According to Althusser (1971) the media is part of the ideological state apparatuses [ISAs]. These are the mechanisms used by the ruling-class to control ideas, which support their interests and maintain their power in capitalist societies.  The media influences the way in which the poor and working-classes are perceived by the public as lazy, worthless and welfare dependent.  Although Althusser’s theory was published in the 1970s, it is still relevant in today’s neoliberal capitalist society.  This is demonstrated in Jensen’s (2014) concept of poverty porn and Tyler’s (2015) notion that the material predicament of the poor has become TV entertainment for the masses.  The public generally believe what they see, hear and read in the legacy mainstream media. However, the concept of ISAs overlooks the power that new social media platforms have to change how the public see and think about the poor.

i. Refer to two real-life examples that demonstrate how the media demonises some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society.

ii. Is the current system of welfare benefits so generous that it undermines work by handing out ‘free’ payments, or is that a myth?  Support your response with evidence, rather than simply writing down your opinions.

iii. How can social media be used to change public opinion about the poor, and in doing so also improve government welfare policies?

In the context of nineteenth century America, Alexis De Tocqueville suggested that freedom of the press is necessary for the objective functioning of a democratic society. Without that freedom there is a danger of unaccountability, as government might not always act in the interests of the public. De Tocqueville also contended that tyranny, of the majority members of a society, could only be constrained if the press were free from private commercial interests. 

In the post-truth age of the twenty-first century, relativism – which suggests there are many truths, rather than a single objective reality – informs the interests of the modern media.  As such, the traditional mass media presents the news in a simplistic binary of good/bad, which overlooks the complexity of social and political interactions in society.

The news value of the good/bad dichotomy appeals to the public’s respectable fears.  This is the idea that society is generally good but there are some bad actors out there. However, the truth does not support the media’s good guy/bad guy news value inventory.  Fear is good for the production of news.  

Media news values are not necessarily democratic nor are they objective.  They are mediated and driven by corporate, commercial, political and private interests.  Consequently, truth, integrity and the principles of democratic freedoms are idealistic casualties, in how the news is portrayed to the public.  The truth only becomes apparent if it can be tied into wider public and commercial interests.  

Identify two contemporary examples that suggest news values is – or is not – in the best interests of the public.

A victim is a social construct, in a similar way that crime is understood by how an act is perceived by society in general.  The understanding of what constitutes a crime is not universal, as it differs according to the time, place and context.  Murder carries the maximum punishment of a life sentence, and the individual murdered is generally perceived as a victim.  However, this is not always the case.  The State makes laws, which regulate public perceptions of an act, and can therefore decide who should be given the status of victim.  Government has the monopoly on violence and as such the power to decide who is the victim and who should be viewed as the perpetrator of violence. This is not a straight forward process. Women and children are generally considered to be innocent and worthy of the label of victim. However, in the context of news reporting in Gaza, the Israeli State justifies the killing of women and children, by arguing that Hamas hides amongst the Palestinian people. Innocent civilians are therefore denied the status of victim.

The denial of victimhood by the State is also an example of structural violence.  Wacquant defines structural violence as actions committed by, or inequalities perpetuated by the government.  The media is also complicit in this process of misrepresentation. For example, its news values portray welfare dependent working-class females as deviant and pathological.  No consideration is given to how their agency is constrained by the structural violence of patriarchy or economic changes, which are factors beyond their control.  The lived-experiences of White working-class females are framed in the context of them making the wrong lifestyle choices.  This is especially where having children outside of marriage is concerned.    

Race also intersects class where universal acknowledgement of victimhood is concerned.  This can be seen in the media portrayals of the murders of Sarah Everhard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.  All three females were young, middle-class victims of male violence, and serving police officers were either directly or indirectly involved in their murders.  However, Sarah was White, whilst Bibaa and her sister Nicole were Black.  It can be argued that the factor of race contributed to differences in the media coverage of their murders. There was considerably more public sympathy and subsequent protests on behalf of Sarah, but a distinct lack of them on the part of Bibaa and Nicole.  This suggests that regardless of inter and intra-group differences, perceptions of race are a significant factor in how the media and general public define what constitutes the ideal-type victim.

i. Using at least one real-life example, explain what are the characteristics of an ideal victim to the media.

ii. What is the problem with the media’s simplistic definition of what constitutes a victim (i.e. the problems that such representations overlooks or hides). Refer to race, class and gender differences in your response.

