sis of the political economy of
communications. Such a view of ideology assumes that a “true” picture of reality is
available to us, but is hidden by the ideology(ies) that dominate a given society. The
dominant ideology in Western societies in the modern era has been liberal ideology, albeit
combined with elements of older Christian and conservative ideas, patriarchy, racism, and
other assorted ideologies. But it is the following second view of ideology that is
primarily used in communication scholarship.
The second view of ideology derives from semiotics, and particularly from the work of
theorist Louis Althusser. In his famous article, “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses,” Althusser defined ideology as that which “represents the imaginary
relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” Ideology is, for all intents
and purposes, the permanent condition of our lives. There is a real physical world out there,
but we experience it only through ideology. Ideology is so pervasive that is fundamentally
both built into the material world we have made (i.e., how we have organized nature and
the built environment in which we live) and our deepest selves (through a process
Althusser calls “interpellation”).
Ideology is not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, every society needs ideologies insofar as
every society needs to have coherent frameworks through which to interpret reality.
Objective knowledge of the wor英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】ld is not possible, and thus we necessarily filter reality
through language and consciousness ultimately conditioned by ideology. The issue for
communication scholars is not so much whether we should have ideology, but which
ideologies we should have. Some ideologies are better than others, and some are entirely
destructive, such as white supremacy, or fascism. Media and culture act as conduits for
ideologies as they circulate through society and communicate themselves to us through
stories, statements, images, experiences, and other means. Ideologies themselves are
historical: they change, adapt, and sometimes die.
Ideology’s presence in our reality means that the world has a larger coherence than we
often suspect. Appreciating this coherence makes critical analysis of media and culture
much more productive. The presence of ideology means that, when doing media criticism,
we can assume that there are systematic connections between one media text (a program,
a T-shirt, a billboard, a conversation) and another. Ideology prevents media studies from
becoming a sophisticated trivial pursuit, insofar as it suggests that the numberless media
phenomena we encounter are in different and important ways connected to each other by a
larger architecture of ideas about reality. In studying media, we can therefore gain glimpses
into the underlying patterns and structures that support society in general. The triviality of
media and popular culture
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