Theoretical Perspectives on Culture and Technology

Learning outcomes

Discuss how structural-functional theory views culture and technology
Discuss how conflict theory views culture and technology
Discuss how symbolic interactionists view culture and technology

In the foreground there is a crowd of concert attendees. Two people are holding up camera phones and recording the concert stage which is yellow, pink, and orange with lights and special effects.

There are three major theoretical approaches toward the interpretation of culture. A functionalist, or structural functionalist, perspective acknowledges that there are many parts of culture that work together as a system to fulfill society’s needs and to promote stability. Conflict theory focuses on populations that may be systematically disadvantaged while other groups are advantaged. They focus on power and inequality within a culture. A symbolic interactionist is primarily interested in culture as experienced in the daily interactions between individuals and the symbols that have meaning in a culture. If we think about technology as an overarching aspect of culture, we can utilize the theories to explain and even predict cultural patterns, including technology.

Music, fashion, technology, and values—all are products of culture. But what do they mean? How do sociologists perceive and interpret culture based on these material and non-material items? Let’s complete our analysis of culture by reviewing them in the context of the three theoretical perspectives and also examining the role of technology in culture through the same theoretical lenses.

Functionalism on Culture and Technology

Functionalists view society as a system in which all parts work—or function—together to create society as a whole. In this way, societies need culture to exist. Cultural norms function to support the fluid operation and continued stability of society, and cultural values guide people in making choices. Just as members of a society work together to fulfill a society’s needs, culture exists to meet its members’ basic needs.

Functionalists also study culture in terms of values. Education is an important concept in the United States because it is valued. The culture of education—including material culture such as classrooms, textbooks, libraries, dormitories—supports the emphasis placed on the value of educating a society’s members.

Functionalism and Technology

Because functionalism focuses on how media and technology contribute to the smooth functioning of society, a good place to begin understanding this perspective is to write a list of functions you perceive media and technology to perform. Your list might include the ability to find information on the Internet, television’s entertainment value, or how advertising and product placement contribute to social norms.

Commercial Function

A boy and girl are shown from behind watching a football game on television.

As you might guess, with nearly every U.S. household possessing a television, and the 250 billion hours of television watched annually by people in the United States, companies that wish to connect with consumers find television an irresistible platform to promote their goods and services (Nielsen, 2012). Television advertising is a highly functional way to meet a market demographic where it lives. Sponsors can use the sophisticated data gathered by network and cable television companies regarding their viewers and target their advertising accordingly. Whether you are watching cartoons on Nick Jr. or a cooking show on Telemundo, chances are advertisers have a plan to reach you.

And it certainly doesn’t stop with television. Commercial advertising precedes movies in theaters and shows up on and inside public transportation, as well as on the sides of building and alongside roadways. Major corporations such as Coca-Cola bring their advertising into public schools by sponsoring sports fields or tournaments, as well as by filling the halls and cafeterias of those schools with vending machines hawking their goods. With rising concerns about childhood obesity and attendant diseases, the era of soda machines in schools may be numbered. In fact, as part of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act (2010) and Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative, a ban on junk food in schools began in July 2014. It’s worth noting, however, that this program’s implementation varied from state to state, and that in 2018 the USDA weakened enforcement of the act.

Entertainment Function

An obvious manifest function of media is its entertainment value. Most people, when asked why they watch television or go to the movies, would answer that they enjoy it. And the numbers certainly illustrate that. While 2012 Nielsen research shows a slight reduction of U.S. homes with televisions, the reach of television is still vast and the amount of time spent watching is substantial. On the technology side, as well, there is a clear entertainment factor to the use of new innovations. From online gaming to chatting with friends on Facebook, technology offers new and more exciting ways for people to entertain themselves.

Social Norm Functions

Even while the media is selling us goods and entertaining us, it also serves to socialize us, helping us pass along norms, values, and beliefs to the next generation. In fact, we are socialized and re-socialized by media throughout our lives. All forms of media teach us what is good and desirable, how we should speak, how we should behave, and how we should react to events. Media also provide us with cultural touchstones during events of national significance. How many of your older relatives can recall watching the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on television? How many of those reading this textbook followed the events of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina on television or the Internet?

