The Play Theory of Mass Communication
(1987 edition)
(orig. 1967)
Parts of this book are veritably littered with sigmas and derivatives, reflecting an avowed "preoccupation" with methodology. The layperson nonetheless can find their way into Stephenson's basic thesis rather easily by way of some of his own public opinion research, which he shares.
e.g. Senator McCarthy's approval rating was virtually unaffected by his censure.
e.g. In the U.S. Stephenson finds there are two completely contradictory definitions of "democracy" each of which perseveres in rather total ignorance of the other.
Tragically, as in so many such inquiries from this era of social science, the total political polarization of the 2010s is already fully visible, awaiting only the structural evolution which would enable it to ramify into full-blown feedback loops. It is already visible, and I think Mr. Methodology also explains it quite well.
Without having to deny that inner-direction has its roots in history the facts for other-direction suggest more immediate causal agencies. ... New Yorkers moving to California or Texas want to behave like everyone around them; they do so in terms of the trivia of modern consumer goods—cars, homes, dress, barbecue pits, swimming pools, and the rest—not out of any sense of shame but out of dissonance, followed by self-expansion, self-respect, and self-expression. They change their ways, and their social character follows suit. Whether their deeper value-systems fall in line as well is another matter; our own view is that it would be well to recognize that early internalizations remain untouched.
(p. 83)
In short, Stephenson proposes that
Inner-direction, as it is described by Riesman, is dependent upon inner beliefs, upon early internalizations which fix the person's character. ... Other-direction, instead, is much more in relation to mass communication—to what is "popular," to new experiences, to fads, and so on.And again,
(p. 80)
There are some who look with an uneasy eye at these mass pleasures; behind them they see the lurkings of "hidden persuasion" and "tyranny over the mind"... Mankind, these critics feel, is being painlessly put to sleep... This, it seems to me, is a jaundiced view. I suggest, instead, that often it is the very beliefs that mass communication cannot change that keep mankind out of step with the times.I wonder if today we do not suffer much cognitive dissonance on this last point, despite the fact that this is exactly what we think we see when we look across to the other side of the present political divide. In any case, such a conclusion permits neither of the extreme positions on Media Effects to which we have become unhappily accustomed.
(p. 1)
Advertising has been blamed for social effects that belong, instead, to the contrary principles of social control.
(p. 203)
...why television can sell soap but not, it seems, citizenship. The reason lies in the part played by mediating mechanisms in advertising; in between the advertisement on the one hand and the consumer who reads it there are the facilitating factors of supermarkets, shopping habits, and the ready availability of spending money which make it relatively easy for a consumer to be "sold" a new brand of soap. It is the absence of such mediating institutions that makes it very difficult for a society to "sell" citizenship.Or indeed, for band directors to sell practice.
(p. 204)
When a new band teacher talks about building a culture within their program, they are talking about appealing to students' other-direction, i.e. appealing to the part of students that is susceptible to behavioral change. I suspect that even the humble high school band I passed through had several kids join up mostly to be with their friends; whereas to build a culture means kids practice because their friends practice. At that point, in theory, we are freed from the tyranny of the social control method. But this is not so easy to achieve. I think most band directors and even a majority of parents and administrators probably understand why, but few are willing to reckon with the loss of mediating mechanisms here, probably because the fact of such loss calls into question what is known, often pejoratively, as the relevance of high school band, of Mozart, of the bassoon, etc. And, if indeed we create what we need, then the fact that said mediating mechanisms have not been replaced probably means that most people's inner-direction can direct itself just fine without them. That is just reality. Add to this the fact that the usual extrinsic-benefit suspects are not exclusive to music, and you have a situation where music education can no longer be prescribed on universal grounds. Where it can be prescribed, though, is where its benefits are unique and exclusive to music; and so the task remains of exposing (ideally) all children to some version of music education, and then figuring out who really needs it.
In this latter task the lack of mediating mechanisms is no hinderance, and it might even be preferable. In these (admittedly rather stilted and academic) terms, one might observe that the reason most every kid in the 1993-94 Anwatin Middle School 6th grade beginning band was fired up to play saxophone or drums but tepid-to-frigid on all of the other options is due to the abundance of mediating mechanisms favoring the image (if not the reality) of the saxist or drummer, whereas the euphonium and the euphoniumist, e.g., enjoyed no such support.
This is too obvious of course, but it makes explicit the analogy I am attempting to salvage here, at which point various other observations Stephenson makes here could be illuminating for music educators in some less-obvious ways.
