Lazere-Literacy & Media-Politcal Implications

Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications Author(s): Donald Lazere Source: New Literary History, Vol.
18, No. 2, Literacy, Popular Culture, and the Writing of History (Winter, 1987), pp. 237-255 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468728 . Accessed: 22/08/2013 23:12
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Literacyand Mass Media: The PoliticalImplications

Donald Lazere
about the effectsof mass media, on especiallytelevision, literacyand learning in the United of these efStates,but the momentouspoliticalimplications fectshave not been adequately explored. I will make a case here that the restricted cognitivepatternsinduced by media in audiences also induce predominantlyconservativeattitudes,not in the sense of a reasoned conservativeideology but in the sense of an uncriticalconthat reinforcesthe social status quo and precludes opposiformity here withthe polittional consciousness. I will not deal systematically ical implicationsof other aspects of media such as subject matter, structuralfeaturesincluding formats, formulas,and organizationof and pertime and space, or the makeup of producing institutions I in of neoconservative but have refutation sonnel, argued elsewhere, criticswho claim to find a left-wing bias pervading American media, that in spite of some liberal elements,each of these aspects too has, on balance, a conservativecomplexion.1 and part of the agenda of My own politicalleanings are socialistic, thisessay-by no means a hidden part of it-is a concern thatmedia induced illiteracy is contributing toward the kind of one dimensional societythat Herbert Marcuse warned about, in which the capacityto of a soimagine alternativesto the statusquo, especiallyalternatives I do not cialistic nature, has been systematically destroyed. expect readers to share thisconcernor to agree withall of more conservative myargumentsin its support,but I do hope to gain theirassent to the ultimatethrustof my argument,which is that the low level of cognitive development to which the discourse of American mass media and politicsis presentlygeared is woefullyinadequate for the effective functioning of a democracy,and that scholars of literatureand their own political convictionsmightbe, have a whatever language, to work toward raisingour public discourse to a more responsibility reasoned level of dialogue between the ideologies of the rightand our theoreticalconlies in reorienting left.Part of this responsibility cerns,research,and curriculato include the topicsthatare surveyed, in a verytentative way,in thisessay.
rUCH HAS BEEN WRITTEN
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NEW LITERARY HISTORY
My vantage point on these issues is thatof a scholar in composition and literaturewitha collateral interestin theoryof culture and politics. My explorations here begin with the strikingcongruence between the cognitivepatternsdiscoveredby researchon the influence of televisionviewingon children,a concise summaryof whichis contained in Kate Moody's Growing and by research in Up on Television,2 English on the nature of reading and writingdeficienciesin college between televisionviewing students.Direct cause-effect relationships in childhood and reading and writing skills,especiallyin college stubut the similarity to verify of patterns dents,are difficult empirically, is too obvious to ignore. Mina Shaughnessy,a pioneer researcherof college remedial writingstudents,found their most common cogniin concentrating tive traitsto be the following:difficulties and sustainingan extended line of thoughtin reading and writing (including in thematic,symbolic,or propositionaldevelopment); lack of facility analyticand synthetic reasoning; deficienciesin reasoning back and forthfrom the concrete to the abstract,the personal to the imperand in perceivingirony,ambisonal, and the literalto the figurative, and of of view.3 guity, multiplicity points The similarity between these patternsand those induced by television viewingin childrenextends further to findingsin several other fields of scholarship, including (1) studies by cognitive-developlike Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Wilmental psychologists liam Perryof the cognitivetraits associated withlower stagesof moral and psychological studiesof oral historical (2) reasoning proficiency;4 culture and discourse;5 (3) studies in social versus writing-oriented psychologyand political socializationdealing with the authoritarian and (4) sociological accounts of a "cultureof poverty";7 personality;6 of such as that Basil Bernstein and Claus research (5) sociolinguistic codes and cognitiveoperations Mueller finding"restricted" linguistic in lower social classes, compared to the "elaborated" codes more common to the middle and upper classes.8 (The problematicdefinition of class involved in the last three groups of studies will be discussed later.) This essay will not deal directlywith literature.It should be evident, however,thatthe issues discussed here have the highestsignificance for the futureof literature and its study.The cognitivecapacities lacking in the individuals studied by Shaughnessy and these researchers in other fields are preciselythose most closely associated withliterature This is a powerfulreaffirmation and literary criticism. of the value of literary studyat all levels of education for promoting cognitive development and critical thinking. Moreover, there are countless valuable connectionsto be made between literaryscholar-
LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA
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ship and recentresearchin the above fields;our criticalconcernsand contribution to studiesin those fields, methods can make a distinctive and such studies in turn presentnew avenues forliterary theoryand research that can contributegreatlyto revitalizingour profession. For example, the methods of reader response research can be apcodes, and poplied to studyingstages of moral reasoning,linguistic liticalattitudesin childrenand adults fromdiffering sociologicalcontrol groups, both in theirreading of literature and in theirreception of televisionand other mass media. To date, however,more studiesalong these lines have been done in compositionthan in literature, though theyare stillat the beginning stages in the formeras well. One study,for instance,conducted by Andrea Lunsford, a followerof Shaughnessy,applied cognitive-developmental stage theories to the teaching of college remedial writers,who, according to Lunsford's research, tend to be fixed in Piaget's egocentricand Kohlberg's conventionalstages of moral reasoning, with correspondinglyauthoritarian,good guys versus bad guys political attitudes.9Lunsford's study accords with many in the behavioral and social sciences findingan explicitor implicitassociation of low levels of literacy and cognitivedevelopmentwithpolitical in the sense of conformist attitudesthatare conservative and authoritarian. The remainder of this essay will examine point by point the linksbetween such conservatism and cognitivedeficiencies.
Oral versus LiterateDiscourse