What hope is there for the working-classes in neoliberal Britain, particularly when poverty, unemployment and uncertainty about the future is the norm, rather than the exception?  Sixty to seventy years ago, when British industry was driven by manufacturing and production processes, the working-classes were perceived as the backbone of the economy.  However, under the current modes of financial capitalism, unskilled and semi-skilled work are generally considered as surplus to the requirements of the neoliberal labour market.  Sociologically, workers at the lower end of the occupational class structure are now viewed as the precariat.  This is because of the precarious nature of their insecure employment positions, such as agency work and zero-hour contract jobs.  However, their unemployed counterparts are demonised and labelled as the underclass by the political classes.  The underclass are viewed as underserving, feckless, lazy, work-shy and welfare dependent.  Stereotypical images of the unemployed poor are commodified by the media for the purpose of entertainment, which is often referred to as poverty porn.  This negative  portrayal of the poor overlooks the impact that structural violence has on maintaining poverty in society.

As the rich get richer, and increasingly more of the unemployed get prison, the media reinforces the victim-blaming notion that the so-called underclass are the architects of their own misfortune.  Consequently, due to the way in which contemporary capitalism is organised, it seems that we can no longer speak of a work[ing]-class with any certainty.  A reason being is that those whose precarious lives leave them tottering on the brink of society are ascribed as the less: the worth-less; the work-less; the job-less; the home-less; the future-less and hope-less.  The poor in neoliberal times are conceived as less deserving than their middle-class or in-work counterparts.  In contrast, society’s strivers are conveyed to the public as those who made the right choices and are consequently able to engage with the markets of neoliberal capitalism; whereas the predicament of society’s skivers is explained by the poor choices they have made.  We have become used to the idea that the poor amongst us are the causal factors of everything that is wrong in society, rather than seeing them as victims of mass economic changes, which are beyond their control.

Refer to your lived-experience, or those of a social group that you identify with. Respond to this post by explaining how an example of your [or their] material [i.e. financial/poverty] situation, might be seen [by the wider public or the State] as a consequence of poor individual lifestyle choices.

Sapere aude: dare to know.  In Marten Luther King’s speech concerning “the race problem in America” he referred to John 8: 32 – ‘the truth shall set you free’.  However, that is not necessarily the case in late modernity, as merely knowing the truth is not enough to obtain freedom from injustice.  Without the means to change the status quo, which maintains unequal relationships of power in society, the acquisition of knowledge can be like an iron cage.  Simply knowing the truth, without the power to contest false truth claims, can frustrate and constrain the agency of the powerless.

In 1835 de Tocqueville contended that freedom of the press is necessary for democracy in America.  Implicit in this notion is that the truth is an objective reality, which is fundamental to any society that prioritises the democratic freedoms of its members.  However, in contemporary society the truth is not the primary concern of the media, and it is only prioritised if it supports its capitalist news values of commodifying scandal.  As such, in neoliberal times even the truth becomes a means of accumulating capital, rather than viewed as an end in itself.  The idea that the media is part of what Althusser refers to as the ideological state apparatus is demonstrated in the case of Julian Assange.  The truth did not set him free, but instead incarcerated him.  

Assange’s repression by the State apparatus demonstrates the tension negotiated by the mass media, in the post-truth age.  WikiLeaks was used as a media platform by Assange, to provide evidence of atrocities perpetrated by the American State, against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, freedom to publish comes at a cost.  In Assange’s case, the price of the truth is his personal liberty.  

How can we use the media to weaponize the truth in the war against injustice and inequality?   

Castells contends that in the network society, of modern consumer capitalism, technology increases social engagement.  To Castells, online communications are merely a precursor to subsequent social relationships and therefore neither reduce nor replace them.  An example of Castell’s theory in practice is online dating, which begins in virtual space, but has the overall aim of fulfilling intimate physical desires in the real world.  Castells theory in practice is supported by research, which reveals that the stigma once associated with online dating is now a phobia of the past.  It is now generally accepted that intimate relationships exist in a market.  As such, finding the partner of your dreams is no longer a matter of luck.  Dating and mating have effectively become a science, driven by the free market principles of competition and consumer choice.  Algorithms ensure compatibility and therefore the likelihood of customer satisfaction and happiness increases.  Desire is a commodity for capitalist accumulation in our ‘pay-as-you-go’ network society.  However, it can also be argued that the certainty of science is also reducing the spontaneity of intimacy in modern life.  Society stagnates when its members do not have the freedom to make choices and learn from their lived-experiences, especially where personal relationships are concerned.  What is the future for society if our capacity for intimacy depends on a network connection?  Consider, who will be excluded, who will be included and why?

