ghostbat enthusiast

in a recent bid for nostalgia of my early college days I looked at some notes from my freshman year of college as a student of media studies (this was eight years ago) and had a laugh because some of our earliest lessons were about the frankfurt school of thought and its text "the dialectic of enlightenment", which asserts and analyzes many things but generally (generally) speaks to a belief that mass media = mass culture = mass propaganda = mass repression, which is to say that mass media’s objective is to ideologically manipulate its audience and sell to them power as it already exists, that the ideologies it sells to the masses render them weak and complacent about the states of their lives. it argues that when the dominant ruling class controls "the media", it will only produce media that reaffirms the status quo and validates its own sociopolitical positions. this is a marxist point of view and does hold great value, particularly at its time of creation (1920s) but in the very next lesson we were introduced to the birmingham school of thought of the 1960s, which engages with and criticizes the frankfurt school of thought, for which I took the following notes (in my own 18 year old words trying to make sense of it):

"We are now living in a very different cultural moment from the Frankfurt School of thought. Regular working class people are speaking truth to power in an unprecedented way. Birmingham claims that we now must theorize in a way that accommodates this. So yes, Frankfurt is right, but audiences are comprised of individuals who internalize meaning from the media they consume in various ways. The critical and conscious consumer does not inevitably internalize ideas propagated by the media they consume. Frankfurt, an inherently elitist ideology, fails to take into account that everyone manifests the culture they consume in different ways. Simply imagining the individuals who make up broad audiences as a 'mindless, vulnerable mass' is facile and elitist."

now this was only in my freshman year; both frankfurt and birmingham have had their ideas criticized and interrogated even further, and I've since engaged with more advanced texts, more modern and modern-relevant schools of thought and the entire beautiful rigamarole of understanding various critical theories, but the dialectical nature of these two particular schools seems to be constantly and increasingly relitigated in modern discourse - discourse which is highly accessible to anyone and everyone who consumes media and has intense opinions about it. "'dark romance' is bad because it teaches women to romanticize and be complacent with abusive men" versus "it is sexist to presume that women are mindless sponges who can only absorb harmful ideologies from the media they consume". "'dark' ships are immoral because they teach people to trivialize and be complacent with the real life harm they represent" versus "it is elitist to presume that consumers of such ships are mindless sponges who can only absorb harmful ideologies from the ships they enjoy." I saw a tiktok with tens of thousands of likes insisting that sexualized scenes in young adult media are not only 'unnecessary', but dangerous because they encourage "gratuitous fetishization of young female bodies". yet I was just reading a paper last week from sociologist scholars sue jackson and tiina vares that said this, in "Too Many Bad Role Models for Us Girls: Girls, Female Pop Celebrities and 'Sexualization'":

"[...] the literature's concerns about the negative impact of 'sexualized' media on girls have emanated within feminist critiques of the limited, body-focused and sexist versions of femininity available to girls in 'sexualized' media, but these concerns have largely been swamped in the public arena by a right-wing conservative rhetoric about the loss of child innocence, morality and decency effected by 'sexualization'. Claims about the 'sexualization' of girls have been widely debated, however, and a body of critical interrogation on the topic now exists. [...] A critique particularly relevant to this [...] is the absence of girls' perspectives to inform claims made about their assumed 'sexualization' in relation to 'sexualized' media. More broadly, commentators have similarly noted the sparseness of research with girls and young women in relation to their negotiation of a sexually saturated popular/celebrity culture."

when you specialize in a particular field and the most important historical subjects and discourses of that field are not only constantly reenacted in the public consciousness, but reenacted by people who seem to only arrange their beliefs around fears of cultural degeneracy, around under-realized interpretations of 'power' and 'harm' and 'media influence', you are left in a position where sharing your own thoughts using your education and expertise feels pointless because who cares, who is seriously invested in breaking down these subjects with all the care and nuance and respect that they deserve, who will listen? these are not meaningless, unimportant, uncomplicated subjects simply because everyone consumes media, and we must consult research around these subjects before confidently producing the 4000th iteration of repetitive Hot Takes about the tangible effects that media does or doesn't have on the world around us