The discourse about the media, by portraying “media” as the Other, allows people to blame the media for social flaws, or at least be suspicious about its/their possible contributions to inequalities. This Other is seen as a force outside of people who are (potentially) affected by the media-saturated environment they inhabit. The blame is directed either towards different media manifestations (commercials, social networks, video games, etc.) or towards professional media producers – individuals held directly accountable for problematic media practices and products.
Using Foucault’s conceptualization of power, I suggest that the big picture is more complex than a struggle between the privileged and the oppressed, between marginalized and dominant social groups. This does not mean that everybody benefits from mediated communication and the social system it supports in exactly the same way. This also does not mean that there are no discrimination and inequalities. However real the power struggles are, if we examine the social system over time and take into consideration all the networks of power, as suggested by Foucault, the picture becomes more complex and difficult to describe in terms of binaries (e.g., oppressors vs. oppressed). In the grand scheme of things, it might be unproductive to look for victims and villains[1].
In his History of Sexuality Foucault famously argued that “power is everywhere”[2]: it is not held only by certain individuals and social groups, and not maintained through coercion. Although the social system might grant power to some people more often than to others at some points in time, and although people who hold power more often than others share certain characteristics based on their race, gender, sexuality, class, and physical ability, that does not mean that these characteristics always predetermine power.
In order to further explain the relationship between the social system and individuals that constitute it, I propose combining Foucault’s conceptualization of power with the theories of hegemony[3] and social justification[4]. These two theories allow us to discuss in more detail how individuals can contribute to the social system whether they benefit from it or not. I argue that the division of people into those who are to blame for maintaining social flaws through (mediated and non-mediated) communication and those who are victims of these communication practices is misleading. The discourse of media externalization that supports this binary and the blame that stems from it should, therefore, be challenged.
The theory of hegemony formulated by a neo-Marxist scholar Gramsci posits that the domination in society is maintained not through force but through consent. According to Foucault, similarly, power is not maintained through coercion; however, the notion of consent is not as prominent in his writings. Gramsci and scholars who used the concept of hegemony to discuss the media[5] applied this theory to explain how dominant social groups deal with resistance by assimilating subversive ideologies through the process known as co-option. Co-option “refers to ideologies maintaining their hegemonic status by including aspects of opposing or new ideologies into their own frameworks, thus broadening their appeal and avoiding resistance in new social climates”[6]. The original Gramscian interpretation of hegemony is, thus, built on the idea of the struggle between different classes (social groups), which had been extensively explored by Marx.
I propose reconciling this interpretation with Foucault’s understanding of power as held not by certain social groups and individuals over others, but in the grand scheme of things by the social structure over individuals that constitute it (although in the snapshot view of society some individuals are always more powerful than others). The notion of consent that is essential for the theory of hegemony can be, thus, usefully transferred to Foucault’s understanding of power: because we all give the social system our consent through the simple act of remaining within it (and contributing to it though communication), we all allow it to exist, no matter how often power flows in our direction and how often it leaves us.
I argue that the main struggle within the hegemonic social system takes place not between more and less dominant groups, as Gramsci and many scholars after him[7] suggested, but rather between the social system and individuals that constitute it. In this sense, I find Foucault’s notion of fluid power, or the fluid privilege described by McIntosh to be particularly useful for understanding how hegemony works.
The exploration of (mediated) communication is directly related to this theoretical discussion. According to symbolic interactionism[8] [9], individuals participate in the social system through processes of communication that allow them to negotiate, challenge, and reproduce cultural meanings. Communication, thus, plays an essential role in creating the social system. Human beings are constantly engaged in communication, and in the recent period of history, this engagement increasingly takes place through technology. We are socialized from childhood to accept certain forms of expression and communication within the social system as “normal,” which makes them invisible to us[10]. As we communicating (via technology or not), we challenge but also reproduce certain ways of being, thinking, and acting in the world. Thus, our participation in communication processes that reproduce ideologies of our culture makes us all participate in the maintenance of the social system, where power and privilege are in a constant flow. Indeed, it is not coercion that keeps the hegemonic social system in place but consent of all its members.
The fact that some individuals benefit more than others from the status quo does not mean that those who benefit less do not contribute to maintaining the system. In order to further explain this paradoxical situation, I draw on the system justification theory that emerged within the field of social psychology[11]. System justification is defined as the “process by which existing social arrangements are legitimized, even at the expense of personal and group interest”[12]. The theory posits that people tend to accommodate and rationalize the status quo. Counterintuitively, those who have less power in the social order engage in these practices as much as or even more than privileged ones. The more individuals are disadvantaged, the more they might feel the need to justify the system in order to rationalize their own unfortunate condition.
