Accusatory studies
previously acquired cultural habits at least to
the extent that new responses are adopted in
situations that previously would have evoked old
ones.’
Such a process produces stress and anxiety
and necessarily affects the communicative
performance of those undergoing it. However,
communication with those in the new culture is
essential to adaptation. Interestingly Kim argues
that the mass media can be a useful source
of information for those trying to acclimatize
to a new culture, as the messages they carry
‘explicitly or implicitly convey the world views,
myths, beliefs, values, mores and norms of the
culture’. See communication: intercultural
communication.
▶Young Yun Kim, Becoming Intercultural: An Inte-
grative Th eory of Communication and Cross-cultural
Adaptation (Sage, 2001).
Accusatory studies Jib Fowles in Th e Case for
Television Violence (Sage, 1999) uses this term to
describe the research studies that have focused
on the eff ects of screen violence. Th e studies are
‘accusatory’ in the sense that they purport to
prove the connection between screen and real
violence, the one likely to instigate the other, or
to desensitize audiences in their response to real
violence. Such studies, in Fowles’s view, ‘amplify
the derogatory discourse’ concerning violence
in the cinema and on TV. See violence on tv:
the defence.
Action code See codes of narrative.
Active-audience thesis See audience: active
audience.
Active participation Occurs in situations where
media interest in a news story becomes involve-
ment, and the story takes on a media-induced
direction. An appetite for stories of scandal and
sensation, and the cut-throat competition for
circulation, can lead newspapers into playing
the role of agent provocateur, as handy with the
chequebook as the reporter’s notebook.
Activism See media activism.
Actuality Material from real life – the presenta-
tion in a broadcast programme of real events and
people to illustrate some current theme or prac-
tice. radio, in parallel with fi lm documentary,
pioneered actuality in the 1930s. Producers such
as Olive Shapley and Harry Harding were early
innovators in this fi eld. Th e radio programme
Time to Spare, made in 1934, documented
unemployment, broadcasting the voices of the
unemployed and their families and creating an
impact that was both moving and disturbing.
Actualization See maslow’s hierarchy of
needs.
Adaptors See non-verbal behaviour: reper-
toire.
Advertising The extent of the reliance of all
forms of mass media upon advertising can be
gauged by glancing at any monthly edition of
brad, which comprises some 400–500 pages
of information on where advertisements can be
placed and how much they will cost. Everything
is there – the national and local press, TV and
radio, cinema, posters, bus shelters, parking
meters, litter bins and transport advertising.
Powerfully occupying the driving seat is inter-
net advertising (see advertising: internet
advertising).
If advertising merely sold products, it would
cause less critical concern than it does. But it
also sells images, dreams, ideal ways of life, ideal
images of self; it sells, then reinforces time and
again, values – those of consumerism; and it
trades in stereotypes. In Th e Shocking History
of Advertising (Penguin, revised edition, 1965),
E.S. Turner states that ‘advertising is the whip
which hustles humanity up the road to the Better
Mousetrap’.
For some analysts, advertising is a kind of
magic. Raymond Williams in Problems in Mate-
rialism and Culture (Verso, 1980) argues that it
has the ability to ‘associate consumption with
human desires to which it has no real reference.
Th e magic obscures the real sources of general
satisfaction because their discovery would
involve radical change in the whole common way
of life’. Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertise-
ments (Marion Boyars, 1978, 1998) shares a simi-
lar concern: ‘Advertisements obscure and avoid
the real issues of society, those relating to work,
to jobs and wages and who works for whom. Th e
basic issues in the present state of society which
do concern money and how it is earned, are
sublimated into “meanings”, “images”, “lifestyles”,
to be bought with products not money.’
Further, the magic of advertising may mean
that we believe commodities can convey
messages about ourselves; this leads to us being
‘alienated from ourselves, since we have allowed
objects to “‘speak” for us and have become
identifi ed with them’. Such alienation may well
lead to feelings of fragmentation and discomfort
within the self; feelings which could fuel a desire
to seek solace in further consumption.
A number of critics point to the danger that
advertising messages and the consumption
they partly fuel may undermine and distort
self-development. Anthony Giddens writes in
Modernity and Self-Identity (Polity Press, 1991)
that ‘the consumption of ever-novel goods