Fraser the solution is

to see not a singular public sphere but a number of public sphericules,

through which groups interact, contest and withdraw to when they so

desire. In viewing the public sphere theory in this way, it is possible to

offset the reality that participatory privileges are something to be

enjoyed only by members of the dominant group.

Further reading: Calhoun (1992); Fraser (1992); Habermas (1996); Price (1995)

RACE

Race is a system of categorisation that classifies populations by

reference to physical attributes such as skin colour and other perceived

bodily distinctions. An implication of such a system is that different

races inherit common behavioural and emotional traits. Yet the

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concept of race is itself, like the concept of nation, relational – each

race is to some extent a product of its difference from others in the

system. It is clear that over time and in different circumstances the

system changes, altering such fundamental matters as the number of

races that are recognised, and therefore the way that different

characteristics and attributes can be distributed and distinguished.

Thus, there is a great element of culture in what counts as race. Race

is a meaningful category, rather than a biological given; the ideals and

characteristics of races are not natural but are constantly reproduced in

language, historical ideologies and discourses, images and other

cultural practices.

In media and cultural studies, writing on race emerged alongside

identity politics. Concerned with what were perceived to be limited

representations of raced identities in the media, text analysis was

undertaken in an attempt to chart the relationship between societal

attitudes and raced characters. Work by Bogle (1989) and Jhally and

Lewis (1992), for example, argued that representations relied on

stereotypes and promoted a form of implicit racism. While important

in highlighting the limits of raced representations, this form of

investigation often relied on a binary of positive/negative images.

Binaries such as these seemed to suggest that there was indeed a

paradigm of positive characteristics that are representative of a given

race. But neither good policy nor good media content could come out

of a demand for ‘more positive images’ to redress the balance.

Said’s (1979) concept of Orientalism offered a theoretical means

of addressing this problem. He argued that race was a discourse that

served to shape how Europeans understood themselves through

assigning undesirable characteristics to other races. By constructing the

inhabitants of the Orient as savage, uncivilised and exotic, Europe

imagined itself as brave, cultured and noble. Said’s model could not

necessarily be applied to other nation/race dynamics, but it does

reinforce the notion that characteristics of race are constructed, and are

often less a ‘construction’ of the race to whom they are applied than of

the people who create and sustain the discourse. This has lead to post-

colonial and post-structuralist work that continues to move away from

the essentialism inherent in previous writing on race, in favour of an

approach that recognises the socially constructed and dialogic nature of

the categories.

Race is constantly under reconstruction. In the nineteenth century

the term was virtually synonymous with ‘nation’ – one could write of

the Czech or Belgian or Bantu ‘race’. Later, race was reduced to three

global categories – ‘caucasian’, ‘mongoloid’ and ‘negroid’. Later still,

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different jurisdictions struggled to place their populations into

categories that reflected their own circumstances, rather than squeeze

people into a universal standard. Hollinger (2000: 199) discusses how

in the US an ‘ethno-racial pentagon’, based on historically assigned

racial categories, is designed to allow the enforcement of anti-

discrimination and affirmative action policies of the federal govern-

ment. Consisting of five categories – European, African, Hispanic,

Asian and Indigenous – the ‘pentagon’ has ‘come to replicate the

popular colour-consciousness of the past: black, white, red, yellow and

brown’ (Hollinger, 2000: 202). Certainly, despite its desire for

bureaucratic accuracy and neutrality, the categorisation of race in this

way is problematic, not least owing to internal differences within and

between each of the categories, and the difficulty of moving between

them, which has major implications for ‘mixed families’. Two of the

‘races’ – Hispanics and Europeans – would both be regarded as ‘white’

in other contexts.

The use of the ‘pentagon’ as an anti-discriminatory tool in US

federal policy clearly moves beyond the idea of race as a universal to

recognise histories of both culture and discrimination. Thus it

demonstrates that the category of race, for theoretical or governmental

purposes, cannot be separated from historical and cultural contexts (see

Hall, 1997; Hartley and McKee, 2000).

Because it is historical and therefore culturally specific rather than

universal, the ‘pentagon’ model would not make sense outside of the

US. In Africa, Europe, Asia or Australia, the demographic make-up of

the population is different. Australia for instance has no Hispanic

category. But it does make a distinction between ‘Anglo-Celtic’ and

‘multicultural’ Australians – the latter being those who migrated after

World War II, first from Southern Europe (Malta, Greece, former

Yugoslavia, Italy) and later from Asia (Vietnam and Cambodia in

particular). Australia thus has a racial ‘diamond’, not a pentagon:

Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, multicultural, Asian.

The current historical period is characterised by a re-proliferation

of the races, an attempt to arrive at non-discriminatory descriptive

categories for governmental purposes and different racial categories in

different jurisdictions. On the streets, there remains the working

through of quite different racial policies rooted in popular prejudice

and residual supremacist theories, and sometimes also inter-ethnic

competition, such as disputes between populations where both are

regarded as racial minorities, for example, Korean and Black or

Hispanic Americans. How the bureaucratisation of race in multi-

cultural policy may affect the outcome of these skirmishes remains to

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be seen. In communication and cultural studies, and in the media, it is

important to follow the development of debates, policies and coverage

of race, but not to assume that race describes any essential properties or

attributes.

See also: Diaspora, Ethnic/ethnicity, Identity politics, Orientalism,

Representation