The fact that members of disadvantaged groups are—under some circumstances, at least—more likely than others to justify the system is consistent with the notion that they are motivated to reduce ideological dissonance in such a way that the status quo is preserved.[13]
I argue that cultural meanings that we absorb through mediated communication play a crucial role in system justification processes. While people are not brainwashed or duped by the media (as it might look like according to the media effects model), they are not free to reject dominant frameworks of understanding (as the extreme version of the active audience paradigm would have us believe) either. We are constrained by ideologies that circulate through communication, mediated or otherwise; but we are also the ones through whom ideologies exist in the first place.
We are born into certain cultural meanings, and though we can and do challenge them, we also reproduce broader frameworks of understanding through a variety of communicative acts. It is crucial to acknowledge that “preserving the status quo is a collaborative process”[14] and that in this process “everyone… is both a victim and a supporter of the system”[15]. The hidden frameworks of understanding discussed by scholars of symbolic interactionism[16] are similar to implicit attitudes explored by the social justification theory[17]. In particular, Implicit Association Test created to further investigate these attitudes has revealed that most people hold implicit biases that make them contribute to the flawed social system[18].
This explains, for instance, the phenomenon discussed by Michelle Alexander in her provocative book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [19]. Alexander argues that slavery did not disappear but rather took different forms. One certainly has to pause when confronted with the fact that there are more Black men in American prisons nowadays than were enslaved on plantations before the Civil War. According to the social justification theory, this can be explained not by blatant racism (which in “the age of colorblindness” is condemned as politically incorrect) but by implicit biases, more specifically by the so-called automatic White preference. Describing how the Implicit Association Test works, Banaji and Greenwald[20] indicate that an astonishing seventy-five percent of test-takers reveal this preference, including those who sincerely reject racism, or are themselves Black. Furthermore, studies show that automatic White preference is linked to behaviors that feed into discrimination and racial inequalities, often unbeknownst to people who engage in such acts[21] [22].
According to the social justification theory, “members of disadvantaged groups play a perplexing role in maintaining their own disadvantage”[23]. This claim finds its parallel in the theory of hegemony, which posits that people contribute to their own oppression by giving to the oppressing force their consent. Foucault’s conceptualization of power serves as a further link between these two theoretical frameworks, explaining that people do not hold or lack power by definition of who they are. There is no denying that marginalization and its unfortunate effects are real. Nevertheless, marginalized individuals play a certain role in maintaining the flawed social system, while individuals who benefit from the status quo more often than others do not necessarily have more power to change the system (although they might have power over other individuals in specific scenarios).
To put it simply, the discourse of externalization obscures the complexity outlined above. The media is/are seen as either part of the reason social problems (e.g., sexism, racism, and homophobia) persist in the modern technology-saturated world, or as a hope for a better future. When we change our focus to emphasize that the media is/are people communicating with each other through technology, and that all people (and not just more privileged individuals) participate in making the social system the way it is though communication—this allows us to think differently about the social change and our own role in it.
[1] Vaclav Havel, “The power of the powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Vaclav Havel (London, Faber & Faber, 1991), 125-214.
[2] Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, p. 63.
[3] Antonio F. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, International Publishers, 1971).
[4] John T. Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji, & Brian A. Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25 (2004): 881-919.
[5] Kevin M. Carragee, “A Critical Evaluation of Debates Examining the Media Hegemony Thesis,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 330-348.
[6] Katie Milestone & Anneke Meyer, Gender and popular culture (Malden, Polity Press, 2012), p. 18.
[7] Carragee, “A Critical Evaluation of Debates Examining the Media Hegemony Thesis.”
[8] Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
[9] Snow, “Extending and Broadening Blumer’s Conceptualization of Symbolic Interactionism.”
[10] Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum,” in High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich (New York, Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1970): 160-168.
[11] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo.”
[12] Jost & Banaji, “The Role of Stereotyping in System Justification and the Production of False Consciousness,” p. 2.
[13] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo, ” p. 910.
[14] Ibid, p. 909.
[15] Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” p. 144.
[16] Snow, “Extending and Broadening Blumer’s Conceptualization of Symbolic Interactionism.”
[17] Mahzarin R. Banaji & Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York, Delacorte Press, 2013).
[18] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo.”
[19] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, The New Press, 2010).
[20] Banaji & Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
[21] Anthony G. Greenwald, Colin Tucker Smith, N. Sriram, Yoav Bar-Anan, & Brian A. Nosek, “Race Attitude Measures Predicted Vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 9, (2009): 241-253.
[22] Louis A. Penner, John F. Dovidio, Tessa V. West, Samuel L. Gaertner, Terrance L. Albrecht, Rhonda K. Dailey, & Tsveti Markova, “Aversive Racism and Medical Interactions with Black Patients: A Field Study,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, (2010): 436-440.
