Mass Media and Contemporary Technological Anxieties

Fredric Jameson’s article, Reification and Utopia on Mass Culture, seems to bounce around a lot to cover every point he can make about mass media and culture. He goes from topics discussing “high-brow” culture to symbolic effects to distribution processes. However, I think Jameson’s point on why media is apart of society in the first place is a strong argument. He uses the Freudian model of social theory to simplify Norman Holland’s The Dynamics of Literary Response. Jameson uses Holland’s ideas on how commercial arts can “manipulate” their publics to emphasize points on how this is done through aesthetic gratification and wish-fulfilling functions. Jameson then extends past this point of wish-fulfillment to say mass culture is not an empty distraction, false consciousness (or pure spectacle), but, “rather as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies that must then have some effective presence in the mass culture text in order subsequently to be 'managed' or repressed.” (141) People have these underlying fears and dreams that media can control by fulfilling these Freudian desires of individuals and collectively as a society. This is what Jameson believes is the function of mass culture, which then can be branched off to discuss high and low cultures, racial issues, symbolic effects, and distribution.

The best way to describe the function of mass culture was through our screening of Pacific Rim and discussion of Jaws. This showed how symbols can become overdetermined in social meaning, but also how individual desires for gratification occur through the spectacle of the images. However, I have noticed that much of the media in our contemporary culture is becoming focused on technology itself. The social and political anxieties people are having are of technology and images themselves. Films such as Her, Jurassic World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, and television shows from 30 Rock to House of Cards are discussing the anxieties surrounding technological modification and fabricated media images. This amazes me because these popular, successful media types are hypocritical of the topic they are discussing. They themselves are enhanced technological commodities that display a false reality, yet mass media is still used to “manage” or repress the anxieties people have of these objects.

So maybe mass media can now be seen as a form of distraction because the content distracts us from its own form. Contemporary mass media discusses the growing social anxieties of technology, but does this without calling attention to itself as part of the anxiety. Is there any way to solve this conundrum? Can mass media become transparent enough to actively discuss anxieties with technology? Or will viewers always find another distraction within the images and media? I personally believe mass media cannot become transparent enough to actively engage a viewpoint on technology because part of the gratification people get out of mass media is through its spectacle. I believe people will always find a distraction away from the form of the media.