Electronic
Journal of Sociology (2004)ISSN: 1198 3655
Through the Looking Glass: Class and
Reality in Television
Monica
Brasted, Ph.D
SUNY College
Brockport
mbrasted@brockport.edu
Abstract
Sociologists have long
recognized that our social class influences how we experience the world. Our
social position even influences our consumption of cultural products such as
television programs. It is possible that different classes watch different
programs, however, it is also possible that these classes watch the same
programs, yet interpret them differently due to their class status. A review of
a study done by Andrea Press (1991) on women of different classes watching
television is provided as an example of this theory in practice.
It has long been
recognized that our social position or social class determines how we
experience the world. The life experiences of a greeter at Wal-Mart are much
different than those of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Our social class influences
in profound ways everything from the cars we drive, the houses we live in, and
the types of food we eat. Our social class even
influence, according to some, our consumption of cultural products such as
television shows, theatre events, and music performances. That is, a person’s
position in society can determine the television shows he or she will watch and
how he or she will interpret them. In this paper I will explore the link
between social class, culture, and interpretation of cultural product in
greater detail.
First, a definition of culture. According to Fiske
(1990), our "culture" consists of the meanings we make of our social
experience and of our social relations. Culture is the meaning we ascribe to
life. Culture provides us with a sense of our selves and who we are in
relations to others around us. Culture is very important not only because of
its key role in defining our social and psychological identities (even our
human identity) but also because, according to some theorists, class experience
is deeply inscribed in our consumption of culture. That is, the experience of
culture (and thus the meanings about our world that we derive from that
culture) is dependent on our position in society.
It is often argued that different classes watch different
television programs. For example, upper class members may be more likely to
tune into a symphony on PBS, while lower class members are more likely to be
watching The Simpsons on
FOX. Bourdieu (1980) argues for social class viewing differences based on his
concept of cultural
capital. By cultural capital he means that a society’s culture is as unequally
distributed as its material wealth and that, like material wealth, it serves to
identify class interests and to promote and naturalize class differences
(Fiske, p.18). Therefore, those cultural forms that a society considers to be
“high”, such as, classical music, haute cuisine/fashion, and fine art or the
ballet, coincide with the tastes of those with social power, whereas low or
mass cultural forms appeal to those ranked low on the social structure. In
other words, those who have taste and powers of discrimination (i.e., the upper
classes and elites) go to syphonies and eat cavier. Those who do not have taste
or power (the middle and lower classes) do not.
According
to Bourdieu, culture, and the knowledge that is integral to it, is replacing
economics as a means of differentiating classes. It is, in this view, always
possible to tell someone's social class by the concerts they see and the
magazines they read.
For Bourdieu, the existence of cultural capital
reveals the efforts of the dominant classes to control culture for their own
interests as effectively as they control the circulation of wealth. Like money and our
access to it, there is an illusion of equal availability. However, cultural
capital is actually confined to those with class power and this restriction of
access contributes to the continued stratification of classes. In othe rwords,
culture becomes a mechanism of class differentiation and determines the kinds
of consumption you can engage in. For example, with the advent of cable
television, higher classes often times have more television viewing choices
than lower classes because they can afford it.
There is a problem here
though and that is with the exclusivity of cultural boundaries. Bourdieu (and
others) often assume a direct one to one relationship between class, culture,
and consumptions patterns. But is this so. That is, does the existence of a
stratified cultural universe where the upper classes are expected to go to
symphonies and the lower classes are expected to watch the Simpson's really
exist in strict form. Does this really mean that the different classes will
consume different programs?
Perhaps we can learn something about the permeability
of class boundaries and the fuzziness of cultural capital by considering
television. We live in a culture in which television is a main component. The
majority of homes in the United States contain at least one television set. The
widespread accessibility of television programs to the various social classes
makes it unique among cultural products. Therefore, the stratification that
results from the consumption of traditional cultural products such as live
symphony concerts or theatrical productions may not be found in the
case of television. The cleaning person, who may not be able to
attend a live symphony concert, can still enjoy one through the medium of
television. Mass culture, such as television, can work to undermine class
divisions at the level of culture. The result, some would argue (Horkheimer and
Adorno, 1977), is homogenization of the classes rather than stratification. In
other words, a coming together or commonality among the classes is created. The
boss and the employee are now able to share their viewing experiences of the
final episode of Friends with
one another around the water cooler.
