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

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The radio broadcasting industry, which preceded TV as the home-

based entertainment and information medium, now displays interest-

ing differences from television. Radio has niched, with significant

activities that are not common in television, for instance, local

programming (including rural and remote), youth and music

programming (where different stations have very specialised playlists),

and broadcasting for minority or community groups. At the

international level, radio broadcasting is still supported by national

governments for development and propaganda purposes. The latter is

dominated by the ‘big five’ organisations: the BBC, Voice of America,

Deutsche Welle, Radio France International, and Radio Netherlands,

although most countries add their voice to the global conversation,

often via shortwave.

See also: Convergence, Datacasting, Digital/analogue distribution,

Post-broadcast media

CELEBRITY

Celebrity is the semiotics of identity. It is found only in societies in

which identity is a major socio-cultural and political issue. It has

become more important as contemporary Western societies have

evolved towards the status of ‘entertainment cultures’, where identity

is seen as more significant than decision-making, action or faith, and

the celebrity supersedes the leader, hero or holy-person.

Celebrities are individuals who are noted for their identity in the

media. Generally speaking they can come from any walk of life –

musicians, sports stars, models, criminals, film, television and radio

personalities as well as participants in reality TV. As a descriptive

category, celebrity would not usually include, for example, politicians

currently in power or members of royal families. This is because

celebrity is concerned more with the representation of individualism

in all of its forms than with the coverage of people associated with

particular institutions.

The concept of celebrity differs from that of the star, in that the

latter is understood as being a product of a particular medium, the

Hollywood film industry. Celebrity, in comparison, is understood to

have arisen under the conditions of postmodernity whereby the

hyper-production of images leads to some faces and bodies being more

recognisable than others. Tracing what he calls a ‘history of fame’,

Braudy (1986: 4) notes that as ‘each new medium of fame appears, the

CELEBRITY

human image it conveys is intensified and the number of individuals

celebrated expands’. The promise of photography and theatre in the

construction of fame in previous eras has certainly now been realised

with the increase in media forms that include tabloid newspapers,

magazines and entertainment-focused TV networks such as E in the

US, not to mention a myriad official and unofficial celebrity websites.

Although stars and celebrities have subtle differences in their

creation, the purposes they serve for their audiences or fans are similar.

Celebrities act as signs or media texts in that they provide a means by

which media consumers can negotiate and work towards articulating

personal subjectivity. Wark (1999) and Lumby (1999a), for example,

claim that unlike the construction of stars, the construction of a

celebrity is reliant on matters that would be considered everyday or

ordinary. One aspect of the appeal of celebrities is that they perform the

ordinary. Stories involving celebrities will often involve these

extraordinary people in everyday/ordinary contexts of divorce, drug

abuse, weight issues and romance. This desire to ‘separate celebrities

from their images’ (Lumby, 1999a: 139) is explicitly revealed in some

of the tabloid’s most often-used headlines – ‘Stars without their

makeup’ and ‘So-and-so at home’.

The ordinary value embodied in celebrities has caused some to

comment that they are ‘the ideal representation of the triumph of the

masses’ (Marshall, 1997: 6). Others suggest that celebrities do little

more than contribute to a continued dumbing down of societal values,

distracting populations from matters of importance such as politics,

economics and religion. But this is to ignore the changing aspects of

the public sphere, where important civil discourses are being

challenged, discussed and debated via the bodies of celebrities.

Celebrities do not represent the triumph of the ordinary; rather, they

represent the possibility of popular representations concerning private/

ordinary matters in a sphere long dominated by outdated models of

civility.

See also: Dumbing down, Identification, Star/stardom, Subjectivity

Further reading:

Edgell (1993); Milner (1999); Pakulski and Waters (1996)

CLUSTER

Districts with a concentration of a single or closely related industries.

