Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis-Sage article

European Journal of Communication http://ejc.sagepub.com

Review: Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. £16.99. 215 pp Ivor Gaber European Journal of Communication 2007; 22; 511 DOI: 10.1177/02673231070220040804 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ejc.sagepub.com

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REVIEWS

for science journalists simply to reproduce press releases, and to follow the paths of least resistance; the tendency towards oversimplification, and the tendency to focus on ‘breaking’ medical research rather than important, but complex, developments, say, in geophysics; the disjunction and mutual hostility between journalists and formal scientists. However, these problems are not solely, or even partially, the result of the embargo system and making the embargo system the starting point for analysis of science journalism serves to obscure wider social and cultural processes that are more significant in producing our tense relationship with formal science. Despite the strong focus on the USA, and the somewhat strained and stretched central argument, this book is a significant and useful addition to media studies of science and technology, and provides an excellent introduction to key debates in science journalism. As such it will be of great use to all those interested in the dissemination of scientific knowledge and the public understanding of science, as well as journalism students and researchers. Mark Erickson University of Brighton

Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006. £16.99. 215 pp. The title of the late Roger Silverstone’s important book, sadly his last, makes life easy for the reviewer. It says it all – that the new ‘mediapolis’ is a space where the media can create a new global morality. And had Silverstone wanted to find a ‘perfect storm’ of a case study for his central thesis he would have had to have looked no further than the war in Iraq and its horrendous aftermath. One of the truisms of media history is that the US finally withdrew from Vietnam because American public opinion turned against the war, as a result of the nightly television pictures of American soldiers returning home in body-bags. The contemporary narrative – an important word for Silverstone – represented by those body-bags, was very much focused on the American solider as a hero being returned from the battlefield to be buried in his native soil. The narrative of Iraq might have started in a similar manner but developed its own momentum with equally powerful political ramifications. The ‘mediapolis’ – which Silverstone defines as ‘not just a space of appearance, but a space for control, and of course resistance . . . a space that is conflicted, intransigent and often inflaming’ – can be seen as at the heart of the global aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. The war began with Rumsfeld’s ‘shock and awe’ – a phrase that captured the notion of the Iraqi people as depersonalized. This depersonalization was fundamental to the narrative of war, which, as the American bombs rained down on Baghdad, saw no people ‘like us’ down below, being killed, maimed and left homeless, only ‘evil’ – another important concept for Silverstone – as personified by Saddam and his henchmen. Drawing on the writings of Hannah Arendt, Silverstone sees ‘evil’ as an important explanatory element in understanding the mediapolis. ‘Evil is the signal expression of otherness’, he writes; ‘of the other as malevolent in a world governed by “good” . . . to ascribe 511 Downloaded from http://ejc.sagepub.com at National School of Political on March 11, 2010

