POL Ch. 6 Media in Everyday Life, PP 219-56

chapter six
Media in Everyday Life
m edia are pervasive in most of our lives, yet we tend to take them
for granted. Many of us experience on a daily basis mobile phones,
social media, the web, television, and news. With the integration of mobile phones
into everyday life, and people receiving their news electronically, the fields of jour-
nalism, newspaper and magazine publishing, and television news are increasingly
changing as their models for reaching readers and audiences (and their revenue
models) have been dramatically disrupted by digital media practices. In this chapter
we consider the media as a set of social forms and practices of looking that engage
us in our everyday lives.
The Media, Singular and Plural

Media is the plural form of medium, which describes the means or technology used
for storing and communicating information and other configurations of data and
text, such as narrative. The term has been used since the sixteenth century, when
it connoted a permeable membrane or intermediate agency, such as the wall of a
blood vessel. Medium is also used to describe a psychic, a person who channels a
dead person’s spirit, making it audible and visible through expression and gesture.
All of these meanings suggest intervening layers through which something flows.
Although it is a plural term, media is often used as a singular noun. We speak
of the media, or the mass media. These singular forms include different media (or
mediums) such as the news, radio, film, television, the web, and mobile phones.
We may also include in this group playable media, such as computer games, a form
that began to approach mainstream popularity in the late 1970s. In 2015, gaming
generated $91.5 billion in revenue, with China and the United States each contrib-
uting a quarter of that figure. Clearly the game industry is a mass media industry.
But these different forms of media are not all consonant with one another. Games
may be played on a computer, game console, tablet, or phone—all different forms
I 219
of media. News media is similarly produced on, packaged through, and circulated
in a variety of media forms. The news has been traditionally printed on a press and
distributed through newspapers, but today it is more likely consumed as television
coverage circulating on news websites and Twitter feeds. In the media of sound,
the news has long been circulated on the radio, broadcast by airwaves, satellite, or
over the Internet and is now played on radios, computers, and phones. The radio
podcast exemplifies the increasingly individual nature of media consumption—
one listener on their own time schedule, rather than listening simultaneously with
others. The news is increasingly visual, with news websites using video and pho-
tography and television news often consumed via computer screens. There are
many modes of media today, which define different, increasingly individual audi-
ences, listeners, and viewers. As we discuss in this chapter, media today involve an
exchange between media consumers and media producers, rather than a one-way
communication.
Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this broader under-
standing of media when he proposed in the 1960s that media include forms other
than radio, television, cinema, and the press. For McLuhan, a medium is a techno-
logical form that extends the self.1 In this definition, media include technologies
such as cars, trains, light bulbs, and even vocal and gestured or signed speech.
Media are forms through which we amplify, accelerate, and prosthetically extend
our bodies for information communication and cultural transmission. A medium
is not a neutral technology through which meanings, messages, and information
are channeled unmodified. The medium itself, whether that medium is a voice or a
technology such as television, has a major impact on the meaning it conveys. There
is no such thing as a message without a medium or a message that is not affected
by its medium.
Media convergence is a concept that became widely used in the twenty-first
century to describe the coming together of previously separate media forms and
industries through computing and digital technology.2 Whereas movies were his-
torically made on celluloid (analog) film and screened in movie theaters outside the
home, they are now produced and screened digitally and often watched at home on
computers, the same device through which we may write and communicate. The
digital technology industry and the film industry have thus converged. But con-
vergence did not originate in the digital era. Convergence moments have existed
throughout media history. During the first half of the twentieth century, film news-
reels sometimes preceded feature films at movie theaters, serving as educational
entertainment. In the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, feature films and
cartoons produced for movie theaters were sometimes syndicated for television
broadcast after their theatrical run. This was a kind of proto-convergence practice,
a crossover of film and television industry domains and cultures. Films, used as
television programming, expediently filled nonprimetime slots without production
costs, and fresh income was thus generated from old media.
220 I M e d i a i n E v e r y d ay L i f e
In the twentieth century, multiple forms of media converged as never before,
facilitated by the digital turn and the rise of the personal computer as a platform
for multiple functions previously consigned to different industry areas and different
genres of consumption and use. In the twentieth century, movies, radio and televi-
sion programs, and computer games were consumed via distinct venues and devices.
By the twenty-first century, all of these media forms could be stored on digital
platforms and consumed via the web. This has been facilitated by increased broad-
band networks and the creation of vast storage options (known as the “cloud”).
Although the cloud implies something ephemeral and immaterial, digital storage
(owned by Apple, Google, and other major tech companies) entails the use of vast
energy-consuming physical servers spanning multiple geographical sites. These
servers extend our computer memory beyond the personal hard drive, storing data
for access from many places and supporting activities like streaming videos. Movies
and television programs, previously accessible at theaters or through television sup-
ported by syndicated programming or home video setups, may be watched on any
computing device through subscription services such as Netflix and Hulu. The
distribution market converged with production when online distributors like Netflix
began to produce original works (“content”) such as the series Orange Is the New
Black in 2013.
The market in print media and book distribution and film and television media
distribution converged when Amazon, which began as an online bookseller, began
to sell first video cassettes and then streaming video along with offering prod-
ucts such as household goods, furniture, electronics, clothing, and food. As media
industries converge, mediation and consumption become entwined. Amazon took
convergence a step further when it entered into television production in 2013 with
original series marketed solely through its Prime Video market. These series include
Transparent, a situation comedy directed by Jill Soloway that centers on a Los
Angeles family whose father is in the process of coming out as a trans woman.
Convergence entails not only the intersections of media platforms but also inter-
sections of industry sectors, genres, and media forms. Even family photographs
became re-mediated when analog photographs stored in boxes and albums were
given a new life as digitized and shared image files, first through CDs, hard drives,
and email attachments, and then on social media platforms such as Facebook and
Instagram, where they remain archived under licensing agreements that give these
companies the rights to collect, store, and use them. Media convergence has esca-
lated in the digital era in ways that are unprecedented in scope and scale.
Media is a big, changeable, and messy concept. Everyday media include the
phone, a device that today serves a multitude of functions that used to be performed
through different instruments. The mobile phone is also a clock, navigation device,
personal calendar, and gaming platform. It is a computing platform that ties us to
social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat). It brings us advertising,
email, and text messages. You may read books and listen to music on your phone.
M e d i a i n E v e r y d ay L i f e
I 221
It is a source for personal communication, news, reference checking, and research.
In the contemporary media environment, we experience fewer d istinctions between
media forms and genres—via digital technology, they are consumed together and
simultaneously, on the same devices and in individual ways. As we will discuss fur-
ther, the key concepts that have defined media over the last century—mass culture,
mass media, and audience—are now in flux.
Everyday Life
A key way to frame this new world of media consumption is to consider the media
as a wide-ranging set of forms, technologies, and practices through which we expe-
rience everyday life. In 1982, media theorist John Caughey noted that “otherwise
diverse studies of everyday life typically share the assumption that ordinary life is
not, as it seems, an ordinary or natural phenomenon, but rather a complex process
in need of exploration and explanation.”3 To consider everyday life, we must focus
on media. Everyday life is, as we have noted in the previous paragraphs, highly and
increasingly mediated. Our concern is not only how we make meaning through our
practices of looking at things that are made to be looked at (like art or films), but
also how media inform everyday practice.
This concern with everyday practice was brought into cultural theory by
Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life.4 De Certeau stud-
ied how people live through everyday activities like navigating city streets. During
the 1980s, most culture scholars working on media were emphasizing experiences
with media objects, such as film viewing, or art and taste. De Certeau shifted the
focus from forms of media to the overall field of experience in which we negotiate
our environment. Our bodies are immersed in mediation with the spaces, objects,
and technologies of everyday life. He foregrounded the everyday ways in which
ordinary people move through spaces of the everyday, which are designed by city
planners to facilitate order and to serve the interests of business and law. Rather
than talking about making and doing as the activities of the artist or producer, and
rather than discussing consumption as a passive act of simply watching or looking,
De Certeau proposed that we regard the human subject as a mobile, mediated, and
mediating subject who engages in the world by negotiating spaces, making them
“habitable.” In a famous chapter of his book, “Walking in the City,” De Certeau
introduces walking as a practice of social mediation. He shows how the city is built
by civic government and private industry and held together by policy and design
but intercepted and negotiated by the ordinary human subject who walks (or uses a
wheelchair, we might add), appropriating the urban network and structures in ways
he described as tactical, not always following the order and logic of the city. That
ordered structure is visible in its grid-like abstraction from the god’s-eye view above
(as we noted in Chapter 3, de Certeau’s example is a view from the Twin Towers
of the World Trade Center). But down on the ground, the city appears much
more messy. In other words, people mediate the city by engaging its built forms
and objects in practical and offhand ways, often outside of and against intended
actions. This activity is performed not only through engagement with signs and
media texts and through interpretive meaning making, but also through the mun-
dane everyday activities of using, doing, and adapting. We may refer to McLuhan’s
notion of media as “extensions of man” to understand this broader use of the term.
To take a shortcut, to find a workaround, is tactically to mediate the city.
How do we get from social practice to media practice? One of De Certeau’s
main contributions was this shift in understanding of mediation from the form
or object to the practices through which we use things. Media practice, or the
mediation of culture, may be as simple as walking, or using what McLuhan calls
“extensions”: shoes, a cane, a wheelchair, a bus, a bike, a car, a map, a GPS system,
a human guide—all of these are forms of media through which we negotiate social
space. Engagement with “the media” even in the more conventional sense of the
news and entertainment media industries involves re-mediation tactics. We are
users and negotiators, mediators and remediators, and not just producers and con-
sumers of the media in our worlds.
Mass Culture and Mass Media

