The Media, Modernity and Enlightenment

1
The Media, Modernity and Enlightenment

• Roddy Flynn

2

• Media as an industry and the concept of modernity
  are fundamentally interlinked
• Term "Modernity" must be treated with some
  caution
• Positive interpretation of modern quite recent

3

• Postmodernism - term used to describe a society
  pervaded by the idea of ceaseless development,
  progress and dynamic change
• Term postmodernism also reflects perceived
  failure of the modernist project

4
Political Modernity

• Dominance of secular forms of political power,
  conceptions of sovereign and legitimacy,
  nation-states with defined territorial
  boundaries.

5
Economic Modernity

• Money based economy based on large-scale
  production and consumption of commodities for the
  market, extensive ownership of private property

6
Social Modernity

• Decline of fixed (feudal) social order with its
  established hierarchies - replaced by new social
  (class) and sexual (patriarchy) division of
  labour.

7
Cultural Modernity

• Decline of religious world view typical of
  traditional societies - rise of secular culture -
  individualist, rationalist and instrumentalist.
• But also
• The construction of imagined communities -
  nations and nationality.

8
Modernity Enlightenment

• All of these changes in part made possible by the
  emergence of a new way of thinking that peaks in
  the 18th century - The Enlightenment
• A new way of thinking - Critical rationalism -
  applied reason to social, political and economic
  issues with concern for progress, emancipation
  and improvement and is thus critical of the
  status quo

9
A paradigm or set of Enlightenment ideas

• Reason - means of organising knowledge. The
  process of rational thought.
• Empiricism - the idea that all knowledge is based
  on empirical facts that humans can understand
  through their five senses.
• Science - notion that scientific knowledge was
  the key to expanding all human knowledge.

10
A paradigm or set of Enlightenment ideas

• Universalism - reason and science could be
  applied anywhere using the same set of
  principles. Science produced general laws which
  governed the entire universe.
• Progress - the application of science and reason
  would bring an ever increasing level of happiness
  and well-being
• Individualism - individuals are the starting
  point for all knowledge,and that individual
  reason cannot be subjected to a higher authority.

11
A paradigm or set of Enlightenment ideas

• Toleration - all human beings, regardless of race
  or creed, are the same.
• Freedom - opposition to feudal/traditional
  restraints on behaviour.
• Uniformity of human nature - all human nature
  essentially the same.
• Secularism - opposition to religious authority,
  stress on need for secular knowledge to be free
  of religious orthodoxy.

12
What was the Enlightenment?

• 1. A paradigm (bundle) or ideas. A belief system,
  world-view or Zeitgeist
• 2. An intellectual movement, a network of
  intellectuals clustered in Paris, Edinburgh,
  Glasgow, London
• 3. A publishing industry and an audience for its
  output

13
What was the Enlightenment?

• The Enlightenment was the creation of a new
  framework of ideas about man, society and nature
  which challenged existing conceptions rooted in
  the traditional worldview dominated by
  Christianity

14
Who was the Enlightenment

• The Philosophes "a man of letters who is also a
  free-thinker".
• Key Figures Newton, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau.

15
Why does the Enlightenment occur?

• The Enlightenment - a rebellion against a
  traditional form of knowledge based on religious
  authority.
• Pre-Enlightenment, Church controlled media and
  the dissemination of information
• Challenged by Discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus
  and Galileo in the 16th 17th centuries
  Accounts of distant and exotic societies from
  travellers
• Created - empirical and scientific base from
  which to challenge religious worldview

16
Political Impact of Enlightenment

• The Enlightement undermines claim to power by
  absolute monarch which was based on the "divine
  right of kings" - the position of king as ruler
  ordained by God.
• Absolutism undermined - replaced by notion of
  social contract between ruler and ruled

17
Political Impact of Enlightenment

• Although critical of traditional authority, the
  self-interest of philosophes ensured they were
  not as subversive as they might have been.

18
Enlightenment, Science and Progress

• 18th century Science (esp. Newton) promised
  increasing control over a previously hostile
  natural environment.
• Enlightenment thinkers believed that scientific
  method (through an emerging science of society or
  sociology) might all them to rationally determine
  and improve the shape of society.

19
Enlightenment, Science and Progress

• Belief in progress and change through the
  application of reason represent shift in
  world-view
• Society and nature would yield to the application
  of human intelligence.
• Innovation, previously a term of abuse became a
  word of praise.

20
The Communication of the Enlightenment

• Enlightenment creates secular intelligentsia,
  with social/cultural base independent of
  traditional institutions (esp. the Church)
• Also represents change in creation/ dissemination
  of ideas - through new institutions such as
  scientific academies, learned journals and
  conferences.
• Discovers new audience for social, political,
  philosophical and scientific ideas

21
The Communication of the Enlightenment

• Sees explosion of new forms of communication
• E.g. France - Between 1715 - 1785 number of
  journals on literary matter, news, art, science
  etc. grows from 22 to 79.

22
The Communication of the Enlightenment

• Potentially large audience limited by
• a) cost of subscription
• b) limited availability of the cultural education
  necessay to understand/partake in the debates
  about new ideas.
• Aided by post 1750 growth in subscription
  libraries

23
US/French Revolutions

• Thresholds between traditional and modern society
• US constitution enshrined several central
  Enlightenment precepts uniformity of human
  nature, tolerance, freedom of thought and
  expression

24
US/French Revolutions

• Influence of Enlightenment on French Rev
• Introduction of civil law,
• Parliamentary control of taxation,
• Individual and press liberties,
• Religious tolerance,
• Wholesale ending of feudal laws and obligations