Processes of mass communication, the aims and functions of mass communication, the notion of popular culture as a product of mass communication, are all issues relevant to comic magazines and are briefly defined in this introductory part of the thesis.
Communication is the process of transmitting meaning between individuals. It always involves at least three elements - the source, the message and the destination. A source may be an individual or a communication organization. The message can take many forms, and the destination may be an individual or a group, or what is known as a mass audience. In this last case the terms mass communication in popular usage evokes the meanings of television, radio, motion pictures, newspapers and magazines. ‘Mass communication’, is rather, ‘a special kind of communication involving distinctive operating conditions, primary among which are the nature of the audience, of the communication experience and the communicator’ (Wright, 1974:242).
The process, by which communication works, whether it is mass communication or communication between individuals, has a distinctive pattern of characteristics, an outline of which has been described by Scramm (1974). The basic communication system is shown in Figure 1. Such a system involves a continuous exchange of messages. Messages in the communication process are made up of signs in the form of signals that stand for something in experiences. The sign is different from an object that it only represents the object in a reduce level of cues. One of the most important aspects of such a system might be that receiver and sender must be in tune (Figure 2). If each circle represents the accumulated experience of the sender and the receiver respectively, then, for communication to be possible, the circles must meet in a common experience field.
To understand the process of communication one should consider first of all the receiver and the sender in the communication system as described in Figure 3. When a signal comes to the receiver, this is in the form of a sign. If the receiver learns the sign, then certain learned responses are acquired with it (mediatory response). These responses are the meaning the sign has for the receiver, and will then determine what the receiver will do about the sign, as other sets of reactions have also been learned, connected to the mediatory responses. Whether this encoding process actually results in some overt communication or action depends partly on the barriers in the way. These barriers may account for moral or social restrictions. Whatever the result, this is the process of communication, which is really nowhere starting or ending; it is really endless.
One important aspect in communication is a process called feedback, which tells us how our messages are being interpreted. Feedback in communication can be provided either from the environment or another individual (Figure 4), or it can be provided from our own messages (Figure 5). Finally it should be noted that in communication messages are rarely sent out in a single channel; there is rather a multiplicity of channels, even in printed mass communication where the channels are perhaps more restricted. The parallel relationships between channels are complex, as the communicator can emphasize a point by adding as many parallel messages as she or he feels are discerned.
This model of communication process can be applied to mass communication, whose aims and function have long been the focus of social, political and media researchers. Lasswell (1948) noted three major activities of communication specialists: (1) surveillance of the environment, referring to the collection and distribution of information concerning events in the environment; (2) correlation of the pats of society in responding to the environment, including interpretations of information about the environment and prescriptions for conduct in reaction to these events; and (3) transmission of social heritage, focusing on the communication of information, values and social norms, from one generation to another; part of this activity is entertainment, referring to communicative acts primarily intended for amusement, irrespective of any instrumental effects they might have.
Transmission of culture (socialization) and entertainment have raised the issue of mass culture and its possible role in creating a conformist mass audience. A complex set of relations exists between mass media and their consumers. Mass media transmit material, out of popular culture, for the average tastes of a socially undefined public. The thoughts, values and tastes of various social groups, are in turn made to conform mass distribution (Loveday & Chiba, 1981). American critics of popular culture, mass media and information technologies, have focused on media and the private sphere of leisure. The ‘mass society’ paradigm argues that the diffusion of mass culture provides a pay-off for whatever subjugation the individual must endure in the workplace. A mass society of atomized individuals is its unfortunate and unanticipated consequence (DeFleur & Ball-Rockeach, 1975).
Dallas Smythe has argued that the main purpose of mass media is to provide, not entertainment or news, but ‘people’ in audiences who work at learning the theory and practice of ownership of civilian goods and who support the military demand management system (Smythe, 1977:20). A mass society is not the unfortunate consequence of people who cherish conformity and upward mobility, but it is the necessary requirement of a capitalist system that extracts surplus value from the labour of audiences to satisfy the need for capital accumulation, legitimation and repression. According to Smythe, leisure time is work, the process of building the audience commodity, What Aronowitz (1979) has described as the colonization of leisure. Garnham (cited in Mosco & Herman, 1980:261) suggests therefore, that the research strategy appropriate to understand the audience commodity is: to look at the way in which the mass media structure socially necessary consumption time in ways that are functional to the general reproduction of the capitalist mode of production at the economic level (Garnham, 1976:48).
Because commercial mass media enable the capitalist system to create surplus value, when viewed dialectically, contemporary culture is more than a powerful instrument of ruling class hegemony (Mosco & Herman, 1980). The goal of media programs in operation, argues Enzersberger (1979), is to create isolated passive consumers with production in the capitalist system controlled by property owners and elite bureaucrats. The capacity of mass media to express and to produce consumer needs accounts for the power of mass culture (Aronowitz, 1979:50).