There is ongoing debate over the extent and impact of media socialization. One recent study (Krahe et al., 2011) demonstrated that violent media content does have a desensitizing effect and is correlated with aggressive thoughts. Another group of scholars (Gentile, Mathieson, and Crick, 2011) found that among children, exposure to media violence led to an increase in both physical and relational aggression. Yet, a meta-analysis study covering four decades of research (Savage, 2003) could not establish a definitive link between viewing violence and committing criminal violence.

It is clear from watching people emulate the styles of dress and talk that appear in media that these depictions have a socializing influence. What is not clear, despite nearly fifty years of empirical research, is how much socializing influence the media has when compared to other agents of socialization, which include any social institution that passes along norms, values, and beliefs (such as peers, family, religious institutions, and the like).

Life-Changing Functions

Like media, many forms of technology entertain us, provide a venue for commercialization, and socialize us. For example, some studies suggest the rising obesity rate is correlated with the decrease in physical activity caused by an increase in use of some forms of technology, a latent function of the prevalence of media in society (Kautiainen et al., 2011). Without a doubt, a manifest function of technology is to change our lives, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Think of how the digital age has improved the ways we communicate. Have you ever used Skype or another webcast to talk to a friend or family member far away? Or maybe you have organized a fund drive, raising thousands of dollars, all from your desk chair.

Of course, the downside to this ongoing information flow is the near impossibility of disconnecting from technology, which in turn leads to an expectation of constant access to information and people. Such a fast-paced dynamic is not always to our benefit. Some sociologists assert that this level of media exposure leads to narcotizing dysfunction, a result in which people are too overwhelmed with media input to really care about the issue itself. In this state, their involvement becomes defined by awareness instead of by action (Lazerfeld and Merton, 1948).

Conflict Theory on Culture and Technology

Conflict theorists view social structure as inherently unequal, based on power differentials related to issues like class, gender, race, and age. For a conflict theorist, culture is seen as reinforcing issues of privilege for certain groups based upon race, sex, class, and so on. Women strive for equality in a male-dominated society. Senior citizens struggle to protect their rights, their health care, and their independence from a younger generation of lawmakers. Advocacy groups such as the ACLU work to protect the rights of all races and ethnicities in the United States.

Inequalities exist within a culture’s value system. Therefore, a society’s cultural norms benefit some people but hurt others. Some norms, formal and informal, are practiced at the expense of others. Women were not allowed to vote in the United States until 1920. Gay and lesbian couples have been denied the right to marry in some states. Racism and bigotry are very much alive today. Although cultural diversity is supposedly valued in the United States, many people still frown upon interracial marriages. Same-sex marriages are banned in most states, and polygamy—common in some cultures—is unthinkable to most Americans.

At the core of conflict theory is the effect of economic production and materialism; for example, dependence on technology and education in rich nations versus a lack of technology and accessible education in poor nations. Conflict theorists believe that a society’s system of material production has an effect on the rest of culture. People who have less power also have less ability to adapt to or enact cultural change. This view contrasts with the perspective of functionalism. For example, in the U.S. culture of capitalism, we continue to strive toward the promise of the “American Dream,” which perpetuates the belief that the wealthy deserve their privileges.

When we take a conflict perspective, one major focus is the differential access to media and technology embodied in the digital divide. Conflict theorists also look at who controls the media, and how media promotes the norms of upper-middle-class white people in the United States while minimizing the presence of the working class, especially people of color.

Control of Media and Technology

Powerful individuals and social institutions have a great deal of influence over which forms of technology are released, when and where they are released, and what kind of media is available for our consumption, which is a form of gatekeeping. Shoemaker and Voss (2009) define gatekeeping as the sorting process by which thousands of possible messages are shaped into a mass media-appropriate form and reduced to a manageable amount. In other words, the people in charge of the media decide what the public is exposed to, which, as C. Wright Mills (1956) famously noted, is the heart of media’s power. Take a moment to think of the way “new media” evolve and replace traditional forms of hegemonic (i.e., ruling or dominant) media. With hegemonic media, a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one race, gender, or class that manipulates the media to impose its worldview as a societal norm. New media weakens the gatekeeper role in information distribution. Popular sites such as YouTube and Facebook not only allow more people to freely share information but also engage in a form of self-policing. Users are encouraged to report inappropriate behavior that moderators will then address.

