Blog Post #3: Media Consumption & Marxism

After reading over this week’s chapter concerning Marxism and the way in which it may be applied to the media, I’ve begun to consume media, whether news or entertainment, as a conscious reader rather than as part of a  passive audience. Although, as a media student, I’ve been taught to interpret bias as an all-encompassing entity that governs the cycle and creation of news, even while trying to balance my news sources I’ve found myself looking for the intent that drove the way each topic was framed and each source was presented. It has been made evident that, oftentimes consumers may be aware of the author’s polarized stance on a certain topic, but not necessarily the tendency of that stance to be incorporated into the larger “substructure” that weaves its way into societal norms, as well as individual thinking in a certain society. Studying Marxism has also made me more aware of how heavily influenced the media is by class structure, and how an understanding of the differences between certain classes serves as a hegemony in that, while class structure is seldom blatantly acknowledged in media, it is a concept that everyone is expected to understand that provides the context for the way in which the world functions. While delving into more entertainment-based media, the grid-group analysis of the main characters in shows is something that has been made more prevalent to me in the light of Marxism. Despite the fact that most archetypal characters in most shows are easily identifiable, I’ve come to apply the Marxist idea of these characteristics binding the group and balancing it out in a way that I never noticed before. This has led to me making many parallels between shows that I would have never made a connection between before studying Marxism, and understanding that the Semiotic idea of syntagmatic structure also overlaps into the idea of the same grid-group methods being ubiquitous in mainstream entertainment over many decades.