Myths of deregulation
N
Narcotizing dysfunction Term used as early
as 1948 by Paul H. Lazarsfeld and Robert K.
Merton in ‘Communication, taste and social
action’ published in The Communication of
Ideas (Harper & Row, 1948), edited by Lyman
Bryson, to describe what they saw as one of the
chief social consequences of audience exposure
over time to the mass media. Th is rather awful-
sounding affl iction, of fi rst being subdued, or
‘drugged’, and then put out of action, comes
about, believed the authors, because audiences
are reduced to ‘mass apathy’ by a heroic eff ort
to keep up with the vast amount of information
placed before them.
Th e authors feared that ‘mass communications
may be included among the most respectable
and efficient of social narcotics ... increasing
dosages of mass communications may be inad-
vertently transforming the energies of men from
active participation into passive knowledge’. See
compassion fatigue; effects of the mass
media; uses and gratifications theory;
mainstreaming.
Narration In, for example, a TV documentary,
what the narrator or the voice-over tells the
audience helps structure both programme and
response. Narration is the intermediary between
‘raw information’ and the ordered discourse
or text. In his monograph Television Discourse
and History (British Film Institute, 1980), Colin
McArthur argues that the ‘central ideological
function of narration is to confer authority on,
and to elide contradictions in, the discourse’.
Narration, therefore, serves to identify and help
further an ideological base.
Narration is as much a technical convenience
as an ideological mechanism. It is a time-saver;
permits summary; allows for effi cient transition;
is custom-built for an expensive, time-conscious
medium. Given creative independence, many
programme producers have reduced the
dominance of narration or done away with it
altogether, as much as possible letting the world
‘speak for itself ’ by using sound and vision with-
out comment; allowing camera and microphone
to eavesdrop on activities free from framing.
Of course the process of mediation is ulti-
mately unavoidable: cameras have to be set up
in one place or another; pointed in one direction
rather than another; decisions have to be made
about long-shot and close-up and fi nally the fi lm
has to be edited. A text has been constructed. See
codes of narrative; narrative; narrative
paradigm; symbolic convergence theory.other timeless qualities. In everyday parlance,
a myth is something invented, not true. For
analysts of the communication process, myth has
more specifi c connotations. Myth is an interpre-
tation of the way things are; a justifi cation. For
Claude Levi-Strauss, myth is a force generated to
overcome contradictions. Either way, at the heart
of myth is ideology, chiefl y the value-system of
those at the top of society.
Th e French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915–
80) ascribes myth to the second order of signifi-
cation, that is, connotation, but connotation
with a very special task – that of distorting the
truth in a particular direction. For Barthes, myth
is a weapon of the bourgeoisie which it uses to
regenerate its cultural dominance.
In Mythologies (Paladin, 1973), Barthes writes,
‘Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its
function is to talk about them; simply, it purifi es
them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a
natural and eternal justifi cation, it gives them a
clarity which is not that of an explanation but
that of a statement of fact.’
Myth defines ‘eternal verities’ that may be
neither eternal nor verities. And myth acts
economically, ‘it abolishes the complexity of
human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
essences, it does away with all the dialectics,
without any going back beyond what is immedi-
ately visible, it organizes a world which is with-
out contradictions because it is without depth, a
world wide open and wallowing in the evident,
it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to
mean something by themselves’.
According to Richard Cavendish in his intro-
duction to Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopae-
dia (Little Brown, 1999; Silverdale Books, 2003),
myth is a ‘charter of authorization for groups,
institutions, rituals, social distinctions, laws and
customs, moral standards, values and ideas ...
[Myths] authorize the present state of aff airs’
and their power ‘transcends rational argument’.
Myth succours and supports the status quo; its
chief inspiration is order and its communication
mode is rhetoric. See semiology/semiotics.
See also topic guides under media: politics
& economics; media: power, effects, influ-
ence; media: processes & production;
media: values & ideologies; representa-
tion.
▶Jonathan Cuff er, Barthes (Fontana, 1983).
Myths of deregulation See deregulation,
five myths of.