Historians of literacy,including Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jack Goody, and Ian Watt, have correlated the social origins of written discourse and of analyticreasoning. According to Goody and Watt: In oral societies thecultural tradition is transmitted almost entirely byfaceto-face and changesin itscontent are accompanied communication; bythe homeostatic offorgetting or transforming thoseparts ofthetradition process thatcease to be either or relevant. on theother Literate societies, necessary or transmute thepastin thesameway.Instead, hand,cannot discard, absorb, their members are facedwith recorded versions ofthepastand permanently itsbeliefs; and becausethepastis thussetapartfrom thepresent, historical becomes This in turn and enquiry possible. encourages scepticism; sceptiideas aboutthe cism,notonlyaboutthelegendary past,butaboutreceived universe as a whole.Fromherethenextstepis to see howto buildup and to testalternative and out of thistherearosethekindof logical, explanations: and cumulative intellectual tradition of sixth-century Ionia. The specialized, in thesyllogism, kindsof analysis involved and in theotherforms of logical
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procedure, are clearly dependent upon writing,indeed upon a form of writingsufficiently simple and cursive to make possible widespread and habitual recourse both to the recording of verbal statementsand then to the dissecting of them. It is probable that it is only the analytic process that of sounds and syntax,which writingitselfentails,the writtenformalization makes possible the habitual separatingout into formally distinct units of the various culturalelementswhose indivisible wholeness is the essentialbasis of the "mystical whichLevy-Bruhlregards as characteristic of the participation" of non-literate thinking peoples. (352-53) Marshall McLuhan's benign, superficial predictions about the postliterate age being ushered in by electronic communication fail to consider seriously the prospect of an attendant, universal regression of reasoning capacities. Thomas J. Farrell, finding the same traits in his college remedial English students that Shaughnessy noted, has applied to them Walter J. Ong's intriguing hypothesis that children's cognitive development recapitulates the historical development from oral to literate society.10According to Farrell, remedial students have been blocked in the development of reasoning capacities from those that Vygotsky associated with childhood speech to the more complex ones embodied in writing. Moody's and similar studies indicate precisely the same block in children whose language processing capacities are formed through television to the exclusion of reading and writing. Moody writes: Television's most successfultechniques-short segments,fast action, quick cuts,fades, dissolves-break timeinto perceptualbits.Reading requires perto trackline afterline. Television habituatesthe mind to ceptual continuity short takes, not to the continuity of thoughtrequired by reading. The pace and speed of televisioncause children to be easily distracted;theyare inundated withtoo many messages and cannot stop to make sense of thisconfusion. Focusing and payingattentionto printbecome an unnatural strainfor the conditioned TV viewer.... When human eyes read a line of printtheysee letters-little black marks -one afterthe next in long, straight, parallel lines. To gathermeaning,eyes move fromleftto right.The image on the TV screen is produced and perceived in a completelydifferent way. Pictures exist as a constantly moving field of winkingdots in a see-throughgrid. It's quite possible that left-right eye habitsemployed in reading are unconsciouslyeroded by several hours a day of watching television.The eye and brain functionsemployed in TV partsof the brain than those used in viewinglikelyput demands on different kinds of cognitivedevelopmentat the reading, causing incalculablydifferent expense of reading and writing aptitudes. (63, 67)
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Oral discourse can of course be highly complex and analyticusually when it takes place between already literatespeakers and audiences. Exclusivelyoral-visuallanguage acquisitionin children,howof theirlater developingmore adult, comever, limitsthe probability in either discourse. Beyond the level plex capacities speech or written of children'sprogramming, televisionis obviouslycapable of making intellectualdemands on viewers,as in televisedShakespeare or "Hill StreetBlues," the rare programthatrequires the audience to synthesize motifsout of a mosaic of characters,events,images, and sounds. It is widelyadmittedin the media business,however,that most mass communicationaimed at adults, both in television, radio, records,or film,and in print,is at a literacylevel not much higher than that of children's programming.In order to maximize ratingsand sales of advertised products, commercial media must appeal to the largest possible market,thus to the lowestcommon denominatorof cognitive development. Having an adult populace that is fixed in an infantile mentalityalso conveniently happens to prevent people from becoming very criticalabout either advertised products, the corporations that produce them and those thatown the media, or the whole sociopoliticalorder in which those corporationsplay a centralrole. American politicaldiscourse has regressedfromthe