Mediated Intellectuals: Negotiating Social Relations in Media

Social life is mediated in numerous ways. Ideas, social interaction and practical activity are all mediated in part by communication or media technologies. Whilst it would be folly to suggest that media technologies mediate most people’s entire experience of political and intellectual life, it is the case that the presence of these technologies in people’s lives is such that they cannot be ignored. To a degree the capacity of media technologies to facilitate critical political and intellectual engagements is limited by the context of their production and use. However, in this chapter I argue that a paradigm shift, the ‘cultural’ or ‘linguistic turn’ filtered through to media and cultural studies, often has the effect of sidelining the question of production. Consequently, the role of the intellectual changes from a producer of media messages to at best an interpreter, and at worst nothing at all. The ideas behind the postmodern elements of the cultural turn were, in part, a response to the perceived reification of ideology as a concept and to a supposed understanding of media communications as ‘hypodermic’. This is to say that postmodern media and cultural studies stylised the Marxist understanding of media as one in which capitalists transmitted their one-sided messages to a passive audience, which then accepted them. In contrast to this, the postmodernists ‘empower’ audiences by arguing that they actively produce meanings in a process of negotiation, often rejecting or transforming intended meanings. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.