The Cultural Approach to Mass Communication

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The Cultural Approach to Mass Communication

• James Carey

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James Carey the Cultural Approach

• Lecture Outline
• Defining culture
• biographical notes
• general influences
• themes and concerns
• methodology
• mass media apparatus
• transmissive and ritual models.

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Culture and Cultural Studies

• Defining Culture and Cultural Studies
• British Cultural Studies
• Continental Cultural Studies
• American Cultural Studies.

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Defining Culture

• The ideas, customs, skills, art and social
  practices of a people or a group that are
  transferred, communicated or passed along
• the ideas, customs, values and so forth which
  belong to a particular group in regards to a
  precise historical moment
• finally, the collective apparatus of social
  relations which define the individual subject in
  terms of identity, self-hood and subjectivity.

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James Carey
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Intellectual Influences

• John Dewey
• Lewis Mumford
• Kenneth Burke
• Harold Innis
• Raymond Williams and
• Stuart Hall
• Jack Goody
• Richard Rorty

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Themes and Concerns

• Problem of democracy
• drawbacks of technology
• critique of journalism
• politics of academia.

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Methodology

• Carey engages in dialogue with a given tradition
  of thought or model
• Chicago School and McLuhan
• Dewey and Walter Lipmann
• America and Europe
• Conversation versus ideology
• Time versus space.

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Mass Media Apparatus
The mass media apparatus is a system of
relationships amongst five social institutions
which is productive of media. These
institutions are

• scientific research
• technological development
• financial
• juridical
• the mass media outlet itself.

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Transmissive Model
Sender
Message
Receiver
Effect
S
M
R
R1
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Ritual Model
Message Text
Meaning
Producer Reader
Referent
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Transmissive and Ritual Models

• Dialogic
• communal practice
• periodic
• redundant
• symbolic experience
• example the Catholic Mass.

• Monologic
• about control of space
• behavioral relationship
• b/w Sender - Receiver
• material dimension
• origins
• problem of power relations
• example the Crusades.

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Disciplinary Orientations

• Ritual Model
• humanities
• qualitative
• interpretative
• environment
• about meaning

• Transmissive Model
• social sciences
• quantitative/empirical
• measurable
• behavioural effect
• social control

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