Discourse dissemination across social boundaries

Picture by brooklynpix

Having embarked on the mission to find out how to do Critical Discourse Analysis, it was nice to find out that one of the staff of the School of English and a former teacher of mine, Dr Mayr, has recently brought out a book with exactly that as the title. I've borrowed it from the library (a hassly affair as it is only available as a short loan, which has me running to the library through the rain at 3:45pm to return it before I get fined at exactly 4pm) and eventually decided to purchase it as it's useful and because I feel a sense of pride at owning books from people who have taught me.

The book intends to show precisely how the "semiotic choices" authors make (authors here referring to journalists and writers as well as photographers, singers, visual editors and whoever engages in communication) are influenced by and feed into discourses, or frameworks of interpretation, which are in turn ways to obscure the ideology of the text. These ideologies form the hegemony of the higher classes, and eventually serve to convince the lower classes that the way the higher classes control and oppress them is in fact legitimate. 

Let me first say that the book does a really good job of showing how these semiotic choices work. I will be writing more on this later as I will most likely be basing a lot of the analysis I'm going to do on what's explained in the book. As of yet I am working my way through it to form a sort of plan for how to do the analysis. 

So although I really do admire the minute detail they go into when analyzing texts, some of the underlying ideology shall we call it irks me to the max. The idea that - even in a democracy - the higher/educated/managerial classes, the ABC, control the lower and working classes, the DE, through the media (such as the Daily Mail which a lot of the examples in the book are drawn from) is in fact almost belittling as it implies that the lower classes have very little agency of their own. 

This is a quote from the book:

Power comes from privileged access to social resources such as education, knowledge and wealth, which provides authority, status and influence to those who gain this access and enables them to dominate, coerce and control subordinate groups. (...)

Power can be more than simple domination from above; it can also be jointly produced when people are led to believe that dominance is legitimate in some way or other. (...)

Power, at least in democratic societies, needs to be seen as legitimate by people in order to be accepted, and this process of legitimation is generally expressed through language and other communicative systems. (Machin and Mayr, 2012: 25)

To do a little analysis here; in the second part of the quote "people" are an object of a passive verb: they are led to believe that the dominance is legitimate rather than that they just believe it, which would imply more agency on their part. Who is the implied actor here? Who leads them to believe it? With reference to the first part of the quotation, it is suggested that "those who gain this access" are the ones who lead the "people" on and who are apparently not "people" themselves. Also, "dominance" could have been phrased in a more neutral manner, as "reign", "regime" or "government". Dominance is a very charged word which implies that the one group is controlling the other. The rather explicit suggestion throughout is that those who have money and who are educated are controlling and coercing the poor and the uneducated.

However if we are talking about how the higher classes control the lower through ideology, then it makes no sense that most of the examples in the analysis are from a paper (the Daily Mail) that espouses views almost exclusively held by the lower classes, as opposed to the Guardian or the Times, which communicate ideas more popular with the higher and middle classes. Clearly there is a question here about who actually writes the articles; who communicates these ideologies and why is it in their interest to do so. Also, one needs to know what the actual readership of the articles is like.

I am under the impression that the Daily Mail is written for and by people from working class environments and communicates ideas held by some people in this group, though certainly not all. The ideology of the educated classes is more so represented by papers like the Guardian, which is also written by people who come from ABC environments. (I should warrant that I am working on impressions, but I would be surprised if I were proven wrong.A research project to back up this hypothesis could take the form of a survey for journalists of the various papers, to ask about their and their parents' education, type of work and income and their political leanings.)

Now, if both groups actually read papers written by their own group, then where does the transfer of ideology happen?

Another source of material analysed in the book is the Cosmopolitan. Machin and Mayr show how its imagery and articles paint a streamlined, idealised and kind of vapid picture of what women's lives are or should be like, and then promote the accesoires that belong with such a lifestyle. It is very entertaining to read their minute analysis of the high-pitched lighting and absolute absence of any clue as to what type of work the stylishly dressed women are doing.

A question that they leave open, which is fair enough to them I suppose, is "who actually buys this crap?" Who are these women spending actual money to read the magazine? Who takes the barely obscured sales pitches and laughable advice serious? Now beside all the people who read the magazine for a laugh, although that may very well be a majority of the readership, I believe that the intended audience of the newspaper is a group of girls and women who do in fact have an image of what their own lives are or should be like that matches the image sketched in the Cosmopolitan. They buy the magazine because they would actually like some advice on what make-up products are available and how they could go about wooing a man, in the same way that I bought the How To Do Critical Discourse Analysis book because I wanted to know precisely that.

If this is true it means that the group who reads the magazine does so because they already share its ideology. The same may be true for the newspaper choice; the Daily Mail readership shares its fairly explicit racism, its sense of humour and its obsession with "crazy murder beasts" who batter little children. The Guardian readership would indeed like to be informed about the latest developments in the NSA debacle or what's on show in the country's modern art museums. That's why they buy the paper.


In conclusion, ideological hegemony via newspapers may not work in the way the authors seem to suggest - ideas "produced" by a powerful group that serve to prolong their domination over the less powerful group. In a democracy, this theory belittles the wit and agency of those supposedly subordinate groups. Rather, each group communicates their ideology to other members of the same group, who are not "led to believe" new discourses but who in fact already agree, which is the premise that their voluntary consummation of the information is based on. Within the groups discourses develop organically, but they will be slower to filter down from the one group to the other.

Rather than media, education may be a key to how some discourses are communicated across social boundaries. Again it should be asked who decides on the content, who communicates it to the children, and how much of it the children actually believe and internalise.