If the resources you require are close at hand, and if there are others

doing similar work in your local area who can assist you, then your

work will be easier and more productive. If you are surrounded by

people attempting to outdo you – competing for sales or attention –

you are likely to work harder. The economist Alfred Marshall wrote of

‘industrial districts’ in 1890: cutlery production in Sheffield, cotton in

Manchester and coal in Newcastle (Marshall, 1961). These are clusters.

When there is such a critical mass of related industries, educational

institutions, government agencies and community associations located

in the same place, innovation and productivity are stimulated. The

result is greater prosperity. As Michael Porter points out, competitive

advantages in a global economy lie increasingly in local things –

knowledge, relationships and motivation (Porter, 1999).

CLUSTER

Localisation and industry clusters are proliferating in what US

federal banker Alan Greenspan described as the ‘weightless’ new

economy (see intangibles). No longer are the raw materials of a

Newcastle essential for cluster formation. The miniature (practically

weightless) microchip, creativity, information, research, talent and

networks have replaced coal or steel, manual labour and machinery as

components of the majority of clusters.

In 1939 two Stanford University students started an electronic

measuring device company out of a car garage in Palo Alto, California.

By 1999 their company, Hewlett-Packard, was one in a cluster within

the area, now called Silicon Valley, that had a combined revenue of

US$47.1 billion. A large number of the companies that make personal

computers, circuits, software, 3D graphics and that pioneered Internet

search engine technology can be found in Silicon Valley. It is also the

home of Stanford University, which educates people to become

researchers and workers. It is ‘an entire environment, or habitat honed

for innovation and entrepreneurship’ (Lee et al., 2000: 1).

Cluster research has expanded and challenged previous economic

theories. New findings on the importance of cooperative relationships

between research, private industry and third-sector organisations are

arising out of cluster research. Although primarily an economic

concept, clusters are focusing attention back on place, lifestyle,

localism and community. The assumption that ‘nations are the salient

entities for understanding the structure of economic life’ (Jacobs,

1984: 30) is being disproved at a macro level through globalisation and

at the micro level through clusters.

See also: Creative industries, Globalisation, Localisation

CODE

Tacit or underlying rules of combination of recognised elements in any

communication system, from language to computer code. Code is a term

originating in communication science, which over the years divided into

areas that had little to do with each other (see art–science interface).

Sciences based on ‘code’ include mathematical and computer sciences,

e.g. programming, signal processing and cryptography; communication

science as applied to telecommunications, etc.; and biotechnology, in

which genetic codes have become a major international focus.

The work of US information theorists led to the idea that

communication was a mechanical transfer process and that code was

CODE

simply the form messages would take for transmission through a

channel. Clearly that model was based on telegraphy (Morse code) and

telephony, where the code comprised not what was said by the caller,

but the electronic form taken by soundwaves through the telephone

wire. This scientific/mechanical notion of code has driven develop-

ments in computing, notably the writing of code for software

applications, and in telecommunications (mobiles, G4).

Code was taken up in linguistics, media studies and semiotics. An

early pioneer in the field was the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de

Saussure in the first decade of the twentieth century. Saussure wanted

to study language scientifically, but was faced with an almost infinite

jumble and variety of actual speech. Instead he looked for whatever it

was that enabled utterances to be produced – and ‘decoded’ – in a

coherent and systematic form. Listeners needed to be able to

understand sounds in a given combination that they’d never heard

before, and to bypass the fact that everyone’s voice is unique (including

accent, intonation, speed, clarity of diction, etc.), so that physically the

sounds heard are always unique too. The key was ‘code’: the

generative system of rules of combination (grammar) that allowed

elements (lexical items such as words) to be selected, combined and

used to produce new, hitherto unuttered speech. Hearers, sharing the

code, ‘hear’ what the code says rather than merely what the speaker

says, so variations can simply be filtered out.

Codes allow both combination and organisation – words chosen

from a paradigm or list of possible choices can be strung together in a

syntagm or chain, but that string is itself rule-governed as to its

organisation. In a standard sentence a subject, verb and object are the

minimum requirement. You can choose between different words, but

the lexical items chosen have to do the right work in the right order.