Mass culture, or mass art, is seen this way as just one more product of mass society of standardized individuals, consumers of the stereotypes offered by the mass media. Romano (1984:213) has described the following traits of this type of art: its unproblematic character; the avoidance of reality; dehumanization; sweet and/or bitter sentimentalism; the anxiety to entertain; bad taste; the evocation of fixed associations and of stereotypes; the intention of manipulating consciousness in a conformist direction. Therefore, mass culture as a market-oriented product and as embodiment of the above traits in the different mass media forms it appears, has given rise to intellectual and moral controversies. Literature has long been an expressive form of culture, and by studying its organization, content and linguistic or pictorial symbols, we learn about the typical forms of behaviour, attitudes, commonly held beliefs, prejudices and aspirations of large numbers of people (Lowenthal, 1961).
Building up a theory of popular culture, Lownthal (1961) notes that all forms of literature show not only the socialized behaviour of people, but the process of their socialization as well; it speaks not only of individual experience, but of the meaning of that experience. ‘the fictional work in literature’, argues Lowenthal, ‘ at its best embodying the general, in particular combines the advantages of two extremes: it presents the important theme as it is acted out and felt by the individual, and at the same time gives us a sociologically meaningful detail’ (Lowenthal. 1961:XIII). Popular culture, in summary, is a great pattern, of patterns of thought and behavior worked out by trial and error over the ages to meet the common basic needs of people (O Caollai, 1975:332). Since the circumstances of life are continually changing, culture must also continually change. Lowenthal argues there is little doubt that popular culture changes have been associated with the broader social and technological changes which ushered in the beginnings of a middle class.
Yet, there is not an all-embracing formula for the study of popular culture. Lowenthal (1961:XXI-XXII) though, makes some possible points to be taken under consideration in an examination of popular culture. These include, patterns of influence, since an artist is of course influenced by his predecessors, and in turn influences his successors, while also influencing the standards of his/her audience; in turn, he/she is influenced by their standards. ‘Considering the concern of mass media producers’, argues Lowenthal, ‘the question what the audience wants becomes increasingly important’. That is specially the case in societies dominated by the mass media, such as those of the Western capitalist world, where ‘there are discernible programming standards beyond the needs and choices of the audience’. Still, a study of popular culture, argues Lowenthal, should center more on content than on channels, and attempts should be made to refer to historical as well as contemporary phenomena and to select sources from different national contexts.
Comic magazines are an important part of children's literature, and their power mainly consists in their characterisation as ‘collective symbolic systems’ (Stahl, 1976:31). As such, they provide a corpus of information about the beliefs, values and practices of the culture in which they are conceived. As it is later examined, this culture is often indicated to be expressing the American monopoly capital and modern financial imperialism context. Comic magazines ‘offer a determinate form of thought, of knowledge and of social consciousness, subject to the laws of the aesthetic interpretation of reality’ (Terron, 1970). Moreover, they produce and retain social values when the need for them exists (Fisher, 1963). Above all, the philosophy and the ideological value patterns in children's comic magazines assume a more important role. Acosta (1973) sees all forms of mass media as an ideological-industrial complex devoted to the justification and perpetuation of the capitalist system. This system, he argues, is the North-American complex of financial, political and military interests that constitutes the core of American imperialism.
A critical content analysis through the heuristic microcosm of children's comic magazines was conducted for the purposes of this dissertation. The main concern in the analysis has been to provide clear illuminations of the values and attitudes expressed in children's comics, and to associate this pattern of cultural elements to the Anglo-Americans cultural macrocosm. Different literary materials are interpreted as indicators of the close association between the comics' cultural pattern and socio-psychological and political habitudes of the capitalist model of society over a period of time. Part one examines the structure and organization of the mass media complex and the possible effects on social behaviour. This part of the work stresses on the fact of American ownership and control over the ‘social construction of reality’ through the mass media. Part two focuses on the development and function of comic industry as ‘the advertising sector’ of immense networks of multinational companies, which originate again in the Western capitalist world. Part three concentrates more on the ideological aspects of comic culture. Through an exemplified content analysis of children's comic magazines, the fact pointed out, is that the overall cultural pattern identified in these magazines is indicative of the Anglo-American imperialist and capitalist cultural elements.
Pointing out that the mass media complex as a whole, the comic industry, and the comic culture, all have the American stamp on them, clearly creates certain socio-political and economic implications, which need further to be investigated. The principal concern of this thesis is to provide evidence of cultural invasion of a foreign cultural context through children's comics; furthermore, the thesis suggests that children's comic magazines provide a case of cultural propaganda and stereotyping in favour of the Anglo-American exploitative and manipulative interests.
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