FRAMEWORK FOR USING SOCIOLOGY TO STUDY POPULAR MUSIC

 When sociologists study music they focus on one or more of the following four topics:

 1.      The production of the music

a.      Who makes the music? Who are the artists in terms of their social backgrounds and sources of inspiration?

b.      What are the processes through which music is made, and what are the connections between musicians and the conditions under which music is created/produced?

c.      How is the music tied to culture on a local and larger level? What ideological themes in the culture does it represent, reproduce, challenge?

 2.      The distribution of music

a.      What is the organization, both formal and informal, of the music industry?

b.      How are concerts, recordings, jam sessions, clubs, local festivals and occasions related to who consumes music?

c.      What types of music come to be recorded and distributed in a region or society, by whom, for what reasons, and through what types of technology?

 3.      The consumption of the music

a.      How do people consume music in everyday social settings, local clubs, recordings, concerts, commercials, peer sharing processes, etc.?

b.      Who consumes what types of music and how do they gain access to consumption opportunities?

c.      What are the implications of the culture of the consumers, their resources, and their social relationships?

 4.      The integration of music into people's lives and the impact of music on their feelings, thoughts, and actions

a.      How do people integrate music into their everyday lives and their ideas about the world and their connection with it?

b.      What is the impact of music on the experiences of individuals and groups and on culture, ideology, interaction, and identities?

c.      How people give meaning to music and music-related experiences

d.      How people use popular music as a form of expression, as a means of communication, and as a vehicle for opposing and resisting dominant cultural norms and practices and established social arrangements.  

MONEY FOR NOTHING: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF POPULAR MUSIC

Media Education Foundation, 49 minutes

Through history popular music has been the medium through which people have expressed themselves, communicated with each other, and articulated ideas related to everything from personal desires to social justice. Popular music has been a medium around which people share feelings and create social solidarity, express opposition to dominant ideas, and even encourage forms of revolution from slave revolts to adolescent rebellions against dominant culture and established social structures.

People in positions of power have generally been sensitive to the potential oppositional influence of popular music and, at various times, tried to limit its existence or control its content through coercion or censorship. However, popular music today is less a "people's medium" than it is a profit maker for a few major corporations. In connection with powerful global forces, 5 major transnational corporations account for 80% of the sales of popular music and control much of the music industry today. They are Bertelsmann, Sony, AOL/Time Warner, Vivendi, and EMI. 

Popular culture in general, and popular music in particular, are important in a sociological sense because they are closely connected with how power operates in social relations and social processes. For example, Antonio Gramsci and other sociologists have argued that social control in contemporary social life could not simply occur through managing the means of production and the bodies of workers. There was also a need to influence widespread definitions of "common sense" and ideas about how the world does and should be organized. In other words, there was a need to get inside the minds of people. And the most effective way of doing this was to sponsor, organize, and mediate the joy and pleasure that people experienced in their everyday lives. If this could be done, people would be inclined to accept the status quo and the powerful organizations that maintained it. This process of manufacturing consent in a group, society, or social network is called hegemony. 

Popular Culture and the Music Industry

When popular music is covered in the mainstream media we generally learn about the personal lives of individual performers. We get details about their rise to stardom and visual images that highlight the glitzy side of their lifestyles, especially the houses, clothes, cars, and toys that their wealth has enabled them to consume.  

Such coverage pop music stars tells us nothing about the music industry itself -- how popular music is made and distributed, and how the rise to rock stardom is integrally connected with corporations that operate according to a commercial logic that has little to do with artistic expression or the sponsorship of a people's medium for communication.

Annie Defranco, one of the few independent musicians in the US, sums up how this commercial logic impacts contemporary culture. She says that large entertainment corporations take local musical culture, homogenize it, commercialize it, coopt it, suck the life out of it, and then sell it back to the very people who created the cultural contexts in which it originated.

