Do the press see their readerships more as citizens or as consumers?¹
Tag Archives: consumer
Number 6
Posted by on Oct 16, 2014
The philosopher Jürgen Habermas has argued that modern capitalist society has seen the decline of ‘the public sphere’ and that the mass media encourage a view of people as consumers rather than as citizens. Research into some British Newspapers suggests that Habermas is right. Read more of this post
The Magic System
Posted by on Oct 14, 2014
ADVERTISING: THE MAGIC SYSTEM¹ – Raymond Williams
In the last hundred years […] advertising has developed from the simple announcements of shopkeepers and the persuasive arts of a few marginal dealers into a major part of capitalist business organization. This is important enough, but the place of advertising in society goes far beyond this commercial context. It is increasingly the source of finance for a whole range of general communication, to the extent that in 1960 our majority television service and almost all our newspapers and periodicals could not exist without it. Further, in the last forty years and now at an increasing rate, it has passed the frontier of the selling of goods and services and has become involved with the teaching of social and personal values; it is also rapidly entering the world of politics. Advertising is also, in a sense, the official art of modern capitalist society: it is what ‘we’ put up in ‘our’ streets and use to fill up to half of ‘our’ newspapers and magazines: and it commands the services of perhaps the largest organized body of writers and artists, with their attendant managers and advisers, in the whole society. Since this is the actual social status of advertising, we shall only understand it with any adequacy if we can develop a kind of total analysis in which the economic, social and cultural facts are visibly related. We may then also find, taking advertising as a major form of modern social communication, that we can understand our society itself in new ways. Read more of this post
