Read: Coerscion by Douglas Rushkoff

We all know the meaning of the term terrain. In its practical application it represents the earth, the ground upon which we live and move. However, the term can also be associated with complex problems such as those listed by Sun Tzu in The Art of War (1963), "Ground may be classified according to its nature as accessible, entrapping, indecisive, constricted, precipitous, and distant."

In cultural studies, the term is used metaphorically where culture is a terrain on which there takes place a continual struggle over meaning, in which subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings which bear the interests of the dominant group.

Today, global corporate multinational and transnational entities are linked by a web of interdependent markets, investments, and trade agreements. Thus, the wealth of America's top quintile is implicated not only in the poverty of South Central Los Angeles but also in the slums of Buenos Aires.

· In 1991, the Nike Corporation made $3 billion in profits, paying its factory workers in Indonesia-mostly poor, malnourished women--$1.03 per day, not enough for food and shelter. "Just Do It!"

· By 1996, the 447 richest people on the planet had assets equal to that of the poorest 2.5 billion-42% of the world population.

What do we think it means when we buy a sweater and the label reads MADE IN THE PHILIPPINES, or what is behind the cup of Colombian (Brazilian, Angolan, etc.) supreme that we drink every morning.

Yet, 42% of American adults cannot locate Japan on a world map according to Garrison Keillor (NPR, 22 March 1997), and another survey revealed that nearly 15% couldn't locate the United States (!).

Very few Americans understand the degree to which corporations have taken over their lives. But according to a poll taken by Time magazine, nearly 70% of them believe in the existence of angels, and another study found that 50% believe in the presence of UFOs and space aliens on earth. More than 30% believe that they have made contact with the dead.

The celebration of ignorance that characterizes America today can be seen in the enormous success of a film like Forrest Gump, in which a good-natured idiot is made into a hero; or in the old, but immensely popular TV sitcom Cheers, in which intellectual interest of any sort is portrayed as phony and pretentious and outright stupidity is equated with that which is warm-hearted and authentic.

What is going on? Today America is "colonized" by media culture. We are not necessarily indoctrinated as much as we are pleasured or entertained into our capitalist society. To a stupefied populace, "democracy" will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy's and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this managed infotainment is actually the news.

FILM, MUSIC and ART articulate specific ideological positions and help reproduce dominant forms of social power, serving the interests of societal domination.

MEDIA CULTURE PROVIDES POWERFUL IMAGES AND SCENES FOR IDENTIFICATION THAT MAY DIRECTLY INFLUENCE BEHAVIOR, PROVIDING MODELS OF ACTION, FASHION, AND STYLE. THE TERRORFYING REALITY

OF THIS IS THAT MEDIA ARE MIGHTY CORPORATIONS THAT HAVE NO CULTURAL COMMITMENT WHATSOEVER.

David Walsh of the National Institute on Media and the Family asks, "Would you let total strangers come into your home and sell your children a set of values and attitudes that you disagreed with completely? Well these uninvited guests are the various electronic media in your children's lives."

From birth, our children are growing up and receiving most of their information and example behaviors from an electronic world. Teenagers today have more money and independence that ever before. Their lives have become the object of obsessive focus by corporate America. The net result: adults are mystified and often horrified with the obvious effects media are having on our children.

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Ideas About American Culture

· Culture in the broadest sense is a form of highly participatory activity in which people create their societies and identities. Therefore, society and culture are contested terrains and cultural artifacts are produced and have their effects within determinate contexts.

· American societal and cultural characteristics are unique when compared to other cultures. There is no common thread underlying the evolution of our culture that assists us in understanding who we are. Rather, there are disjunct ideas. But, capitalism/commerce/trade seem to "mediate" between the arts and culture; Therefore,

· The popular has ascended over high art forms via economic powers since we measure success by money; but the sheer repetition and the concept of "understanding at an early repetition" create a constant vacuum for more of the same.

· Stanley Aronowitz in Technoscience and Cyberculture (1996) states that "American culture is technoculture . . . everyone uses technology in the production of artifacts which define various subcultures. We cannot simply list the beliefs, ideologies, and activities of the American people without examining their objects and technological systems and understanding that they too are American, even though, as sometimes

happens, the objects and values seem to be contradictory."

Douglas Kellner in Media Culture (1995) sets forth a cultural studies that is CRITICAL in that it probes forms of oppression and domination and articulates normative perspectives from which to criticize these forms. To develop a critical standpoint requires one to articulate the social constitution of the concepts of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and the ways that representations of these phenomena produce

identities in contemporary societies, as well as how alternative representations produce new and different identities.