The commercial logic of the popular music industry is characterized by a time frame in which there is a need for quick returns on investments for the shareholders of the five major media entertainment conglomerates. This need for immediate returns influences who makes music because it is much more cost efficient to focus on a few big stars than on many musical artists. It makes more sense to develop one marketing campaign for one mega-star than it does to develop many marketing campaigns for a wide range of performers whose music appeals to diverse musical interests. The ultimate goal of the commercial logic of each of the major corporations that control much of popular music would be to produce one new mega-CD every few months and have everyone in the world buy it.

One of the outcomes of this logic is that mid-range stars seldom make large amounts of money. In fact, they have major expenses that they pay directly or pay back to the major recording companies through royalties that the companies keep.

This means that the vast majority of people who make music are workers who need representation and support to maintain their involvement in music. In fact, it would be helpful for them to have a union that would be similar to the players' associations in professional sports and the screen actors' guild in television and film.

The Promotion and Distribution of Popular Music

In Money for Nothing it is noted that there are four commercial vehicles for promoting and distributing popular music:

1. Radio
2. Video
3. Concert tours
4. Retail stores

Radio
Since 1996 and the passage of the Telecommunications Act radio has not been an open promotion and distribution system for popular music. The stated goal of this law was to deregulate the communications business so that any individual or company could compete in a "fee market" environment. But what the law did was to enable three major corporations to acquire ownership of the vast majority of high power radio stations around the United States. To maximize their profits, these corporations have developed pre-programmed play lists that disk jockeys must use on local stations. No longer are there radio personalities who create their own play lists based on their sense of local musical tastes and preferences. In the 1960s such a system was defined as criminal, and described as "payola" − that is, a system of paying disk jockeys to play certain records so that those records could become popular and profitable. However, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 made such a system legal. Today, corporately controlled systems of payola are the foundation of how radio stations operate. That's why the same popular music is played from one station to another around the country. Of course, play lists are designed to appeal to people with particular demographic profiles, but there is pervasive homogeneity from one play list to another. 

Video
MTV and VH1 are the central marketing systems in the corporate world of popular music. MTV was developed in 1980 as a vehicle for major recording companies to promote and market their records; t was intended as a cable station infomercial for a limited range of popular music. Today it runs in xxx countries and is watched by xxx million people 24-hours a day. This makes it the source of the most powerful infomercials in the world.  

Concert Tours
The widely hyped pop music mega-tours that occur today require vast resources. No single performer or musical group could coordinate and sponsor such tours on their own. Even local venues for mid-size performances are now being purchased by major recording companies so that they and other major corporations such as Ticket Master, can control concert tours and monopolize everything from ticket prices to the performances of major stars. Even the major stars become trapped in this commercial scheme because dozens or even hundreds of people in their entourage and in the tour labor force depend on their tours and performances.

Retail stores
The retail sales of popular music have also been consolidated. Independent and "mom and pop" retailers have been bought out or driven out by major corporate retailers such as Best Buy and WalMart. In fact, WalMart sells 9% of the all the recorded music in the US.

Cross Media Marketing

The goal of major corporations is to create what marketing people refer to as "media synergy." This is basically a strategy for getting the biggest bang possible out of their marketing buck. This occurs when popular music can be linked with radio, movies, videos, records, magazines, theme parks, and an assortment of branded goods.

An example of media synergy is the use of popular music in commercials designed to sell brands and products, or the use of commercials as a context for creating recognizable music and performers. The use of popular music to sell products is relatively new in the US and other industrialized nations. This is a strategy that would have been unthinkable before the 1980s. In fact, it would have been seen as a prostitution of music − the ultimate form of selling out and compromising artistic integrity and creativity. The widespread acceptance of this strategy today clearly illustrates the power of market forces to influence culture and society.

Once marketing people in transnational corporations began to brainstorm strategies that would associate their products with the emotions and memories of consumers it did not take them long to hit on music as a vehicle for making this connection. After all, how many of our emotions and memories are cued by particular songs and musicians? Many of us hear particular songs and instantly remember people, places, and things that have been important in our lives. The assumption is that if our memories and emotions can e connected with brands and products, we will consume particular things and accept as normal and natural a lifestyle based on consumption.  

