Health and media: an overview

Abstract

Why should medical sociologists study the media? Accounts of the experience of illness are common in medical sociology (see, for example, recent reviews of this field by Pierret 2003 and Lawton 2003). The information these provide has been helpful over the years in re-orienting the vision of health care providers away from a biomedical and reductionist view of patienthood, towards a more holistic understanding of the meanings of illness for those who experience it. In this way many sociologists have contributed to a more widespread construction of 'patients' (passive) as being instead 'consumers' (active), promoting recognition of the psychosocial element of biopsychosocial care. Thus the medical gaze has been extended to parts of life previously hidden from view, so that a new knowledge of illness has come to dominate thinking in certain health care arenas – perhaps particularly so in primary care and in nursing (Armstrong 1983a, 1984). In tandem with these developments has been the emergence of media and cultural studies as new disciplines. These have taken the (mass) mediated nature of personal experience to be an important topic. This can be understood as a component of the broader project of understanding what it is to be a person in late or postmodern social conditions. Thus it is very common, in these fields, to see accounts of media representations of gender, class or race (for example, Dines and Humez 2002), because these are felt to be important factors in understanding issues of identity, over which mass media have considerable influence. Personal identity is, to a great extent, a cultural construction (Rose 1999). Systems of knowledge, or discourses, are promoted in mass media and influence audiences in various ways. New media, such as the Internet, allow a new kind of experience (Castells 1996). We must, therefore, understand popular media if we are to understand experience and its rendering in narrative forms. Yet these two fields of study – media studies and the sociology of health and illness – appear to stand at a distance from one another. There are, of course, studies of medical knowledge itself as a cultural system (Armstrong 1983b, Lupton 1994) and historical accounts may reveal the role of medical and other scientific knowledge in constructing, say, gendered subject identities (Showalter 1987). In this respect, medical sociologists draw upon the same broad theoretical perspective as many sociologists of science and technology, in so far as the truth claims of other sciences are temporarily bracketed, or held in suspense, in order to understand the role of scientific knowledge in the social construction of its subject. Yet medical sociology does not generally reveal very much about the mass mediated nature of scientific knowledge, which has largely been studied as a separate field (for example, Nelkin 1995). To understand the potential relationship between media studies and medical sociology – at least where issues of identity and experience are concerned – we must address the issue of where experience comes from. On the whole, the discipline of psychology has a particular view of this, which many sociologists call an 'essentialist' vision of human nature. Sociologists must understand human experience differently from this, as at least in part a social construction rather than something that emanates from an inner essence. In constructing the self, modern culture makes available to individuals a great many options and resources. The resources might be understood as cultural scripts, or discourses, and modern self identity is formed in a manner that is sometimes quite reflexive (Giddens 1991), drawing on culturally available narratives, stories, scripts, discourses, systems of knowledge or, in more politically oriented analyses, ideologies. Perhaps the greatest repository of stories in late modern societies is made up from the various organs of the mass media – television, newspapers, magazines, radio and, increasingly, the Internet. Here, people find a rich collection of resources to draw upon in telling the story of their selves. When people get sick, or make decisions about health, or visit their health service providers, or decide what to think and vote about health care policy and finance, their behaviour may be formulated in large part from resources drawn from various mass media. These can include depictions of what it is like to be sick, what causes illness, health and cure, how health care providers behave (or ought to) and the nature of health policies and their impact. Particular stories may be promoted by particular interest groups seeking to exert influence over populations. Mass media depictions, of course, are not 'true'. At best, they are partial truths. Sometimes we may even feel they are collections of lies! The producers of mass mediated messages about health have particular agendas, and this is likely to influence what is shown. As ordinary people we must decide to trust or distrust media messages in much the same way as we decide to trust or distrust medical advice or other expertise. As sociologists interested in the experience of illness, and in health care and health policy, we ought to be interested in which stories get told and which are suppressed, and in how members of the media audience (which includes health policy makers and health care providers themselves of course) respond to mediated health messages. Because I think this is important, I have provided an overview of the media and health research field (Seale 2003). I have also edited this monograph which contains some of the best examples of media studies of health that I have been able to elicit from the research community, in a process of selection that was unusually competitive. In this introduction, therefore, I have first discussed why I believe it to be important to bring together the fields of media studies and the sociology of health and illness. In the sections that follow I outline a general account of the media and health field, focusing first on different conceptualisations of the media audience, then on the general formal structure of popular mass media health representations. I feel that there is now sufficient knowledge to propose a general account of representations that can guide