You can say ‘I love you’. But you can’t say ‘You love I’ or ‘Love you I’:

they don’t mean the same even though the same words are chosen.

Proper ‘coding’ requires attention to the organisation of elements

chosen.

Taking that notion a stage further, many socially organised practices

can be referred to as a code: there are aesthetic codes, behavioural

codes, codes of conduct, decency codes ... all the way down to zip

codes. In each case what is referred to is an established (shared)

understanding of what is appropriately associated with what, according

to rules of choice and chain.

It may be that some of these codes – codes of conduct for example

– are so called because of their codification into tabular form, in which

case the term ‘code’ derives from codex (Latin: tablet, book).

CODE

COLLOCATION

The tendency of words to co-occur in everyday discourse. Thus, dark

collocates strongly with night, in so far as they tend to co-occur. The

same could be said of the relationship of deadly to nightshade or nuclear

to weapon. The study of meaning, using this approach, investigates the

meaning of a word in terms of its patterns of collocation, on the

principle (enunciated by R. Firth, a British linguist who first

formulated the notion of collocation) that ‘you shall know a word

by the company it keeps’. (Compare Wittgenstein: ‘the meaning of a

word is its use in the language’.) Collocation does, however, imply

statistical profiles of patterns of co-occurrence. These have proved

notoriously difficult to produce until recently when it has become

possible to apply sophisticated computational techniques to a very

large corpus of data. Recent dictionaries – for instance, the Collins

Cobuild English Language Dictionary – have been developed using such

techniques.

Further reading:

Halliday and Hasan (1975)

COMMUNICATION

Interaction by means of mutually recognised signals. Communication

enjoyed great vogue in the mid to late twentieth century as a ‘master

discipline’. Since it was an aspect of virtually all human and quite a bit

of non-human activity, it seemed appropriate for an academic

discipline founded in its name to harbour similar ambitions. Thus

the study of communication began to assume some of the mantle of

philosophy, seeking to explain humanity to itself. Numerous strands of

otherwise disconnected thought contributed to this process:

. From European structural linguistics and Russian formalism came the

idea that there were fundamental structures underlying all human

language. Attempts were made to theorise how signifying elements

were combined in general, not just in a given language (Saussure).

Such an approach to language was soon extended to other

‘signifying systems’, such as literature (Jakobson and the Russian

formalists), the narrative structures of folk tales and narrative

cinema, etc. (Propp, Todorov), and thence to culture in general

(Lotman).

COLLOCATION

. Meanwhile, American comparative linguistics, under the influence of

Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edmund Sapir, proposed the notion of

‘linguistic relativity’, suggesting that language organised perception,

and different languages organised it differently. Thus, reality was a

product of how communicative systems ordered the world. Different

cultures – Hopi Indians compared with ‘standard average

Europeans’, for instance – therefore experienced different realities.

. The French structural anthropologist Claude Le

vi-Strauss connected

communication with two other fundamental aspects of culture –

marriage and money – suggesting that the circulation of signs (in

language and art), women (in kinship systems) and money (in the

economy) revealed fundamentally similar structures, which Le

vi-

Strauss believed revealed universals of the human mind.

. American social-science empirical research into the micro-processes

of modern life brought communication into the purview of formal

study for the first time. It concentrated on the practical details of

how mass society communicated with itself, starting with the

unresolvable problem that such a society comprises masses who are

anonymous to each other and to commercial and political elites, but

who are constitutionally and commercially sovereign as citizens and

consumers. In such a paradoxical situation, mass communication

became of strategic importance, especially the role of advertising

(Vance Packard), journalism, public relations or PR, and political

propaganda (Michael Schudson). The effects of ‘mass’ entertain-

ment on unknowable but sovereign individuals was also seen as an

important issue.

. It followed that business needed communication, the more scientific

(i.e. using easily replicated methods to produce findings that were

generalisable across large populations), the better. Consumer

optimism and behaviour, maximised by the most scientific means

possible, were key to the rise and continuing success of the post-

World War II economic boom in the US, Japan and Europe. In the

US Schools of Communication, founded on the need to train

citizens in the public arts of rhetorical persuasion so as to

democratise the public life of the Republic, prospered as they

added media, PR, journalism and advertising to their repertoire.

