Does the image dominate contemporary mass media society and does it matter?
Combined with semiotic signification, the images of contemporary mass media, in the form of advertising, cinema, television and print media form a nexus of meaning with the viewer at the centre. As suggested by Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen in Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (1982), such images become both reflective and creative, at once providing a mirror on and a foundation for the simulacra of modernity such as lifestyle and consumer aspirations.
The definition of an increasingly hot universe of media and the deliberate manipulation of its message means that the image becomes ever more important, as Stuart Ewen asserts in PR! A History of Spin (1996):
Against the memory of mass mobilizations and the immediate thundercloud of public ultimatums, television was not simply inspiring as a technology for communicating ideas. It was also a powerful social metaphor. It accentuated the idea of public life as a spectacle, a thing to watch more than to participate in. (Ewen, 1996: 388)
Through increasingly complex and sophisticated technologies, the image becomes not only a reflector of public life but also a shaper of it. Baudrillard examines the paradoxes of reality television in his essay The Precession of the Simulacra (2004), whereby the images seen and experienced no longer become distinctly separate from the viewer but are part of an obscene symbiosis that entails a deterritorialising of the psyche. We no longer invest our desires in objects and images, says Baudrillard, but are instead part of a Gestalt with the image. It is impossible to separate the image, the media and the society.
Of course, one facet of the rise of broadcast technology and the importance of the image is the degree to which global communication is possible. Concepts such as Mass Society theory (McQuial, 1991: 64) and a global media mean that, more and more, communication is being conducted pan-nationally. In a post-Fordist society, where transglobal audiences demand a homogenous output, the image becomes an important tool in areas such as marketing and advertising, as John Fahy argues in his article The Challenges of Global marketing (1998): The world has changed due to the influence of technology and communications creating markets which show strong commonalities across national boundaries. The global reach of powerful brand names such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Mercedes, Gucci, Yves St Laurent, and so on are pointed as evidence of this trend. (Fahy, 1998: 197)
As Douglas Holt states in How Brands Become Icons (2004), however, these global brands are also those that can be easily encapsulated into and through an image. The Golden arches of McDonald’s, the insignia of Mercedes and YSL, the swoosh of Nike, the colours of Coke, each create, through intense image making, not only what Holt calls an image based iconic brand (Holt, 2004: 1) but manage to do this across borders and boundaries, both linguistic and cultural. We can return here to Barthes’ notions of neologisms in the sense that, for the modern consumer, the linguistic signs ‘Nike’, ‘McDonalds’ or ‘YSL’ become as much images as the swoosh, the golden arches or the logo. Language, in Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ (1989:1) becomes secondary to the sign that is capable of conveying a whole gamut of non-linguistics inferences without the need for translation.
As we have seen, the image and its viewer stand at the center of a network of influences and meanings in contemporary mass media. Not only does it cross cultural boundaries, a key element in transglobal marketing, but also through developments in technologies and theoretical concepts of semiotics, it has gained an ever-increasing importance as a carrier of ideology and generator of revenue. We can add to this, also, that as Mathew Kerbel suggests in If It Bleeds, It Leads (2000), the images of television and film, especially, consistently blur our notions of reality and our relationship to it: We rely on television. Television helps us make sense of the world. It helps us figure out what’s important. It helps us get close to people we would otherwise never meet. It shows us events that we would otherwise never experience. (Kerbel, 2000: xi)
The tripartite process we have been looking at here; the validation of semiotics as an interpretive science, the rise in image intensive technologies and the necessity for global communication and marketing, all combine to, not only produce a sense that the image dominates contemporary culture but that it is contemporary culture and in this sense it has enormous value and worth. Images not only shape the ways in which we experience the world but, as we have seen, affect the ways that we interact with it, what we eat, how we look, what we think.
The image, in Bartesian terms, is the carrier of the myths that we continually invest in both culturally and psychologically and it is this that has been subverted by, not only marketers and admen, but by film makers, television producers, graphic artists and the host of other creators of the modern lexicon of images. The speeding up information dissemination in the form of image technologies and the greater value such information is imbued with will inevitably, asserts Todd Gitlin, involve an alteration and evolution in the human subject: The onrush of the media torrent the speed of its images on the screen, its sentences on the page, and its talk over the air, as well as the quickness with which images move through space and the velocity of its product cycles all speeds depend on an overall social speed-up and are but its most visible features. (Gitlin, 2001:103)
References
Barthes, Roland (1982), Selected Writings, (London: Fontana)
Barthes, Roland (1973), Mythologies, (London: Paladin)
Barthes, Roland, (1977), Image, Music, Text, (London: Fontana)
Baudrillard., Jean (2004), Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)
Baudrillard, Jean (1985) The Ecstasy of Communication, published in Foster, Hal (ed), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto)
Culler, Jonathan (1985), Saussure, (London: Fontana)
De Saussure, Ferdinand (1991), Course in General Linguistics, published in Rice, Philip and Waugh, Patricia (eds), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader, (London: Edward Arnold)
Ewen, Stuart and Ewen, Elizabeth (1982), Channels of Desire, (London: McGraw Hill)
Ewen, Stuart (1988), All Consuming Images: The Politcs of Style in Contemporary Culture, (London: Basic Books)
Ewen, Stuart (1996), PR! A Social History of Spin, (London: Basic Books)
Fahy, John (1998), The Challenges of Global Marketing, published in Egan, Colin and Thomas, Michael, The CIM Handbook of Strategic Marketing, (London: Butterworth Heinneman)
Gabler, Neal (1998), Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, (New York: Alfred Knopf)
Gitlin, Todd (2001), Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives, (New York: Metropolis Books)
Hoffman, Robert and Palermo, David (1991), Cognition and the Symbolic Processes: Applied and Ecological Perspectives, (London: Lawrence Erlbaum)
Holt, Douglas (2004), How Brands Become Icons, (Boston: Harvard Business School Press)
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Kerbel, Mathew (2000), If It Bleeds, It Leads: An Anatomy of Television News, (London: Westview Press)
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Tags: Barthes, Baudrillard, consciousness, culture, film, images, mass media, media society, TV
