Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

In their founding book for media studies in France, Thinking Mediacultures, New Praxis and New Approaches of the world’s representation, sociologists Eric Maigret and Eric Macé point out that there is a French resistance to new media inherited from legitimate bourgeois culture. Bourdieu’s fear of mass culture has infused French academia over the years. He states that the content on television is mainly dictated by the laws of the market, and shows television as a means of distracting citizens from more important matters. Bourdieu also feared that the United States was using television as a medium to spread its hegemony. Television is thus feared and perceived both as a tool for power and for capitalism by the majority of French intellectuals. Furthermore, this vision helps the intellectual elite confirm the status of legitimate culture – therefore marginalizing popular culture. The main difference between the gradual tolerance for television by the United States compared with the dismissal of it by French intellectuals seems to be the result of the absence of the “cultural turn.” Although cultural studies were mainly based on the work of French philosophers, the exception française made it impossible to adopt the work of cultural studies that leveled legitimate and popular culture. Thus, this paper aims to be a synthesis of the main intellectual debates in France over this medium and to argue that the reason why French intellectuals have feared television is because it is viewed as a threat to the myth of a one and indivisible nation.