The concept of “the masses” was introduced in the nineteenth century to describe
the growing underclass of people who labored in factories during the rise of capi-
talist industrial society. The industrial worker typically had little or no capital, did
not own property or the means of production, and earned a living by selling their
physical labor. In Marxist political theory, “the masses” has been used as a singu-
lar concept, a synonym for “the people” or the proletariat, a term introduced in
1850s France to describe the propertyless industrial wage earners who emerged as
a class distinct from both the landless agricultural worker (the peasant class) and
the bourgeoisie (the property-owning class). In the nineteenth century, many of the
bourgeoisie of Europe and the newly rich railroad magnates and landowners of
the United States used their wealth to build factories, luring agricultural workers
to manufacturing jobs that yielded mass-produced products. These industrialists
invested their capital in the means of production, and then exploited worker labor.
U.S. factory owners lured propertyless peasants and workers from Europe with the
promise of more plentiful jobs, seeming to offer land ownership opportunities and
class mobility as well. Factory owners enlisted children as laborers and paid wages
too low to cover housing and food for an individual, much less a family. Sold for
more than the cost of overhead, raw materials, and wages, the goods that workers
created reaped profits for the factory owner but left the low-paid factory worker
exhausted and with barely enough money to survive. The working class swelled
into what journalists began to call “the teeming masses” as cities began to fill with
factory, office, and shop workers, many of them single and living apart from their
I 223
families back in Europe or on the rural farm. These were the alienated workers,
as we noted in Chapter 3, of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and King Vidor’s
The Crowd—factory and office laborers who headed out alone into the streets
seeking relief, distraction, and cheap amusements with the meager leisure time and
money available to them. Twentieth-century media industries of the cinema, radio,
and television rose up to cater to “mass society.” Cheaply made, entertaining, light
fare that could be mass-produced and mass-circulated thrived in the cinema palaces
and appealed to members of the working class and middle class (the same middle
class that has declined in numbers due to today’s neoliberal economy).
The idea of a monolithic “mass culture” is linked to the period of modernity
and industrialization in which national newspapers, a national cinema, and national
radio and television broadcast media shaped culture in industrialized nations and
locations where this media was exported. In the United States, mass culture arose
through periods of intense corporate growth and monopoly formation. The printing
press generated newspapers, magazines, and popular novels for broad mass circu-
lation, to be sold in urban newsstands. The cinema, introduced in 1895, quickly
appealed to the expanding concentration of workers. Radio, introduced in the 1920s,
and television, introduced in the 1940s, relied on broadcast formats that transmit-
ted from one or a few sources to many individual listeners and viewers, carrying
the same mass entertainment programming to millions of individual homes. In the
postwar years, the concentration of the working class in the city and the expansion
of the middle class outward to the suburbs were paralleled by the rise of corporate
monopolies and the emergence of transnational cartels. Media industries both pro-
voked and catered to the emotional, psychological, and practical desires of the urban
masses for entertainment, news, and distractions from work.
The term “mass media” refers to forms of communication that reach large num-
bers of people in a relatively short timeframe. It has been used since the 1920s to
describe media forms designed to reach large audiences—groups perceived to have
shared interests. It also refers to the conventions in which audiences receive regu-
larly programmed entertainment shows or news about world events, usually from
a centralized mass distribution source such as a newspaper corporation, television
network, major film studio, or news and entertainment media conglomerate. The
primary mass media forms during the twentieth century were the cinema, radio,
network and cable television, and the press (including newspapers and magazines).
During that century, visual images and time-based media came to dominate mass
media markets.
Throughout most of the Cold War period, communication scholars critiqued
mass media for its production of propaganda, focusing particularly on authoritarian
and totalitarian regimes’ effective use of this strategy. The quintessential example
is the use of film and poster art to support the rise of Nazism in Germany prior to
World War II. For example, German film director Leni Riefenstahl produced propa-
ganda films designed to enlist the German masses in the Nazi Party ethos. Her 1935
film Triumph of the Will documents a 1934
Nazi rally in Nuremberg that she attended
and documented.
This film is one of the most powerful
examples of the use of time-based images
to instill political beliefs in its audience. The
1934 rally was planned as a mass visual spec-
tacle. Adolf Hitler, who served as the film’s
executive producer, had the rally choreo-
graphed and filmed with aerial photography,
telephoto lenses, multiple cameras, and an
elaborate tracking-shot system. His strategy FIG. 6.1
was to use staging, framing, and camera movement to give the Screen shot from the film Triumph
impression that the whole nation was united behind him, when of the Will, dir. Leni Riefenstahl,
1935
in fact at this moment his party had just experienced a major
challenge from the National Socialist Party. The film is com-
posed of shots featuring imposingly dramatic compositions. Hitler figures centrally
in most of the shots. He is either the implied master eye behind god’s-eye point
of view shots that convey a totalizing gaze, or he is at the center of the composi-
tion, immersed in a sea of admiring subjects whose eyes all point to him. The film
opens with grand aerial tracking footage of Hitler’s plane swooping in over the city,
intercut with shots of the city from the plane’s-eye view as Hitler scopes out his
domain. We later see many shots of Hitler in the crowds, taken from a low camera
angle that makes the spectator literally look up to him, emphasizing his stature and
charisma. Triumph of the Will is an example of the ways that practices of looking
can uphold nationalism and idolatry in real time (staged events) as well as through
images and recordings that involve editing and framing. The concept of the media
as propaganda is one approach to understanding the mass media’s historic ties to
the promotion of mass ideology. By analyzing the composition and orchestration
of sets, performances, and film texts such as this, we can better understand how a
populace may be crafted into an undifferentiated mass audience.
We may think of this kind of propaganda as unique to totalitarian regimes,
but the repression of thought through the media has a long and global history.
In the United States, a formidable mass media industry was established by the
mid-twentieth century, one with global reach decades prior to late-century privat-
ization, mergers, production outsourcing, and trade globalization. Dubbed the
“American Century” by media mogul Henry Luce, the twentieth century saw the
rise of communications and media systems as central mechanisms in the ascen-
dance of the United States as a global superpower. The postwar period, during
which digital technologies and information culture were undergoing development,
was a time of intensified intellectual and political repression in the United States.
Communication scholar Angharad N. Valdivia reminds us that at mid-century,
I 225
U.S. scholars and critics were subjected to “red-baiting,” a practice in which accu-
sations of communist leanings were used to discredit progressive views and to
silence dissent. In 1950, Senator Joe McCarthy publicized lists of supposed Com-
munist Party members or sympathizers, riding a long wave of anti-communist sen-
timent that extended from the “Red Scare” of the late 1910s through the Cold War
period. Conservatives before McCarthy had falsely equated progressive reform with
communism, but he brought to this climate a high degree of showmanship and a
penchant for public vilification that made his name synonymous with the com-
munist witch hunt conducted by the government’s House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) in the 1950s. McCarthyism and HUAC are legendary for their
repression of political speech and their destruction of careers. Everyone was open to
suspicion as accusations were not limited to politicians. HUAC targeted more than
300 people in Hollywood. Many of those investigated were quite famous as writ-
ers, directors, and actors in the media industry. Although some of those targeted,
including Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, were able to continue their work out-
side the United States or by working under pseudonyms, fewer than 10 percent
of the group targeted was able to resume a career in the entertainment industries.
Though most active in the 1950s, HUAC lasted into the 1970s. Under its shadow,
anyone critiquing the media industry’s political and economic basis risked condem-
nation and public censure. As Valdivia notes, during this period, “celebratory and
‘patriotic’ approaches were the only ones allowed.”5
Historically, media industries have formed through either private corporations
that control media production and messages or government-controlled television
networks. Take the case of Disney. Founded in 1923 as a cartoon studio, Disney
is currently one of the world’s leading providers of entertainment and information
with company assets that include television networks, theme parks, resorts, and
global property holdings on almost every continent. Not only does Disney own the
Walt Disney Studios, which includes Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise as well
as Marvel Studios, it is part of the Disney/ABC Television Group, which includes
broadcast and cable channels such as ESPN and holds a large stake in Hulu. Disney
also owns many theme parks and a cruise line, and it derives a significant income
from merchandizing (Disney is famous for policing intellectual property and copy-
right). In 2015, Disney reported $52 billion in revenues. Similarly, Berkshire Hatha-
way, a company known for its CEO Warren Buffet, one of the world’s wealthiest
people, owns shares in news media companies as well as clothing and food brands
(including Coca-Cola and Kraft) and service companies (such as insurance). The
rise in size and scope of media companies parallels the global and cross-industry
expansion of corporate ownership’s range and scope.
Yet the dynamics of media control have shifted profoundly in the last ten years
in ways that do not always reflect this explosion in acquisition of holdings. Events
are now covered and analyzed as much in Twitter feeds as they are via news sources,
and the mainstream media increasingly incorporates the voices of viewer-users into
their coverage. Some television or print news
stories are released online with a number of
Twitter quotes within them, including text
and images, making the news effectively a
multiplatform industry. Yet this dynamic has
generated niche information worlds in which
people consume news from an increasingly
limited set of sources—which many com-
mentators see as increasing polarizing politics.
Today, consumers are more likely to regard
themselves as potential media producers, as
well as consumers who exercise choice.
As Western industrial culture progressed
into the twentieth century, the locus of taste
and the ethos of mass media shifted to the
suburbs. Public culture was no longer an urban phenomenon FIG. 6.2
Twitter post by a reader published
contained in the department store, concert hall, movie theater,
in a mainstream news feed
and city hall. Suburban mall culture facilitated consumption of
mass manufactured goods by the suburban masses. One could
watch mass broadcast television “along with” others in the nation from one’s own
living room. Films could also be consumed in the new mall-based cinemas, which
were larger than their urban counterparts, attracting consumers who traveled in the
family car from distant suburbs. Film industries based in Hollywood, Bollywood,
and Hong Kong sought out global markets for their films just as mass manufac-
turers such as Nike, Apple, and Levi sought out global markets for their goods.
Even before World War II, Hollywood film production had become multinational
by installing production units and studios in European locations. As we discuss in
Chapter 10, film industries in Mumbai (with its Bollywood film center) and Hong
Kong have vied with Hollywood for dominance in the global media market. This
global mass culture film industry escalated dramatically in the last two decades
of the twentieth century, which saw the release of multinational features such
as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a 2000 U.S.-Chinese co-produced martial
arts film that includes three languages: Mandarin, English, and French. In 2016,
this film remained the highest grossing foreign language film (co-)produced by the
U.S. film industry. With this turn to a global mass audience and media conver-
gence, media markets continued to expand. In 2012, the global media market was
valued at $1.73 trillion, a figure predicted to reach $2.15 trillion by 2020.
Critiques of Mass Culture