From Sutton-Smith's introduction (1987):
According to Stephenson the reader or the viewer of mass communication conducts a conversation with himself or uses his information for conversation with others. He participates in the community of gossip and value that is represented in the various media, and from all of this he gets a sense of self enhancement and improved morale. But his mind is constantly at work freely translating or transforming this material according to his personal predispositions. The play of his fantasy and his wishes are at work. This is an active and constructive constitution of the self. It is not just an escape, although it may be that as well.I agree that this does happen. I don't see at all how we should simply assume that it is always happening, as Cultural Studies people seem to assume.
(p. xiv)
Unlike much of the rest of his work or ideological life, in this case the person is under less control. He can select the programs or the media he wishes or he can tune them out.What if (s)he wants to create them?
More to the point, what if (s)he only ever wants to select and has no desire to create nor any awareness of the concept of creating and what distinguishes it from selecting? What if (s)he got through high school band without ever being asked to create, nor even to select for that matter? And/or what if (s)he subsequently believed (t)he(i)r 1980s-bred Cultural Studies professor that selecting and creating are morally and functionally equivalent and anyone who says they're not is a fascist? And, tragedy of tragedies, what if (s)he believed this precisely because it was consonant with so many early internalizations which are bound to remain untouched?
It seems to me, in such cases, and even in the face of the significant limitations already given, that it's time to get just slightly prescriptive, judgy, universalistic, etc., to go rather 1940s on shit vis-a-vis what this means for such people, why it could (potentially) mean badly for them individually, and why it (probably, and in either case) means worse for their social surroundings than it does for them. Per Stephenson, we cannot expect a social control regime to prevail here, and it would be well to recognize that early internalizations remain untouched by any such efforts. But if New Yorkers can get into grilling just by moving to Texas, maybe we can start by making high school band into a more Creative State. And maybe then we can at least do some good on behalf of the aforementioned social surroundings.
Jorn, modified: "
(Tuning out would then be...tertiary? Now that is some thin ludic gruel indeed.)
6 comments:
Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)
"As an agency of social discipline, the school, together with other elements in the tutelary complex, both reflects and contributes to the shift from authoritative sanctions to psychological manipulation and surveillance—the redefinition of political authority in therapeutic terms—and to the rise of a professional and managerial class that governs society not by upholding authoritative moral standards but by defining normal behavior and by invoking allegedly non-punitive, psychiatric sanctions against deviance."
(p. 49)
Lasch's distinction here between
"authoritative sanctions"
and
"psychological manipulation"
somewhat mirrors Stephenson's "social control" and "convergent selectivity."
One problem, though, with any preference for the old ways of
"authoritative moral standards"
as against the more superficial, "therapeutic" turn of
"defining normal behavior"
is that, if Stephenson is correct, the window for begetting such internalizations is, to use his word, early. And short. And when it's gone, it's gone.
In that case there would be, unfortunately, no sense in admonishing adults (or even adolescents) with didactic moralism; rather, the "therapeutic" way would be the only hope for behavioral change once early internalizations have solidified. And, it would be worth asking whether any exceptional case of mid-life moral enlightenment or personal reform in fact represents a true reversal on the deepest level of internalized "social control," or whether in fact it represents a person escaping from a social environment which is antithetical to their early internalizations into an environment where these internalizations are more the norm among the cohort.
Later on, Lasch observes that "conscience (as distinguished from the superego) originates not so much in the "fear of God" as in the urge to make amends." (259) This strikes me as a profound and timely point; but I'm not sure how "mak[ing] amends" can be operative anytime but after the fact, in which case we are squarely in the "therapeutic" zone whether we like it or not.
I meant to add
(reiterating a point made here)
that
Stephenson's take on Riesman's typology rather confounds the nature-nurture question, and perhaps threatens to supersede it. The point being, there may well be aspects of our personalities that are almost wholly products of "nurture," and yet we had absolutely no choice in or awareness of their formation.
Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)
"Like sex, drugs, and drink, [sports] obliterate awareness of everyday reality, but they do this not by dimming awareness but by raising it to a new level of concentration."
"Games quickly lose their charm when forced into the service of education, character development, or social improvement."
(p. 100)
"the essence of play lies in taking seriously activities that have no purpose, serve no utilitarian ends."
(p. 109)
"The spirit of early bourgeois society was deeply antithetical to play."
(p. 111)
"the degradation of play originates in the degradation of work... it is precisely when the play element disappears from law, statecraft, and other cultural forms that men turn to play not to witness a dramatic reenactment of their common life but to find diversion and sensation."