For example, marketing people at Nike knew exactly what they were doing when they obtained permission to use the Beatles' song, Revolution, to sell sport shoes. The use of this song in a commercial not only attracted widespread attention, but it appropriated the notion of revolution and connected it with buying athletic shoes made by workers in sweatshops in Southeast Asia. From a historical perspective this was clearly a case of devolution rather than revolution.

From the perspective of pop musicians there is nothing more useful to one's career than having their music used in commercials. Ads clearly reach more people than MTV, MTV2, and VH1 combined. Ads appear on radio, television, and theater promos, and the performers in the ads may be pictured in magazines and other print media. 

One of the classic forms of cross media marketing is the strategy of sponsoring television shows in which unknown contestants compete to become a pop music star. This enables the major recording companies to actually begin marketing a performer and a song before they even exist!

Independence: Does It Exist?

Despite the power of major entertainment corporations, independent labels continue to exist. They struggle to discover and develop talent at the local, grass roots level. When artists emerge and become successful, they enable the smaller companies to continue this process. However, there is always the chance or threat that small companies and emerging artists associated with those companies will be bought by one of the big five media entertainment corporations and plugged into the machinery of the music industry.

This is what occurred with Nirvana and other bands (Tommy Boy, Def Jam, etc.) that made their starts in local clubs and neighborhoods. Legends of the meteoric rise to stardom of particular performers now permeate street music culture and influence the form and content of local music (need data on this). The history of hip hop illustrates this process.

Is it possible for bands to create and maintain their own labels? Yes, but only with great effort and luck. And it is a major political challenge − meaning that it requires being able to deal with pressures exerted by major corporations.

The Internet has emerged as a medium for independence. But the struggle to keep the Internet open is ongoing.

Consumer Activism: Do Fans Have Power?

Individuals often feel powerless in the face of corporate forces that seem unstoppable. However, there are things that popular music fans can do as individuals and as members of action groups. They can support independent bands, record labels, and retail stores. They can promote and support alternative radio stations and public access television. They can sponsor educational forums in which they inform people why every rock star looks like Brittany Spears and In Synch.

At the grass roots political level we can form groups that encourage the enforcement of anti-trust laws, that reclaim the public airwaves and set publicly responsive standards for their use, and that push for legislation that opens the door for more local FM radio. And we can support artists who are ready and willing to promote a politically progressive consciousness among fellow artists who give higher priority to creativity and autonomy than they do to playing bad odds for becoming rock stars. 

What Was Missed in Money for Nothing?     

• A discussion of the Napster case and the ways that individuals can share music, produce music independently, and take more active control over the music they make and hear.
• An acknowledgement of new sources of diversity in popular music around the world, and the ways in which local musicians creatively make music and combine their creations with the creations of other musicians around the world. These individualized forms of cultural mergers have led to the creation of new forms of popular music.
• Making generalizations about music is difficult. For example in the case of Celtic music there is music from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and from places around the world where people from these countries have migrated. Then in Ireland Celtic music from the northern counties is different from music in the western counties, and there are within-county differences from town to town.
• In the case of Latin music there is tango, rumba, mambo, reggae, salsa, etc. (Note: The only reasons that we can say that there is something such as "Latin music" is because there are commercial and analytical reasons for creating typologies − Latin music hour, the Latin music section of a CD store, or a sociology course on Latino community.
• Local cultures and social conditions are represented and expressed through music. As people travel and as technology enables musicians to have contact with each other there is a growing fusion of musical types, types for which there are not even names or categories.
• The existence of a global music industry does produce some homogeneity. However, there is strong resistance to this by some musicians and music consumers who seek more responsive representations of their feelings and thoughts through music. The transnational corporations have now geared up to appropriate those and sell them back to the resisters, thereby pulling them into the commercial music system. How will the Internet be involved in this power struggle? It is more problematic than the film infers.
• The blurring of distinctions between popular music and other forms of music including classical and religious music.