Throughout modern media’s rise, there have been critiques of its societal role.
One of the most influential critiques of the media and the industrialization of
I 227
culture came from the Frankfurt School theorists, who applied Marxist theory to
the study of culture in the postwar years and whose work has been influential
since the 1960s. This group, which includes Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno,
and H erbert M
arcuse, among others, criticized the capitalist and consumerist ori-
entation of postwar media forms, including popular movies, television, and adver-
tising. Most Frankfurt School scholars had fled as Jewish refugees from 1930s
Germany, where they had been associated with Frankfurt’s Institute for Social
Research. In 1944, Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the concepts of “mass
culture” and “the culture industry,” proposing that the entertainment industry
deceived the laboring classes into acquiescence toward capitalism. The authors
proposed that the laboring class, which largely remained uneducated due to a
class society that reserved college for the upper classes until later in the twentieth
century, was targeted by a mass media industry that exploited workers as passive
consumers. Many university-based social scientists at the time measured media’s
societal impacts in propaganda and persuasion, the relationship between media
and crime, and media’s market potential. But few tied this mass media research to
a critical political and economic theory of culture. In their important work on the
culture industry, Adorno and Horkheimer regarded the masses as passive subjects
and saw the industry (media producers) as the purveyors of mass media texts that
shaped mass culture. Mass media obscured the realities of life in class society and
at best made conformity tolerable.
Adorno and Horkheimer drew attention to the fact that the capitalist indus-
trial workplace produced not just goods but also cultures. When they dubbed
this sector of industrial production “the culture industry,” they revealed the eco-
nomic and social lines connecting industries that were then understood to be
separate (e.g., film and television) with manufacturing industries and practices.
Their point was that by ideologically promulgating a desire for middle-class life-
styles and goods among the mass working populace, the mass media reproduced
capitalism’s class system. Just as advertisements sold products, narrative cinema
sold the lifestyle and class system of capitalist modernity. Some films, such as
William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, released right after World War II,
romanticized w orking-class and middle-class laborers and soldiers, making their
lives seem honorable, noble, and iconic. Other films, such as King Vidor’s Gilda
(a 1946 film noir), generated fascination with decadent lifestyles and the ques-
tionable values of the new global industrial venture capitalists engaged in shady
cartels. Television serials represented middle-class life as a normative standard,
combining its fictional stories with product promotion spots that stitched desire
for specific branded goods into fantasies about living the lives portrayed in post-
war situation comedies.
In these ways, cinema and television manufactured desire not only for life-
styles, but also for things—not just any goods, but the brand-name goods dis-
played and advertised in the shows or worn and used by the stars and discussed
FIG. 6.3
1947 ad for Max Factor Hollywood
patented Pan-Cake Make-Up
in new popular magazines. For instance, in the late

1940s the Hollywood makeup manufacturer Max
Factor developed cosmetics using compounds that
would hold up under the hot lights of the film set and
which would render skin in nonreflective, matte sur-
faces, allowing more control over the ways in which
skin tone appeared on the new panchromatic color film
stock. Vibrant color images of female stars in different
shades of lipstick connoting different gender stereo-
types inspired women and teenage girls who saw these
films. The idea that a woman should appear in public
wearing makeup modeled on her favorite stars was
promulgated by the print media industry, with stories in the popular magazine
Photoplay advising readers to let “Hollywood experts” be their guides to the tricks
of makeup and dress. Stars were quoted giving beauty and makeup tips, and a spe-
cial section of the magazine was devoted to “Hollywood Face Facts,” with editors
dispensing technical and product advice on how to alter one’s face with makeup
to look more like one’s favorite star.
By the 1960s, the standardized
balancing of film stock to provide
the greatest tonal range in the pho-
tographing of white skin tones led to
changes in film stocks and screen aes-
thetics. The standard tone of makeup
and of film stock had been historically
white, as an unmarked norm. By the
1970s, the Kodak “Shirley” cards used
for skin tone calibration, named after
their original white brunette model,
became multiracial.
By the late 1950s, some were
concerned about Adorno and
Horkheimer’s pejorative disdain of the
FIG. 6.4
Multiracial “Shirley” card, 1996,
distributed by Eastman Kodak for
calibrating skin tone on prints
I 229
worker and their agency and intellect. In 1957, British literary scholar Richard Hog-
gart challenged the dichotomy between (low) mass culture and elite literature.6 In
1964, Hoggart founded Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, out of which was produced some of the most important scholarship in
visual cultural studies and popular media studies. In The Popular Arts (1964), Bir-
mingham scholar Stuart Hall and his co-author, Paddy Whannel, proposed: “The
struggle between what is good and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased is
not a struggle against the modern forms of communication, but a conflict within
these media.”7 Hall and Whannel’s book jacket combines a radio, a television con-
sole, and celluloid film reels in a composition that makes a human face, which
suggests “the mass media” (a term used in the book’s subtitle) is a unified object
that should not be critically opposed from without but understood critically in its
human dimensions from within. Whannel had been employed by the British Film
Institute to travel around England educating the populace about television and
mainstream film, including Hollywood films, as objects no less worthy of study
than “serious” literature.8 A British tradition of cultural studies arose around the
Birmingham School, with some of its hallmarks this refusal to write off popular or
mass culture as debased forms reflecting dominant interests and an insistence on
noting forms of practice, such as punk music, that emerged out of youth subcul-
tures or community-based practice.
American media scholar John Fiske argued that in reading and watching main-
stream media products, everyday people express interpretive agency, defying the
social order embedded in the texts’ dominant meanings. Popular culture is pro-
duced not solely by industry producers, but also by readers
FIG. 6.5
The Circuit of Culture, from
and consumers.9 The “American” versions of popular media
Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and studies and cultural studies, which was typified by Fiske, was
Sean Nixon, eds., Representation: subject to critique by a range of writers who decried the over-
Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices
attention to individual pleasure and alternative expression
and the failure to acknowledge the vast scope of economic
The circuit of culture
and cultural authority exercised by the Ameri-
can media industry, which had achieved global
Representation
reach. Other authors, such as Angela McRobbie
and Dick Hebdige, combined Antonio Gramsci’s
theory of hegemony (discussed in Chapter 2)
Regulation Identity with Barthes’s semiotics (discussed in Chapter
1) to stress that agency comes from below in
subcultures defying mainstream culture indus-
tries. People use techniques such as bricolage
and pastiche to forge alternative styles and
Consumption Production modes of expression.10 These scholars empha-
sized the cultural practices of media viewers,
users, and consumers rather than simply
interpreting the cultural text itself. Hall
and others described a “circuit of cul-
ture” in which meaning is produced and
circulated through intersecting modes
of production, consumption, regulation,
representation, and identity.11
Thus, since the late 1960s, cultural
theorists have questioned the high art/
mass culture divide, suggesting that our
experiences with media are too complex
and varied to be adequately character-
ized in sweeping categories such as mass
consciousness or mass culture. Today,
digital media takes this further, since the
fragmenting of audiences and viewing prac- FIG. 6.6
@NeinQuarterly Theodor Adorno
tices means that there is no longer one mass
Twitter avatar
audience. Rather, the populace is fragmented
among a range of cultures and communities,
some of which use art and media to challenge or even transform the dominant mean-
ings generated by the mainstream culture industry. Moreover, the culture industry
no longer makes a unified set of products. It increasingly produces a diverse range of
popular culture and media designed to appeal to niche audiences. Hence, the media
can include counterhegemonic forces that challenge dominant ideologies and the
social orders they uphold. Yet one glance at global popular culture shows that the
critique of mass culture still has relevance—the repetition of formats, genres, nar-
ratives, ideologies, formulas, and conventions demonstrates a remarkable global
standardization of culture.
Amusingly, Adorno has become a cultish figure for the popular NeinQuarterly
Twitter feed, created by Eric Jarosinski, through which one can order a tote bag
adorned with Adorno’s picture.12 The joke is that this kind of star-emblazoned tote
bag would be disdained by Adorno, yet in its ironic joke about the critic as com-
moditized star, it embraces his skepticism about and rejection of the commercializa-
tion and homogenization of popular culture.
Models for thinking about the influence of media and popular culture on
social behavior have also come from philosophy and art. Take, for example, the
work of Guy Debord, who was initially associated with Lettrism, a 1940s French
artistic movement. With the Lettrists, Debord introduced psychogeography, a
hybrid approach that emphasizes the impact of geography on human feelings and
actions.13 Debord and his colleagues made counter-maps of the city that chal-
lenged the centralized, institutional logic of urban development introduced by Le
I 231
FIG. 6.7 orbusier and the other planners of postwar Paris.14 This Situ-
C
Psychogeographic hubs in a plan
ationist map is compared to a map of the 16th arrondissement
of Paris that reconfigures the
standard planimetric map, from drawn by Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, who traced the route
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, The taken by a student over the course of a year between her home,
Naked City, 1957 (lithograph,
33.3 × 48.5 cm)
the School of Political Sciences, and her piano teacher’s resi-
dence. By contrast, this image presents us with a messy clot
without any of the navigable elements found in the Naked City
psychogeography map.
In 1957, Debord and others founded Situationist International, a group of art-
ists, intellectuals, and political theorists who studied the experience of life in media-
intensive, mid-century capitalism. The Situationists blurred the distinction between
art and life, calling for a constant transformation of lived experience through staged
and spontaneous actions. The term specta-
cle refers to an event or image that is par-
ticularly striking in its visual display to the
point of inspiring awe. We commonly think
of spectacle as involving enormous scale—
fireworks displays, awe- inspiringly large
FIG. 6.8
Map of the 16th arrondissement
of Paris tracing the routes taken
by a student over a year, from
Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe,
Paris et l’agglomération parisienne,
Vol. 1, Presses universitaires de
France, 1952, 106
images, IMAX movie screens, or devastating
bombs. Debord and the Situationists were pri-
marily interested in spectacle as a metaphor for
society itself, emphasizing that we live amidst
orchestrated spectacles. Debord describes
spectacle as both an “instrument of unifica-
tion” and a world vision that forges social rela-
tionships. All that was once directly lived, he
argued, has become mere representation. His
point was not only that images dominate, but
that everyday life experiences are now domi-
nated by the logic of the spectacle.15 FIG. 6.9
The Situationists have since become a Screen shot from the film Capital,
dir. Maxim Pozdorovkin and Joe
symbol of resistance to the society of the
Bender, 2010
spectacle. Spectacles are technologies through
which we look and which alter our vision.
Although Debord and the Situationists were rooted in 1960s social movements,
their ideas about the world as spectacle are increasingly relevant to understand the
contemporary global city, which serves as an iconic reminder of the successes of
global capital in places where previously capitalism was anathema.
We can see the importance of spectacle in this frame from Maxim Pozdorovkin
and Joe Bender’s Capital (2010), a film tracking the construction of Astana, a
utopian capital city of the future built to embody the new vision of Kazakhstan,
a vast, oil-rich Central Asian nation-state that has undergone dramatic transforma-
tion since it became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.
We can also see the influence of Situationist International in
the work of The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno), FIG. 6.10
Screen shot from the video The
a political performance art ensemble. Bichlbaum and Bonanno Yes Men Are Revolting, dir. Andy
impersonate corporate leaders and create online representations of Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, and
fictional corporations, attending business conferences and meet- Laura Nix, 2014
ings around the world to make “culture jam-

