Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Uses of Literacy
One of the issues I've never developed as I would have liked to is the contrast between, and the real meaning of the relationships between, local cultures and the great organs of persuasion, whether they be the mass media or whatever. I've certainly never belonged, though I have been accused of it, to the group that says nothing really happens to people as a result of the media since they're so much part of the local culture they belong to...I also don't believe that they're blank slates waiting to be written on; but the relationship between the two is something to do with a kind of transmutation, with the way people will take things offered to them and transmute them into the terms of their own culture. But the media aren't in business for nothing and there is a sense in which they do have an effect and an "impact" that that's becoming more and more the case.
There goes Hoggy-wog again with his blank slates and his transmutations. What he's taking issue with here is that one of the main issues that comes up over and over and over again in cultural studies is the question of how readers and viewers respond to cultural texts and, in particular, mass-media texts.
Here's a trick: the key word here is "agency."
In the early years of cultural studies, everyone made a noisy hullaballoo about how the public was being manipulated by the big, bad media, and cultural studies theorists sensed that they were smarter than all those poor, brainwashed people who were oblivious to what was going on.
So, since academics placed themselves apart from ye olde common folke, believing that they alone had their eyes wide open to media's manipulations, they set about exposing the ways in which the masses were being kept from seeing things as they really were. There is no spoon that bends, the Matrix-esque scholars would say—the media is bending it for you.
As cultural studies developed, though, the idea that the public was wholly brainwashed by the media seemed a mite simplistic. Not that the media doesn't have an influence: as Hoggart points out, it's not an either/or scenario. Still, there's no doubt that there's been more and more attention paid to how people receive texts and create their own meanings.
Ultimately, it's a question of emphasis. We'll take our spoon emphasized to the left, thanks.