COMMUNITIES AND CAMPAIGNS

COMMUNITIES AND CAMPAIGNS

It has perhaps been too common to think of the social groups that organize campaigns through the media as being sporadic and limited, though intense, in their concerns, and to conceive of the communities embedding media and campaigns as relatively homogeneous, whether their cultural identity is currently threatened or secure. Indeed, this way of conceiving culture and communication may be an effect, in part, of the way in which campaigns and communities have been represented by media themselves. Moreover, campaigns may have been associated particularly with commercial marketing or with specific issues such as health education. In truth, campaigns represent

a general structural or organizational resource for placing particular issues on a public agenda. Such issues proliferate as societies less readily map onto classic, social and political divisions of interest (Castells, 1983). More accurately, campaigns are a way of opening up and addressing more complex aspects of society through the vantage point of that issue. At the same time, communities themselves, both of place and of interest, have become more various and complex in view of migration and the general tendencies of postindustrial or, better, post-Fordist societies (Harvey, 1989). If contemporary social conflicts are increasingly acted out in a complex cultural domain, it becomes crucial for critical research to explore how the “campaigns” of “communities” may be, and are in fact, processed through the media.

In doing so, research may depart from the commitments and energies of various local and national organizations and institutions as these engage in a sustained and public form of dialogue through periodicals, conferences, and other means, which could hardly be considered spasmodic irruptions of a transient public opinion. It is an important feature of current political cultures that interest groups of all kinds have become much more aware of the importance of the ways in which they are represented, both to themselves and to others. This is witnessed by some previous research in several countries (see Beharrell and Philo, 1977; CCCS Media Group, 1982; Gitlin, 1980).

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In addition, there have developed organizations which distinctively concentrate on media such as, in the USA, Action for Children’s Television and Viewers for Quality Television (see also Simpson, 1987) as well as the British Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Among the independent film and video production centers, community presses, and radio stations which are proliferating in many countries (Berrigan, 1977), there are also some that focus specifically on the representation of local groups and concerns.

More generally, the expectations among the audience-public of what media should accomplish for communities, are likely to change as part of the social-structural developments outlined above. The young people who are today’s children in front of the television screen, and today’s students in media education classes, may conclude that, as they become adult “citizens,” they are both more and less than that. Less, because citizenship, in mass communication as elsewhere, implies rights of knowledge, of access, and of participation which are not widely granted; more, because these citizens do not make up a homogeneous formation which, in converging on a consensus, addresses a shared agenda. This conclusion implies reconsidering the ends and means of mass communication. The determining factors of the whole process are likely to arise less from the media themselves, than from the social, contextual uses to which they are applied; these factors carry an agenda for further qualitative research.