ming” interventions. In their 2014 film The Yes
Men Are Revolting, Bichlbaum and Bonanno
take on climate change by staging a fake cor-
porate presentation at a fossil fuels industry
event. At the Homeland Security Congress,
they pretend to be U.S. Department of Energy
representatives promoting a renewable energy
initiative that would be owned by Native
American tribes. Before being discovered,
they get policymakers and defense contractors
to perform a fake Native American ritual for
I 233
renewable energy, an action that has a visibly moving effect on many participants. In
their combination of serious political critique, masquerade, and pranksterism, The Yes
Men follow the Situationist precedent in disrupting the normative psychogeographies
of everyday life. They parody, reroute, and disrupt the usual practices of both the cor-
porate world and the media industry it relies upon to promote itself. In the film, we see
media personnel getting spoon-fed information through press releases and events that
they do not question. The Yes Men events generate external media coverage as soon
as their “fake” presentations are discovered. In this strategy of exploiting mass media
attention, The Yes Men adeptly call attention to corporate malfeasance, revealing as
critical guerrilla humor what previously passed for corporate ingenuity.
As this example shows, critiques of mass culture have continued to expand and
change since the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and early cultural studies. In the
1990s, amidst discussions about media globalization, anthropologists including South
Asian postcolonial theorist Arjun Appadurai and Argentinian scholar Néstor García
Canclini emphasized the unevenness and hybridity (mixedness) of Western cultural
imperialism. In his 1996 book Modernity at Large, Appadurai takes issue with the notion
that the media are the opium of the masses, reminding readers that the consumption of
media throughout the world has often provoked irony, anger, and resistance, not merely
compliance or acquiescence. Engagement with Western media has in fact entailed
agency to a degree unacknowledged in media effects and media imperialism communi-
cation theories.16 In his 1995 book Hybrid Cultures, Canclini proposes that we should
observe how people in Latin American nations engage with Western media and cultural
processes in ways that are complexly mixed and not simply reproductions of the pro-
cesses and structures of the dominant industry
FIG. 6.11
“Tribute to Joan Miró,” a Zapotec and its economy. He considers how artistic and
rug by Delfina Ruiz, Mexico, cultural forms are deterritorialized, unmoored
inspired by Miró’s Characters and
from their original national and cultural contexts,
Dog in the Sun, for sale on NOVICA
global marketplace in 2016 and how style and meaning change in different
contexts. He describes as “impure,” mixed, and
hybrid the forms of expression that emerge
when Western culture is appropriated, as in
the example of artisans in rural Mexico inter-
preting classic European artworks in craft
techniques—a Joan Miró painting rendered
in a tapestry, for example.17
Media Infrastructures
Situationist interventions show how the
flows and patterns of human usage can
disrupt official networks and systems in the
built environment. De Certeau also reminds
us that humans who walk in the city may
disrupt the unity and clarity of state-sponsored urban design, which appears simple
only when viewed from a god’s-eye vantage point. When we make do with the world
around us, we also make over that world.
The networks and systems that support media transmission are similarly struc-
tured in relationship to power. We should ask not just what sorts of messages get
transmitted through media systems, but also what logic, priorities, and ideologies
are built into media networks. Here our emphasis shifts from theories about the
media industry’s social and economic structures to those that analyze its tech-
nological infrastructure. That technological infrastructure is of course always also
social and economic. By looking at infrastructure, we can understand better the
dynamics of media systems and the messages they circulate.
As television spread in the postwar era, it became a national broadcast medium,
with local programming in some countries. Initially, long-distance national transmis-
sion was facilitated through “terrestrial television,” in which radio waves transmitted
from a television station could be received through antennae. This type of broadcast,
over-the-air (OTA) television, was first tested in the United States and Great Britain
in the 1920s. Community antenna television (CATV) was used as early as 1938 in
England and 1948 in the United States, where it was more common in regions where
a single mountaintop antenna could serve entire towns via cable. By the 1950s, TV
signals could reach almost every region in the United States, and AT&T had laid
coaxial cable throughout the nation. In the early years, television programming was
sometimes limited to regional or local audiences due to transmission limitations. By
the 1960s, transmission was more reliable and more unified, with programming from
the three centralized commercial stations broadcast around the country. Advertising
revenues provided profits for the three major television production networks and
their regional affiliates. In Britain, television has operated since 1938, when the wire-
less equipment manufacturers that had formed the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC) around radio in 1922 first began to broadcast. By 1955, 80 percent of the
nation had television, and the country saw the controversial introduction of com-
mercial stations, which were called “independent,” using the acronym ITV.
Satellite transmission was introduced in the 1960s to facilitate long-distance
broadcasting, making possible the transmission of live news and events overseas.
In many regions, including Africa, satellite has been used more widely than it has in
Europe and the United States because of the difficulties of laying cable to reach remote
areas with small populations. Satellite remains South Africa’s dominant transmission
form. The model of broadcasting locally was challenged by the laying of national and
undersea cable systems and by satellite transmission. With the expansion of broad-
cast range and accompanying increase in potential markets, the major U.S. networks
produced programs that appealed to more universal or “mass” cultural interests, phas-
ing out the earlier community-based and regional programming models.
Industry deregulation starting in the late 1970s spurred a market for cable
programming in North America, East Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East,
and South America. Twenty years after the phase-out of the “local” programming
I 235
model, the emergent cable programming industry introduced a “narrowcasting”
model. This consisted of identifying small niche groups not fully served by or satis-
fied with mass programming. Following market research, cable producers designed
special pay-channels and pay-programming to appeal to viewers who did not fit the
tastes or language profiles of the proverbial “masses.” Chinese-, Korean-, Hindi-,
and Spanish-language channels were introduced to cater to diasporic communities
throughout the world, and programming from networks such as CNN, the BBC,
and TV5 from France, among others, was distributed globally via cable systems.
The United States saw the introduction of “minority” networks such as Black
Entertainment Television (BET) and Lifetime (Television for Women). Telemundo
and Univision were introduced to serve Spanish-language audiences globally. The
proliferation of stations and programming options escalated into the 2000s, giving
the appearance that television had become a realm of expanded entertainment
choices, catering to highly specific viewer styles, languages, subjects, and tastes in
a scope that is paradoxically global. This appearance of expanded options reflected
the ideology that the individual must be served by the media industry in ways that
acknowledge the unique specificity of individual groups. Critics of the cable phe-
nomenon such as John McMurria emphasize that cable’s apparent expansion of
choice did not create diversity but rather perpetuated existing television industry
problems such as lack of diversity in management and hiring and the proliferation
of programming deploying racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes.18
Scholars have linked this “individual choice” mentality to the rise of neoliber-
alism, a term describing the resurgence, since the 1960s, of laissez-faire economic
liberalism, industry privatization, and diminishment of government regulation.
Neoliberal policies also incentivize free trade and private-sector investment and
eliminate barriers around global investment and competition. Media deregulation
allowed for unprecedented consolidation of media ownership, which means that in
the United States, most media companies are now owned by a few massive global
corporate conglomerates, such as Viacom, Comcast, Sony, Twenty-First Century
Fox, Disney, British Sky Broadcasting, and Time Warner.
The development of the Internet in the 1960s and 1970s, with the subsequent
expansion of the home computer market and the development of the web in the
early 1990s, dramatically changed the media landscape and its infrastructure. The
introduction in the 2000s of social media reflected the neoliberal model of choice
that had been used to justify deregulation and privatization in media and health
care markets. The Internet, which began as a text-based communication medium,
became more visual with advances in digital technologies throughout the 1980s
and 1990s. With the expansion of broadband, the Internet became a platform for
video, television, and film viewing by the early 2010s. The Internet is a network
that allows for multiple modalities of communication and circulation, effectively
building out from the modalities of television, telephony, radio, and film, as well
as the mail and library systems, to serve a plethora of cultural transmission forms
on a single network. This model, in which multiple transmissions and exchanges
are supported by packet switching (allowing multiple exchanges to occur simul-
taneously), presented a radical switch from former models such as the telephone,
in which the user could receive only one transmission at a given time, or televi-
sion, in which only one show could appear on a given screen at any given time.
The Internet began in the 1960s with ARPANET, a military project designed to
create a complex and flexible network that would enable communications to be
re-routed in the case of attack, emergency, or breakdown of any information chain
in the network.
The infrastructures of our primary media systems today, which undergird the
systems of broadcast television, cable television, the Internet, and mobile phones,
are a combination of wireless systems, satellite communication systems (which
send signals to satellites orbiting the Earth that then send them back to Earth), and
networks of cables, most of them under the sea. As Nicole Starosielski writes, “with
each wave of technological development, the media landscape appears less wired,”
yet this experience of wirelessness is “grounded by a large mass of cable systems.”
These wires are “buried under soil and pavement, snaking along the bottom of the
ocean, enclosed in industrial parks and office buildings, secluded in rural areas.”
They are the infrastructure of the “wireless” culture through which almost all Inter-
net traffic travels.19 How information and messages travel through these networks
affects their speed. Of course, in moments of disruption and catastrophe when
networks go down (or satellites fail), the infrastructures of these systems reveal
themselves, emerging from their otherwise invisible state of existence underwater,
underground, and up in the sky.
Satellite technology has been a key infrastructure for media and communi-
cation industries over the last fifty years, with thousands of satellites launched
for military applications (spying from the skies), weather observation, scientific
applications, security apparatuses, and media and entertainment practices. Satellite
is crucial to the expansion of television networks in ways that were initially largely
invisible. Cable networks distribute programming via satellite to localized cable sys-
tems, which began with HBO in 1975, followed by many other cable networks.
Thus, the role of satellite technology in distributing “cable” television was made
largely invisible to the public through its very naming, yet in the contemporary
media landscape, with direct satellite television and radio, satellites are fully a part
of consumers’ media imaginary. As Lisa Parks and James Schwoch note, satellites
“have been fundamental to contemporary conceptualizations of the global and to
processes of globalization. Satellites circulate signals across and beyond the sover-
eign boundaries of nations on earth and in doing so facilitate the flows of a global
economy.”20 Satellite technology has become commonplace for communication
technologies, to the extent that we barely register when we are deploying satellites
in our everyday lives—for instance, when a telephone call to someone down the
street is routed through a satellite orbiting the Earth.
I 237
FIG. 6.12
Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE-
IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier
Point (Optical Reconnaissance
Satellite; USA 224), 2011
(chromogenic print)
The world of satellites is, not sur-

