Messages and meanings

Ideology is the final connotation of the totality of connotations of the sign or the context of signs. (Umberto Eco, 1971, p. 83)Interest in and discussion of the mass media has come from a variety of theoretical and disciplinary sources. Within these wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory approaches, the analysis of media messages has been seen as of varying importance. American concern with mass communications has tended to focus on a model of communication which stressed the relationships between the individuals involved. In this tradition the communication process was conceived of as a relationship between a sender of messages on the one hand and a receiver of messages on the other. The mass communication process merely converted the receiver from being one to being many individuals. Given this image of the workings of the mass media, the attention of researchers was directed at the psychological dispositions of the producers of mass media messages and at the effects of the message on the members of the audience. The analysis of the meaning of media messages came to be subsumed in these areas of study. Moreover, early Marxist studies of the media, whilst based on very different theoretical premises, tended to be more concerned with the overall ideological role of the mass media in capitalist societies and less concerned with the meaning of and the production of meaning within specific media messages. When such questions were addressed they were inflected with a form of cultural pessimism. Members of the Frankfurt School, for example, attempted to show that mass culture, and particularly, American mass culture with which they had acquired a forced familiarity, was a debased culture. Adorno and Horkheimer (1977) suggested that the culture of a society under monopoly capitalism was peculiarly repressive in that while bourgeois culture offered a better and more valuable world realizable by every individual from within, mass culture produced a more totalitarian state in which even the illusory advantage of inner freedom of the individual was lost.