Ideology

I looked up the word 'ideology' up in my dictionary and the definition is "the body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture." Now what does all that have to do with mass communication in society? Marx and Engels (1970) says, "the dominant ideas of society are the ideas of the dominant class." The class that holds the power attempts to impose its ideas, its version of reality, on the rest of society.

This gives a misrepresentation of a culture. There are sub-cultures that abide within the whole. Giving the perspective of one sub-cuilture cannot represent everyone. The capitalists class, of course, has different ideas, views, needs, and aspirations than the working class. The working class has their own truth. The problem is that the representation the capitalist class offers is universalized and naturalized then offered as the truth for everyone. This is why we have social conflicts.

In the book, it talks about humanistic theory of ideology. It describes the struggle between attempts on the part of subordinated minorities to define a part of their life outside of the control of the dominant majoirty. You see this everytime a "Rags to Riches" story is broadcasted. It's an individual who has moved through the class system from lower to capitalist, and wants the popular class to know about it. But the problem with this is that the capitalist doesn't care, they only care about what representation you can bring to make the whole look good. For example, we glorify athletes who are very skilled at their sport, but give them no credit for the hard work it took to get there. As long as Lebron James keep dazzling crowds with his basketball skills, as long as Kanye West keeps giving us memorable music along with drama so we can keep talking about him, the popular culture doesn't care about anything else.

Social constructionism denies that there is any access to a reality outside of representations that would allow one to measure the truth or falsity of representations. That's not true. It denies it because people are scared to expose the truth because it will give another representaion that will jeopardized the one that was provided before. The consequences would be that more people know about the truth and will re-act in ways the capitalist didn't want. I believe that people tell you what they want, so they may recieve the reactions they want. That is what's wrong with the media today, there are so many versions of one thing, you don't know which one to believe for truth.