marSimilarly, athon Lincoln-Douglas debates to the glib,attenuatedformatof televised debates, thirty-second spot commercials,and managed press conferences.The professionalconsultantswho developed the format of rapid-fire,"top-forty"stories for local newscastsjustified it by claiming,"People who watch televisionthe most are unread, uneducated, untraveled and unable to concentrateon single subjects more than a minute or two."11William Safire reportsthat when he was a speech writerfor PresidentNixon, Nixon told him,"We sophisticates can listen to a speech for a half hour, but after ten minutes the average guy wants a beer."12 And Howard Jarvis,author of California's notorious tax-cuttingProposition 13, when asked why he spent all of his advertising funds on television rather than newspapers, replied, "People who decide electionsdon't read."13 The crossculturalstudies by Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner of oralityand literacyin present-daysocietiesconclude that in African culturesthatare stillprimarily oral, people's reasoning in oral modes becomes highlysophisticatedtoward meetingthe needs of theirparticularsociety.'4WilliamLabov has reached similarconclusionsin his studies of the black American language and subcultureof the inner An article by Cole and Jerome Bruner, however,argues that city.15 exclusive acquisition of language throughblack dialect and oral cul-
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ture puts black childrenat a disadvantagein schools and otherrealms culof American societydominated by Standard English and written ture.16 This echoes Goody and Watt'sthesisthatsince the beginnings of literatesocieties,access to written language withinthemhas been a social a form of what the French mark of dominant classes, prime "cultural Pierre Bourdieu calls capital."17There may be sociologist somewhatof a tautologyhere in the factthatsociety'srecognitionof or at least standard dialect, as a sign of statusin those who literacy, in those who don't is to some extent an it possess and of inferiority of class there is no denying,however, that in matter bias; arbitrary our society's sophisticated information environment, facility in reading and writingis indispensable for either social domination or effective opposition. Ben Sidran's Black Talk provides an interesting sidelighton this issue.18 American blacks, restrictedsince slavery days to oral disand course, were able to code oppositionalmessages in both the lyrics musical structure of the blues that were indecipherable to the thatoral diswhitemind. Here again, thisconfirms writing-oriented codes, may be highly course, or what Basil Bernsteincalls restricted sophisticatedwithina subculturethough not functionalin the larger culture. The significance of the complex coding in the blues is thatit was the recourse of a dominated group denied access to overt politform. ical communication,especiallyin written There is a clear correspondence in contemporary America of oralityand literacyto hierarchiesof social class and power, although the cause-effectrelationshipis problematic. Oscar Lewis identifies the traitsof oral culture,such as the lack of a strongsense of past and futurereferredto by Goody and Watt,withthose of the culture of In regard to mass media, studies of the class makeup of poverty.19 televisionviewersshow that,above the level of the underclasswho are too poor and alienated to own televisions, poorer and less educated the most are most credulous about what they and people watch culture of television is bound to reinforcethe Thus the oral watch.20 oral culture of poverty. Furthermore, as John Fiske and John points out, those who produce television Hartley'sReading Television come from the dominant,literateclasses.21(One hears about usually televisionand advertisingexecutiveswho refuse to let theirchildren watch televisionlest it rot theirminds.) In thissegmentof class relationships,then, literacyrepresentsnotjust culturalcapital but social control,withdangerous potentialforpropagandisticmanipulationof viewers. confirmthat the informationprocessing inFinally,psychologists volved in watching televisionis a passive cognitiveoperation com-
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pared to the active mental effortnecessary to decode writtenlanreinforces the absence of audience interaction guage.22This passivity with broadcasters and of control over media institutions and massmediated politics.All these aspects of oralityin media transmission to a mood of anomic, resignedaccepand audiences, then,contribute tance of powerlessnessand submissionto the statusquo.
Egocentrismand Sociocentrism
of the televisionworld for the As Moody suggests,the substitution real world impedes cognitivedevelopmentfromwhat Piaget calls the in psychoanalytic terms-to the recipegocentric-or "narcissistic" rocal stage in which mature object-relationsare established. The of culturalactivity-plays and films(now ever-increasing privatizing even pornographic ones) viewed at home rather than in a theater, music heard on radio, records,or televisionratherthan in a concert hall, televisedsports,and so on-leads toward the solipsismof Jerzy Kosinski's vidiot in Being There.The resultinginhibitionof normal ego formationperpetuateschildlikedependency on parental and political authority.The egocentriccognitivestage is also most susceptible to ethnocentricand to what Piaget terms sociocentricbiases, hence to chauvinisticpropaganda manipulating them.23Moreover, the empirical research of George Gerbner's "Cultural Indicators" of project at the Annenberg School of Communications,University viewers tend to television that indicates develop heavy Pennsylvania, exaggerated fears of violence in the streetsand of foreignenemies, appeals to law and order and to makingthemsusceptibleto simplistic and police.24 the officialuse of forceby the military