Game Over: Gender, Race & Violence in Video Games
(Media Education Foundation, 41 minutes)

Computer video games generate nearly $7 billion in annual sales. An increasing number of children spend an increasing amount of time playing these games. However, sociology and other social sciences have been slow to study how these games are integrated into people's lives.

• What makes video games attractive to people of different ages?
• What games are preferred by young people of different ages?
• How is playing a video game different from or similar to other media -based experiences?
• Does playing video games foster the formation of supportive peer relationships, or are they played under circumstances that socially isolate young people from peers?
• Are video games used as a family activity, or do they interfere with time spent in relationships with other family members?
• Does playing video games take the place of other activities and, if so, which ones -- watching TV, doing homework, spending time with friends and family, playing outside, being physically active, etc.?
• Does playing video games inspire kids to do other things and to connect with the social and physical world in new ways?
• Do kids learn from the games and, if so, what do they learn, and how do they integrate what they learn into their everyday lives?
• Do they learn things related to masculinity, femininity, and gender relations, or things related to race, violence, power, the body, weapons, war, authority, family, friends, social relationships, society, etc.
• Not all games are like Quake and Doom -- what about the effects of participating in SimCity and other interactive challenges that have present challenges that call for creative and socially responsive actions in a virtual environment?
• Do they learn physical and cognitive skills as they face the challenges presented in the games, or other qualities such as patience, persistence, paying attention to details, awareness of underlying social structures, etc? 
• How are video games connected with other forms of the media in society?
• Do large media companies use video games in cross marketing schemes as a strategy for promoting consumption and consumer culture in general?
• What happens when kids play video game sports before they play real-time informal games or organized sports? Will they be more apt to be turned off by adult controlled organized sports after they have organized and controlled their own teams and all their own actions in the video games? Why go outside and play in settings where others measure your success when you can actively participate in a video game where you play next to the athletes you have seen on television?

These are research questions that await study. The emphasis in Game Over is on games played by young boys. What about games played by children, boys and girls, younger than 8 years old, or 5 years old, and what about games played by men and women college students? 

This could be the topic of your last assignment: If you are interested in these questions, go play games with kids you know, and talk with them about their experiences. Learn how they give the games and game experiences and then incorporate those meanings into their lives, How are game experiences related to culture, ideology, social interaction, identity, socialization, social structure, social institutions, social inequality? These are sociological questions, and they are important to ask as we live in a culture and society that is increasingly constituted by media images.

• How did George, Tyrene Manson, and Noel Santiago become get involved in boxing? What other alternatives did they have? Where was the gym? What was the neighborhood like? How did socio-economic factors constrict or influence their sport participation and what boxing meant to each of them? How did the unpredictability of life influence their lives? Could they have participated in an organized, competitive sport like many other young people do?
• What meanings did George, Tyrene Manson, and Noel Santiago give to their experiences − how were they connected with their lives, with social and cultural context in which they lived? Did they box for fun? Was it a job? What was it to them? Why was it important to fight in the Golden Gloves?
• Why did they stay involved? Why was boxing so important to Tyrene and George? Why did Noel dropout?
• Who were advocates and significant others in the lives of these three people? What were their options for obtaining the "hook ups" they needed to take control of their lives?
• What about Harry as a trainer? Why did he do what he did? How did he fit into the organization of boxing as a sport?
• How did they define and respond to Las Vegas and their trip there? Would it be different than your definition of Las Vegas and your response to a trip there?
• How is boxing in the film organized differently than soccer in Briargate or Highlands Ranch? What are the differences? Are there differences in the way that sport participation is tied to development and social mobility, and to the success of those who sponsor the programs?
• After seeing the film, how do you view the connection between boxing and violence? Would you argue that boxing causes violence? For the young adults in the film? For others? In U.S. culture as a whole?
• Did the camera for the documentary influence their lives?
• Did you feel like a voyeur as you watched the film? Would you have felt the same way if it had been a film about young upper class adults playing polo or golf? Why or why not?

