Marxism & Pluralism Essay

The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. Discuss the arguments for and against this view.

New and digital media has without a doubt transformed the general feelings, attitudes and beliefs on a subject within society which allowed audiences to exemplify a sense of power when consuming and producing media products and there is sufficient evidence that can dispute these developments. in this essay I will be assessing Marxist and Pluralist values and argue whether or not audiences are more influential in terms of the new/digital media’s involvement that has affected their consumption and production.

A Marxist perspective would argue that the so-called information revolution has done little to benefit audiences or to subvert the established power structures in society. Far from being a great leveler (Krotoski) as many have claimed, it has merely helped to reinforce the status quo by promoting dominant ideologies. The most popular news website in the UK by a considerable margin is the 'mail online', which receives more than 8 million hits every month and is continuing to expand rapidly – with forecasts that it will make 100 million or more in digital revenues in the next three years. Similar to its tabloid print addition, the website takes a Conservative, right-wing perspective on key issues around gender, sexuality, and race and audiences a pair to passively accept what did Marxist theorist, Gramsci called a hegemonic view. When one of their chief columnist, Jan Moir, write a homophobic article about the death of Stephen Gately in 2009 there were Twitter and Facebook protests but, ultimately, they did not change their editorial direction of the gatekeepers controlling the newspaper.

A Pluralist perspective would argue that society is classless and consequently argue that audiences are more powerful in terms of consumption and production enabling them to ‘confirms, accommodate, challenge or reject’ (Gurevitch). The pluralist viewpoint links to the uses of gratification theory by Blumer and Katz (1974) who came up with an audience theory maintaining those media audiences are dynamic and make conscious choices about the way they consume the media. Audience uses the media for personal identity where they find themselves being reflected in texts of learning behaviors and values, as well as using the media for surveillance which is using the medium of information which is useful for living such as reading the news all looking at the weather forecast. The Arab Spring protest is a suitable approach to understanding the pluralist approach as individual processes due to unemployment, rising prices and privatization of the state; this shows how individuals are protesting against the elite and therefore as on the same level as them. Another useful example of studying the pluralist approach for audiences and the media would be citizen journalism as audiences have now become 'users' who have become publishers where they create their own content. This gets audiences the power to come up their own news stories without having any gatekeepers or having the 'elite' control them; 'the mutualisation or sneezes a very powerful idea that particularly writes for the Guardian, as our relationship with our readers is very strong. We can use the community of our readers in ways we would not have been able to in the past' (Rushbridger).

To conclude, it is challenging to dispute that the institutions and conglomerate leaders have maintained a substantial amount of power through new and digital media technologies but in fact, most of the evidence suggests that the plural approach to argument is more prominent and there have been an array of developments that have empowered audiences.