Lack of AnalyticReasoning
Among the furthercognitivedeficienciesfound by researchersin the language of mass media and its reception by audiences are an modes of reasoningnecessaryto absence of the analyticand synthetic relate the personal and the impersonal,concrete and abstract,cause and effect, or past, present,and future(compare the "presentorientation" of the culture of povertyand of oral societies),as well as to either/or view issues in sufficient complexityto resist stereotyping, In the emotional and present Amerappeal.25 demagogic thinking, ican political context these cognitive deficiencies comprise yet an-
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other factor contributing to conformity,authoritarianism, and passivity. People sufferingfrom immediate, intense political oppressionthe situationof the proletariatin Marx's scenario forsocialistrevolution, of Third World colonies, of American blacks who waged the civilrightsmovement-need littleabstractinformation or sophistication in reasoning to be persuaded thatchange is in theirinterest. In a societylike present-dayAmerica, however,the grosser formsof inreduced and the majority of the justice and conflicthave been greatly population socialized into a mood of at least passive assent. Even though major evils in the social systemmay persist,theytend not to be readily felt or understood through the firsthandexperience of most people outside of the hapless underclass. In order for people to perceive and effectively oppose such evils,theyneed not onlyto have access to a diversity of informationsources, many of which are in print and writtenat an advanced level of literacy,but to have the analyticreasoning capacities to evaluate distantevents and abstract data. The handicap here of people at low levels of literacyis compounded by the nonanalytictraitsof mass media. The mind at advanced stages of cognitivedevelopmentseeks both to relate personal, specificimpressionsto exterior,general truths and to ground abstractgeneralizationsin concrete examples. American mass culture, however, tends to lurch between unrelated poles of in such a wayas to avoid critical concretenessand abstraction, analysis of sociopoliticalissues. On the one hand, media ceaselesslymultiply, with tacit approval, concrete images of the status quo-commodity how-totechniques,the activities of governconsumption,celebrities, ment officials, and so on. On the other hand, when media discourse deals withabstractions, it is usually not in order to critically question the value systemimplicitin these concrete images, but to propagate equally unexamined platitudesabout the Americanway of life,patrican be reaotism,democracy,and the free world. These abstractions concretized and but all too in often our defended, sonably public discourse theyare not. When politicians,news, and dramaticmedia report events related to issues such as crime, racial conflict,feminism, communism,and Third World insurrection, tend to such events as isothey approach lated phenomena, outside a framework of causal, historical, or class analysis. For example, conservativemedia criticshave accused television dramatic programs of liberal bias in avoiding the portrayalof black or Hispanic criminals.A more plausible explanation is that a truthful portrayalof such criminalswould have to be placed in the historicaland economic contextof racial and class discrimination-
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not with the intentionof absolving individuals from responsibility, but of exploring the complexitiesof individualversus social responsiformulasof genres like the half-hourcop show, bility.The simplistic however, preclude such complexities,so theirproducers' only alternative to fuelingracistprejudices is to evade the issue by portraying nearly all street criminalsas white. In any society,it serves the interests of the dominant classes to have volatile issues mystified by thatmight being portrayedin accounts lackingthe analyticspecificity raise questions about the intrinsic inequitiesof the establishedorder. A similarmystification is accomplished when politicalevents are reported outside of a dialectical analysis of historicalaction and reaction that might implythe impermanence of the status quo. For example, American politicians' and news media's discussions of the Cold War and Third World or black American uprisingstend to disregard as a possible factorthe natural cycleof historicalchange that may be leading to the decline of world dominance by the United States, Western Europe, and the white race. Similarly,officialaccounts of anti-Americanforces in Cuba, El Salvador, or Nicaragua chronicallyignore the contextof a centuryof United States military and corporate intervention in Central America that may have made rebellion and acceptance by rebels of communistsupport inevitable, disastrousthough the consequences mightbe for all concerned.
RestrictedLinguisticCodes in the WorkingClass