prisingly, linked to that of surveillance
and the invisible worlds of security and
conflict. Artist and cultural geographer
Trevor Paglen is one of many artists who
have challenged the surveillant gaze of
satellites. For his series The Other Night
Sky, Paglen tracked and photographed
classified satellites and other space
objects and debris. Paglen makes visible the invisible strategies through which sur-
veillance operates. The project uses observational data produced by an interna-
tional network of “amateur satellite observers” to calculate the position and timing
of satellites, which are then photographed. In this image from the series, Paglen
juxtaposes the normally invisible activity of satellites in the sky with the famous
landscape of Yosemite as seen from Glacier Point.
These invisible infrastructures are designed to not be seen.
FIG. 6.13 Lisa Parks has written about the invisible field of the satellite gaze,
(a) Antenna tree, Calabria, Italy;
(b) Antenna cactus installation
pointing out the masked presence of cell towers in structures that
by Larson Camouflage, Tucson, are designed to look like trees. Driving past such structures, we
Arizona might imagine ourselves to be in nature when we are in fact sur-
rounded by camouflaged architecture
supporting the ever-present network
of information flows. Parks writes that
“by disguising infrastructure as part of
the natural environment, concealment
strategies keep citizens naive and unin-
formed about the network technologies
they subsidize and use each day.”21
An infrastructural analysis also
allows us to see how the concept of the
cloud masks the vast array of machines
necessary to create the illusion of a vir-
tual, wireless world. Private companies
like Google, Amazon, and Facebook
have invested billions in creating server
(a) (b) farms, which hold the vast amounts of
memory and data storage needed to sus-
tain social media, media streaming, and
information technology.22 The cloud is
a convenient metaphor which conjures
images of wispy bits of white floating in
the sky and which gives the veneer of
environmental friendliness to the tech
industry and consumer technology prac-
tices. The reality is, however, that these
storage farms consume and waste vast
amounts of energy. Many of them are built
near hydroelectric power sources because they FIG. 6.14
are so energy consuming. For security reasons, Backup generators at the
Facebook data center in
many of these storage facilities are hidden in
Prineville, Oregon
anonymous buildings. Tung-Hui Hu notes that
despite how it masks these large data centers,
the cloud, “as an idea, has exceeded its technological platform and become a poten-
tial metaphor for the way contemporary society organizes and understands itself.”23
This disconnect between media infrastructure metaphors and their material realities
reveals a fundamental myth of the tech industries as immaterial in their relationship
to the environment.
The media infrastructures, industries, and technologies that we are discussing
here reveal how communication technology models have shifted from mass media
to what Manuel Castells has referred to as the “network society”—information,
messages, and finances circulate through networks rather than through systems of
broadcast and one-way communication.24 The complex ways in which contempo-
rary media are structured allows both for the effectively unregulated consolidation of
media power and for an increase in consumer-user productions and communications.
There are now, as we noted, vast corporate conglomerates that own network and
cable television, film studios, radio, web media, and newspapers, and huge corporate
entities such as Google (which owns YouTube) and Facebook (which owns Insta-
gram) that have enormous power over media messages and the structures through
which they are circulated and shaped. Media scholar and activist Robert McChesney
has chronicled the changes in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) poli-
cies throughout the 1990s and 2000s that have limited government regulation of
media ownership, facilitating private-sector mergers and monopoly conglomerates
that span telecommunications, television, print journalism, the film industry, the
web, entertainment and amusement venues, and a surprisingly diverse range of other
sorts of industries (food, oil, clothing, toys).25 Yet these same media forms have
also enabled c onsumer-user production, home entertainment, web media, and social
media, which in turn have restructured viewing practices, audiences, and the forms
through which viewers consume and make media themselves.
I 239
Media as Nation and Public Sphere
Media can both affirm nationalism and critique it. By airing an issue or event inter-
nationally, broadcasters signal its global importance and offer a means of connect-
ing affected communities across vast distances. In his highly influential 1983 book
on nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson writes that the modern
nation-state is an imagined political community—imagined as both limited (with
borders) and sovereign (self-governing). Anderson famously notes that the nation
is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion.”26 Anderson argues that national news-
papers, among other factors, led to these feelings of community. Although Ander-
son did not discuss television, one can certainly argue that television has been a
central medium in the creation of national identity, in particular in times of crisis.
Thus some critics have noted that Anderson’s concept of “print capitalism” should
be extended to include “electronic capitalism.”27 Because of its capacity for instant
transmission, its public presence, and its situation within the domestic sphere,
television has played a primary role (as radio did before it) in fostering a sense of
national identity and a collective public sphere. For instance, as Arvind Rajagopal
has written, Hindu nationalism in India was fostered by the enormously popular
television series Ramayan, a Hindu epic, shown on state-run television from 1987
to 1990. The Hindu epic, a nostalgic view of a Hindu past, was effectively deployed
via television to mobilize religious nationalism.28
In many postwar cultures, television was viewed in public places before it had
fully saturated the home television markets. In Japan most television viewing took
place in large outdoor plazas before the late 1950s, when more Japanese house-
holds acquired television sets. Shunya Yoshimi writes that professional wrestling
was a popular genre of these outdoor broadcasts, which sometimes drew thou-
sands of viewers.29 Later, restaurants began to capitalize on the popularity of public
viewing by installing television sets. In Great Britain, prior to the television era
national sentiment was rallied through mobile movie trailers that brought news-
reels out of the theaters and into the public square, where citizens could bond in
a more public and interactive manner than the darkened private theater allowed.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, when massive crowds gathered in Tahrir Square in
Cairo to protest the Egyptian government, large screens showed films outdoors to
the crowds. Organized by local artists and media activists, this became known as
Cinema Tahrir. Collective public viewing can thus interpellate viewers as part of a
national audience or a political movement. When Anderson wrote of the imagined
national community, he stressed the importance of simultaneity, of the sense of
experiencing events together at the same time. The fact that television can be trans-
mitted instantaneously across great distances helps to create this sense of national
or global community connectedness, and the screening of films outdoors in public
creates shared experiences of public space. The public space created by these media
is virtual as well as physical.
Thus, contemporary media forms are a primary means through which concepts
are created not only of a nation but also a public. The media contributes to several
interconnected publics: national publics, global publics, and networked publics.
The concept of a public and the differences between public and private have been
subject to debate since the early twentieth century. Michael Warner has written
that a “public” can be defined as a space of discourse, which involves a relation
among strangers, in which public speech is both personal and impersonal. A public
is a social space constituted through the “reflexive circulation of discourse,” that is,
the circulation and exchange of ideas.30 Warner notes that the Internet has sped up
this circulation of ideas. That is, the circulation of ideas in more traditional media
such as newspapers and television took place at daily and weekly intervals, whereas
now it takes place within the instant temporality of the web.31
The notion of a public has been deeply allied with the concept of a public
sphere, which is defined ideally as a space—a physical place, social setting, or
media arena—in which citizens come together to debate and discuss the pressing
issues of their society. In the 1920s, social commentator Walter Lippmann postu-
lated that the public sphere was nothing more than a “phantom”—that it was not
possible for average citizens to keep abreast of political issues and events and give
them due consideration given the chaotic pace of industrial society. Definitions of
the public sphere have been enormously influenced by the ideas of German theorist
Jürgen Habermas, who postulates that modern bourgeois society has within it the
potential for an ideal public sphere. Habermas sees the public sphere as a group
of “private” persons who can assemble to discuss matters of common “public”
interest in ways that mediate state power. With the rise of newspapers, salons,
coffeehouses, book clubs, and private social contexts in which public debate could
take place, the liberal European and American middle class of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries gained the potential for a public sphere. Habermas surmises
that this public sphere has always been compromised by other forces, including
the rise of consumer culture, the rise of the mass media, and the intervention
of the state in the private sphere of the family and home.32 In ideal terms, the public
sphere is emblematic of participatory democracy, a space in which citizens can
debate public issues regardless of their social status and in which rational discus-
sion can spur positive social change. In addition, Habermas believes that the public
sphere is a public space in which private interests (such as business interests) are
inadmissible, hence a place in which true public opinion can be formulated.
Habermas’s theory of the public sphere has been repeatedly challenged. The
nineteenth-century public sphere he described was only available to white bour-
geois men, and scholars have pointed out that the exclusion of women, people
of color, noncitizens, and working-class people is what makes possible this way
of conceiving the public. In other words, these scholars show how the idea of a
I 241
unified public sphere is not only a fallacy but is also based on exclusion (hence,
not truly public). Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argue that the public sphere
imagined by Habermas needs to be reconceived as a working-class (“proletarian”)
public sphere and that the model of the nineteenth-century European bour-
geois public sphere had been too easily transformed into fascism, as it was in
Germany in the 1930s. Negt and Kluge also update the public sphere to include
media, both media industries and alternative media, as a counterpublic.33
The public sphere model is based on the idea that there are distinctly separate
public and private spheres and that the state is separate from private market inter-
ests. This distinction between public and private has long been challenged, since
the political terrain of all modern societies involves, to varying degrees, elements
of private interest. Furthermore, the notion of a separation of public and private
spheres is based on gender, race, and class ideologies that must be rethought. The
traditional division between public and private depends on the belief that women
should be relegated to the domestic sphere of the home and men to the public
arenas of business, commerce, and politics.
Many scholars have proposed that we think in terms of multiple public spheres
and counterspheres, rather than one. Political theorist Nancy Fraser has pointed out
that historically women were relegated to the private domestic sphere of the home
and elided from the public spaces and discourses of middle- and upper-class Euro-
pean and white men. She defines a women’s or a feminist countersphere, among
other counterspheres of public discourse and agency.34 A counterpublic under-
stands itself to be subordinate in some way to the dominant public sphere but is
still a site from which people can speak up in society. Theorists such as Fraser sug-
gest that we can envision many publics that overlap and work in tension with each
other: working-class publics, religious publics, feminist publics, and so forth. Along
these lines, feminist media critics such as Lynn Spigel have critiqued the distinction
of public and private as it negates women’s labor in the domestic sphere as well
as the integration of media and domestic space.35 Michael Warner notes that the
sexual cultures of gay men and lesbians can be seen as a counterpublic in that they
are spaces of discussion, debate, and the circulation of ideas that are structured by
alternative dispositions and protocols, “making different assumptions about what
can be said or what goes without saying.”36
The idea of the counterpublic, or of various publics, has moved beyond the
model of a physical site like a café or meeting hall to online contexts. Even when
their interactions involve face-to-face interaction, most publics communicate in
mediated ways, and these remote forms of contact are as intensely personal and
emotional as in-person exchanges. Online communities like Reddit operate as dis-
cussion forums, and even though they may have millions of members, they are sites
that construct publics and counterpublics. Contemporary technology research-
ers such as Yochai Benkler call these networked publics and use contemporary
visualization techniques to chart the trajectory of public debate.37 Do social media
interactions constitute kinds of public spheres and counterpublics? The corporate
ownership of such forums, and their integration of advertising, demonstrates a rad-
ically different world of civic discourse.
Democracy and Citizen Journalism

