This paper addresses two core questions in media and audience studies. The first examines how Marxist media theorists conceptualize mass media as ideological apparatuses, tracing arguments from classical Marxism through Althusser and Volosinov. Special attention is given to the concept of hegemony—its meaning, its roots in class dominance, and its significance for understanding how audiences make sense of media texts. The second question explores the concept of mediatization, discussing how media increasingly shapes culture, politics, religion, and everyday life, and why this concept is important for understanding the relationship between media institutions and contemporary society.
Marxist theorists emphasize the role of mass media in reproducing the status quo, though there is no single unified school of thought regarding these theories. Marx viewed the society he inhabited as one dominated by a ruling class; society was therefore seen as an ideological arena in which many class viewpoints are contested, even if this contest occurs within a context of class dominance. Marxist media theory argues that mass media is a means of production within capitalist society, serving to disseminate the views of the ruling classes while neutralizing alternative ideas. The ultimate role of mass media, in this account, is to produce a false consciousness among the working classes. This leads to an extreme position in which media products are seen as monolithic expressions of ruling-class values, effectively ignoring the diversity of values present in media and the possibility of oppositional readings among media audiences (Artz, Macek & Cloud, 2006).
Another characteristic of Marxist theory regarding media is the materialist position, which argues that social being determines consciousness. According to this view, ideological positions tend to be functions of class position as well as the dominant ideology of the ruling class. This stance contrasts with idealism, which grants priority to consciousness. Marxists disagreed internally on this issue: some interpret the relationship between social being and consciousness as one of direct determination, while others stress that the relationship is dialectical.
The Marxist fundamentalist position on ideology treats it as a form of false consciousness, arising from the adoption of the dominant ideology by people whose interests that ideology does not serve. From this perspective, mass media tends to disseminate the dominant ideology on behalf of the class that owns and controls it. According to the political economy strand of Marxist thought, mass media conceals the economic basis of class struggle; ideology then becomes a route to obliterating struggle rather than a site of struggle itself.
The theorist Louis Althusser rejected the notion of false consciousness, arguing instead that ideology is the medium through which people experience the world. Althusserian Marxism stresses the irreducibility and materiality of ideology, treating it as a determining force rather than a mere distortion of reality.
Another Marxist theorist whose work has been influential in cultural studies is Valentin Volosinov. Volosinov argued that a theory of ideology that grants an abstract concept of consciousness an existence prior to organized social forms risks becoming metaphysical. Despite these internal differences, Marxist theorists broadly agree that mass media possesses ideological power, while disagreeing about its precise nature.
The term hegemony has been used to denote the predominance of one social class over others, encompassing not only political and economic control but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own worldview so that subordinated groups come to accept it as "common sense" and as entirely natural. Hegemony, in this sense, posits a contradiction between dominant ideology and the social experience of subordinate groups, making this interface an inevitable site of ideological struggle.
Hegemony is important to audience studies because Marxist mass media theory provides an explicit framework that exposes the myth of a free and neutral social science. Marxist perspectives draw attention to the political and economic interests embedded in mass media and highlight social inequalities in media representations. Hegemony also helps to situate individual media texts within a larger social formation, enabling researchers to analyze how audiences negotiate, accept, or resist dominant meanings.
The term mediatization has been widely used to understand the relationship of media to culture and society, and has appeared in various contexts to characterize media influence on different phenomena. However, relatively little work has been done to fully theorize the notion; some media researchers have proposed more coherent conceptual frameworks for understanding mediatization as a social and cultural process.
In one usage, mediatization describes media's influence over research and public discourse. Some scholars argue that "media" is not itself an analytic concept but rather an ambiguous term referring to the increasing cultural and social significance of mass media and other forms of technically mediated communication. From this perspective, media plays a significant role in the production and circulation of interpretations — including interpretations of science (Wijfjes & Voerman, 2009).
Mediatization is also used to describe the transformation of political communication. It encourages analysts to look for common patterns across disparate areas and describes how diverse social and cultural processes are reshaped for media representation. One example can be found in state ceremonies or religious rituals that begin to imitate the features associated with their television versions — performances shaped by media logic rather than tradition alone.
"Mediatization's impact on politics and culture"
"Why mediatization is theoretically important"
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