In addition, some conflict theorists suggest that the way U.S. media are generated results in an unbalanced political arena. Those with the most money can buy the most media exposure, run smear campaigns against their competitors, and maximize their visual presence. Almost a year before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the candidates––Barack Obama for the Democrats and numerous Republican contenders––had raised more than $186 million (Carmi et al., 2012). Some would say that the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Committee is a major contributing factor to our unbalanced political arena. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of outside groups, including Super Political Action Committees (SuperPACs) with undisclosed donor lists, to spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads as long as they don’t coordinate with the candidate’s campaign or specifically advocate for a candidate. This finding was predicated on the idea that spending money on political ads is itself a form of free speech, and is therefore constitutionally protected. What do you think a conflict perspective theorist would suggest about the potential for the non-rich to be heard in politics, especially when SuperPACs ensure that the richest groups have the most say?

Technological Social Control and Digital Surveillance

Social scientists take the idea of the surveillance society so seriously that there is an entire journal devoted to its study, Surveillance and Society. The panoptic surveillance envisioned by Jeremy Bentham, depicted in the form of an all-powerful, all-seeing government by George Orwell in 1984, and later analyzed by Michel Foucault (1975) is increasingly realized in the form of technology used to monitor our every move. This surveillance was imagined as a form of constant monitoring in which the observation posts are decentralized and the observed subject is never communicated with directly. In effect, the subject never knows when or if they are actually being surveilled within the panoptical environment, and therefore comes to internalize the system’s implicit social controls. Today, digital security cameras capture our movements, observers can track us through our cell phones, and police forces around the world use facial-recognition software.

Feminist Perspective

A thin female model is shown walking down the runway in New York’s fashion week.

Take a look at popular television shows, advertising campaigns, and online game sites. In most, women are portrayed according to a particular set of parameters and tend to have a uniform look that society recognizes as attractive. Most are thin, white or light-skinned, beautiful, and young. Why does this matter? Feminist perspective theorists believe this idealized image is crucial in creating and reinforcing stereotypes. For example, Fox and Bailenson (2009) found that online female avatars conforming to gender stereotypes enhance negative attitudes toward women, and Brasted (2010) found that media (advertising in particular) promotes gender stereotypes. Some commercial media enterprises have tried to reconcile their political commitments with their economic viability. For example, as early as 1990 the feminist magazine Ms. instituted a policy of publishing without any commercial advertising.

The gender gap in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) is no secret. A 2011 U.S. Department of Commerce Report suggested that gender stereotyping is one reason for this gap, and acknowledged a longstanding bias toward men as keepers of technological knowledge (US Department of Commerce, 2011). But gender stereotypes go far beyond the use of technology. Press coverage in the news and other media reinforces stereotypes that subordinate women, often prioritizing looks over skills and knowledge, and disparaging women who defy accepted gender norms.

Recent research in new media has offered a mixed picture of its potential to equalize the status of men and women in the arenas of technology and public discourse. A European agency, the Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Men and Women (2010), issued a report suggesting that while there is the potential for new media forms to perpetuate gender stereotypes and gaps in technology and media access, at the same time new media could offer alternative forums for feminist groups as well as the exchange of feminist ideas. Still, the committee warned against the relatively unregulated environment of new media and the potential for anti-feminist activities, from pornography to human trafficking, to flourish there.

Increasingly prominent in the discussion of new media and feminism is cyber-feminism, the Internet’s application to, and promotion of, feminism online. Research on cyber-feminism runs the gamut from the liberating use of blogs by women living in Iraq during the second Gulf War (Peirce, 2011) to an investigation of the Suicide Girls web site (Magnet 2007).

Think It Over

Contrast a functionalist viewpoint of digital surveillance with a conflict perspective viewpoint.
Describe how a cyber-feminist might address the fact that powerful female politicians are often demonized in traditional media.

Symbolic Interactionism on Media and Technology

Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective that is most concerned with the face-to-face interactions between members of society. Interactionists see culture as being created and maintained by the ways people interact and in how individuals interpret each other’s actions. Proponents of this theory conceptualize human interactions as a continuous process of deriving meaning from both objects in the environment and the actions of others. This is where the term symbolic comes into play. Every object and action has a symbolic meaning, and language serves as a means for people to represent and communicate their interpretations of these meanings to others. Those who believe in symbolic interactionism perceive culture as highly dynamic and fluid, as it is dependent on how meaning is interpreted and how individuals interact when conveying and negotiating these meanings.

