The social sciences have arguably been riddled with what Jan Nederveen Pieterse has termed “boundary fetishism” (2001: 220). The ontology of hybridity constitutes an important and suggestive critique of that thinking. I believe this ontology provides a fruitful approach to understanding the interactions between older and newer media logics in contemporary politics and society and it can help shed new light on the relative power of actors in a media system. Attempts to control, police, and redraw boundaries, and the power struggles that criss-cross domains are important defining features of contemporary political communication. For every example of a boundary between older and newer media in the communication of politics, there are examples of that boundary being transgressed. Throughout this book I show how this ontology may illuminate important aspects of the evolving media systems of Britain and the United States.
Power and System
I now turn to discuss how this ontology of hybridity informs three further core themes of this book. First, the power relations among political actors, media actors, and publics associated with older and newer media. Second, the idea of a system. And third, the idea of media logics.
The concept of power and the concept of a social system have each been central to the social sciences and this is not the place to rehearse these long-running debates. But working on the basis that evidence and theoretical hunches coevolve interdependently as one moves forward with any research, it is important that I sketch out the theoretical assumptions that I have found useful when writing this book. Throughout and in the concluding chapter I revisit these ideas as I reflect on the cases and examples.
As I argued in the previous chapter, a useful starting point for studying media and politics is Denis McQuail’s deceptively simple definition of a media system as “simply all relevant media” (McQuail, 1992: 96). I say “deceptively simple” because, while McQuail’s definition may have been reasonably self-evident during the late period of mass communication toward the end of the twentieth century, “simply all relevant media” has a more challenging edge to it in the highly diverse media system in which we now find ourselves.
Any understanding of power must involve an examination of the relationships between social actors, but less obviously it must also encompass the relationships between social actors and technologies, because technologies enable and constrain agency in the hybrid networks and sociotechnical systems identified by actor–network theory, as I discussed above. As the Weberian tradition in the social sciences has maintained, the exercise of power must always involve an interactive social relationship of some sort. However, as Steven Lukes has argued, these interactions may be understood very broadly as the social relations that create the cultural and ideational contexts in which the essential precondition of power—the construction of meaning—takes place (Lukes, 2004). But only by exploring concrete interactions and exchanges among social actors, and how media are used in and come to shape those interactions and exchanges, can we get inside the power relations that prevail in a given setting (Blumler & Gurevitch, 2005). The many and diverse interactions among social actors may aggregate to constitute systems, as David Easton’s influential approach in political science has maintained (Easton, 1957, 1965).
There is nothing rigid or mechanical about seeing social life as based upon systems. It is not necessary to suggest, along with functionalist sociologists such as Talcott Parsons, that there is a single, overarching social system that integrates all social functions to produce a stable order (1951). Nor is it necessary to assume that there is a single “system level” to which all aspects of social life are said to conform. Indeed, unlike a related concept common in the social sciences, “regime,” system may often connote flexibility, adaptability, and evolutionary change emerging from the sum of social interactions. Regime, on the other hand, connotes hierarchy, fixity, and asymmetries of power in social relations. Systems will often exhibit these features, but they may also exhibit horizontality, fluidity, and equality. And, as Manuel Castells has argued, institutionalized power relations frequently meet with “counter-power,” as the social movements that are increasingly built upon networked communication come to challenge state and corporate institutions (Castells, 2007).
We may extend this analysis further. Following Brian McNair, I assume that all systems are characterized by varying degrees of inherent complexity, instability, and messiness. Systems contain many nonlinear elements and often undergo long, unpredictable, and chaotic periods of change. As McNair says, systems “exhibit structure, but of an irregular kind. Communication systems are never in exactly the same place twice” (McNair, 2006: xiv). Systems are based on competition, conflicts over resources, and desires for preeminence, but systems analysis also carries an assumption that a great deal of interdependence exists among the salient actors. Actors compete and some gain the upper hand, creating what Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye have termed relations of “asymmetrical interdependence” (Keohane & Nye, 1989). But even the most powerful in any system must cooperate with those who are less powerful, in the pursuit of collective goals. Cooperation of some sort is required for the maintenance of a system, for the production of useful social goods and the authoritative allocation of resources, however broadly those resources may be defined (Easton, 1957: 386–387). This sometimes gives those with fewer obvious resources the power to act in ways that force adaptation among those who seemingly had greater resources before specific interactions began. And as the pluralist approach of Robert Dahl and many others has maintained, those who are powerful in one social field may not necessarily be powerful across all social fields (Dahl, 1961).