Can the media serve social justice political movements? While many have raised
concerns about media ownership consolidation and the homogeneity of media cov-
erage, we may also consider whether the media may be a venue for democratic
ideals. Communications technologies may be used as empowering tools that pro-
mote an open flow of information and exchange of ideas. This view affirms the
potential for media forms to be used by individuals and groups to resist dominant
structures or offer countercultural perspectives. Marshall McLuhan, who wrote
most influentially in the 1950s through the 1970s, was a proponent of this view.
McLuhan argued that television and radio were like natural resources, waiting to be
used to increase humanity’s collective and individual experiences of the world. He
argued that the media are simply extensions of our natural senses, helping us better
to hear, see, and know the world and, moreover, helping us to connect ourselves
to geographically distant communities and bodies. His analysis in the 1960s and
1970s of how the speed of information’s flow through the media has affected local,
national, and global cultures was tremendously influential and is affirmed by the
mediascape today.
Many of McLuhan’s ideas are now being recycled in the digital media age. In
fact, he is the “patron saint” of Wired Magazine, which was established in 1993 to
cover computer technologies and web culture. Wired embodies techno-utopianism,
and McLuhan’s catchy aphorisms, such as his concept of the media creating a
“global village,” have resonated powerfully with the idea that digital technologies
and the Internet have created new forms of community. In 1965 McLuhan stated,
“there are no remote places. Under instant circuitry, nothing is remote in time or
in space. It’s now.”38 His words now seem prescient of the most optimistic views
about media globalization. Yet, although McLuhan’s notion of the global village
resonates in profound ways with contemporary digital media culture, it cannot help
us to understand the ways in which globalization has created new kinds of inequal-
ities between those who are plugged in and those who are not.
In the contemporary media environment, with the rise of social media, defini-
tions of media and audiences have dramatically changed. We can see elements of
both the liberatory and damaging qualities of media globalization. On the positive
side, the dominance of mainstream media has been challenged by the rise of citizen
journalism and web-based media produced by citizen-users. As we discussed in
Chapter 1, citizen journalism can be defined as the process by which ordinary cit-
izens participate in the dissemination and production of news. Journalism scholar
Jay Rosen writes that citizen journalism is “when the people formerly known as
I 243
the audience deploy the press tools they have in their possession to inform one
another.”39 The challenge of citizen journalism to the traditional journalistic con-
struct of experts is significant. This phenomenon is emerging in a context in which
the journalism profession, along with its ability to maintain ethical standards, has
been gutted through the media industry’s turn to freelance and free labor. This
trend has crushed many publications and shrunk criticism and genres of practice
such as careful, intensive investigative story research, which requires paid work
time without the pressure of fast turnaround placed on freelance workers, who
are paid by the story. Readers/consumers increasingly turn to the web for news
but find fewer resources for vetting the accuracy and reliability of news stories
churned out by freelance contributors and “fake news” outlets, and supplemented
by crowdsourced commentary. At the same time, in the contemporary context
of volatile global politics, journalism poses the risk of political retribution, as in
the many cases of journalists assassinated for their political views. Consider the
case of Naji Jerf, the Syrian editor-in-chief of the monthly Hentah. Jerf was well-
known for making documentaries describing violence and abuses in Islamic State–
controlled territories. He was gunned down in broad daylight in Turkey in late 2015
while walking near a building housing Syrian media outlets. Citizen journalists
reported his death, which was one of three journalist assassinations in Turkey in
three months.40
As print newspapers and television news lose readers and viewers, the web pres-
ence of news organizations has grown. The British news outlet the Guardian has
created a global online presence on a scale that it could never have achieved when
it was published in paper form only. In 2012, the Guardian ran an ad (which sub-
sequently won many awards) that depicts the complex world of web media. The
ad, which was created by the British agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), plays with
viewer-reader expectations by adapting a well-known fable, the Three Little Pigs. The
ad asks viewers: Were the three little pigs so good, and was the wolf really so bad?
In the ad, a SWAT team arrests the pigs for having boiled the wolf. Then,
via social media comments (which scroll across the screen), the story unfolds in
surprising ways, with an amateur video that shows the wolf had asthma (which
challenges the story that he blew the pigs’ houses down) and confessions that the
pigs had committed insurance fraud to keep their houses that they were losing in
the mortgage crisis. The story ends with protesters taking to the streets, proclaim-
ing “the banks made the pigs do it.” The ad portrays the “whole picture” as one
that includes not just journalistic investigation but also reader commentary, social
media discussion and debate, citizen journalism, viewer engagement and analysis,
and surprising conclusions.
Citizen journalism is one of the primary ways that the media’s democratic
potential can be seen today around global media events in which people participate
together in person and in real time and space even as they use social media. In the
early 2010s, the Occupy Wall Street movement used the web, social media, and
FIG. 6.15a–c
mobile phones strategically to organize and to anticipate police Screen shots from video ad for the
action between sites, utilizing the skill of tech-savvy members Guardian, by Bartle Bogle Hegarty
such as media sociologist and activist Boston Joan (Joan Dono- (BBH), 2012
van). The capacity of media to enable political activism is par-

ticularly evident in user-produced images and videos of police violence, shootings,
and street protests, which have dramatically changed journalism and raised public
awareness of police brutality. The vast evidence of U.S. police violence against
black subjects shared through Facebook, blogs, and news outlets throughout 2015
and 2016 demonstrates the power of the image to incite deep emotional responses,
social movements, and public engagement.
I 245
The Black Lives Matter movement is
a key example of this harnessing of social
media’s potential to protest and to engen-
der change by deciding not only what to
show but also what not to show. Black
Lives Matter began as a movement in the
context of protests against police vio-
lence and took on a social media life in
2013 as a Twitter hashtag (#BlackLives-
Matter) when George Zimmerman was
acquitted of murder in the shooting death
of Trayvon Martin, a high school student
FIG. 6.16 who was unarmed and had gone out to get snacks at a local
Screen shot of bystander video
convenience store in Sanford, Florida. The Black Lives Matter
taken by Feidin Santana show-
ing police officer Michael Slager movement expanded online as people began to use social media
fatally shooting Walter Scott in to share information and phone camera footage documenting
North Charleston, South Carolina,
on April 4, 2015, following a traffic
police violence and killings of other young black men around
stop for a broken brake light the United States. There are parallels to be noted between the
Emmett Till case discussed in Chapter 1 and the Martin case.
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered because he
was accused of whistling at a white woman. Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin
was killed simply because he was walking down the street of a predominantly white
neighborhood. Black Lives Matter as a movement is propelled in part by social media
and the choices made by people in the circulation of images not only as evidence
but, more important, as icons of injustice and expressions of the demand for rights
and for justice. In many cases, decisions have been made not to show images of vic-
tims but to emphasize instead images expressing empowerment and rights. Protest
entails taking control through the curation of images that circulate on social media
beyond those provided by the press and the police. Movement participants thus
define the discourse within a broad field of networks and in an expanded field of time
and space as activists in different cities connect and report through image and text.
Picked up by the press as an instance of citizen journalism, a bystander video
shot by Feidin Santana documents officer Michael Slager killing Walter Scott, an
unarmed motorist, on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina. What it
shows contradicts Thomas’s police report. It was among the images that launched
a public discussion about documentation and the credibility of police reporting of
violent incidents. The production of images, which extends to the use of police
dashcams and bodycams, has raised public awareness about violence that has long
been practiced and hidden—in this case, the long history of U.S. police violence
against black people. Nicholas Mirzoeff refers to these new visual productions and
circulations as a form of visual activism. In Mirzoeff’s terms, social movements
such as Black Lives Matter are explicitly about the right to look, the right to defy
visuality in which looking is deployed
by those with power as a means of
repression. He notes that in U.S.
prisons, inmates can be punished for
looking at guards in a manner codified
as “reckless eyeballing.”41
After police in Ferguson, Missouri,
killed Michael Brown in August 2014,
protests rolled out for weeks, with
participants in each new event gen-
erating and posting more images on
social media. Protestors began to hold FIG. 6.17
signs stating “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and generating images Students gather at American Uni-
versity in solidary with Ferguson,
of people protesting with their hands up, referencing the fact
December 3, 2014
that Brown had had his hands up in the air at the moment he
was shot. Images of protest circulated on Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook, Snapchat, and other forums, ending up in mainstream media coverage
as well. The phrase and pose became iconic of the movement as vast numbers
of images from protests were uploaded to the web every minute. Mirzoeff states,
“These new conditions are producing a new politics. Eighty-five percent of African
Americans aged 18–29 have smartphones, several points higher than their white
counterparts. The young, often queer, often female, black activist generation that
has come into being since Ferguson relies on social media to make these protests,
and the actions that cause them, visible in new ways.”42
Visual culture practices, in tandem with social media and digital technologies,
are thus transforming politics and public culture through decisions made by citi-
zens every day about how to have image agency in a global media event. Citizens
determine what to photograph and post and how best to express political agency
through image and text without the direct filter of the media industry.
Global Media Events