When Billy Broke His Head . . . and Other Tales of Wonder 
(PBS, 1994, Fanlight Productions, Boston - 1-800-937-4113)

Billy Golfus was an award-winning radio journalist when an accident in 1984 left him brain damaged. He did this film after spending 10 years as one of about 43 million Americans with disabilities (remember, there are various definitions of "disabilities" and these definitions are constantly debated in connection with social policy).

When Billy Broke His Head is a film about the politics of making identity claims under the constraint of being in a wheelchair, having brain damage, or having any other attribute socially defined by many others as discrediting. In other words, Billy is coping with stigma. His story shows how this can be frustrating and exhausting, despite emerging changes in our culture regarding to the meanings given to physical disabilities.

This could be described as a "road film" as Golfus goes around the country meeting with people with disabilities. He focuses on those who have been involved in political activism and created some of the political pressure that led to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.

Golfus focuses on the tendency among many (temporarily) able-bodied people to expect that people with disabilities are "tragic but brave" or "flawed but inspirational" or just "fragile and helpless."

People with disabilities often discover that people who consider themselves to be "normal" stigmatize them, and deal with them in terms of stereotypes related to the stigma. This creates challenges when it comes to initiating and maintaining social interaction, or it leads people with disabilities to be socially isolated. Interaction is likely to be fleeting when people do not treat you as a competent human being with a contribution to make. Interaction can become tedious when you answer for the 3000^th time "What happened to you?" − especially when you have so many other things you want to discuss.

Golfus also discusses how the isolation of people with disabilities subverts knowledge of disabilities and leads to a situation where people with disabilities are often stared at and treated as curiosities.

The main point of the film is that disability is more of a "political fact" than anything else, and it requires political actions to deal with issues related to the lives of people with disabilities. The focus on finding "cures" for disabilities is needed. However, it can be counterproductive when it leads people to define people with disabilities as "sick" and in need of medical treatment rather than in need of social transformations that would enable them to successfully claim identities related to something other than their disabilities. Of course, changing cultures and social structures is not easy but it is necessary if we are to deal with the public issue of disabilities instead of simply the private troubles of those with disabilities.

Tough Guise (Jackson Katz; produced by Sut Jhally)

(Note: there are rough draft notes based on an initial viewing)

(Gender) Ideology is powerful in our lives − even if we do not agree with a particular ideology, it can be difficult to resist if it is deeply rooted in the culture, and it is certainly difficult to transform a dominant ideology. MUST BE ABLE TO USE THE MEDIA (but access, except through WWW is very difficult because corporations control 99% of the access. PBS and NPR are struggling. Public airwaves issue − we could make many changes in the strings we the people attach to leasing the airwaves to private media corporations.)

Power is at least partly grounded in ideology − issues related to maleness/masculinity, whiteness, heterosexuality (eg: parents warning daughters about lesbian coaches and players; heterosexual males have sexual assault rates many times higher), being able-bodied are not raised. These things remain invisible, and this enhances power associated with certain categories. DOMINANCE FUNCTIONS WITHOUT INTERRUPTION BY BEING UNNAMED.

NOTE: Katz argues that the challenge of being a male in this society has become greater over the last 50 years. This is not only because of women contesting what it means to be a woman. It is also because of people contesting what is means to be a man. The efforts to preserve traditional masculinity have become increasingly desperate − bigger guns, bigger bodies ("guns"), more killing, bigger fights, rougher play (NFL highlight films; hockey fights), hyper-masculine caricatures in the media, and in everyday life − they would be funny if they were not so dangerous!

Cool Pose and men of color (facing a greater crisis of masculinity because of less access to institutionalized seats of power in society)

"The stronger women get, the more men love football" (Nelson) and watch the WWF! (retrenchment is always present in the face of change − vested interests are strong!)

(Note: themes of powerlessness that are the subtexts in WWF dramas − the bosses and the manipulative women)

ALTERNATIVE IMAGES AND IDEAS ABOUT MASCULINITY

McGuire and Sosa (noncompetitive; emotional; sensitive)

Ali (vulnerability; other media representations of vulnerability)

Music lyrics (Garth Brooks, etc.)