[23] Banaji & Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, p. 118.
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash
Using Foucault’s conceptualization of power, I suggest that the big picture is more complex than a struggle between the privileged and the oppressed, between marginalized and dominant social groups. This does not mean that everybody benefits from mediated communication and the social system it supports in exactly the same way. This also does not mean that there are no discrimination and inequalities. However real the power struggles are, if we examine the social system over time and take into consideration all the networks of power, as suggested by Foucault, the picture becomes more complex and difficult to describe in terms of binaries (e.g., oppressors vs. oppressed). In the grand scheme of things, it might be unproductive to look for victims and villains[1].
In his History of Sexuality Foucault famously argued that “power is everywhere”[2]: it is not held only by certain individuals and social groups, and not maintained through coercion. Although the social system might grant power to some people more often than to others at some points in time, and although people who hold power more often than others share certain characteristics based on their race, gender, sexuality, class, and physical ability, that does not mean that these characteristics always predetermine power.
In order to further explain the relationship between the social system and individuals that constitute it, I propose combining Foucault’s conceptualization of power with the theories of hegemony[3] and social justification[4]. These two theories allow us to discuss in more detail how individuals can contribute to the social system whether they benefit from it or not. I argue that the division of people into those who are to blame for maintaining social flaws through (mediated and non-mediated) communication and those who are victims of these communication practices is misleading. The discourse of media externalization that supports this binary and the blame that stems from it should, therefore, be challenged.
The theory of hegemony formulated by a neo-Marxist scholar Gramsci posits that the domination in society is maintained not through force but through consent. According to Foucault, similarly, power is not maintained through coercion; however, the notion of consent is not as prominent in his writings. Gramsci and scholars who used the concept of hegemony to discuss the media[5] applied this theory to explain how dominant social groups deal with resistance by assimilating subversive ideologies through the process known as co-option. Co-option “refers to ideologies maintaining their hegemonic status by including aspects of opposing or new ideologies into their own frameworks, thus broadening their appeal and avoiding resistance in new social climates”[6]. The original Gramscian interpretation of hegemony is, thus, built on the idea of the struggle between different classes (social groups), which had been extensively explored by Marx.
I propose reconciling this interpretation with Foucault’s understanding of power as held not by certain social groups and individuals over others, but in the grand scheme of things by the social structure over individuals that constitute it (although in the snapshot view of society some individuals are always more powerful than others). The notion of consent that is essential for the theory of hegemony can be, thus, usefully transferred to Foucault’s understanding of power: because we all give the social system our consent through the simple act of remaining within it (and contributing to it though communication), we all allow it to exist, no matter how often power flows in our direction and how often it leaves us.
I argue that the main struggle within the hegemonic social system takes place not between more and less dominant groups, as Gramsci and many scholars after him[7] suggested, but rather between the social system and individuals that constitute it. In this sense, I find Foucault’s notion of fluid power, or the fluid privilege described by McIntosh to be particularly useful for understanding how hegemony works.
The exploration of (mediated) communication is directly related to this theoretical discussion. According to symbolic interactionism[8] [9], individuals participate in the social system through processes of communication that allow them to negotiate, challenge, and reproduce cultural meanings. Communication, thus, plays an essential role in creating the social system. Human beings are constantly engaged in communication, and in the recent period of history, this engagement increasingly takes place through technology. We are socialized from childhood to accept certain forms of expression and communication within the social system as “normal,” which makes them invisible to us[10]. As we communicating (via technology or not), we challenge but also reproduce certain ways of being, thinking, and acting in the world. Thus, our participation in communication processes that reproduce ideologies of our culture makes us all participate in the maintenance of the social system, where power and privilege are in a constant flow. Indeed, it is not coercion that keeps the hegemonic social system in place but consent of all its members.
The fact that some individuals benefit more than others from the status quo does not mean that those who benefit less do not contribute to maintaining the system. In order to further explain this paradoxical situation, I draw on the system justification theory that emerged within the field of social psychology[11]. System justification is defined as the “process by which existing social arrangements are legitimized, even at the expense of personal and group interest”[12]. The theory posits that people tend to accommodate and rationalize the status quo. Counterintuitively, those who have less power in the social order engage in these practices as much as or even more than privileged ones. The more individuals are disadvantaged, the more they might feel the need to justify the system in order to rationalize their own unfortunate condition.
The fact that members of disadvantaged groups are—under some circumstances, at least—more likely than others to justify the system is consistent with the notion that they are motivated to reduce ideological dissonance in such a way that the status quo is preserved.[13]
I argue that cultural meanings that we absorb through mediated communication play a crucial role in system justification processes. While people are not brainwashed or duped by the media (as it might look like according to the media effects model), they are not free to reject dominant frameworks of understanding (as the extreme version of the active audience paradigm would have us believe) either. We are constrained by ideologies that circulate through communication, mediated or otherwise; but we are also the ones through whom ideologies exist in the first place.
