Towards an analytics of mediation

Abstract

In this paper I discuss a framework for the analysis of media discourse – the ‘analytics of mediation’ – that takes into account the embeddedness of media texts both in technological artefacts and in social relationships and, hence, seeks to integrate the multi-modal with the critical analysis of discourse. On the methodological level, the analytics of mediation applies a multi-modal discourse analysis onto media texts in order to study their visual and linguistic properties: camera/visual; graphic/pictorial or aural/linguistic. On the social theory level, the analytics of mediation addresses critical concerns on the ethical and political role of television and other media in our ‘global village’. Can television foster a cosmopolitan consciousness or does its ‘fake proximity’ alienate the spectator from the rest of the world? Can we talk about the media as agents of global citizenship or do the media lead to compassion fatigue – a Western denial of humanitarian problems? I illustrate such questions by drawing on one concrete example of television news.

Keywords:

• mediation
• analytics of mediation
• multi-modality
• critical discourse analysis
• television
• suffering
• global citizenship
• cosmopolitanism

Notes

1. See Arendt (1973/1990), McGowan (1998), Villa (1999) and Peters (2005) for the historical argument that the discourse of ‘universal’ morality, a form of ethical practice informed by ideas of Christian care and civil responsibility, was first articulated into the public realm in the Europe of Enlightenment and today constitutes a powerful discourse of public ethics in the Western world.

2. Aristotle (1976, 1140a24–1140b12, 1144b33–1145a11). See also Walker (1998) for a situated and relational view that perceives ethics as practices of responsibility that encode and express values and modes of connecting to others. ‘Morality’, she argues, ‘arises and goes on between people, recruiting human capacities for self awareness and others’ awareness; for feeling and learning to feel particular things in response to what one is aware of; for expressing judgment and feeling in the responses appropriate to them' (1998, p. 5).

3. For the connection between pity and citizenship see Boltanski (1999, pp. 20–34) and Arendt (1973/1990, pp. 59–114); for the connection between private and public disposition see Peters (1999, pp. 214–225); and for the connection between the communication of the private self in the public sphere of television see Scannel (1991, pp. 1–9).

4. For semiotic analyses of suffering see van Leeuwen and Jaworski (2002) on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; Perlmutter and Wagner (2004) on the violent conflicts relating to the G8 Summit in Genoa; for the language of mourning in public and, specifically, media discourse see Butler (2003); for the language of mourning concerning the events of September 11 see Martin (2004); for the analysis of spacetimes see Chilton (2003). For discourse analysis of discourses of pity in the context of migration see Reisigl and Wodak (2000); and for discourse analysis of the language of involvement in news broadcasts see Wodak (1996, pp. 100–130).

5. As Peters reminds us, the core controversy in social and media theory reflects a deeper rivalry between Marx's conflictual view of society and Durkheim's consensual view of the social body (Peters, 1999, p. 223).

6. The most radical version of pessimism on the role of the media in social life is Baudrillard's thesis, where the media are considered to be responsible for the disappearance of the real into a simulacrum – a mirror image of reality that is nowadays the only authentic reality of the spectator, leaving no space for considering mediation as an ethical space (Baudrillard, 1988). For a philosophical response to the nihilism of Baudrillard's ‘hyperreality’ in the context of information technologies see Introna (2002, 2001). Taking a Levinasian position that asserts the condition of proximity as the sine qua non of an ‘other’-oriented ethics, Introna argues that, in the age of electronic mediation, ethical practice calls less for moral norms and codes and more for reclaiming or asserting face-to-face presence as a guarantee for sustaining responsibility towards the ‘other’.

7. This optimistic account of the ethical force of mediation goes as far as considering the media to be changing democracy today towards a deliberative model. Deliberative democracy, as opposed to representative democracy, is a non-localized, non-dialogical model of democracy, which comes about when audiences use media information to form judgements about distant events and undertake public action in the local contexts of their everyday life. In the face of the crisis of representative forms of public participation through political partiesand social movements, deliberative processes contain today the hope for new practices of politicization and collective action. See Thompson (1995, pp. 114–116) for examples of such possibilities; see also Alexander and Jakobs (1998, pp. 22–41) on American civil society.

8. Audiences, we are told, must turn their sense of responsibility into a form of moral-practical reflection because this is the best – the only – option we have (Thompson, 1995, p. 265).

9. For a criticism of this position, accusing Derrida of cutting the semiotic system off from social relations, see Butler (1997, pp. 150–151); see also Said (1978, p. 703).

10. Derrida's criticism of Saussure is a philosophical argument that explains the inferiority of writing in terms of the broader historical biases of Western thinking, which takes the form of the opposition between conceptuality/language and materiality/visuality. See also Shapiro (1993, pp. 6–12) for a criticism of the linguistic reduction perspective, which suggests that the verbal has a far greater range than the visual; and see Jay (1994, pp. 493–542) for a critique of the 19th- and 20th-century suspicion of visual culture – what he calls the antiocularcentric discourse, particularly in French thought. Shapiro's and Jay's accounts on the antagonism between linguistic and vision-centred discourses reveal unresolved tensions in the debate.

11. Here I adapt Chatman's categories of three main text-types in communicative practice: description, argument and narrative (1991, p. 9).

12. For the use of Piercean semiotics in visual analysis and in media texts see Hall (1973/1980), Hodge and Kress (1988, pp. 19–20), van Leeuwen (2001, pp. 92–118), and Schroeder (2002, pp. 111–116).

13. See Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2001) and van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001) for the grammar of the visual; see also van Leeuwen and Jaworski (2002) and Perlmutter and Wagner (2004, pp. 91–108). The Piercean typology corresponds to other classifications of meaning types, such as Panofsky's (see van Leeuwen, 2001, pp. 100–117).

14. This is one of Foucault's basic claims (Foucault, 1970, 1972) and a major premise for the post-structuralist anchoring of discourse analysis in critical research; for discussions see Fraser (1997), Torfing (1998), Chouliaraki (2002) and Howarth (2002).

15. There is also the textual meta-function of semiosis, which looks inwards to the text itself and serves the social purpose of creating meaning that is recognized as coherent and intelligible; according to Jewitt and Oyama, the textual meta-function holds together the individual bits of representation-interaction into coherent text wholes (2001, p. 140). In so far as it concerns itself with the combination of language and image in coherent texts, the textual meta-function obviously appertains to the multi-modal analysis of television that I discussed above; it is part of mediation as difference within the semiotic.

16. These questions are adapted from Morson and Emerson's discussion on Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope (1990, pp. 366–375).

17. All examples are taken from a voiceover transcript of April 8, 2003.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lilie Chouliaraki

Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Discourse Studies at the Copenhagen Business School. She is co-author of Discourse in Late Modernity (EUP, 1999), editor of The Soft Power of War (Benjamin, 2006) and author of The Spectatorship of Suffering (Sage, 2006).