Technology itself may act as a symbol for many. The kind of computer you own, the kind of car you drive, your ability to afford the latest Apple product—these serve as a social indicator of wealth and status. Neo-Luddites are people who see technology as symbolizing the coldness and alienation of modern life. But for technophiles, technology symbolizes the potential for a brighter future. For those adopting an ideological middle ground, technology might symbolize status (in the form of a massive flat-screen television) or failure (ownership of a basic old mobile phone with no bells or whistles).

Social Construction of Reality

Meanwhile, media create and spread symbols that become the basis for our shared understanding of society. Theorists working in the interactionist perspective focus on this social construction of reality, an ongoing process in which people subjectively create and understand reality. Media constructs our reality in a number of ways. For some, the people they watch on a screen can become a primary group, meaning the small informal groups of people who are closest to them. For many others, media depictions become a reference group: a group that influences an individual and to which an individual compares himself or herself, and by which we judge our successes and failures. We might do very well without the latest smartphone, until we see characters using it on our favorite television show or our classmates whipping it out between lectures.

While media may indeed provide the means by which the messages of rich white males are spread, Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992) point out that some forms of media discourse allow competing constructions of reality to appear. (A discourse is an ongoing conversation, or a body of knowledge accumulated thusly.) For example, advertisers find new and creative ways to sell us products we don’t need and probably wouldn’t want without their prompting, but some networking sites such as Freecycle offer a commercial-free way of requesting and trading items that would otherwise be discarded. The web is also full of blogs chronicling lives lived “off the grid,” or without participation in the commercial economy.

Social Networking and Social Construction

While Tumblr and Facebook encourage us to check in and provide details of our day through online social networks, corporations can just as easily promote their products on these sites. Even supposedly crowd-sourced sites like Yelp (which aggregates local reviews) are not immune to corporate marketing intrusions. That is, we think we are reading objective observations when in reality we may be buying into one more form of advertising.

Facebook, which started as a free social network for college students, is increasingly a monetized business, selling you goods and services in subtle ways. But chances are you don’t think of Facebook as one big online advertisement. What started out as a symbol of coolness and insider status, unavailable to parents and corporate shills, now promotes consumerism in the form of games and fandom. For example, think of all the money spent to upgrade popular Facebook games like Candy Crush. And notice that whenever you become a “fan,” you likely receive product updates and special deals that promote online and real-world consumerism. It is unlikely that millions of people want to be “friends” with Pampers. But if it means a weekly coupon, they will, in essence, rent out space on their Facebook pages for Pampers to appear. Thus, we develop both new ways to spend money and brand loyalties that will last even after Facebook is considered outdated and obsolete.

Think It Over

In what ways has the Internet affected how you view reality? Explain using a symbolic interactionist perspective.
Would you characterize yourself as a technophile or a Luddite? Explain, and use examples.
Consider a current social trend that you have witnessed, perhaps situated around family, education, transportation, or finances. For example, many veterans of the Armed Forces, after completing tours of duty in the Middle East, are returning to college rather than entering jobs as veterans from previous generations did. Choose a sociological approach—functionalism, conflict theory, or symbolic interactionism—to describe, explain, and analyze the social issue. Afterward, determine why you chose the approach you did. Does it suit your own way of thinking? Or did it offer the best method to illuminate the social issue?

Glossary

cyber-feminism: the Internet’s application to and promotion of feminism online dysfunctions: social patterns that have undesirable consequences for the operation of society functionalism/structural-functional theory: a theoretical approach that sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of individuals that make up that society gatekeeping: the sorting process by which thousands of possible messages are shaped into a mass media-appropriate form and reduced to a manageable amount latent functions: the unrecognized or unintended consequences of a social process manifest functions: sought consequences of a social process neo-Luddites: those who see technology as a symbol of the coldness of modern life panoptic surveillance: a form of constant monitoring in which the observation posts are decentralized and the observed subject is never communicated with directly technophiles: those who see technology as symbolizing the potential for a brighter future social facts: the laws, morals, values, religious beliefs, customs, fashions, rituals, and all of the cultural rules that govern social life social institutions: patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs social solidarity: the social ties that bind a group of people together such as kinship, shared location, and religion

Chapter 3: Culture