Katz notes that all change/transformation is accompanied by efforts to retrench (go back to the way things were, to the basics). This means that culture and ideology often contain contradictions, inconsistencies. In fact, many would say they are inevitable. This makes them tough to study and to identify what might be called "dominant culture" and dominant ideology, especially in rapidly changing cultures where democracy and freedom of speech and expression are basic principals.

Retrenchment in the guise of innocence and the idealness of a conflict-free existence is especially effective − this is where DISNEY enters the picture: If we only could eliminate all those troubling aspects of our pasts and just get along by burying differences! (Who is most likely to say this? Those who were not hurt or even privileged by the events of the past, and those whose characteristics are not defined as "different")

Question: What would happen in a culture if everyone's dream was the same (happily ever after with the prince, plus quick wealth, power, fame, plenty of sex and exciting recreational opportunities)?

Additional notes from Coakley

Adapted from Coakley, Sport in Society: Issues and Controversies (7^th edition, 2001, McGraw-Hill)

    We need new definitions of masculinity in society. As things are now, dominant forms of sport tend to normalize the idea that masculinity involves aggressiveness and a desire to physically dominate others. In fact, some people associate men's behavior in sports with biological nature and conclude that traditional definitions of masculinity are "natural." Strong and aggressive men are lionized and made into heroes in sports, while weak or passive men are marginalized and emasculated.

As boys and men apply this ideology to their lives, they learn to view manhood in terms of things that jeopardize the safety and well-being of themselves and others. They may ride the tops of elevators, drive cars at breakneck speeds, play various forms of "chicken," drink each other "under the table", get into fights, use violence in sports as indicators of manhood, use dangerous substances to build muscles, avoid interacting with women as equals, keep sexual scores in heterosexual relationships, rough up girlfriends or wives, rape, or kill "unfaithful" women. Some men learn that size and toughness allows you to get away with violating norms, and that status depends on making others fear or depend on you. If men take this ideology far enough, they may get in the habit of "forcing their way" on others through physical intimidation or coercion.

    Even though this ideology of masculinity can be dangerous and socially isolating. For example, male athletes are seldom criticized for using it to guide their behavior in sports. In years of experiences in and around sports at all levels I've never heard coaches scold athletes for hitting someone too hard or showing no feeling when they have blown out someone's knee or knocked someone unconscious, or paralyzed or even killed an opponent (as in boxing). Is it dangerous to teach young men not to hesitate to hurt people, or not to express remorse when they do? Does this destroy their ability to empathize with others and feel their pain? If you teach boys to be tough and to dominate others, will they be able to develop intimate and supportive relationships with other men or with women? How will they handle their relationships with women? Will their rates of assault and sexual assault be high?

The frightening record of men's violent and destructive behavior suggests that there is definitely a need to develop additional and alternative definitions of masculinity. The dominant definition of masculinity and the idea that "boys will be boys" is closely associated with serious problem behaviors in many societies around the world?in other spheres of everyday life as well as sport . However, dominant forms of sport in today's society seem to prevent people from raising questions about gender ideology. The study of sports in society has an important role to play in the raising of these questions.

Film: Mickey Mouse Monopoly

Issues raised by film:

1. What types of stories get invented and perpetuated in public culture?
   What is the impact of Disney on childhood culture in the US and around the world?

2. If culture partly consists of stories about history and current ways of life, who tells the most popular stories in US culture? If Disney and all of its media holdings, theme parks, retail outlets, and other entertainment companies are key players in this storytelling process, what kind of power do they have in the culture? What are the issues associated with such power?  

3. What does it mean to say that many children around the world have been "raised on Disney" and had their imaginary worlds influenced by Disney characters and dramatic plots?

4. When storytellers become powerful "creators of popular discourse" in a culture, what are their responsibilities as citizens? Or can they ignore citizenship and simply be profit making groups of people responsible only to shareholders? 

5. How are gender and gender relations represented in Disney cartoons? Most important, how do children "read" these representations and then incorporate them into their own play activities and their understanding of the social world?

6. Where do writers obtain their inspiration and sources for the images and representations they include in feature length cartoons?