future research studies and assist those concerned to understand the underlying logic that produces particular media health stories1. Following this, I outline areas of media and health studies that have been quite thoroughly investigated and others that have been less well studied. For this, I draw on my recent survey of published literature (Seale 2003) and analysis of the content of the 96 abstracts submitted by researchers internationally who applied to write a paper for this monograph. In the course of this section, I show how each of the papers in this volume fits into the field and, in most cases, how these studies offer guidance for future directions of research. I begin with a brief introduction to the structure of the media studies field. Media studies, as it is generally taught to students, is often understood to divide into three broad areas of inquiry: production, representation and reception. Studies of production (for example, Glasgow University Media Group 1976, Schudson 1989) may concern the manner in which media producers behave, or aim to deepen understanding of the commercial environment of media organisations, or involve a 'political economy' approach to media institutions. Such studies ask, for example, about the nature of the influence exerted by governments, professional organisations and business interests on those responsible for producing various media. How do cigarette companies influence magazine editors through paying for advertising? How do the public relations activities of, say, the food industry influence what we see in the media? How do journalists relate to their sources and decide on what counts as a good story? How do health pressure groups use the web? How do government agencies and the medical profession attempt to regulate health information available on the internet? Studies of representation involve analysis of media messages themselves. Such studies may seek for ideological biases, or the discursive dominance of particular themes and constructions, or be concerned with whether messages are likely to promote or damage health. Or they may investigate the formal properties of media messages as linguistic, narrative or semiotic systems. How does a medical soap opera portray doctors as against nurses? What messages about personal versus societal responsibility for health are conveyed in the advice columns of magazines? Which political analyses of the problems of health care systems get most coverage? Is health information on the Internet at variance with medical advice? Studies of reception involve investigations of media audiences. Once considered passive recipients (or forgetters) of information, audience 'theory' developed during the 1980s towards a conceptualisation of audiences as much more active in relating to mediated messages. A reconceptualisation of the 'mass' audience towards a view of fragmented 'audiences', with varying motivations and competencies, has also emerged. For example, politicians are important audience members: they are highly responsive to mass media reports. Media producers themselves are also members of the media audience. What they see in the media may influence what they produce. To what extent are health policies designed to assuage a potentially hostile media? To what extent do health professionals model their behaviour on what they see on the television? How do ordinary people respond to media messages about food scares, or safe sex, or exercise, or deadly diseases? How do people use health information on the Internet? These are examples of the questions that are of interest in reception, or audience studies. Here, we can begin to see that distinctions between producers and consumers of media are not always easy to sustain. The concept of a feedback loop in which certain audience members are also involved in production is helpful here. In studies of the Internet the blurring of the boundary between audience and producer is particularly evident. The production of web sites and contributions to other Internet forums for the discussion of health matters and the promotion of particular health related messages is within the reach of many people, no longer being confined to specialist occupational groups of media producers. Action, pressure and patient groups may form around such Internet activities. The existing structure of this field of study is weighted towards analyses of health representations (this point will be made more evident in the survey of abstracts that follows this section). Any general account of media and health, if it is to be based on an adequate body of evidence, must therefore take this as the primary object of analysis. But in order to understand media health representations it is necessary to know a little more about the media health audience. In the discussion that follows, little reference will be made to media production issues1 and, reflecting the balance of existing published work, the focus will be on traditional popular 'mass' media rather than the Internet or the more specialist media read by professional groups. They are nevertheless important areas and studies of the internet, as you will see, and are included in the papers in this volume because of their importance for the future of media health research. This is necessarily brief, being the bare essentials of audience theory needed to understand the account of representations that follows (a fuller account that explains the underlying rationale for this selection is in Seale 2003: Chapter 1). In my view any general account of the media health audience should take account of the following five points, which I list together with references to works in which the particular perspective is best expressed: The audience may (or may not) seek health-promoting information as a part of rational risk profiling at fateful moments. The work of Giddens (1990, 1991, 1992) and to some extent Beck (1992) outlines this vision of the modern individual's relations to expertise, though not with particular reference to media audience theory. The audience seeks emotional stimulation through dramatised contrasts that have an entertaining effect; fear and anxiety, for example, may be aroused so that they are experienced as a contrast to security and pleasure. Hill's (2000) studies of 'reality television' brings