Negotiating the Local and the Global through Media (Core Post 5)

I want to focus specifically on the Morley article from this week. Morley attempts to understand the whole through studying the sum of its parts. In the first part of his essay, Morley focuses on some studies of the global and the local in terms of studying technology consumption. Morley then shifts to negotiate the postmodern media landscape paradox of individual media consumption and the formation of homogenized identities or social groupings.

Morley attempts to negotiate understanding the macro processes of media through localized consumption of media. Much of his article reads as a defense of his ethnographic research methodology of being in the living rooms of UK families, studying which programs gather the family around the living room TV, which programs people watch simultaneously yet in different rooms, and which the varied programs based on gender, age, class, etc. For Morley, in the realm of audience studies, there exists a central tension, that between "romanticism of 'consumer freedoms'" of the consumers and the "paranoiac fantasy of 'global control'" of the producers (1). For Morley, it perhaps is no longer a question of encoding and decoding in terms of media institutions and this monolithic power that these institutions have to influence and program audiences who must actively decode such insidious mechanisms of control. To Morley, traditions of audience studies, optimistic of audience agency, neglect serious questions of power and manipulation. Furthermore, it is not enough the simply conclude that consumers can be creative in the ways in which they receive media (read as: the ways in which they can counter dominant discourse). Morley defends his method by stating that his studies extend beyond this "banal" observation by examining the ways in which these creative abilities manifest in terms of access and "appropriate" usage (4). In order to understand issues of access, and when access is achieved, issues of usage (consumption) and then connect these issues to our understanding of macro processes of media production, distribution, and consumption, we must start from the bottom up, the living room, rather than rely on reductive technological determinism. For example, Morley argues that in order for new media technologies to be adapted and widely used, they must somehow overlay old patterns of consumption or must work on some basic understanding (9). Think, for example, of the slow process of the introduction of the iPhone, testing user adaptation through the iPod touch.

Moving on from discussions of how best to study the relationship between media products and consumers, Morley engages in questions of the future as media becomes more essential and routine to daily postmodern life. For example, while media technology has now become, more or less, omnipresent in affluent countries, this homogenizing effect has led to even further fragmentation: narrowcasting TV channels, the telephone undermining spatially contingent communities as distance no longer poses a threat to a sense of place and acceptance, and his predictive gap between the info-rich and the info-poor as media technology add-ons require a certain level of income. Technologies are no longer public resources once they are ingrained enough to provide this crucial foundation upon which to overlay new advances to core technologies (cable to TV, streaming to the computer/TV, the cell phone to the landline). In this regard, I am thinking of the forced banishment of analog televisions of yesteryear (at least something they did in Florida several years ago) which put a significant amount of senior citizens with limited income in a do-or-die position to upgrade their televisions and televisual access. Literally, the public open access of a satellite was taken away for more private televisual access. He's not too far off in terms of the telephone eliminating spatial barrier if we look at social media. Why make friends in a new place when I have easy access to my friends back home or my friends across the country? I can text, call, videochat with them when I'm lonely and miss their voice or want to see how their looks have changed. Even more, why even call them when I can read their incessant Facebook updates, Instagram posts, or tweets?

On the flipside, Morley analyzing fragmented consumption that can lead to homogenization. He specifically analyzes how local news can reinforce ideas of community and nation. The individual, through the "we-feeling" promoted by news (stories that affect us all or that we should know to remain informed), begins to identify with this "we" be it the nation, municipality, etc. As technological overlays have transformed the ways in which news is presented (we no longer just watch Walter Cronkite somberly deliver us the news), Morley engages with the postmodern obfuscation of reporting or performing (13). This engagement reminded me of the news clips we watched in this week's lecture: the fancy graphics, the simulcasts, live reporting of "major" events, the split screens, etc. Rather than simply telling us what happened, TV now tries to embroil us in the event.

Side note of some things that I was confused about: Morley mentions at least twice in the article the gender roles entrenched in certain technologies but fails to go into greater detail, which peeved me. He also mentions some sort of invocation of sociology as a necessary precondition to meaningful studies of TV and media but doesn't wholly define those parameters of methodologies.