7. When Disney characters take on race-related or ethnic personas, are they portrayed accurately in terms of history, heritage, and current conditions? 

8. When Disney "edits" history, what do they leave out, and what do they include? In other words, what is not represented in Disney films?

9. How does Disney and other major transnational corporations get people to advertise their products and to pay Disney as they do so? 

10. After seeing the film, will you watch Disney films differently? If not, why not? If so, how so?

11. As a parent (or future parent), how will you handle or mediate the influence of Disney in the lives of your children?

***********************************************************************

Film: ADVERTISING AND THE END OF THE WORLD (Sut Jhally) 

• Advertising is a key component of culture

Thesis: our economy is consumption driven, and we have a consumer culture. Jhally asks:

• How is that culture reproduced? (because people do not consume by nature beyond what is needed to survive, so advertisers are required to work very hard to redefine survival, create "wants," and turn wants into needs)
• What are the implications of a consumer culture − nonmaterial and material?

Jhally critiques capitalism. He says that capitalism has produced dramatic changes in the cultural and physical landscape; it has given rise to the most sophisticated production processes the world has ever known, and it now requires compulsive and impulsive consumers in order to survive.

Consumption must be viewed in the context of capitalism, lest it be misunderstood.

Desire and identity have been linked with commodities as the result of a massive investment of
resources, care, creativity, and thought into perfecting a commercial discourse.

Jurassic Park cost less per minute of production than a group of ads of similar length. Speilberg's genius has been eclipsed by many working in the realm of commercials.

Jhally notes that advertising and commercial discourse have colonized contemporary culture, both space and consciousness; we experience 3600 commercial expressions per day

Space: sport stadia = shopping centers and billboard spaces with fields in the middle; outer space billboards; custom "cyber-billboards" for sports fields 

Consciousness: movies (James Bond), DeBeers and "diamonds are forever" slogan has provided a way for commercial culture to structure intimacy − and you will discover this soon, if you have not already done so.

Jhally focuses on the "cultural role" of advertising rather than its "marketing role." He notes that advertising is a cultural system that has become the primary source of "story telling" in our culture (listen to little kids) in that it presents images and messages re: to how to behave, what's good/bad, valeus, etc.)

The consistent stories communicated in and through advertising are:

1.  What constitutes happiness? 
    Happiness and political freedom are linked to consumption & commodities. BUT people say they want:

• Autonomy and control
• Self-esteem (sense of personal significance)
• Satisfying family
• Relaxing leisure time and adventure
• Romance and love
• Close, meaningful social relationships

Advertisers have known this since the 1920s! And they have linked products to these themes in an effort to create a fantasy world based on commodities. Jhally notes that if we wanted to create a culture in which we were happy in terms of these 6 things, we would not create a consumer culture. 

2.  What is society? (and the individual-society relationship -- M. Thatcher:"there is no society; there are only individuals and families")

• Advertising approaches all of us as individuals, not as members of society; it highlights individual issues, not social issues.
• NOTE: the market cannot deal with certain social issues (capitalism may be great when it comes to certain things, but not everything!)
• Jhally encourages the current generation to accept the responsibility they have to critically examine the impact of market forces on the world.

3.  What is the time frame we use to think about our lives?

• Advertising focuses our attention on the immediate, not the long term. Profits are needed now, not 20 years from now − ask the stockholders! Returns must be quick, and CEO bonuses are based on it (downsize, if that jacks up bottom line over the short run). 
• Advertising has now/recently gone from focusing on the cognitive to focusing on the emotions (this is because ads must now stick out because there are so many of them; how do you get noticed?)
• Benetton, Mtn. Dew, sex, pain, humiliation, joy, orgasm, death, injury, etc. We will see more and more of these. 

Jhally closes with the plea to develop critical abilities to deconstruct that advertising that is so pervasive in our lives, and to take social action in opposition to the stories told in and through advertising.