Kellner further believes that maintaining a critical standpoint also requires interpreting culture and society in terms of relations of 1) power, 2) domination, and 3) resistance, as well as 4) articulating the various forms of oppression in a given society via multicultural perspectives. Thus, a critical social theory and cultural studies that attacks oppression and strives for social equality is necessarily multicultural and seeks to attend to differences, cultural diversity, and otherness.

Go to: www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm and read Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture

Concepts of Cultural Studies

Cultural studies seeks to listen to the marginal voices and to the perspectives they bring to the debates about power, authority and meaning. THE WAY WE DRESS, WHAT WE EAT AND HOW WE SOCIALIZE communicate things about ourselves, and thus

can be studied as signs. This study of signs is called semiotics and attempts to establish the basic features of signs and explain the way they work in social life.

· Signs, Codes and Texts

Signs are often organized as codes governed by explicit and implicit rules agreed upon by members of a culture or social group. A system of signs may thus carry encoded meanings and messages that can be read by those who understand the codes. A signifying structure composed of signs and codes is a text that can be read for its signs and encoded meanings. Text can only be fully appreciated if seen in context. When the social and power relationships are examined, the historical forces shaping the text are understood.

· Representation of the "Other"

The process, and the products, that give signs their particular meaning is representation. Through representation, abstract and ideological ideas are given concrete form. Thus, the idea/sign "Native American" is given a specific ideological shape in the way "Native Americans" have been represented in literature and film. The representative entity outside the self, that is, outside one's own gender, social group, class, culture or civilization, is the Other. Broadly speaking, all non-Western cultures and civilizations are seen as the Other of the West. Within Western society, women, homosexuals and immigrants are often seen as the Other. The most common representation of the Other is as the darker side, the binary opposite of oneself:

-- We are civilized, they are barbaric

-- The colonists are hard-working, the natives are lazy

-- Heterosexuals are good and moral, homosexuals are immoral and evil.

· Discursive Analysis

The notion of discourse binds all of these concepts into a neat package. A

discourse consists of culturally or socially produced groups of ideas containing texts (which contain signs and codes) and representations (which describe power in relation to Others). As a way of thinking, a discourse often represents a structure of knowledge and power. A discursive analysis exposes these structures and locates the discourse within the wider historical, cultural and social relations.

Factors Impacting the Coding and Decoding of Discourse: Cultural Group

1. Shared socio-cultural practices-

· Some in harmony with the 'text'

· Some in contradiction: cultural conflict is ultimately a struggle for domination and the principle arena is public culture.

2. Strata or levels-

· Religious affiliation/convictions, political persuasion, or membership in a sub-culture such as a youth sub-culture;

· Class: importance mainly related to access (or the nature of access to different discourses). The person's position in social formation structures their range of access to various discourses and ideological codes-"class interest." (e.g., the computing language of the "computing class")

3. The sites of conflict themselves include religion, morality, scientific discovery: psychology, astronomy, evolution, etc.

An example of site conflict might be found in HUMOR when a joke has different meanings for different listeners. A joke is 1) language, 2) communication and 3) code.

· Hegemony

This key thought is critical for understanding the history and structure of any given society. Hegemony:

1) Binds society together without the use of force;

2) Is achieved when the upper classes supplement their economic power by creating "intellectual and moral leadership." Compromises are made with the working classes and a general consent is generated.

3) Both negotiation and consent are essential. Ideas, values and beliefs are not imposed from above, neither do they develop in a free and accidental way, but are negotiated through a whole series of encounters and collisions between classes.

4) This active process, which operates on a number of fronts, eventually leads to a "compromise equilibrium" between competing classes.

5) Culture is one of the key sites where struggle for hegemony takes place; and it is in the arena of POPULAR CULTURE that the issues of "moral and intellectual leadership" are resolved.

Thus, hegemony helps explain the way that power works within culture that is in itself "free and democratic," like America. Hegemony's embracing of consensus means that any opposition can be 'contained and channeled into ideologically safe harbors not through imposition, but through negotiation.

So, subordinate groups are not ignored, but given a certain 'place', a position within the embrace of the dominant group, and their views articulated to a degree within the

master-narrative. A master-narrative is the grand story told by the dominant groups to legitimate and justify their actions and policies. For example, in America, African Americans have been 'placed' within a dominant white cultural narrative, but through political struggle, cultural self-assertion and intervention have developed an increasing role in the mainstream.

HEGEMONY ASSERTS CULTURAL STRUGGLE AND IS BEST DEFINED AS 'A CONTESTED AND SHIFTING SET OF IDEAS BY MEANS OF WHICH DOMINANT GROUPS STRIVE TO SECURE THE CONSENT OF SUBORDINATE GROUPS TO THEIR LEADERSHIP.'

