Marxism & Pluralism - homework essay

The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. Discuss the arguments for and against this view. 

This essay will explore the ways of how new and digital media empowers an audience in terms of what they consume and how they now create media products. More recently then ever has the media ever seen changes quite so dramatic. The Internet has now caught on and as a result pushed out older traditional media platforms like the print platform into decline. This 'new' platform has given audiences more power in terms of what they choose to consume and produce.

A Pluralist perspective may argue that; in terms of News consumption the E-media platform has been a significant help in giving a chance to all of the start-up and 'cottage Industries' who want to produce news content. The internet and more specifically social media (Facebook, Instagram) can be described as the "Technological blossoming of the culture of freedom, individual innovation and entrepreneurialism" (Castells, 1996) because for an audience it not only gives them far more sources of news to choose from, which is in favour of pluralism as  Pluralist's see society as consisting of competing groups and interests, none of them predominant all of the time; but it also gives them a platform which is largely out of state control so they can report and talk about news stories uninterrupted. However this may be an issue in some states where the Government in control has more of a Marxist view and restricts access to views which go against their own ideologies, for example Russia and China have now both gone into agreements about cohesively expanding there firewalls to restrict and monitor content over the Internet. This of course is a Marxist view and clearly shows the view of a capitalist society as being one of class domination. Going back to look at how audiences consume media, in particular; where they view there News on the Internet as looking at the OFCOM report of national viewing statistics it stated that around 43% of people who use the Internet for their News use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter are both sites which many established news organisations use to present their news but it is also a platform for citizen journalists who write what they see and this is why social media has such high user traffic because audiences can trust this and not accept the norms of a dominant culture which is what they might get when following larger news organisations.

A Marxist perspective would argue that the so-called “information revolution” has done little to benefit audiences or to subvert the established power structures in society. Far from being a “great leveller” (Krotoski, 2012) as many have claimed, it has merely helped to reinforce the status quo by promoting dominant ideologies. The most popular news website in the UK by a considerable margin is the ‘Mail Online’, which receives more than 8 million hits every month and is continuing to expand rapidly – with forecasts that it will make £100 million or more in digital revenues in the next three years. Similar to its tabloid print edition, the website takes a Conservative, right-wing perspective on key issues around gender, sexuality and race and audiences appear to passively accept what the Marxist theorist, Gramsci, called a hegemonic view. When one of their chief columnists, Jan Moir, wrote a homophobic article about the death of Stephen Gately in 2009 there were Twitter and Facebook protests but, ultimately, they did not change the editorial direction of the gatekeepers controlling the newspaper.

On the other hand, a Pluralist’s perspective would say that no one class can be deemed better than another and that the state does not control and force it’s values on the masses. In fact, the theorist Gurevitch stated that ‘audiences are seen as capable of manipulating the media in an infinite of ways according to their prior needs and dispositions and as having access to what Halloran calls ‘the plural values of society’ enabling them to conform, accommodate, challenge or reject.” This reinforces the idea that audiences have the power to interpret and produce media content in the way in which it conforms to their own values and ideologies and they don’t just accept news as common sense; which is what Antonio Gramsci proposed with his theory of hegemony. Audiences can choose to view news in terms of what they feel they believe in, for example the uses and gratifications theory suggests that Audiences actively seek out different things from media content, for example ‘surveillance’ where people choose to view the media to reassure there security. Developments in New and digital media has given audiences the means to create media content, for example apps that are owned by mass media conglomerates and start-up companies give people to ability to upload and share content to news sites around the world. This leads on to the argument about the great citizen journalist. You cannot be more empowered as an audience member if you have the opportunity to have your own content put across world or national news. The first major example of citizen journalism was the Rodney King case in America where an unarmed Black man was beaten by Police. The thing that made this case really stand out was that it was captured on tape and given to a news organisation. This led to outrage and the start of the LA riots. This empowered audiences so much more because of the impact it had on society, it also acted as a gateway to other people, who sometimes risked their safety to record footage which usually governments didn’t want people to see.

However, a Marxist perspective would argue that even though Audiences are now to an extent ‘empowered’ by developments in new and digital media that the control still lies with in the top organisations. This can be backed up with Pareto’s law and it states “A minority of (media) producers always serve a majority of consumers”. This means that although it may seem as though the audience can be selective over where they choose to view their news , ultimately they are being shown a piece that has been passed down from one organisation. Lin and Webster once stated “Top 5% of all websites accounted for almost 75% of user volume”, this is evident in the fact that companies like Facebook are buying up other news sharing and producing sites like Instagram (a social media app) which could be said ‘gives them an advantage’ and some pluralists may see this them removing the competition at the risk of exceeding the concentration of power. Another example of this is the two largest News organisations in New Zealand (NZME and Fairfax Media) are deciding to merge together to rise up against lower advertising revenues and falling newspaper sales. This would indefinitely give them much more control which isn’t necessarily a bad thing because in a time where the internet is rife with click bait stories and hoaxes it may be beneficial for an audience to start consuming acceptable news. This can be linked to Gramsci’s theory on hegemony as in this case a large media organisation is in control and therefore can influence other classes and groups and especially in the age of the digital revolution where people don’t know what news to trust they may start going back to traditional media platforms like Broadcast and when they do they may accept the values and ideologies as common sense once more.  

 In conclusion, I do believe that to a marginal extent, Institutions and governments still have more control over audiences and they are not as empowered as they are led to believe. This however, would not have been the case 20-30 years ago as the extent to which Institutions were in control was not ‘marginal’ but it was to a rather large extent. Therefore it is true to say that developments in new and digital media has definitely made audiences more powerful in terms of consuming  and producing media but ultimately the large media organisations and state controlled media still holds the majority of power.