Claus Mueller sums up a growing body of research in sociolinguisticsand politicalsocializationin Europe, England, and the United States that supports Basil Bernstein's thesis about restrictedcodes and authoritarianismin the working class: "Conformityand allegiance to established authorityas well as resistanceto change were found to be politicalpredispositionsof individualsbroughtup in the lower classes. Empirical research also demonstratesthatclass-specific factorssuch as conformity, reception to one-sided arguments,and the absence of skepticismcorrelatewiththe susceptibility to persuasion and manipulation" (100). Applying Bernstein'sthesis to media contentand audience response, Mueller citesa studyof the language of the middle-classNew YorkTimesand working-class New York Daily which elaborated and restricted News, codes, respectivelyembody and another studyof a German tabloid equivalent of the Daily News whose language was characterizedby "concrete metaphors,dichotomized statements,simplifiedsentence structures, typifiedformulaand The tions, an undifferentiated vocabulary, stereotypifications.
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use of a restrictedcode by these papers results in unqualified dewhichmore oftenthan not are conservascriptionsof politicalreality tivelyslanted.... Sensationalism,repetition,and a simplisticdepiction of political realitycontributelittleto the readers' knowledge of society"(98). Marxists like Along lines similar to those of twentieth-century School, who have Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci,and the Frankfurt argued that the workingclass has been deflected throughfalse consciousness fromthe role Marx foresawfor it as the vanguard of the socialistmovement,Bernsteinand Mueller implythat the injuriesof education, and controlledmedia have imcapitalisticclass structure, codes that preventworkersfrombeing posed the restricted linguistic able to understand socialisticideas thatare in theirown interest.Achas become so cording to Mueller: "Today's workingclass symbolism opaque that it is impossiblefor the workerto link his situationto an ideological frameworkwith which he could understand, and more act upon the deprivationhe experiences.... The conimportantly, cept of alienation,forexample, can hardlybe made operative politically because a semanticbarrier built of a restricted language code excludes it fromthe worker'sideational world. This sortof difficulty was encountered by West German trade unions whichtried to make the symbol 'participation'a meaningfulone for the workers"(115). Richard Ohmann, commentingon Bernsteinand Mueller in an articleentitled"Questions about Literacyand PoliticalEducation" published in Radical Teacher, presentsa similarhypothesisabout American workers'attitudes: A number thatonlya fewpeople-those sharing in of studies... suggest or and ordered and abstract uninfluence, power by relatively large-have of society. (This is not to say,of course,thattheirunderderstandings are right, or thatworkers are not in manywaysmoresensible.) standings tendto be less conceptual, morefixedon concrete Workers' beliefsystems more in the local and Their ideas on specific centered particular. things, issuesalso tendtobe morefragmented and inconsistent thantheideasofthe theAmerican morehighly educatedand privileged. classas Finally, working a wholelacksa consensus in beliefs and values, to the class compared ruling and theprofessional and managerial strata.26 (Ohmann's last two sentencesecho Fiske and Hartley'sanalysisof the differencein class and power between those who program television and its primaryaudience.) Ohmann continues to say that research such as Bernstein's"does implythata totalizingsystemof ideas such as marxismwould be uncongenial,by virtueof its form,to workers."
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And he concludes, "When we tryto communicate to workersa socialistunderstandingof things,must we thinkof our task as, in part, deficit? Or should we take it that makingup a cognitiveand linguistic the problem is more in the ways we talk and write, and attempt somehow to translate marxism into more concrete and immediate Another illuminating perspectiveon thisproblem was provided by Armand Mattelart,a Belgian sociologistof communicationworking in Chile withthe Allende Popular Unitygovernment during itsthree of years in power from 1970-73. Mattelartdiscussed the difficulties a socialistgovernment, withstrongworking-class participation, trying to improvise alternatives to the institutionsand conventions of a whole systemof mass culture established for capitalisticends and projectinga middle-classworld view,exemplifiedby the Disney productions Mattelartand Ariel Dorfman had previouslycriticizedin How toRead Donald Duck. About the haltingexperimentsin communicating the socialistexperience throughnewspapers published by the cordonesindustriales, units of popular power founded by militant workers in the Santiago suburbs in 1972, "a kind of embryonic'soviet,'" he observed withregret: In thispartisan of dailylifewas absent. political press,all the normality in other newsocialrelations wereimThe not-said wasconsiderable; words, redefined but few were plicitly expressed explicitly. before and I remember thecoup d'etat, just one month beingin a cordon with their thetalkwas aboutthechangeswhich thesemenhad experienced eiwivesand children, Yet never, duringthethreeyearsof PopularUnity. or in thetraditherin thepressof thecordones, or thatof theextreme Left, a theme formass tionalpress, of fundamental had thistype changeinspired in All thebooksabouttheChileanexperience talkaboutpolitical strategy a fewliterary thestrict senseof theterm, butthey flights, ignore, apartfrom therichness ofthispopularexplosion. This is therealrepression: thepeople liveanotherlife,a moreimportant one, and yetcan'texpressit,exceptin familiar unableto speakof it thenthey go backto thefactories, gatherings; children.28 their their with their workmates, companera,
information. terms than the ones we ordinarily use?"27
Limited Imagination
forcein all of the cogniPerhaps the most profoundlyconservative tive patterns discussed here is their potential for inhibitingpeople fromthe estabfrombeing able to imagine any social order different lished one. The present realityis concrete and immediate,alterna-
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tivesabstractand distant;abilityto understandan alternativeis further obstructedby lack of the sustained attentionspan necessaryfor analyticreasoning,the capacityto imagine beyond the actual to the entails reasoning fromthe literalto (which semantically hypothetical the figurative and symbolic), and a sense of irony,necessaryto question the social conditioningthatendorses the statusquo. Such widespread constriction of imaginationwould be a conservativeforceblockingfundamentalchange in any social order-as it unleftist like the U.S.S.R., and as it country doubtedlyis in an ostensibly would be to a lesser extent in a firmly entrenched liberal America under a sequence of charismaticDemocrats like Roosevelt or Kennedy, or even in the most ideally realized socialistsociety.Nor is the beneficial;even point of this argumentthat change is alwaysa priori leftists can respect,to a point, the classic conservativeposition that to bear those illstheyhave people may show good sense in preferring ratherthan flyto othersthattheyknow not of. What is at issue is the hypothesisthat people's loss of the capacityto imagine thingsother than theyare could preclude theirsupportingchanges thatwould in in their interests. Withoutnecessarilyespousing sofactbe strongly that such a cialism,for example, can we not entertainthe possibility stateof mind would keep socialistic policies offthe Americanagenda no matterhow demonstrably preferabletheymightbe to capitalistic ones, in general or on particularissues?