(p. 123)
(more)
Alex Inkeles
"Making Men Modern: On the Causes and Consequences of Individual Change in Six Developing Countries"
(1969)
[216]
"Our experience with the factory enables us to answer the secondary question posed for this section. Since men generally enter the factory as more or less matured adults, the effects observed to follow upon work in it clearly are late socialization effects. Our results indicate that substantial changes can be made in a man's personality or character, at least in the sense of attitudes, values, and basic orientations, long after what are usually considered the most important formative years. The experience of factory work is, of course, not the only form which this late socialization takes. It may come in the form of travel or migration, by exposure to the media of mass communication, or through later life in the city for men who grew up in the countryside. We therefore combined our explanatory variables into two main sets, one representing early socialization experience—as in formal schooling—and the other reflecting late socialization experiences—as in one's adult occupation. We may observe (from table 2) that the late socialization experiences take out a very respectable place for themselves in the competition to account for the observed variance in individual
[217]
modernization scores. In five countries the set of late socialization variables explained as much or more of the variance in modernization scores as did the combined early socialization variables, each set explaining between one-fourth and one-third of the variance.
"In India the early socialization variables were decidedly more powerful—accounting for 52 percent as against 31 percent of the variance explained by the late socialization variables. But in absolute terms, the late experiences are still doing very well. All in all, we take this to be impressive evidence for the possibility of bringing about substantial and extensive changes in the postadolescent personality as a result of socialization in adult roles."
[emailed to self, 16 December 2021]
Paul and Percival Goodman
Communitas
(1960)
[127] "The goods must be on display; this is possible only in a big city. And the chief motivation to get those goods for oneself is not individual, the satisfaction of instinct and need; it is social. It is imitation and emulation, and these produce a lively demand. At first, perhaps, it is "mass comforts" that satisfy city folk—these show that one belongs; but then it is luxuries, for these give what Veblen used to call the "imputation of superiority,"...
"Aristotle said long ago, The appetite of man is infinite—it is infinitely suggestible."
[129] "[the class of goods] which have been produced but are not consumed in the enjoyment. These are all the monuments of form and truth in the arts and sciences. Essentially not marketable at all, but their current presentation according to the prevailing fashion is marketable. Such goods are often wrongly called the culture of society, but it is rather the popular arts and journalism which are the culture, the principle of social cohesion. The great arts are humane, nearer to nature than culture: their social dress—their popularity in their day—soon becomes dated and "period." To signalize this difference, just as their enjoyment does not consume them, so their production is often distinguished by the name of creation."
[191] "Let whatever is essential for life and security be considered by itself, and since this is a political need in an elementary sense, let political means be used to guarantee it. But the rest of the economy, providing wealth, power, luxury, emulation, convenience, interest and variety, has to do with varying human wishes and satisfactions, and there is no reason for government to intervene in it in any way. The divided economy has, therefore, the twofold advantage that it directly provides the essential thing that is in jeopardy, without having to underwrite something else; and it restricts the intervention of government to this limited sphere."
GEORGE LAKOFF
"What Orwell Didn't Know About the Brain, the Mind, and Language"
"Just by functioning with your body in the world as a child, you learn at least hundreds of simple "conceptual metaphors"... For example, Quantity is understood in terms of Verticality (More is Up),... Why? Because every day of your life, if you pour water into a glass, the level rises. ... In your brain, regions for registering verticality and quantity are activated together during such experiences. ...
"We have high-level moral worldviews—modes of reasoning about what's right and wrong—that govern whole areas of reason, both conscious and unconscious, and link up whole networks of frames and metaphors.
"Cultural narratives are special cases of such frames. They stretch over time and define protagonists and antagonists... They define right and wrong, and come with emotional content. ...we all live out cultural narratives—with all their emotionality and moral sensibility. We even define our identities by the narratives we live by.
"What are words? Words are neural links between spoken and written expressions and frames, metaphors, and narratives. When we hear the words, not only their immediate frames and metaphors are activated, but also all the high-level worldviews and associated narratives—with their emotions—are activated. Words are not just words—they activate a huge range of brain mechanisms. Moreover, words don't just activate neutral meanings; they are often defined relative to conservative framings. And our most important political words—freedom, equality, fairness, opportunity, security, accountability—name "contested concepts," concepts with a common shared core that is unspecified, which is then extended to most of its cases based on your values. Thus conservative "freedom" is utterly different than progressive "freedom," as I showed in detail in Whose Freedom."
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