The idea of a “global media event” emerged in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. It was largely based on a concept of television as a unify-
ing force. Interestingly, one of the most iconic global moments in television was
the turn of the millennium on New Year’s Eve of 1999 into the year 2000, when
television coverage began with the dawn of the new millennium in the Pacific (at
the International Date Line) and followed the beginning of the millennium through
Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America. This was a reminder that the
day of the world begins in the Pacific, which has enormous implications for finan-
cial markets that were certainly not envisioned by the nineteenth-century govern-
ments which thought that putting the international date line in the Pacific would
I 247
affirm the centrality of Greenwich, England, as the center of time. Sports events
such as the World Cup and the Olympics are constructed as global media events,
as are some royal weddings (British in particular) and funerals of important heads
of state. Yet moments of crisis have constituted the most global news events. As
Anderson notes in his book Imagined Communities, simultaneity is a key factor in
the sense of participating in a nation and the media play a key role in this simulta-
neity and connectivity. Comparing two moments of crisis—the terrorist attacks on
September 11, 2001, in which television coverage was a key factor, and the Parisian
terrorist attacks in November 2015, in which social media was a key factor—reveals
changing media forms, audiences, and messages in the global mediascape.
In the global media event of 9/11, four planes were simultaneously hijacked, one
crashing into rural Pennsylvania, one crashing into the Pentagon in Virginia, and two
crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, which
collapsed within two hours of the crash. Although little is publicly known about
what the hijackers anticipated about news coverage, it is commonly speculated that
they strategized the timing of the hijackings to produce the largest potential global
audience for their acts. When the first plane hit the North Tower, only a few cameras
caught an image of the crash, and these images were taken purely by chance. Jules
Naudet, a French filmmaker shooting a documentary about New York City firefight-
ers, happened to glance up with his camera as the plane flew over him and struck the
tower.43 When the South Tower was hit by a second plane more than fifteen minutes
FIG. 6.18 later, there was an extraordinary number of people watching, not
Iconic image of World Trade only from the street and rooftops of Lower Manhattan but also
Center towers being hit by second on screens and monitors receiving broadcasts of the live footage
airplane, September 11, 2001
being recorded by the numerous television cameras that had been
brought in to cover the scene of the first crash.
Film and television documentaries that incor-
porate street-level footage of the second plane
approaching the tower typically include both
the image and sound recorded at the scene.
Accompanying the footage of the plane striking
the second tower, we hear the horrified excla-
mations of the hundreds of people watching,
along with the cameras, from below. Though
the camera lenses were trained on the plane
heading into the tower, the live sound allows us
to picture the hundreds of spectators watching
from the ground below, staring up in shock and
disbelief. Television viewers watching the live
broadcasts at a safe distance could watch with
these witnesses, feeling their shock and fear
through the medium of voice.
The attacks of 9/11 were a global media event of unprecedented proportions in
which millions of viewers throughout the world saw images of the twin towers hit
and falling, if not live, then within a very short period of time. It was also an event of
immense spectacle—the image of the second tower exploding has been commonly
referred to as the equivalent of a “movie,” due to the unreality of the spectacle. It is
important to note that one of the primary aspects of spectacle is that it overshadows
and erases the actual violence behind it—in this case, the spectacle of the explosion
erases the people who were incinerated within it. The images of the twin towers
exploding and falling were recorded by photographic, digital, and video cameras
and disseminated via television, websites, newspapers, magazines, and email prior
to the cell-phone camera era. Although the meaning of 9/11 has since been effec-
tively nationalized, in the political rhetoric that followed, it was a media event that
made clear the global reach of the media, with a primary role played by television.
In an event such as this, we can see an array of intersecting media vectors through
which information and images are simultaneously transmitted. The passengers on
the hijacked planes and the people trapped in the World Trade Center used mobile
phones and email to contact the police, family, and friends. Those connections cre-
ated other connections via additional phone calls, emails, and text messages among
relatives, friends, rescue workers, and the press. In the case of United Flight 93, it
was through these communication vectors—specifically mobile phones—that pas-
sengers learned that several other planes had been hijacked and had crashed. This
news apparently motivated passengers to attempt to take over the plane, leading it
to crash in a field in rural Pennsylvania rather than its possible intended target in
Washington, D.C. Over the hours that followed the hijackings, radio call-in shows
were a forum for other vectors of exchange, and air travelers emailed loved ones that
they were safe. The television images transmitted instantly around the world, with
all the major networks live with footage by 8:52 a.m., minutes after the first plane
struck, were rapidly disseminated into many different formats and viewing contexts.
Ironically, as the towers fell, they took with them an enormous television antenna
and various mobile phone transmitters, temporarily blocking television reception
and cell phone connection to many New Yorkers. In the week that followed, U.S.
television remained focused on the crisis, with regular programming and advertising
suspended. Such a dramatic change in the media activity of everyday life signaled
not only the depth of the national crisis but also the shock it had produced.44
Thus, while 9/11 was a global media event in which many media forms were
important vectors of information dissemination and exchange, it was primarily
shaped by television. Viewers around the world were interpellated as a global
audience, with the sense of watching together with the rest of the world. Here,
we can see how Anderson’s concept of imagined communities can be applied to
the experience of television in not only a national sense but also a global one.
This global reach did not translate into a sense of cosmopolitanism and global
comradeship, however, as the subsequent aftermath has seen increased global
I 249
FIG. 6.19
Twitter post about terrorist attacks
in Paris, November 13, 2015
conflict, war, surveillance, and repres-

sion and the increasingly volatile dis-
solution of international alliances. The
meaning of a highly mediated event
such as 9/11 is inextricably tied to the
images that were produced and that
continue to circulate about it.
We can compare the media aspects
of 9/11 to the those of the November 2015 terrorist attacks in France, in which 130
people were killed in a series of coordinated suicide bombings and mass shootings
in Paris and the nearby suburb of Saint-Denis. The Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant (ISIS, also known as ISIL and Daesh) claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Comparing this event to 9/11, we can identify shifts in information flow and audi-
ence creation. Social media played a much greater role in the 2015 Paris attacks,
which included shootings at several restaurants, a football stadium, and a concert
hall (the latter being a site where the largest number of killings occurred).
As the attacks unfolded, information circulated quickly on Twitter, Insta-
gram, and Facebook. These messages were almost immediately translated into
mainstream news coverage, with news websites and television coverage quoting
directly from Twitter and other social media posts in a manner that was tantamount
to crowdsourced news reporting. Citizen journalism garnered considerable social
authority as reporting came in from the sites of the attacks. Facebook inaugurated
its disaster feature, Marked Safe, so that users who were near the attacks could post
“safe” on their Facebook feeds, assuring relatives and friends that they were not in
direct danger. Others in Paris used social media to offer refuge to those who were
unable to reach their homes without risk.45 The Twitter hashtag #PorteOuverte
(open door) was, for instance, used to help people find shelter during the confusing
hours when the attacks were still underway. People both in Paris and throughout
the world heard about the terror attacks from social media, and many turned there
first for their information and networking. This contrasts with 9/11, when people
turned immediately to their televisions—in 2001, Facebook was still three years off,
email was not nearly the pervasive medium it is today, and there were no mobile
camera-phones. In the Paris event, social media posting was not only constant and
pervasive throughout the unfolding of the attacks, it also dominated the news as
messages, photographs, and videos were folded into television news stories and
news sites. As happens increasingly with these events, images of solidarity began
to circulate, with people spontaneously generating iconicity by posting and repost-
ing images such as this composite of the Eiffel Tower inserted within a peace sign.
In January 2016, ISIS released a
video that included footage of the
attacks and images of some of the
attackers carrying out beheadings in
Syria prior to the attacks. The video
was represented by news organizations
as an explicit form of propaganda and
recruitment aimed at young Muslims
living in Europe. It is a complex mon-
tage of news coverage, images of targets
and officials, and images of the attacks
overlaid with techno-graphics (reminis-
cent of the Terminator’s point of view
from the films of the same name). ISIS
has posted similar videos online to
FIG. 6.20
speak to and potentially recruit new
Eiffel Tower peace sign on social
members, in particular from the West. ISIS’s media, November 2015
deployment of visual and social media cultures
distinguishes it from the tactics of previous insurgent and terrorist groups.
Such images raise crucial questions about what constitutes propaganda and
whether images of violence, propaganda, and hate crimes should be censored.
When in 2006 the French satirical periodical Charlie Hedbo published twelve car-
icatures of Muhammad, including one in which the prophet carries a bomb in his
turban, the Grand Mosque of Paris brought criminal charges against the publica-
tion. The French Civil Court ruled that in fact the cartoon mocked fundamentalists
generally and not the religious group Muslims specifically and was therefore not
objectionable in legal terms. The cartoons, drawn by satirist Kurt Westergaard, had
originally been published in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten, spurring
protests in Denmark against the media representation of Muslims. As news of the
Danish media satire spread, protests against the cartoons and the Danish paper
were held elsewhere in the world. But the publishers defended their choices by
claiming the cartoons were expressions of journalistic free speech. The cartoons’
republication in Charlie Hebdo and other presses around the world was in fact orga-
nized to show public global journalistic solidarity with the Danish paper, in defense
of the global principles of journalistic free speech.
There were many actors in the global debate over the cartoons’ publication,
which can be seen within the author-as-producer framework that we discussed
in Chapter 2. Following the original publication, the Danish prime minister
described the controversy as the worst public relations incident Denmark had
experienced since World War II, thus equating the publication with the nation
itself. Those who defended the subsequent republication of the cartoons in
the French periodical Charlie Hebdo point out that the magazine, which can
I 251
FIG. 6.21
People gather in Philadelphia to
pay tribute to victims of the ter-
rorist attack against the French
satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo,
January 9, 2015
be understood as the “author as pro-