We are born into certain cultural meanings, and though we can and do challenge them, we also reproduce broader frameworks of understanding through a variety of communicative acts. It is crucial to acknowledge that “preserving the status quo is a collaborative process”[14] and that in this process “everyone… is both a victim and a supporter of the system”[15]. The hidden frameworks of understanding discussed by scholars of symbolic interactionism[16] are similar to implicit attitudes explored by the social justification theory[17]. In particular, Implicit Association Test created to further investigate these attitudes has revealed that most people hold implicit biases that make them contribute to the flawed social system[18].
This explains, for instance, the phenomenon discussed by Michelle Alexander in her provocative book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [19]. Alexander argues that slavery did not disappear but rather took different forms. One certainly has to pause when confronted with the fact that there are more Black men in American prisons nowadays than were enslaved on plantations before the Civil War. According to the social justification theory, this can be explained not by blatant racism (which in “the age of colorblindness” is condemned as politically incorrect) but by implicit biases, more specifically by the so-called automatic White preference. Describing how the Implicit Association Test works, Banaji and Greenwald[20] indicate that an astonishing seventy-five percent of test-takers reveal this preference, including those who sincerely reject racism, or are themselves Black. Furthermore, studies show that automatic White preference is linked to behaviors that feed into discrimination and racial inequalities, often unbeknownst to people who engage in such acts[21] [22].
According to the social justification theory, “members of disadvantaged groups play a perplexing role in maintaining their own disadvantage”[23]. This claim finds its parallel in the theory of hegemony, which posits that people contribute to their own oppression by giving to the oppressing force their consent. Foucault’s conceptualization of power serves as a further link between these two theoretical frameworks, explaining that people do not hold or lack power by definition of who they are. There is no denying that marginalization and its unfortunate effects are real. Nevertheless, marginalized individuals play a certain role in maintaining the flawed social system, while individuals who benefit from the status quo more often than others do not necessarily have more power to change the system (although they might have power over other individuals in specific scenarios).
To put it simply, the discourse of externalization obscures the complexity outlined above. The media is/are seen as either part of the reason social problems (e.g., sexism, racism, and homophobia) persist in the modern technology-saturated world, or as a hope for a better future. When we change our focus to emphasize that the media is/are people communicating with each other through technology, and that all people (and not just more privileged individuals) participate in making the social system the way it is though communication—this allows us to think differently about the social change and our own role in it.
[1] Vaclav Havel, “The power of the powerless,” in Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990, Vaclav Havel (London, Faber & Faber, 1991), 125-214.
[2] Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, p. 63.
[3] Antonio F. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, International Publishers, 1971).
[4] John T. Jost, Mahzarin R. Banaji, & Brian A. Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo,” Political Psychology 25 (2004): 881-919.
[5] Kevin M. Carragee, “A Critical Evaluation of Debates Examining the Media Hegemony Thesis,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 330-348.
[6] Katie Milestone & Anneke Meyer, Gender and popular culture (Malden, Polity Press, 2012), p. 18.
[7] Carragee, “A Critical Evaluation of Debates Examining the Media Hegemony Thesis.”
[8] Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method.
[9] Snow, “Extending and Broadening Blumer’s Conceptualization of Symbolic Interactionism.”
[10] Neil Postman, “The Reformed English Curriculum,” in High School 1980: The Shape of the Future in American Secondary Education, ed. Alvin C. Eurich (New York, Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1970): 160-168.
[11] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo.”
[12] Jost & Banaji, “The Role of Stereotyping in System Justification and the Production of False Consciousness,” p. 2.
[13] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo, ” p. 910.
[14] Ibid, p. 909.
[15] Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” p. 144.
[16] Snow, “Extending and Broadening Blumer’s Conceptualization of Symbolic Interactionism.”
[17] Mahzarin R. Banaji & Anthony G. Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York, Delacorte Press, 2013).
[18] Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo.”
[19] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York, The New Press, 2010).
[20] Banaji & Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
[21] Anthony G. Greenwald, Colin Tucker Smith, N. Sriram, Yoav Bar-Anan, & Brian A. Nosek, “Race Attitude Measures Predicted Vote in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election,” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 9, (2009): 241-253.
[22] Louis A. Penner, John F. Dovidio, Tessa V. West, Samuel L. Gaertner, Terrance L. Albrecht, Rhonda K. Dailey, & Tsveti Markova, “Aversive Racism and Medical Interactions with Black Patients: A Field Study,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, (2010): 436-440.
[23] Banaji & Greenwald, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, p. 118.
Photo by Mario Purisic on Unsplash
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