Depending upon your personal philosophy concerning the use of media as an hegemonic tool, perhaps this is a redeeming characteristic of the American media wherein our "tradition of the new" with Westerns, action movies and cartoons, etc., at the core of Hollywood's global appeal, offer the platform from which we fantasize anew on freedom and moral regeneration, soft-core apocalypse and wackiness, respectively. Thus, American media "imperialism" spreads to, and are wholeheartedly embraced by, foreign audiences.

Culture makes a difference! Society is driven by conflicts based on sex, race, religion and region, as well as class. Culture shapes people's sense of identity just as much as economics.

Unit II Essay Assignment: Read American Culture: Our Own by Jones and write an essay addressing the characteristics of American culture as you perceive them.

American Culture: Our Own

America has no tradition of monarchy or aristocracy. Neither does it have a history in which the church established the cultural norms. In our democratic society, all persons are considered equal, we have separated church and state politically, and our pluralistic society has never embraced a specific religious faith or denomination. However, American society changes faster than any other on earth, and the American, almost uniquely, can be puzzled about where, in the society, he/she stands. Belonging to a

rapidly changing rather than a traditional society, Americans find "knowing where you stand" harder than do most Europeans.

Therefore, we are unlike our European, African, and Native American heritages in that traditions in art, architecture, literature, music, etc. have sought to give a voice to what used to be called the "common man." This means that these efforts have cast their nets wide, trying to explain the essential "humanness" of every person, the common core of emotional, social, and intellectual traits that all "persons of good will" share to use a phrase by Thomas Jefferson.

Earning respect seems to be one of the most important needs in mass society such as our own. John Adams wrote in 1850 that "the rewards . . . in this life are esteem and admiration of others-the punishments are neglect and contempt. . . ." Later, Thomas Moore, sensing the special predicament Americans were inviting with their egalitarian Constitution, described the citizens of our Nation as "creatures born to be slaves, and struggling to be lords." Thirty years later, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that "nowhere do citizens appear so insignificant as in a democratic nation," and Walt Whitman perceived that one of the unique anxieties is going to be the constant struggle for individual self-respect based upon social approval. That is, where everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody.

In reality, any particular painting, building, musical or dramatic work is limited, contextual, and specific. Inversely, we see our common humanity through the individual example, come to know our feelings by observing or sensing another persons experience. This more democratic approach to artistic and cultural endeavor was uniquely American at the turn of the 20th century, but has become a common trend worldwide since then. This approach to structuring our cultural and artistic experiences is the primary way in which America has come to dominate culture and art internationally.

The very nature of a pluralistic society undercuts the possibility of a unifying philosophical position in American society. Yet, capitalism appears to be the universal

theory underlying our many differences. The idea of creating wealth, of generating stronger economies through invention, investment, labor, and trade has guided nearly all political decisions in our society. Treaties are formed or dissolved as much on the basis

of trade agreements as any moral position on the differences that might divide nations politically. Equally, the idea that America offers unlimited possibilities for personal

advancement and the accumulation of wealth has dominated our thinking about individual rights, property ownership, and taxation. Our entire society is permeated with the belief that capitalistic endeavor is the best form of social activity.

Thus, there are special hazards associated with class in America, where movement appears so fluid and where the prizes seem available to anyone who's lucky. These hazards include disappointment and envy. Because myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn your way upward, disillusion and bitterness are particularly strong when Americans find themselves trapped in a class system that they have been persuaded isn't important. Indeed, the force of class envy is believed to be behind vile and even criminal behavior in America.

By contrast, socialistic and communistic forms of social management exist in other countries around the world. Britain and many other European countries establish socialistic governments while some third world and Latin American countries still embrace communism as their preferred form of social management. Generally, Americans do not look favorably on these alternatives because of the limitations they impose on personal initiative, meaning they control the individual's rights to "have" and to "do." Efforts to compromise between individual freedom for economic advancement and social responsibility for equality and fair play have defined our national and international agendas throughout American history.

As we begin the 21st century consumerism has become the reigning ideology in American society, and its health is gauged by the way we now understand "freedom of choice." Choice is a catch-all notion in a "consumer democracy": It can mean school choice or personal choice, but above all, it refers to an ever-expanding choice of consumer products.

The consumption of goods is now so closely linked to identity that a new form of social analysis has emerged in which classes are defined not by property or profession or even income but by what products they purchase. These new social groupings are part of the elaborate schemata of marketers, where demographics and psychographics are merged to create mythical profiles of who buys what and for what reasons.