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Gavin Williamson has been proudly boasting about de-funding #MediaStudies - in this he is of course cheered on by the media *scratches head*
In August they compared it to plumbing. It's so tedious. So let me repeat my August thread -->
In August they compared it to plumbing. It's so tedious. So let me repeat my August thread -->
I see there’s some rage about media studies again. Shouting about how useless it is, comparing it to being an electrician or a plumber. As someone with a City & Guilds in Plumbing & Heating (qualified in 1991) & a PhD in Media Studies (awarded 2019) I have some skin in the game.
Plumbing is of immense value. There is an immediate and tangible benefit to it. Boiler broken? Pipe burst? Drain blocked? Call the plumber, they come and fix it and charge accordingly. They have a skill – intellectual and practical - that many lack. For this, they charge a fee
I went to university as a mature student. I loved it, found it inspiring and life-changing. Both plumbing and Media Studies have immense value to society.
Academic study of the media dates back more than 80 years. There's a wealth of scholarship on the sociological, psychological, cultural & economic dimensions of the media. Newspapers have been around for more than 250 years, the cinema for more than 100 & TV for more than 60.
Media literally ‘mediates’ culture, news media places boundaries & limitations on what constitutes ‘acceptable’ ideological & political discourse. To paraphrase McCombs and Shaw:
“Media cannot tell us what to think (the oft repeated and wrong ‘brainwashing’ thesis) …but it is remarkably successful at telling us what to think about.”
In other words, it shapes the discourse. The idea that we should not recognise, and interrogate these ideas is absurd. It is not possible to disconnect the study of media from the study of power.
For students at a university like mine, most students are attracted to media studies b'cos they want to intellectually examine their place within systems of representation & relations of power. These systems have often not reflected (even denied existence of) their own experience
So yeah, plumbing, engineering all great, we could not do without them, but that value does not reduce the value of studying the power imbalances of our highly mediatised world, and our place within it. The point is, it’s not a zero-sum game.
It's possible to value both plumbing (& other skilled trades) & Media Studies. Plumbing = immediately, tangibly beneficial; Media Studies = a slower burn, a longer-term benefit of media literacy, recognition of, and challenge to, the ways in which power is mediated and reproduced
So of course elite powerful political actors, embedded in structures of power, produced & sustained by an equally powerful (and largely unaccountable) media don’t see the “value” in studying the media(tion) of power. As if they want an examination of their hegemony -- ends