Of course, the homogenization of classes through mass
culture has met with criticism since homogenization does not mean equality
among the classes. The Frankfurt
School (a critical school of
German sociology) was one of the first to examine the relationship between
culture and class. They were concerned with the influence that the elites had
over the working class in society.
Unlike Bourdieu, who
believed that cultural capital could be used to exert control and to
distinguish the chosen on the hierarchies of class, wealth, and power, the
Frankfurt School viewed high culture such as symphony music, great literature
and art as something that had its own integrity and inherent value and could
not be used by elites to enhance their personal power (Baran and Davis 1995).
Under the culture industry all art was affirming of the status quo. However,
the Frankfurt School wanted to regain high culture forms of art because they
believed it was the one area where there could be negation of the status quo.
Still, though high culture was extolled by the Frankfurt School, mass culture
was denigrated. Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School were openly
skeptical that high culture could or should be communicated through media. In
their critique of mass culture, the Frankfurt School feared that if bad
substitutes for high culture were made available, too many people would settle
for them and fail to support the better forms of culture. This relates to their
belief that mass culture undermined class divisions at the level of culture by
homogenizing the classes. To learn more, Horkheimer and Adorno (1977) develop
their criticisms in the article, “The
culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.”
So which one is it? Does
culture reinforce the status quo or can culture (high or no) be seen as a
location for resistance and the removal of class distinctions and hierarchical
organization. To answer this question, we need to take a closer look at what
actually goes on the the cultural industry.
Basically, cultural products, such as television
programs, can be viewed as commodities that businesses create. The rules that
govern cultural production are the same that govern other types of mass
production. That is, what sells is what will be produced, or in the case of television,
the programs that draw the largest audiences are the ones that will be aired.
In television there is an appearance of choice, however, the differentiation of
products reflects the differentiation of audiences they have created. This
differentiation is created in the minds of the audience by mass culture when in
fact there really isn’t much difference in products. The media, and the
television industry in particular, don’t produce radical products because they
must support the status quo. The
media industry is influenced by a concentration of ownership that fosters
support for the status quo and discourages challenges to the social structure.
Production is standardized to reduce risk, but minor changes occur to give the
perception that there isn’t standardization and the illusion of freedom. I
often hear people complain that they have hundreds of channels, but they can’t
find anything to watch. The multiple channels give us the illusion of choice,
but the reality is that the programming really doesn’t vary that much.
With the commodification of culture, individuals
become reduced to customers and ideological choice is removed. In the case of
television, viewers become customers on two levels. On the first level, they
are consumers of the individual programs. For example, they will shop for a
program that will fulfill their particular need for entertainment or
information. On the second
level, they are potential customers to be sold to the advertisers that buy
airtime during particular programs. The larger the ratings and the
greater the number of viewers of a program, the more an advertiser will pay to
reach potential customers. Advertisers are willing to spend millions of dollars
during the Super Bowl just to broadcast their sixty-second commercial to all of
the potential customers who are tuned in. In addition to turning individuals
into customers, another criticism is that the more culture and television are
commodified, the more they lose any critical potential. As discussed
previously, television tends to support the status quo and not challenge the
dominant ideology. Rather than be a tool of social criticism, the television
industry reinforces the dominant ideologies which are that of consumerism,
liberalism, and capitalsm. No real choice is provided.
While this may appear a
bleak situation, and while the producers of the television programs may intend
to reinforce the dominant ideology, does this mean that they actually succeed?
To answer this question we have to look at the way television programs are
received by the viewer. That is, is the meaning is encoded in the television
shows the meaning that the viewer receives? Put another way, does television
simply inject us
with ideas or can we, as consumers of television meaning, do "something
more" with the ideas presented to us?