A recent twist on these ideas of emergence and interdependence is David Singh Grewal’s theory of “network power.” Power, Grewal argues, may be based on simple sovereignty in the Weberian mould, which is understood as the power of an individual or group to compel others to do something they would rather not do. This power is often but not always backed by legitimized forms of collective decision-making. On the other hand, power may also be based upon what Grewal terms “relations of sociability,” which are defined as “the accumulation of decentralized, individual decisions that, taken together, nonetheless conduce to a circumstance that affects the entire group” (Grewal, 2008: 9). These relations of sociability increasingly exist in network form, but these networks are not entirely chaotic and spontaneous. Over time, networks come to rely on emergent standards, which are shared norms and practices that facilitate cooperation. If we assume that in any given social field the value of a network is directly related to its size (because larger networks grant access to greater amounts of resources like money, communication, audiences, social support, or whatever the relevant resource happens to be) we may also generalize that social actors will want to belong to those larger networks. (The relevant networks in a given social field may be comparatively large or comparatively small—size is not an absolute but a relative concept.) It is the social value of the norms and practices in the larger network that make individuals want to join it. By joining, one gains access to the resources, or the “network power” that resides in the cooperative relationships facilitated by those different norms and practices. This is why individuals constantly adapt their norms and practices to join networks that will provide them with advantages of varying kinds. There are many examples of this process in action in this book. Actors constantly mobilize but also constantly traverse the logics of older and newer media to advance their values and interests.
Conceiving of power as relational, as evolving from a series of interactive exchanges among those who are articulated by chains of dependence and interdependence allows us to move away from abstract, structural prejudgments and generalizations about the specific categories of people who are supposedly powerful or the specific roles that people must supposedly always perform if they are to be powerful. It also enables us to move beyond abstract statistical approaches to media systems. Instead, it suggests a focus on the diversity of mechanisms and
behaviors that enable power to be exercised in discrete contexts (Reese, 1991). In this sense, the idea of a system as I use it in this book also involves the idea of “practice” as it has recently been elucidated by media scholar Nick Couldry. As Couldry argues, “A practice approach starts not with media texts or media institutions but from media-related practice in all its looseness and openness. It asks quite simply: what are people (individuals, groups, institutions) doing in relation to media across a whole range of situations and contexts? How is people’s media-related practice related, in turn, to their wider agency?” (2012: 37, emphasis in original). Power in a media system might be understood, then, in a non-reductive and multifaceted sense, as the use of resources, of varying kinds, that in any given context of dependence and interdependence enable individuals or collectivities to pursue their values and interests, both with and within different but interrelated media.
Systems are based upon social differentiation; divisions of labor emerge among actors and there is a recognition that the pursuit of goals, especially in important large-scale societal projects like politics, media, or business, for example, cannot be undertaken without some embedded, regular structures for managing cooperation and conflict over time. These structures that make up a system may take the form of organizations, but now, in an era of digital media that are best understood as forms of communication and organization, these structures for cooperation may be relatively loose, spontaneous, and supple, and continually adapted and readapted according to the goals being pursued (Bennett, 2003; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Chadwick, 2007, 2012).
Embedding norms and acting with regularity are important parts of exercising power in any system. But so, too, is acting with timeliness, which is to be distinguished from acting with regularity. Timeliness and the mastery of temporal rhythms are important but surprisingly neglected social forces (but see Adam, 1990; Gershuny, 2000; Goodin, et al., 2008; Rifkin, 1987). Yet attention and the ability to create and to act on information in a timely manner are both key to successful communication. Actors try to master time by shaping its social understandings according to their own values and interests. Actors often flout regularity in order to cause shock and surprise and get ahead of the game. These aspects of temporality and how they are enabled and constrained by different media are on show at many points in this book.
A further key aspect of systems is their continual recreation. Systems must be constructed, enacted, and continuously reenacted, often with incremental modifications, by social actors. With the passing of time, the modifications that emerge from the interactions among actors may amount to the decisive reshaping of a system. As Michael Mann’s macro-historical account of social power has argued, the reshaping of power relations may emerge from direct challenges to existing institutional forms, or it may emerge “interstitially,” from new practices that cannot be fully integrated into the existing institutionalization settlement, but which grow at the edges of existing institutions and in the boundary spaces between those institutions (Mann, 1986: 15).
Systems, then, are always in the process of becoming, as actors simultaneously create and adapt. As Couldry argues, drawing upon the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, a system “generates the conditions under which the practice is itself possible” (2012: 39). Only through analysis of discrete practices and moments of interaction are we able to identify these conditions. They cannot be generated in the abstract or by statistical snapshots but must be illustrated through specific examples of things in flow. In this book, this means analyzing how the technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms associated with older and newer media shape politics.