. The Canadian literary historian Marshall McLuhan (1962, 1964),

combining his own discipline with cognitive psychology and the

communication philosophy of Harold Innes, was also influential in

the exorbitation of communication. His aphoristic style appealed

not only to many academics, but to people in the business

community also, including those in the industries McLuhan seemed

COMMUNICATION

to be putting at the centre of the human condition – the media,

advertising and television.

. But on the dark side, governments were interfering with commu-

nication in a major way. Contending ideologies were never more

seriously at odds, both in the Cold War’s ‘mutually assured

destruction’, and in national liberation struggles from Africa to

Vietnam. A serious understanding of how communication worked

in practice within and between militarily formidable states seemed

timely.

. Raymond Williams (1968) and others, including Herbert Marcuse

and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970), brought to communica-

tions a critical perspective that – whatever the virtue of the argument

advanced by any one theorist – ensured an important and

permanent place for communication on the intellectual and

academic agenda.

. Communication science gained ground enormously after World

War II, when inventions ranging from radar to the ‘Enigma’

code-breaker had shown how important information was in

warfare. The invention and commercialisation of computers took

that national-military energy and redirected it both to business/

government and to imaginative ends: both the IBM 360–50s and

360–65s that sent humanity to the moon and safely back, and

Stanley Kubrick’s not-so-imaginary red-shifted computer ‘Hal’

(‘IBM’ minus one letter of the alphabet spells ‘HAL’) in 2001: A

Space Odyssey, which did not. Science had the imagination and

the means, it seemed, to cause machine-originated communica-

tion to transform human life.

. Communications technologies for mass commercial and residential

uptake proliferated throughout the twentieth century. Several

distinct global industries were sustained by them, including telcos,

and the media content industries.

These different tendencies swirled around each other throughout the

latter part of the twentieth century, sometimes connecting but never

fully integrating. The earlier ambition of finding a unified science of

communication in which they might all cohere was never realised.

Instead, communication has reverted to ‘small c’ status: it is an aspect

of incommensurable work carried out in many specialist areas, as

appropriate to their needs.

COMMUNICATION

COMMUNICATION DESIGN

An extension of Information Technology (IT) into the creative or

content area. Communication design combines elements of IT science

(programming) with the creativity of the visual and sound artist (e.g.

animation). Production skills and team-based processes of the kind

associated with media production (film and TV) are also needed. The

output of communication design is therefore a hybrid of creativity and

technology.

As the IT sector matured around the turn of the twenty-first

century, it became clear that in order to continue growing, the new

knowledge-based economy needed to focus not only on IT

infrastructure and connectivity, but more on applications. Computers

and the Internet needed to be simple and robust to operate and

navigate, and commercial sites in particular needed to exploit the

games and entertainment appeal of computers in order to attract and

hold customers. Communication design became more prominent. Its

importance was that it took creativity into areas of the economy that

were not traditionally understood as having any creative ‘content’,

such as banking, education, health, etc. As these service industries

went online, they needed to harness the design flair, the information

architecture and the interactive techniques that communication design

had pioneered in such leisure areas as computer games and

entertainment websites.

CONNECTIVITY

The use of communication technologies for interaction, and a society

so characterised. The connectivity industry incorporates numerous

technologies and involves the creation of networks between personal

computers and other devices such as printers and modems, and with

other networks such as satellite systems. The word ‘connectivity’ was

used by IBM as a name for their proprietary service of coordinating

and bringing about communication between computers, a system that

inevitably tied users into IBM’s own closed network of products. In

1977 the International Standards Organisation (ISO) established a

committee to set standards to enable interoperability between

computers manufactured by different companies. Out of this process

the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) specification was created,

extending the possibilities for connectivity. As the computing industry

CONNECTIVITY