Qualificationsand Counterarguments
I want now to anticipatesome objectionsthat can be raised to the foregoing analysis. One necessary qualification of it is that mass televisionin recentyears,have in some ways media, and particularly comofferedlinguistic codes and a world view thatare more literate, plex, and cosmopolitan than the indigenous local culture of many segmentsof their audience. Hence the viewpointof fundamentalist Christiansand many other conservativesthat television,Hollywood Neverand "the Eastern news media" are hotbedsof liberalism. films, for theless,whiletelevision's example, may promotehigher language, cognitivedevelopment in previouslyilliteratesectors of the public, studies such as those reported by Moody indicate that it leads to a regression in literacyin sectors,mainly of the middle class, whose children's cognitivedevelopment was previouslystructuredlargely I submitthatmass media Furthermore, throughreading and writing. have tended to replace the parochialityof local culture not with a leftistalternativebut merely with differentmodes of substantially
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conservatismand conformity, in the form of nationallyregimented consumer culture and patternsof cognitiveformation.29 Secondly, many conservatives'perceptionsof the politicalimplications of decliningliteracy and the negativecognitiveeffects of television, rock music, and so on is quite the opposite of mine: that they undermine worker efficiency, social cohesion, and support for auThe leftand right-wing are not mutuallyexthority. interpretations clusive. It is quite possible that a decline in literacyand reasoning in workers,is simplyan faculties,with resultinganomic inefficiency unforeseenby-product of a whole national culturededicated to engineering compliant consumers and employees. In the late sixties,a violent public reaction against a perceived excess of criticalthinking by college students helped to justifythe cuts in funding that have reduced American public schools to a shambles. By the 1980s, however, even big business was promotinga returnto liberal education and the fostering of critical skillsin an attemptto correctthe thinking excess of compliancy. The growing credibility gap undermining American institutions' was meritedor not, and whatever authority(whetherthat authority the role of media in discrediting it) has created only in a passive sense the legitimation crisisperceived by criticson both the leftand right. As Erich Fromm noted about the authoritarian effects of mass society in his 1941 classic Escape FromFreedom:"The result of this kind of influence is a twofoldone: one is a skepticism and cynicismtowards whichis said or printed,whilethe other is a childishbelief everything in anythingthat a person is told withauthority. This combinationof cynicismand naivete is verytypicalof the modern individual. Its essential result is to discourage him fromdoing his own thinkingand deciding."30In other words, people (especiallythose whose memory span has been stuntedby mass media) may voice skepticismtoward in general, yetbe gullible in each new manipulationby auauthority like thorities, Charley Brown withhope eternally springingthatLucy won't pull the footballaway this time. Likewise,Americanstoday may be cynicaltoward the statusquo, but theyare equally cynicaltoward any alternative.The resultingapathy,then, simplyleaves social control open to those powerfulenough to exercise it, while the masses, like those in Dostoevski's"The Grand Inquisitor,"gratefully cede the burden of authority to those more clever,be theyscrupulous or not. When I ask my composition students to write on what would go throughtheirminds if theywere draftedto fightin Central America or the Middle East, the most common responses are either that they don't know enough about the situationto evaluate it themselves,so they would have to trust the judgment of our government even
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though it may be unreliable, or else that theywould be opposed on in these foreigncountriesbut thattheywould go principleto fighting anyway,out of fear of punishmentor peer pressure. I can also anticipate a conservativerebuttalarguing that low literacy can be manipulated politically by the leftas well as the right, that people at low levels of cognitivedevelopmentcannot adequately understand supply-sideeconomics,the theoryof nuclear deterrence, the distantbut real evilsof communism,and so on. Similarly, conserchastized the New Left and counterculture of the vative intellectuals sixtiesforbuyinginto the media-inducedmyths of immediategratification in expectinginstantsocial transformation. These lines of argument contain much validity.And demagogic emotional appeals can be used for left-wing causes, as by Stalin or Mao, or to rally certainly the masses against the statusquo as well as in support of it,as Hitler did in his rise. But in order for this to succeed, there must eitherbe massive, active discontentor else the opposition forcesmust be able to controlcommunicationsmedia, education, and so on-as, for example, if communists were able to expose American children to 350,000 propaganda messages by the age of eighteen, as they are now exposed to comparable propaganda forcapitalismin the formof that many televisioncommercials.The lower stages of cognitivedevelopment,basicallythose of children,are most susceptibleto sociocentricappeals to support ourcountry, ourrace and ethnicgroup, our socioeconomic system(that is, capitalism,especially in the idealized form of it packaged as "free enterprise"or supply-sideeconomics), and to fear foreignraces, nations,and ideologies. It is much less easy to rallypeople at thislevel to international cooperation and pacifism than to aggression, patriotism, and retribution against alleged atrocitiesby our Enemies. These low-levelsociocentricappeals are reinforced by the massive socializationin Americanism,free enterprise, and religionthatour childrenreceive in the home, primaryand secondary schools, and church,as well as throughadvertising, publicity, and governmentaledicts. The most profitablepath for media, then, is clearly to reinforce this conservativesocialization.The sheer weightof inertiain the established social order is a strongerconservativeforce than any ideological principle. It is a strugglefor most people just to get by from one day to the next; social stability and the forceof habitand routine ease the anxietiesof daily life. For people who simplydo not want to be bothered with complicated analyses of intangible social ills or reasons to change theircomfortable conservaroutine,a simplistically tive ideology provides a welcome rationalization.So although some leftistinfluence may be asserted, say, by college teachers and some
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segments of the media, and although it may indeed sometimes be manipulative, it is apt to be stronglyoutweighed by conservative influences.
The Question of Class

