Cultural modes
and aspirations in their own voice’.
The exercise of ‘full citizenship’, Murdock
argues, depends upon the media fulfi lling these
rights of information, experience, interpreta-
tion and participation. See topic guide under
media ethics; media issues & debates;
media: values & ideology; representation.
Cultural racism See racism.
Culture The sum of those characteristics that
identify and diff erentiate human societies – a
complex interweave of many factors. Th e culture
of a nation is made up of its language, history,
traditions, climate, geography, arts, social,
economic and political norms, and its system of
values; and such a nation’s size, its neighbours
and its current prosperity condition the nature
of its culture.
There are cultures within cultures. Thus
reference is made to working-class culture
or middle-class culture. Organizations and
institutions can have their own cultures (see
organization cultures). We refer to cultural
epochs resulting from developments – social,
political, industrial, technological – that create
cultural change. Mass production and the mass
media have contributed immensely to cultural
change, giving rise to what critics have termed
‘mass culture’ and disapprovingly portrayed as
manufactured, manipulated, force-fed, marketed
like soap powder and, because of its unique
access to vast audiences, open to abuse of the
mass by the powerful.
Alan Swingewood in The Myth of Mass
Culture (Macmillan, 1977) argues, however,
that there ‘is no mass culture, or mass society;
but there is an ideology of mass culture and
mass society’. Th e ideology is real enough, but
the thing itself he describes as myth: ‘If culture
is the means whereby man affi rms his humanity
and his purposes and his aspirations to freedom
and dignity then the concept and theory of mass
culture are their denial and negation.’
Culture is transmitted through socializa-
tion to new members of a social group or
society. Th e media play an important role in this
process. A central concern of culturalist studies
of the media is the degree to which the media’s
output may both refl ect and communicate the
culture of the more powerful social groups in
that society at the expense of the less power-
ful. By asserting one culture against others, the
media help to nurture a dominant culture and
relegate rival cultures to the realms of deviance.
Today’s cultures have to be examined through
the lens of the Network Society, which has
brought about profound shifts in terms of thebe resistant to outside intrusions and infl uences.
According to Martin J. Gannon and associates
in Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphori-
cal Journeys Th rough 17 Countries (Sage, 1994),
the use of identifying metaphors can assist us
in grasping the nature of our own and other
cultures. The authors take the view that ‘the
dynamics of the culture of a particular nation
can be best understood through the use of one
dominant metaphor that refl ects the basic values
that all or most of its members accept without
question or conscious thought’.
Th ey cite the following metaphors that repre-
sent some of the cultures on their ‘metaphorical
journey’: American football (US), the dance of
Shiva (India), the family altar (China), the opera
(Italy), wine (France), lace (Belgium), ballet
(Russia), the symphony orchestra (Germany), the
bullfi ght (Spain), the kibbutz (Israel), the garden
(Japan), the stuga or summer home (Sweden),
the market place (Nigeria) and the coff ee house
(Turkey). For Ireland, home of the Blarney Stone,
the authors perhaps appropriately select as the
country’s presiding metaphor, conversation.
Cultural modes Th e literate mode is rooted in
the written word; the oral mode is spoken or
visual. Traditionally these have been aligned to
class diff erences; that is, the better-educated
upper-classes have lived by a literate mode of
cultural interaction – the dominant culture
- while the more ‘untutored’ classes have relied
upon oral modes. With the advent of electronic
media the oral mode has become increasingly
assertive. It is essentially the mode of fi lm and
television, though both media still tend to be
run by a class educated in the literate mode and
whose perceptions are conditioned by such a
mode.
Cultural or citizen rights and the media In
‘Rights and representations: public discourse
and cultural citizenship’, in Television and
Common Knowledge (Routledge, 1999), edited by
J. Gripsrud, Graham Murdock poses the follow-
ing citizen rights – what citizens have the right
to expect from the mass media: (1) the right to
information; (2) the right to have access to ‘the
greatest possible diversity of representations
of personal and social experience’; (3) the right
to knowledge, that is access to ‘frameworks of
interpretation’ which facilitate understating of
the links between issues, the causes that lead to
eff ects, and the processes by which knowledge
is assembled and represented to the public; and
(4) the right to participation in a contemporary
context where there is a demand from individu-
als and groups ‘to speak about their own lives