OFFSPEC: Theories and Concepts in Depth
Concepts
Echo chambers:
An echochamber is an environment or ecosystem in which individual encounter beliefs that reinforce their preexisting beliefs by communication in a closed system insulated from rebuttal (countering beliefs), potentially resulting in conformational bias.
On social media, it is thought that echo chambers limit exposure to diverse perspectives, and favour and reinforce presupposed narratives and ideologies.
Social media create echo chambers with the rise of surveillance capitalism, suggested by Zuboff.
Theories
Bourdieu- Cultural Capital
Bourdieu explains Class Habitus as the shared disposition or attitude that allows audiences to belong to a particular specific social or class-based group.
Cultural capital is described as a marker that highlights and distinguishes different audiences into their class dependent on their class habitus.
Bourdieu explains that cultural capital is not quantifiable but instead shaped by a range of institutions and social forces that operates as an invisible set of rules that outlines differences between what is culturally acceptable or unacceptable for that particular class.
The rules operate as an attitudinal force in whereby we develop specific class habitus that leads us to reject or value specific cultural products
Example: The upper-class are stereotypically more likely to consume pro-monarchic products while the middle class would reject them and consider them elitist and snobby
Audiences buy or disregard media products because they do or don’t correlate with their class-based dispositions/habitus. Bourdieu labels those purchases as physical personified cultural capital that act as physical markers that signal our class status.
Bourdieu argues we also consume products ironically, selecting media that presents a vulgar perversion of what we would normally consume- engaging in a constructed world entirely different to our everyday disposition and sampling an alien habitus.
These class-based dispositions and habits are initially nurtured by family and educational experiences– and consequently correlate with the environment that an individual was educated in.
Bourdieu is careful to acknowledge that neither high or low cultural forms are intrinsically better or worse, instead he draws attention to the way cultural consumption and class habitus of social groups reflect wider social inequalities– where cultural forms associated with higher class groups are positioned to have more worth. He argues this is a form of symbolic violence where having the wrong sorts of habitus can be seen as less worthwhile.
Lack of cultural capital prevents individuals from knowing the rules of the game and as a result can prevent them from becoming fully paid members of a class, not sharing similar class habitus with those around you can make you a target or someone who is out of touch with the common belief.
Urry – Fragmentary Individuals
Fragmentation is the notion of separating previously homogeneous groups in the community.
Fragmental identity construction is the ability to construct multiple identities at multiple moments in time and space; such as multiple digital identities varying across different digital platforms that is most often not consistent with our analogue (human) identity
Urry comments upon the shift in modern societies occurring after a huge rise within the global population. He states: “Life centred upon groups of known streets where there was relatively little separation of production and consumption”
He explains that the rise in global population has given rise to mega-cities. Rather than forming mass centres of communal shared living, these mega-cities create more isolation, individualism and fractured, alienated individuals.
This is reflective of globalization which has created a highly polarized class division between wealth made possible through new forms of technological developments- and therefore the development of fragmented communities.
Lazarsfeld and Cantril- Princeton radio project
Lazarsfeld and Cantril managed and oversaw the PRP (Princeton radio research project) which studies the effect of mass media on the public.
The radio project conducted research on the broadcast War of the Worlds where they estimated that only 25% of the 6 million listeners accepted the programs report of mass destruction; and the majority of these did not think it was a literal mars attack but rather an attack from Germany.
*Link to Gerber’s cultivation theory, mass panic propagated as a result of mean world index*
Sensationalistic newspaper publicity following the broadcast also lead to the myth of the terrorized audience that has continued to exist up to modern day.
Cohens subcultural theory
Cohen’s subcultural theory assumes that crime is a consequence of the union of young people into subcultures, in which deviant values and moral concepts dominate.
The fragmentation creates these groups, different representations and perceptions through the lens of different social classes force a label onto these subcultures which ultimately provides a myth in which these groups grow towards.
moral panic