ducer,” regularly engages in “equal
opportunity” hate speech, offending
many religious groups—the publi-
cation’s stated aim is to use satire
to take the power out of things deemed sacred (rendering, for instance, in the
words of the editor, Islam as banal as Catholicism46). Many stated that Charlie
Hebdo should be allowed to publish these images as protected free speech. Crit-
ics of the Charlie Hebdo editors’ decision hold that the images should be inter-
preted as hate speech. It is not only Kurt Westergard and his expression of an
idea that is at stake in this discussion, but the author-as-producer function of the
Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo editors. The editors, in relationship with the
artist and with state laws, were identified as culpable agents in both the national
and the global debates about meaning and intention. Not only national poli-
tics and law matter in this debate—so too do religion, race, and the linking of
appearances and images to behavior and morality: at stake are cartoon pictures
drawn to demean a social group identified negatively based on looks.
When on January 7, 2015, gunmen entered the Charlie Hebdo offices and
killed eleven staff members, mass protests broke out in France and internationally
in support of the periodical—and yet many of those who protested the killings
also critiqued the images because they are offensive to Muslims. These images
clearly held dramatically different meanings powerful enough to incite protests.
In the aftermath, many publications and protestors declared “Je Suis Charlie”
(I am Charlie) as a form of solidarity on social media and on protest posters,
which then generated a global debate
about what such a phrase might mean.
The surviving Charlie Hebdo staff
published a cover the following week
with a cartoon image of Muhammad
holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign and
the words “Tout est Pardonné (All is
Forgiven).”
FIG. 6.22
Anti–Charlie Hebdo protesters in
Istanbul on January 25, 2015
As we see in the Charlie Hebdo case, public culture engagement with media is
not always in the service of political unity or solidarity around a cause. We began
this chapter with de Certeau’s discussion of walking in the city, in which he empha-
sized the agency of people’s everyday, quotidian experiences with social mediation
from the standpoint of having their feet solidly on the ground, and we later intro-
duced the psychogeographical interventions of the Situationists, who disrupted the
normative flows and spatial logics of urban life by suggesting we may take different
paths. In the examples of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, we see the potential of
social media to facilitate and support agency and control of visual dynamics by
resistance movements. In the new terrain of media coverage of global events, we
have a complex interaction of individual agency and social media networking with
broadcast and mass media venues.
Notes
1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964).
2. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York Univer-
sity Press, 2008).
3. John Caughey, “The Ethnography of Everyday Life Theories and Methods for American Cultural
Studies,” American Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1982): 222–243, citation from 222.
4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984).
5. Angharad N. Valdivia, “Teaching Mentorship and Research for a Progressive Era: The Legacy of
Herb Schiller,” Television and New Media 2, no. 1 (2001): 65.
6. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (London: Penguin Modern Clas-
sics, [1957] 2009); see also Richard Hoggart, “Culture: Dead or Alive,” Observer, May 14, 1961,
reprinted in Hoggart, Speaking to Each Other: About Society (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970),
131–34.
7. Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts: A Critical Guide to the Mass Media (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1965), emphasis in original.
8. Jim McGuigan, “Trajectories of Cultural Populism,” Cultural Populism (New York: Routledge,
1992), 52.
9. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989); and John Fiske, Reading the
Popular (New York: Routledge, 1989).
10. In her 1980 article “Settling Accounts with Subculture: A Feminist Critique” (republished in
Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just 17, London: Macmillan, 1991,
16–34), McRobbie took on Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge,
1979). McRobbie insisted that we see the ways that the street was not available to women in the
same way in the 1970s public scene of punk, fashion, and music subcultures.
11. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.
12. David L. Ulin, “Just Say ‘Nein’: Talking with Eric Jarosinski About NeinQuarterly,” Los Angeles
Times, November 20, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/nov/20/entertainment/la-et-jc-eric-
jarosinski-neinquarterly-20131120.
13. Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Lèvres Nues 6, 1955, http://
library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2.
14. Kenny Cupers, “The Social Project: The Complex Legacy of Public Housing in Postwar France,” in
Places: Public Scholarship on Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism, April 2014, https://placesjournal.
org/article/the-social-project/; see also Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
15. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red Books, [1967] 1970), passages 3–5 in
section 1, “Separation Perfected.”
16. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 7; and Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Fact: Essays on
the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013).
I 253
17. Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Leaving and Entering Modernity, trans. Chris-
topher L. Chiappari and Sylvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); see
also Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans.
George Yudice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
18. John McMurria, “Á la carte Culture,” in Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture, 2006,
http://www.flowjournal.org/2006/04/a-la-carte-cable-si-tv-cincerned-women-for-america-and-par-
ent-television-council-consumers-unon/.
19. Nicole Starosielski, “Fixed Flow: Undersea Cables as Media Infrastructure,” in Signal Traffic: Critical
Studies of Media Infrastructure, edited by Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2015), 53–54; see also Nicole Starosielski , The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015).
20. Lisa Parks and James Schwoch, “Introduction,” in Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries,
and Cultures, ed. Lisa Parks and James Schwoch (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2012), 3.
21. Lisa Parks, “Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Invisibility,” Flow, March 6, 2009,
http://www.flowjournal.org/2009/03/around-the-antenna-tree-the-politics-of-infrastructural-
visibilitylisa-parks-uc-santa-barbara/.
22. James Glanz, “Power, Pollution, and the Internet,” New York Times, September 22, 2012, http://
www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-
industry-image.html?_r=0.
23. Tung-Hui Hu, A Prehistory of the Cloud (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), XIII.
24. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture,
Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).
25. Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New
York: New Press, 2000).
26. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15 (London: Verso, 1983), emphasis in original.
27. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24.
28. Rajagopal, Politics After Television, 25.
29. Shunya Yoshimi, “Television and Nationalism: Historical Change in the National Domestic TV For-
mation of Postwar Japan,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 4 (2003): 459–87.
30. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002), 90
31. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 97–98.
32. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
33. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois
and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, [1972] 1993).
34. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 1993), 1–32.
35. Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001).
36. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 56.
37. Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, Rob Faris, Alicia Solow-Niederman, and Bruce Etling, “Social Mobi-
lization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA/PIPA Debate,” Berkman Center
for Internet and Society Research Publication, 2013–16, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=2295953; see also Yochair Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Trans-
forms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
38. Paul Benedict and Nancy DeHart, eds., On McLuhan: Forward Through the Rearview Mirror (Toronto:
Prentice Hall Canada, 1996), 39.
39. http://archive.pressthink.org/2008/07/14/a_most_useful_d.html.
40. “Syrian Journalist & Filmmaker Who Exposed ISIS Aleppo Atrocities Assassinated in Turkey,” RT,
a publication of the autonomous non-profit organization TV-Novosti, December 18, 2015, https://
www.rt.com/news/327226-syrian-journalist-assassination-turkey/.
41. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “How Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter Taught Us Not to Look Away,” The Con-
versation.com, August 10, 2015, https://theconversation.com/how-ferguson-and-blacklivesmatter-
taught-us-not-to-look-away-45815; and Mirzoeff, How to See the World, Chapter 7 and Afterword,
New YorK Basic Books, 2016.
42. Mirzoeff, “How Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter Taught Us Not to Look Away.”
43. That image would be central to 9/11, the documentary that he and his brother would then produce
about their experiences that day, directed by Jules Naudet, Gédéon Naudet, and James Hanlon
(2002, Paramount Pictures).
44. See Lynn Spigel, “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11,” American Quarterly 56, no. 2
(June 2004): 235–70.
45. Vindu Goel and Sydney Ember, “As Paris Terror Attacks Unfolded, Social Media Tools Offered Help
in Crisis,” New York Times, November 14, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/technology/
as-paris-terror-attacks-unfolded-social-media-tools-offered-help-in-crisis.html.
46. Emily Greenhouse, “The Charlie Hebdo Affair: Laughing at Blasphemy,” The New Yorker, September
28, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-charlie-hebdo-affair-laughing-at-
blasphemy.
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Christopher L. Chiappari and Sylvia L. Lopez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
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I 255
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chapter six

Media in Everyday Life

The Media, Singular and Plural

Mass Culture and Mass Media

Critiques of Mass Culture

in new popular magazines. For instance, in the late

ings around the world to make “culture jam-

The world of satellites is, not sur-

Democracy and Citizen Journalism

van). The capacity of media to enable political activism is par-

Global Media Events

conflict, war, surveillance, and repres-

be understood as the “author as pro-

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