At one time it was
thought that mass consumers were passive consumers and that they simply
absorbed in rote and mindless fashion the meanings beamed through them through
the cultural products of television. Media theorists no longer think like that
and today argue that people are not “cultural dupes” (Hall, 1981) and that the
possibility does exist for people to resist the preferred interpretation of a
text.
The critical cultural
approach to studying media has been responsible for the shift from the question
of ideology embedded in media texts to the question of how this ideology might
be read by its audience. A key contributor, Stuart Hall (1980), proposed a
model of encoding-decoding media discourse which represented the media text as
located between its producers, who framed meaning in a certain way, and its
audience, who decoded the meaning according to their rather different social
situations and frames of interpretations. Social position or social class does
influence the meaning an individual takes from a text. Therefore, although the
boss and the employee can now talk about the final episode of Friends they both watched the night
before, their
experiences and the meanings they take from the program can be very different.
By re-empowering the
audience and recognizing individual differences in life experiences and
interpretations, the idea of the homogenization of culture has been resisted.
The critical cultural studies approach has led to a wider view of the social
and cultural influences that mediate the experience of the media, especially
ethnicity, gender, and everyday life.
To
understand how audiences accept or resist media, we should look neither at the
individual nor the masses but rather at social groups. Based on their experiences
as members of social groups, audience members are able to interact with a text
decoding it as an act of resistance that is influenced by their social location
and grouping. They are able to interpret texts created by the dominant ideology
in an oppositional way. Because of the polysemy or multiple meanings in texts
and the ability of audience members to resist the dominant ideology, the
homogenization of culture can be avoided.
Television programs
contain multiple meanings not because of the way they are produced but because
of the differences located in the viewers. The potential meaning derived from a
program is influenced by the social status of the viewers. Although we know
that there is a link between social status and cultural consumption of texts,
we are not able to predict the actual reading any one viewer may make. We can,
however, identify textual characteristics that make polysemic readings
possible, and theorize (try to explain) the relation between textual structure
and social structure that make polysemic readings necessary.
Meaning is a site of
struggle and television attempts to control its meaning. It is the polysemy of
television that makes the struggle for meaning possible, and its popularity in
class structured societies that make it necessary. The dominated class does
have the power to make their own culture out of the products of the culture
industry. The preferred reading of a popular text in mass culture attempts a
hegemonic function in favor of the culturally dominant. The reader, who
statistically is almost certain to be one of the culturally subordinate, is
invited to cooperate with the text, to decode it according to codes that fit
easily with those of the dominant ideology, and if one accepts the invitation,
is rewarded with pleasure (Fiske, p.359). However, the texts can be
deconstructed to reveal their instability, their gaps, their internal
contradictions and their arbitrary textuality. This reveals their potential for
readings that are produced by the audiences, not by the culture industry. This
enables members of subordinate subcultures to generate meanings that relate to
their own cultural experience and position, meanings that serve their interests
and not those of cultural domination.
Put another way, it is
possible to say that even if most people in a class society are subordinated,
they have a degree of power to shape meanings to support their own lived
experiences of the world. There is popular cultural capital in a way that there
is no popular economic capital and thus Bourdieu’s institutionally validated
cultural capital of the bourgeoisie is constantly being opposed, interrogated,
marginalized, scandalized, and evaded, in a way that economic capital never is
(Fiske, p.314). In the best of cases, the subordinate classes are able to use
the culture provided by the mega-media monopoligies to express and promote
their own economic, social, and political interests. The alternative ideologies
of these social groups as they intersect with the cultural capital of the elites
enable them to resist the preferred readings and to produce resistive meanings
and pleasures that are ultimately a form of social power.
For example, women have
been empowered through their interpretations of texts. The potential for
oppositional reading and resistance has been invoked both to explain why women
seem attracted to media content with overtly patriarchal messages, such as
romance fiction, and to help reevaluate the surface meaning of this attraction
(Radway, 1984). Basically, differently gendered media culture, whatever the
causes and the forms taken, evokes different responses, and those differences
in gender lead to alternative modes of taking meaning from media. There are
also differences in selection and context of use, which have wider cultural and
social implications (Morley, 1986).