this out effectively, as does Langer's (1998) account of the 'other news'. Audience readings are diverse, involving 'resistance' as well as alignment with dominant ideas. The notion of the 'active audience' was designed to replace earlier conceptions of audiences as passive recipients of information, a conception often embedded in early health education studies of 'effects'. The work of Hall (1980) and Morley (1986) has been influential here, although critical responses to over-enthusiastic depictions of audiences as always active and resistant have emerged to counter this (for example Philo 1999). This perspective is particularly important in any study of audiences where political issues are of concern. The audience participates in an imagined conversation with mediated ideas, and in an imagined community of other viewers, people 'like me'. Anderson (1991) is responsible for this idea, relating it to the historical emergence of daily newspapers as the first such mass mediated conversation. People draw on media in order to construct themselves – the media are mirrors for narcissistic (self-regarding) experimentation with different potential selves. Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998) outline this view. Beyond these points there is a general one – perhaps the sixth in the list – that I feel has not yet been well recognised, which concerns the nature of audience experience. This is not structured in the same way as the neat divisions of research studies require. A media analyst, in general, picks a particular issue on which to focus: BSE, for example, or depression, or HIV/AIDS, or the emergence of some new contested syndrome, and so on. Once chosen, data may be gathered about the way a range of media presents that particular issue. But audience experience is not like this – it is at once more fragmentary and in a sense more active. As we go about our lives we may at one point in the day hear a report about a health scare on a radio programme, then read about a health policy in the newspaper, then spend the evening channel hopping on the television, seeing a soap opera where characters eat a variety of health enhancing or damaging foods, a documentary where a medical breakthrough is described, finishing with reading a magazine where readers' letters about health issues are answered. Nowhere do we decide to spend the day focusing on the way a variety of media present the topic of depression. As the result of this fragmentary experience, we learn the conventions of an overall media health story, which has certain regular features. Media audiences generally are well schooled in recognising media conventions (the discipline of media studies only formalises a tendency to critique and analyse these which we all have to a greater or lesser extent). Members of media audiences, in fact, are able actively to 'fill in the gaps' when they experience a fragment of an overall story, as Benthall (1993) has argued in relation to audience experience of disaster relief stories: Even when only a part of a narrative relating to disaster is shown on television – for instance, pictures of starving babies, or an aeroplane setting off from a familiar airport bringing supplies, or an ambassador thanking the public for their generosity – viewers come to recognize it as part of the total narrative convention (Benthall 1993: 188–9). It is in the context of this learned capacity of audiences to recognise narrative conventions (which media producers themselves may recognise and exploit) that we can understand media health representations. One of the many insights of narrative analysts (for example Propp 1968, Labov 1973) is that stories often work by creating and then exploiting oppositions. These are common in the overall story of media health. To list just a few classic oppositions, such stories contain heroes and villains, pleasure and pain, safety and danger, disaster and repair, the beautiful and the ugly, the normal and the freak, cleanliness and dirt, female and male, lay and professional, orthodox and alternative. Perhaps most importantly, media health stories often oppose life with the threat, or the actuality, of death. This last opposition explains, for Turow (1989), the enduring appeal of TV medical soaps, as well as the reason for the overriding focus on doctors rather than nurses or other health care workers in such dramas. Doctors can be more easily depicted making life or death decisions. This means that medical soaps – perhaps like all media health stories at some level – explore the most fundamental anxiety that we all face as embodied, finite beings. A perennial complaint of scientists considering media reporting of scientific discoveries is that journalists sensationalise their findings, thus introducing inaccuracies (Nelkin 1995). For example, a new drug is either a miracle cure, or a potential Frankenstein's monster such as thalidomide. There is no room for a drug that is good in some respects but bad in others. This tendency to generate dramatic effect through extrematised oppositions is an aspect of what some have called 'tabloidisation' (Sparks and Tulloch 2000). Whether there exists an increasing tendency in Western media towards 'tabloidisation' or not (and there are those who will argue both sides of this), opinion is also divided on whether such tendencies should be regarded as desirable. One view (seen for example in Livingstone and Lunt's (1994) analysis of daytime TV talk shows) is that tabloidisation is a route to greater democratic participation in the public sphere. It constitutes the popularisation of otherwise complex areas, thus drawing in more participants than otherwise. Others (for example, Franklin 1997) claim that the tabloid format represents a regrettable dumbing down in standards of public popular mass media to be popular if in a way that a find in a scientific of must be necessary if the dramatic oppositions that are the of story telling are to be and this, the complaint of with which the critique of tabloidisation is an understanding of the of media People do not make TV or newspapers in order to provide the public with health The (and this to and as as it does to is more and medical care providers and health have come to recognise this and 2000). 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