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Chapter 10: Media Power (Locating power (class is a way of categorizing…
Chapter 10: Media Power
power is the ability to determine the actions of others, as well as our ability to determine our own actions (dominant individuals/groups vs. subordinate individuals/ groups)
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the more overtly oppressive and obvious the exercise of power, the more likely it is to be resisted
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class is a way of categorizing social groups according to hierarchies of wealth, occupation, taste and culture
a class is a group of something, so social classification is the process of identifying different people as belonging to different groups with different amounts of social power, usually measured in terms of economic status
those lower down the hierarchy always outnumber the rich and powerful-> discontent-> theories of democracy and socialism which argued that it was possible to have a form of society where everyone had a stake in it, even if the degree of investment and equality proposed in such theories varied
modern consumer societies-> meaning of class has changed and decreases in importance: contemporary theories of class: 30/30/40; about levels of ownership and cultural differences rather than workers vs. owners
power relations other than class: race, gender, sexuality
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representative democracy came not from the idealism of democracy, but from the growing desire of the capitalist class for political power to match their economic power
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set of shared ideas that seem, to those who hold them, to be natural and unquestionable
Marxism
criticism of the political economists of the 18th and 19th centuries who argued that giving unfettered liberty to the operation of the arket would lead each individual to pursue his own interests, generating value (or capital), that would in turn benefit all
Karl Marx argued that, rather than freeing everyone into a new period of increased wealth, capitalism simply gave power and wealth to a new elite, the bourgeoisie, which exercised its own power in oppressing those required to maintain its status
what made his writing so important was the connection of these arguments to thinking about ideas and their value in power relations
Hegel
one set of ideas is dominant in society at any oe time and dictates the material nature of society- the thesis
-> zeitgeist: prevailing spirit of the age
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int ime, the two ideas would clash and merge to form a new agreed set of ideas, the synthesis->the idealist process or the dialetic
Marx inverted Hegels's ideas: the way society is organised (its material basis) would determine ideas and the way that people thought about the world (base and superstructure analogy)
- Antonio Gramsci and hegemony
he studied how ideologies worked to actively maintain acceptance of the rule of the powerful in totalitarian contexts, when the mass of people suffered disproportionately
hegemony: leadership; Gramsci's use refers to the way in which economic and cultural leadership is demonstrated by a dominant group, how consent for it is sought and won, and where in society this takes place
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this power is not absolute; wherever power is exercised, there is resitance
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