Andrea Press (1991)
provides a good examination of women, class and television in her study
entitled, Women Watching Television:
Gender, Class and Generation in the American Television Experience. In her
book, Press examined the relationship between the representations television
presents to women of themselves and their own self-images. She asked how
women’s self-conceptions correspond to television images, whether women
identify with the female characters they see on television, and whether women
use television images in forming their own self-images. She also framed her
research with a focus on gender and class by addressing the following
questions: Can it be said that television reinforces patriarchal values in our
culture? If so, how does television contribute to women’s oppression? Is
television in any way implicated when women act to resist their domination in
our culture? How does it function to aid this kind of cultural resistance
(p.9)?
In addressing these
questions Press focused on women’s responses to varying depiction’s of women’s
relationship to work and family, since “it was these particular qualities of
television’s women which seemed to provoke characteristic responses from each
of the two groups (middle-class and working-class women), and since the issue
of balancing work and family is central to the current shift in women’s
identities in our culture (p.11).”
Press
concluded that the answers to the questions raised in her research depended on
several factors, the most important being the social class of the women
studied. Press contended that women’s inclination to identify with
television characters varies with their assessment of the realism of these
characters and their social world. She found that working-class women were much
more likely to find television characters and situations “real” than were
middle-class women. However, she suggests that their evaluations of realism
reflect their wishes about reality, especially material reality, rather than
any objective assessment of the accuracy of television’s depiction. On the
other hand, working-class women were critical of the depictions of their class
on television and find these depictions’s to be unrealistic. Middle-class women
were found to be more critical of the reality of the depictions but still
identified more with the television characters on a personal level. Press
concluded that for middle-class women, the television is both a source of
feminist resistance to the status quo because of its images of female strength,
and at the same time a source for the reinforcement of many of the status quo’s
patriarchal values (p.96).
Her findings led her to
conclude that the hegemonic aspects of television are more gender-specific for
middle-class women and that television’s hegemonic function works in more
class-specific ways for working-class women. Press argued that how women
interact with television culturally is more a function of their social class
membership than their membership in a particular gender group. Women’s
reception of television is affected by both their position as women in our
society and their membership in social class and age groups. In comparing the
remarks of women of different social classes, Press found that television contributes
to their oppression in the family and the workplace both as women and, for
working-class women, as members of the working-class. Press criticized the
media for creating a societal ideal of women in the workplace and the
traditional nuclear family, which is not easily attainable. In their ideal
depiction of women in the workplace and family, television does not address the
real problems and issues that are faced by women. As we know, television does
create false images and distortions of reality. Press argued, “by ignoring
almost entirely the issues that are centrally important in structuring the real
lives of working women, television can only be seen to help glorify and support
a status quo that is in many ways oppressive to women. Television’s unwillingness
to confront, admit, and address so many troublesome aspects of women’s
situations in our society is unfortunately one of the strongest forces ensuring
that it is perpetuated (p.48).”
Press concluded that
while women criticize television and resist much of its impact, it is clear
that television contributes to the dimensions of women’s oppression. Television
is both a source of resistance to the status quo for different groups or women
and a reinforcer for the patriarchal and capitalist values that characterize
the status quo (Press, p.177).
Press’s study provides a
good example of how women from different classes interpret programs in
different ways. Unlike Bourdieu’s argument that the classes possess different cultural
capital and watch different programs, Press has shown that even though cultural
capital may vary, class differences don’t prevent women from consuming the same
cultural products! Women then use the information provided to
actively understand their experience in ways that both challenge the hegemony
of the ruling classes and, simultaneously, reinforce the status quo.
In conclusion, television has the power to support the
dominant classes and the status quo by reinforcing the dominant ideology
through its routinized program choices. However, because people are not
cultural dupes who blindly believe all that is presented to them, they are able
to interpret television programs in different ways. Thus, television also
provides the possibility of resistance though how effective that resistance might
be remains an open question.
References
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