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evil to the other is to place him or her beyond the pale of understanding: the other is incomprehensible and, in a world supposedly governed by reason, the other is dispensable.’ But within the mediapolis, as the Iraq story continued to unravel, the worm turned. The US government, and for that matter the UK as well (which probably goes without saying), decided that, in order to avoid the ‘Vietnam effect’, bodybags would not be seen. But what the US and UK governments did not anticipate was that the mediapolis’s post-conflict narrative would switch from the heroics and deaths of US or British soldiers to their misdeeds as occupiers and to the deaths and sufferings of the Iraqi civilians. As a result, public opinion took, Silverstone might argue, a ‘moral’ view and turned against the occupation. The invisible ‘other’ at the start of the conflict, the Iraqi people, had now become the very visible, as had the transgressions of the occupiers. Silverstone would, I believe, have seen the Iraq narrative as a demonstration of the potential ‘morality’ of the mediapolis. In this book, Silverstone does eventually paint an optimistic picture of the mediapolis but not before he has used some dark and pessimistic hues. Having studied the communications activities within disaporic communities, he is intensely aware of the mediapolis as fractured, dominated by, what appear to be, autistic non-conversations. He highlights the ‘contrapuntal’ (another important concept) nature of these diasporic communities’ relationships with their host cultures. But he also detects how, through their use of media and communications technologies, something that looks like the potential triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’ taking place, as conversations across boundaries – geographical, linguistic and cultural – start to form. This, of course, is to oversimplify, something that Silverstone can never be accused of; but sotto voce one catches elements of, if not religiosity, then something akin to a belief emerging from the pages of this unusual book. He talks, for example, about how these communities – in a rather neat turn of phrase – leave traces across their host cultures ‘like that of a snail on a wall’. It is a delightfully ambiguous phrase, in that a snail’s trace can appear, in some lights, as silken and in others, merely as a smear. There is similar ambiguity about Silverstone’s analysis of the spread of the new communications media. ‘The mobile phone,’ he writes, ‘following hard on the heels of the internet, is only the latest significant communication technology whose emerging patterns of use are beginning to transform the nature of the relationship between public and private spheres, and are creating a kind of perpetual contactability that marks a fundamental shift in our status as individuals in social and virtual space.’ But is ‘perpetual contactability’ a good or bad thing? For the hard-pressed academic sitting in his office, besieged by students, administrators and others, maybe not; but for the African villager, with access to his or her first mobile phone, this new communications technology can be truly liberating. Towards the end of the book, this ambiguity appears to drop away as Silverstone, in increasingly confident tones, asserts that the mediapolis can be, indeed is, a force for good. Hannah Arendt, writing in the 1950s, bewailed the loss of public life within the nation-state and with it the benefits associated with the polis – that is the positive virtues that flow from free public association. Silverstone sees in the rise of the ‘mediapolis’ the possibility of this notion of freedom re-emerging, not in the context of the nation-state, but on a global scale. 512 Downloaded from http://ejc.sagepub.com at National School of Political on March 11, 2010

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This new freedom is based less on the commonalities that supposedly bound people together within the polis located in the nation-state, but on the emergence and celebration of differences – ‘What we have in common is our difference’, he writes. And these differences are resolved, according to Silverstone, in the mediapolis through a number of key concepts. These include notions of justice and a Derridian interpretation of ‘hospitality’, which he interprets as ‘obligations to offer hospitality to the stranger in the symbolic space of media representation . . . a precondition for media justice’. The ideas presented in this book are rich and complex. The text is, on occasion, dense but for the most part it verges on the lyrical. It is a work of intellectual daring, and of a breadth that is remarkable. The conclusions might be somewhat tentative but they contain a snail’s trace of optimism – a trace that is all too rare in the work of contemporary media and cultural studies scholars. This book stands as a tribute to the work of Silverstone and a reminder of how much more he might have had to say and how gracefully he might have said it. Ivor Gaber University of Bedfordshire

Dan Laughey, Music and Youth Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. £50.00 (hbk), £16.99 (pbk). 248 pp. The tendency for popular music and youth culture to be studied alongside one another recently prompted a polemical call from David Hesmondhalgh (2005) for an ‘amicable divorce’ between the two areas of study. Hesmondhalgh’s complaint was that the importance of the relationship between youth and popular music was taken for granted, to the extent that the two were automatically conflated with and reduced to one another, not least by academic studies of scenes and subcultures. To be sure, much of what there is to be learned about popular music does not concern its use by young people – and similarly, there is a great deal to be understood about youth and youth culture that does not revolve around music. Yet these rather obvious assertions ought not to obscure the undoubted significance of music in many young people’s lives or to discourage those who seek to explore this. Dan Laughey’s Music and Youth Culture – whose title will no doubt delight Hesmondhalgh – represents one of the most recent attempts to examine the role of music in young people’s lives and identities. The book is informed by a considerable amount of original empirical work as well as an extensive critical review of previous literature. In my view, although the theoretical discussions cover considerable ground, it is those parts of the book based on Laughey’s own research that offer the most significant potential contributions. As well as examining young people in the present, Laughey includes historical research based on the mass observation studies in the 1930s and 1940s. Youth culture often is regarded as something conceived some time after the Second World War and it is welcome to see some substantive attention to the leisure activities of young people prior to this. The author provides an interesting discussion of jitterbugging and promenading among other things – particularly 513 Downloaded from http://ejc.sagepub.com at National School of Political on March 11, 2010