Returning now to the referencesto social class in several of the since the early scholars cited here, there has been much controversy sixtiesover the empirical validityof Bernstein's,Oscar Lewis's, and other such studiesand over the possibleclass biases of the researchers themselves. Much of this controversystems from the fact that although some scholars involved, such as Bernstein and Mueller, see their studies comprisinga leftist society, critique of class-structured like Seytheirfindingshave also been appropriated by conservatives mour Martin Lipset and ArthurJensen, who see them either as a justificationfor "compensatoryeducation" toward middle-class soin educating the cialization or as evidence of intractabledifficulties in which cases blame has tended to both of poor and racial minorities, nature of capitalistsocietyonto be shiftedfrom the discriminatory the victimsof thatdiscrimination. Further confusion on this issue has resulted from the ambiguous of class among the various scholars involved or differing definitions on both the left and right. Correlations between political attitudes and economic status, occupation, level of education, culture, and Nor cognitive development are often not established sufficiently. have many of these scholars adequately delineated particular segments withinclasses, between which there are apt to be significant in the criteriastudied. It is oftenunclear in studiesof the differences class whethertheir subject is only the industrialproletariat working or also white-collar workersand the petitbourgeois-whether it includes both organized and unorganized labor, men and women, urban and rural laborers,the hardcore poor, whitesand other races, and so on. Crucial though it is for these disputes and ambiguitiesto be resolved in media scholarship,their resolutionis not essential for our concerns here. The salient fact here is that none of the disputants would claim that the cognitivetraitsassociated withrestricted codes, or the authoritarian culture of oral the culture, poverty, exclusively are beneficialto eitherindividualsor a progressivesociety personality in contemporaryAmerica-no matterin what social class they appear. To the extent that illiteracyand mass media perpetuate restrictedcognitivecapacities, these forces contributeto an impover-
252
ished, powerless mentalityin millions of people who belong to diverse social classes by other critierasuch as income level,race, and so on. Teachers in colleges with upper-middle-class,suburban white in cognitivedeficiencies students have been struckby the similarity black and Hisbetween many of these students and the inner-city panic studentsShaughnessystudied. C. WrightMills and the Frankand culture furtSchool theorists plausiblysuggestedthatmass society have created a new class division in which a large percentage of the proletariat and middle classes-including millions of relativelyaffluent people-have become homogenized in the consciousness comprised by the authoritariancognitivepatternsdescribed above. Conversely, Alvin Gouldner hypothesized in an essay called "The New Class as a Speech Community"that a "culture of criticaldiscourse"-his termfor Bernstein'selaborated codes-has become the main determinant of membershipin the dominantclass in contempoof the rary society,whose members include both the administrators statusquo and, in smaller numbers,its most articulatecritics.31 All other thingsbeing equal, there is no denying the liberalizing effectof higher education, elaborated language codes, and the cosmopolitanoutlook bred by traveland access to high culture.(The fact that creativeliteraturein particularis characterizedby preciselythe cognitive traits in Bernstein's elaborated codes-irony, ambiguity, of viewpoints, of and so on-is a powerfulreaffirmation multiplicity the value of literatureand its academic study.) And most empirical research confirms that the higherthe class and literacy level of audience members,the more discriminating theyand theirchildren are apt to be in receivingmedia messages. The major exception to this rule is those at the verybottomof the social ladder, whose alienation, while not usually leading to an articulatedcriticalconsciousness,at least serves as a skeptical shield. In a study of public attitudes in America toward the Vietnam War, Bruce Andrews asserted that "lower-status groups" were the least willingto support government One reason, he suggested,is that "withless formaleducation, policy. and media involvement, politicalattentiveness, theywere saved from the full brunt of Cold War appeals during the 1950s and were, as a world view." result, inadequately socialized into the anticommunist This analysis was somewhatbelied, however,by Andrews's acknowledgment that much of the opposition fromthese groups was of the "win or get out" variety.32 This is not to argue thathigher education or social class inevitably leads to liberal or socialist beliefs. In the contemporaryAmerican contextelaborated linguistic-cognitive codes are formany people the preconditionsforsuch beliefs,but theyby no means guarantee them.
253
Countervailing factors such as the blandishments of prosperity, power, or the elitistsocial milieu of high culture often make people who are born into or attainthe upper social classes as conservative as, or more so than, those in lower classes. (The conservativeeffectsof is the centraltheme power on academic and journalisticintellectuals of Noam Chomsky'sseveral books attacking "the new American mandarins.") On immediate issues such as labor disputes, unionized industrial or clerical workersare likelyto be more militantthan, say, college professors,though the formerare less likelyto be capable of on concrete issues into a systematic leftist idemilitancy synthesizing educated people may rationally ology. And regardlessof self-interest, assimilateleftist perspectivesyetmove beyond them to a refinedconservativephilosophy. of any Indeed, elaborated codes are necessaryfor the formulation reasoned ideology-socialist, liberal, conservative, libertarian, or whatever.The implicationof my entireanalysishere is not that cultural criticsand educators should tryto impose a leftist politicalperhowsuasion on the public or students.They do have a responsibility, ever, to help deprogram public and studentsfrom the uninformed induced by illiteracy and mass media, while at the same conservatism to raise American public discourse to the higher levels time striving of unconstricted debate between all reasoned ideologies.
CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC NOTES Media and Mass Culture: sectionsand readings in American 1 See the introductory Left ed. Donald Lazere (Berkeley, 1987). Perspectives, 2 Kate Moody, Growing (New York, 1980), hereaftercited in text. Up on Television 3 Mina Shaughnessy,Errors and Expectations (New York, 1977), pp. 226-74. 4 Jean Piaget, TheLanguageand Thought oftheChild(New York, 1955); PiagetSampler, ed. Sarah F. Campbell (New York, 1976); Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy ofMoral DevelForms Intellectual and Ethical William Francisco, 1981); (San Perry, of Development in theCollegeYears(New York, 1970). opment 5 See Eric A. Havelock, Prefaceto Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); Jack Goody and ed. Pier Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy,"in Language and Social Context, Paolo Giglioli (New York, 1972), pp. 311-57, hereaftercited in text; WalterJ. Ong, and Literacy The Presence (New York, 1982); oftheWord(New Haven, 1967) and Orality Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy(Toronto, 1962); and Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). 6 Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, D.J. Levinson, R. N. Sanford, The Authoritarian (New York, 1950); Gordon W. Allport,The NatureofPrejudice, Personality ed. (Reading, Mass., 1979); MiltonRokeach, The Openand Closed Mind 25th anniversary (New York, 1960); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1960), pp. 87-179. 7 Oscar Lewis, Five Families:MexicanCase Studiesin theCulture (New York, ofPoverty STATE UNIVERSITY
254
A Critique, ed. Eleanor 1959) and La Vida (New York, 1965); The Cultureof Poverty: Burke (New York, 1971). "The culture of poverty"was an ill-chosenphrase that proin the sixtiesbecause it was interpretedin some quarters of voked much controversy the left as falselyimplyingthat poor people, especially black and Hispanic, had an impoverishedcultureor none at all. This was not the intended meaning of the termperhaps "psychologyof poverty"would have been a less ambiguous way of denoting the internalized patternsthat often resign people to povertyregardless of what the initial,external causes of it may be. 8 Basil Bernstein,Class,Codes, and Control, 3 vols. (London, 1971-75); Claus Mueller, The Politicsof Communication: A Study in thePoliticalSociology ofLanguage,Socialization, and Legitimation cited in text;Social Class,Race, and Psycho(New York, 1973), hereafter ed. MartinDeutsch, Irwin Katz, and ArthurR. Jensen (New York, logicalDevelopment, 1968). 9 Andrea Lunsford, "The Content of Basic Writers'Essays,"CollegeComposition and Communication, 31, No. 3 (1980), 278-90. 10 Thomas J. Farrell,"Developing Literacy:WalterJ. Ong and Basic Writing," Basic 2, No. 1 (Fall/Winter 1978), 30-51. Writing, 11 Dwight Newton, "Bedlam on the News Beat," San Francisco and SundayExaminer 16 March 1975, Sunday Scene section,p. 14. Chronicle, the Fall (New York, 1974), p. 314. 12 William Safire,Before 13 Los Angeles Times,10 Feb. 1980, Pt. 2, p. 1. 14 Michael Cole and SylviaScribner,Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction (New York, 1974); Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology (CamofLiteracy bridge, Mass., 1981). 15 William Labov, "The Logic of Nonstandard English,"in Language and Social Context, pp. 179-215. 16 Michael Cole and Jerome Bruner, "Some Preliminaries to Some Theories of Cultural Difference,"in Yearbook of theNationalSociety for theStudy ofEducation(Chicago, 1972). 17 Goody and Watt,p. 341. See Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education,Society and Culture, tr. Richard Nice (London and Beverly Hills, 1977). 18 Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York, 1971), pp. 2-13. 19 Lewis, La Vida, p. xlviii. this point, see George Gerbner, 20 Among the many empirical studies confirming "Chartingthe Mainstream:TeleLarry Gross, Michael Morgan, and Nancy Signorielli, vision's Contributionsto Political Orientations," 32, No. 2 Journalof Communication, (1982), 100-127. 21 John Fiske and John Hartley,ReadingTelevision (New York, 1978), pp. 109-26. 22 See, e.g., Moody, p. 67. 23 Jean Piaget, "The Development in Children of the Idea of the Homeland and of Relations With Other Countries,"in Piaget Sampler, pp. 37-58. 24 George Gerbner and Larry Gross, "The Violent Face of Television and Its and theFaces of Television: Lessons," in Children Violence, Teaching, Selling(New York, 1981), pp. 149-62. in the regularizaof stereotyping 25 For furtheranalysisof the conservativeeffects tion of media formulas,temporal and spatial frames,see Todd Gitlin,"Television's in Education, Screens: Hegemony in Transition,"in Culturaland Economic Reproduction ed. Michael Apple (London, 1982), pp. 202-46, as well as Theodor W. Adorno's seminal essay "Television and the Patternsof Mass Culture," in Mass Culture, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York, 1957), pp. 474-89. Adorno observed, "The more stereotypesbecome reified and rigid in the present setup of cul-
255
tural industry, the less people are likelyto change their preconceived ideas with the progressof theirexperience. The more opaque and complicatedmodern lifebecomes, the more people are tempted to cling desperatelyto clicheswhichseem to bring some order into the otherwiseununderstandable" (p. 484). 26 Richard Ohmann, "Questions about Literacy and Political Education," Radical No. 8 (May 1978), 24. Teacher, 27 Ohmann, p. 25. Ohmann revised his position,in a directionmore criticalof Bernstein and Mueller on grounds of their definitionsand methods, in "Reflections on Class and Language," CollegeEnglish, 44, No. 1 (Jan. 1982), 1-17. See also the subsein College English,45, No. 3 quent exchange between Ohmann and two commentators (March 1983), 301-7. 28 "Cultural Imperialism, Mass Media and Class Struggle: An InterviewWith Armand Mattelart," 9, No. 4 (Spring 1980), 76-77. Sociologist, Insurgent 29 In an exchange between ChristopherLasch and Herbert Gans on thispoint,Gans presented a liberal pluralist case for the broadening effectsof mass culture, while Lasch's position,as in his The Culture American Lifein an Age ofDiminishing ofNarcissism: (New York, 1978), was similarto mine here. See ChristopherLasch, "Mass Expectations Culture Reconsidered,"democracy, 1, No. 4 (Oct. 1981), 7-22 and Herbert Gans, "Culture, Community,and Equality," democracy, 2, No. 2 (Apr. 1982), 81-87; see also 2, No. 2 (Apr. 1982), Lasch, "Popular Culture and the Illusion of Choice," democracy, 88-92. 30 Erich Fromm,Escape FromFreedom (New York, 1941), p. 250. in TheFutureofIntel31 Alvin Gouldner, "The New Class as a Speech Community," lectuals and theRise oftheNew Class (New York, 1979), pp. 28-42. and American 32 Bruce Andrews,Public Constraint (London, 1976). Policyin Vietnam Noam ChomskycitesAndrews as evidence thatthe lower classes had sounder instincts about Vietnam than manyintellectuals-but he casuallyrelegatesto a footnotethe key "win or get out" qualifier. Noam Chomsky,Towards a New Cold War: Essayson theCurrentCrisisand How We GotThere(New York, 1982), pp. 89, 405-6.

Lazere-Literacy & Media-Politcal Implications

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Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications Author(s): Donald Lazere Source: New Literary History, Vol.

Literacyand Mass Media: The PoliticalImplications

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

Oral versus LiterateDiscourse

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

RestrictedLinguisticCodes in the WorkingClass

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

The Question of Class

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

NEW LITERARY HISTORY

LITERACY AND MASS MEDIA

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