Technological dependence also supports Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum, which suggests that the boundary between the virtual and real world is becoming increasingly blurred.  Baudrillard contends that modern society exists in a hyper-reality, in which modern life is a representation of the virtual.  Hence, the virtual is real and the real is also virtual.  As such, society’s fetish with the body is also a simulacrum and a commodity for consumer capitalism.  This is demonstrated in the way that there is a market for surgical procedures where females [and males] can be surgically transformed to resemble a Barbie doll – a representation of an exaggerated reality.  Lips, buttocks, noses, bosoms, faces and even biological sex, can be adapted to conform with changes in trends and individual taste.  However, does simulating a hyper-reality signify happiness, or is it evidence of the increasing pathology of normlessness and alienation in modern society?

Society cannot exist without social control.  As Durkheim noted, the problem of anomie occurs when there is not enough social control.  However, when there is too much control, societal progress is constrained by a lack of autonomy and human agency.  As such, a problem of modern governance is not so much constraining  the tyranny of the many, but instead restraining the tyranny of the affluent few. It is a relatively few powerful people in society, who control the agency of the many by engineering hegemony.  The powerful achieve their aim of influencing the narrative by controlling the mechanisms of knowing and their implementation. Thus, the mass media must be understood as an ideological tool, one that is appropriated by its controllers to engineer an epistemology of society.

Foucault’s panopticon is an example of top-down structural power: the few watching the many.  What is often overlooked in Foucault’s concept is the significance of socialisation.  An epistemology of society instils knowledge and understanding of the different social contexts in which we understand and conform to hierarchies of power, and the norms of expected behaviour.  As such, social control is achieved and maintained by accepting the rules that govern our behaviour in various milieux.  However, if we reject the knowledge that inform the expected forms of behaviour in different social contexts, then the panopticon has no power to discipline souls.  For example, the prison is the generally accepted social context of punishment, in which a few prison guards observe and control the behaviour of the many prisoners.  Social control is initially maintained by depriving the prisoner of the rights and freedoms taken for granted outside of the prison, and creating a system of power, informed by dependency.  However, after the prisoner becomes acclimatised to their new milieu, power and control within the prison is maintained by the fear of further forms of internal – rather than external – deprivations.  Nonetheless, it is important to note that humans are not always passive actors.  Some prisoners do not conform to the norms of behaviour that is integral to the effective functioning of the prison environment.  Prisoners can resist the prison’s institutional socialisation and develop strategies of resistance, which militate against the status quo.

Mathiesen’s concept of the synopticon, in which social controlled is achieved by the many watching the few, also suggests that social actors are passive.  However, unlike Foucault’s top-down panopticon, Mathiesen’s synopticon contends that social control is maintained from the bottom-up.  He argues that we have become a viewer society in which the consumer habits of the many are controlled by a relatively few media organisations and consumer companies.  They distract us from the reality of our material situation by controlling what we see, think, consume and how we act.  This is demonstrated by the public’s obsession with TV celebrity culture and the way in which we spend exorbitant amounts of time interacting on social media sites.  However, Mathiesen overlooks the way in which actors appropriate social media to mobilise, empower themselves and affect social change.  This is demonstrated by how social media has been appropriated in the Arab Spring, Slutwalk, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter protests, which have to some extent become social movements.  The use of social media from the bottom-up has also highlighted institutional discrimination.  This was seen during the vigil for Sarah Everard and the racial profiling of Bianca Williams, and her partner Ricardo dos Santos.

Both the panopticon and synopticon are means of knowing. They provide us with an epistemology of society. However, they overlook the dominance of the culture of individualism in  modern consumer society, which the powerful employ to constrain the momentum of social and political changes.  Although social media platforms have brought the problem of persisting inequalities to the attention of wider society, the public – as agents of change – lack the power to control their own narrative.  Consequently, the rug is always shifting below the feet of the powerless, who continue to dance to the tune of the powerful.  In our neoliberal society the zeitgeist is that of the individualism of social moments, rather than the collectivity of social movements.
How can we use social media to control the political narrative and empower the powerless? Would changes in the law to regulate social media empower the few or the many?