Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication

by John Brookshire Thompson

In this major work, informed by materials from several disciplines and theoretical orientations, the author develops a distinctive new account of the theory of ideology and relates it to the analysis of culture and mass communication in modern societies. In the two centuries since is first appeared in France, the concept of ideology has undergone many transformations. It has been twisted, reformulated, recast, and finally filtered back into the everyday language of social and political life. Although there is much that is misleading and erroneous in the traditions of ideology, the author shows that it still defines a terrain of analysis that remains central to contemporary social sciences and continues to be the site of lively theoretical debate. The key to his analysis is what he terms the "mediazation" of the culture―the general process by which the transmission of symbolic forms becomes increasingly reliant on the technical and institutional apparatuses of the media industries. Building on the work of Geertz and others, the author asserts that symbolic forms are embedded in such structured social contexts as power relations, forms of conflict, and inequalities in the distribution of resources, and that any discussion of mass communication must embrace its political as well as epistemological content.

Genres: Sociology

370 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1990

Reviews

[Conor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book opens with a strong offering of both a critical re-evaluation of symbolic forms as well as some concrete tools that can be employed in methodology, but loses steam rather quickly in chapter 2 before exhausting it by the end of chapter 3.

Unless one has been living under a rock since the book was published, they should not bother to read chapter 4 at all. The content there is largely the exact same tedious outlining of the history (sometimes relevant, sometimes wholly unnecessary) of the development of various media in Western society. Perhaps necessary, but usually irrelevant to the task at hand for anybody with a modicum of awareness to the world in which they live. Like most other accounts of this nature, the discussion on technical developments in communication and media reads like somebody trying to explain to explain banal technologies to somebody who just stepped out of a time machine. Perhaps compelling when it was first published; nauseating now. Nobody would think to stop everything to explain what the wheel is to somebody when giving an account of what happened during the Crusades; telling me how the radio works is just as obtuse and annoying when trying to discuss symbolic forms.

The same more or less holds for chapter 5. Before reaching this point, I was hopeful that the author would recoup on the attention loss from the preceding chapters, but sadly it seems to have been subjected to the same pitfalls as other contemporaries who try to build innovative new theories on the basis of a band-wagon inducing new technology. We get it--things are new; the attempt to integrate this information into an insightful sociology is not critique-worthy, but one hopes to read something a tad more interesting than "people don't have to be in the same room to communicate with each other any more".

I'm a bit skeptical towards the deep-hermeneutical methodology proposed here and I suspect that I won't find it too useful in my own work, but the incorporation of domination and asymmetrical power relations in the concept of ideology is excellent, as are some of the more modest and concrete explications of ideology's modus operandi.

[Titus Hjelm · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it made any sense to bring a sociology book to a deserted island, this would be one of my top choices. The media part is hopelessly outdated, of course, but the rest is pure dynamite. Thompson has become my favourite social theorist recently.