From Media Logic to Hybrid Media Logics
Identifying how older and newer media shape politics must also involve some basic assumptions about how the practices of media interact with the practices of other social fields. A fruitful concept here is “media logic.” First introduced by sociologists David Altheide and Robert Snow (1979), the concept of media logic was originally developed to identify how the assumptions, norms, and visible artifacts of media, such as templates, formats, genres, narratives, and tropes have come to penetrate other areas of social, economic, cultural, and political life. Peter Dahlgren has usefully condensed the idea of media logic as “the imperatives that shape the particular attributes and ways of doing things within given media and even within specific genres.” This, he argues “pertains to the procedures of selection, form, tempo, informational density, aesthetics, contents, modes of address, and production schedules” (Dahlgren, 2009: 52).
In the media logic perspective, media logic comes to shape the practices of those working outside the media field, and over time the boundaries between media and non-media fields become highly porous. Here I use “field” in the sense articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, to refer to a social category with its own norms and practices that provide the resources (or forms of “capital”)—be they cultural, professional, bureaucratic, emotional, or aesthetic—for exercising power, often in small-scale, everyday contexts (Bourdieu, 1984). Fields are permeable and the logic of media frequently intervenes in other fields. Media treatments of sport, religion, politics, and terrorism, for example, have over time shaped the practices of actors in these respective fields, transforming key aspects of how they behave, blurring the boundaries between media and non-media. In politics, for example, Altheide and Snow have argued that practices derived from entertainment formats have increasingly become “folded” into the production of political news, hence the hybrid formulation “infotainment” (Altheide & Snow, 1992: 466). Lance Bennett has drawn attention to the growth of dramatic soundtracks and “action movie editing” in television’s reporting of war (Bennett, 2005: 175). Over time, those working in other fields become dependent upon media logic and must conform to it in order to access the resource media offer: the ability to communicate with mass publics. As Altheide and Snow pithily explain, “today all social institutions are media institutions” (1991: ix).
Media logic provides a useful approach to understanding the power of media and the power relations within media. It moves us away from accounts that begin from the perspective that media systems and political systems are somehow separate and that the former are largely explained by the characteristics of the latter (though for a greatly nuanced approach see Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Siebert, et al., 1956). Media logic points us toward a different approach, one focused on studying how the discrete interactions between media elites, political elites, and publics create shared understandings and expectations about what constitutes publicly valued information and communication. The who, when, how, and why questions that inform the daily practice of political and media actors evolve over time to create a shared media culture based upon an underlying media logic (Altheide, 2004: 294). This media culture shapes the public’s expectations of what “politics” is. In the long run, it means that those seeking to influence public discourse must adapt their communication strategies to fit the dominant formats required by media logic.
Media logic can explain why political actors and publics often seem to behave in ways that indicate that they have “internalized” the expectations and norms of the media field. The staging of pseudo events designed with favorable media coverage in mind is a classic example of media logic (Boorstin, 1964), but so too are the perpetually evolving yet commonly shared understandings of what constitutes a “good story” or “exciting visuals,” what is “too long” for television or “won’t work on the internet,” and so on. Media logic theory suggests that “effective” political communication comes to be seen as that which taps into embedded social expectations of what makes for “appealing” media coverage in a context of hypercompetition among media. And all of this takes place within a commercial media environment that serves as the primary context within which information about politics is produced and communicated. Media logic theory therefore suggests that we try to understand the processes of sense making that emerge in the daily prac
tices of those in the fields of media and politics; the ongoing decisions about “what goes where” in the construction of mediated political discourse. These are the decisions that shape the emergence and subsequent evolution of media logic.
Despite its obvious strengths, however, the media logic approach has some limitations. It was developed in the era of mass communication, when the dominance of electronic broadcast media was more firmly entrenched than it is today. It also attributed great power to formal media institutions. And while Altheide and Snow observed differences between how print and broadcast media shaped non-media fields, they had in mind a singular media logic that was said to pervade social and political life.
Today, the media environment is far more diverse, fragmented, and polycentric, and new practices have developed out of the rise of digital communication. Lance Bennett has put this in stark terms: the theoretical challenge begins with “the core question of just what we mean by ‘media’ these days” (Bennett, 2003a: 18). This calls for a reappraisal of the idea of media logic and its disaggregation into different competing yet interdependent logics. Writing about news, for example, Mark Deuze has argued that a new logic of “multimedia journalism” emerged in the early 2000s (Deuze, 2004). A further point is that while those in “non-media” fields like politics may have been shaped by media logic, they have in turn acted back on the media field as part of a continual process of mutual adaptation and interdependence. Altheide and Snow maintained that media and culture are reflexive (1992: 466), but these processes of mutual adaptation are arguably neglected in media logic accounts. Thus, while media logic has had an influence on the conduct of politics (as the related literature on “mediatization” has demonstrated (Mazzoleni & Schultz, 1999)) this logic is best seen, not as a force that emanates from media and then acts upon politics, but rather as a force that is co-created by media, political actors, and publics.
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