Coakley's notes: 
I get a kick out of the debates about whether it is Hollywood, video games, and bad TV programs that are presenting immoral and subversive images and discourse to "our children." The most influential and pervasive creators of images in this culture are the representatives of our corporate capitalist economy.

However, we never even raise that issue in our discussions about culture --- the fact that stories, images, and narratives about happiness, society, and the future are being told by representatives of the marketplace, accountable to nothing but market forces and whatever laws regulate their actions.

We have an amazing faith in "the market" and "market forces" in this culture. We assume they will bring power to our homes and deliver health care to all, and we seldom have examined critically what kinds of things are best accomplished within the context of the market, and what kinds of things cannot be accomplished efficiently within a market context.

We are socialized to NOT ask the questions that Jhally is asking. His questions and the issues they raise have been pushed to the margins of culture, to the margins of our public discourse. In fact, when they are raised, many people label them as "political" and dismiss them as based in vested interests when in fact they are the only way we can begin discussing things related to the common good. Advertising has led many to believe that the common good is tied to measures of GDP (production and productivity) and indexes of "consumer confidence."

Gore and Bush never even hinted that either one of them would ask any of the questions that Jhally is asking. In fact, Jhally is asking questions that challenge the policies and platforms of both candidates.

Gore ran on the platform that we have increased our production and consumption so much over the past 8 years that we should stay with him. Bush said that production and consumption can only stay high if we remove government regulations that restrict corporations and people from producing and consuming more. The only candidate that even is aware of the issues raised by Jhally is Nader, and he doesn't have a platform; and he has little money flowing in from big corporations.

BUT the notion of sustainable lifestyles is becoming more popular. Will it become a social movement? Will it be able to change the course of popular discourse in the face of the pervasive global power and resources of corporate capitalism. One-half the largest economies in the world are not nation-states, they are corporations. The WTO and the global flow of capital has immense impact − expanding markets is what is on people's minds, even though expanding markets generally are unrelated to the things that people say are the foundation of happiness for them. 

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FILM: DREAMWORLDS II

(Note: the legal battle fought over this video revolved around whether educators could use materials from the media in their analysis of the media in their classes. Can huge media corporations curb discussion and criticism of their publicly aired materials? Sut Jhally was ready to fight for the free speech rights of media analysts, but MTV withdrew its suit against Dreamworlds because they thought the publicity associated with the case would cut their ratings too much)

MTV began when record companies wanted to use TV to advertise their products.

Main issue presented in film:

• Who gets to tell the stories in our culture?
• Whose perspective is used to frame the stories?
• Who is not represented or silenced in the stories?
• Whose perspectives do not get told?

Sut Jhally (SJ) argues that MTV is full of stories of sexuality, especially female sexuality, that are told from the perspective of adolescent male fantasy (a young male "dreamworld"). These stories present images of femininity that are very narrow:

• Women are in a constant state of arousal
• Women get in and out of clothes constantly
• Women are decorative objects (there is little to indicate that they are human)
• Women are interchangeable
• Women are meant to be viewed (and the gaze is based on a male vantage point and the        camera is a tool of voyeurism)
• Women consist of isolated combinations of body parts presented so as to destroy subjectivity among women

Even when women tell stories there is pressure to have the themes fit within existing "story lines"

SJ argues that there is nothing inherently negative about the story lines or the techniques used to
present them.  But he does ask the question, "What affect do these stories have on the social construction of reality?" Do men of any age use the stories to understand their relationships with women in the real world?

SJ uses "The Accused" to bring home his question in powerful terms. He then argues that these stories in MTV and in the media generally do not CAUSE violence against women, but they create a cultural space in which such violence is seen as possible and in which it is normalized.

SJ focuses almost exclusively on stories about sexuality. But he suggests that there are other stories about social class and welfare, etc. in the media.

CENSORSHIP: SJ is clearly against censorship. In fact, he argues that what we see is the result of "market censorship." He argues that what is needed is less censorship and more diversity and
honesty in the stories that are told. This would enable people to deconstruct stories in the Dreamworld in critical fashion. He calls for "democratic access" to positions of storytelling in our society, but he never outlines how that might occur.

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