Introduction

          The world nowadays is faced with many problems, particularly social issues such as race, poverty, gender issues, politics, scandals, etc. There are also ways in which to battle and face with these problems. The most common and widely used is the media. There are more than billions of people all throughout the world who are equipped with the latest gadgets which would update us in the latest news, current events all throughout the world. And everyday, there are more than billions of people who are glued to their cubes, radios and high tech paraphernalia providing important information and at the same time entertaining them. Their purpose is to provide information to people not just by giving them knowledge about the happenings in our surroundings or globally but also by amusing our thoughts in the form of jokes, comedies and at the same time communicate all throughout the world. Through the media, the people can be aware of the situation, speak their concerns etc. There are different types of media. It may be in the form of newspaper, television programs, radios, etc.

          This paper however would focus only to the television programs and how this type of media deals with social issues which include poverty, race relations, the elderly, gender issues and much more.

How Social Problems are Born?

          Social issues is attractive in the media industries, that way, they can write something about the issue which would later be used in the show in the form of news report, talk shows, debate, comedy, drama, entertainment, etc. In a creative ways, they invent ideas in which they can portray the issues. Everyday, media industries are researching on a particular topic in which they can apply to the program. The producer then will decide what to do on that research and the director on the other hand would give instructions on how to do the show.

          First, let us determine how we get more attention, more public action, for a problem we consider important? How do we get the right kind of public attention and action, right in scale and right in the kinds of solutions the public is willing to accept and fund?

          To answer all these questions, one must be aware that human problems do not just spring up, full-blown and announced into the consciousness of bystanders. Even to recognize a situation as painful requires a system of categorizing and defining events. On the other hands, objective conditions are seldom so compelling and so clear in their form that they spontaneously generate a true consciousness. Those committed to one another solution to a public problem see its genesis in the necessary consequences of events and processes; those in opposition often point to "agitators" who impose one or another definition of reality.

          Furthermore, according to a source that people make social problems out of social conditions, which may be crudely summarized as: it’s all in the head. Thus, people need a system of defining and categorizing events before one would know that he or she got a problem and when most of us agree that we do have a problem or when a social condition has been changed into a problem, it would then be interpreted as a case of the problem having become worse or a case of increasing empathy and sympathy on the part of the public for those suffering. So our first explanation of how a condition has become a problem may not hold--the problem may not have become worse. Our second, that we have become wiser or more understanding or more sympathetic to the plight of others, is flattering to us, but Gusfield does not give us that credit. It is our categories, rather than reality, that have changed. As we look further into his study of drinking-driving in the book from which I have quoted, we find it is rife with discussions of symbolism, dramaturgy, rhetoric, metaphor, and the like. "The Fiction and Drama of Public Consciousness," one chapter title announces. "The Literary Art of Science: Drama and Pathos in Drinking-Driver Research," another reads. However, this is not a case of individual idiosyncrasy. Much of the writing by leading social scientists on how we fix upon social problems, on how they get on the agenda of public attention, is skeptical as to the kind of simple and direct relation we might imagine: the problem gets worse, or we become more sensitive to it. More likely, an interest group of some sort, an advocacy group, has taken it up and made it a matter of public concern. The arts of publicity are more relevant than the findings of science.

          The issue for Gusfield is not only the social construction of public problems, which do indeed have many dimensions, among which the determination of fact, of the existing situation, is only one, but the social construction of science itself, a rather popular theme among social scientists and advanced literary critics these days. There is undoubtedly a degree of overkill in Gusfield's approach but there is something to learn from it too, as we consider how we get the right kind of public attention for an issue of importance. One problem to which Gusfield points is that we move very rapidly from the problem itself, which may be both undeniable and important, to the arts of publicity and attention-getting, and, as he argues, these arts also affect almost immediately the very facts that we use to get attention and that are the bedrock of our initial concern. Thus, if we examine the facts which we use as the basis to claim attention, public money, funds for research, we see that the facts themselves become shaped by the need to compete with other claims, other problems, for which the arts of publicity are also employed.

Postmodernism and Self-Conscious Intertextuality

          Intertextuality is the process whereby one text1 plays upon other texts, the ways in which texts refer endlessly to further elements within the realm of cultural production (Barthes, 1977). Intertextuality is a feature of every text. However I shall suggest here that devices which consciously enhance and emphasize intertextuality contribute a re-reading of the relationships between the social, the writer and the reader, between researchers and researched, students and teachers, theorists and practitioners. I shall argue that intertextuality is a means to demonstrate the limits of discourse, but also, significantly, a stratagem by which it becomes possible to challenge and resist discourse - to open up the possibilities of becoming other (Bogue, 1989; Curt, 1994).

          The concept of intertextuality articulates with post-structuralist perspectives on language and knowledge (Game, 1991). Postmodern analyses challenge the ontological status of modernist claims to knowledgeability concerning the world. Consequently, when such approaches are applied to social theory, the privilege which has been claimed by modernist social scientific discourses is dissolved (Atkinson, 1990; Bauman, 1988; Butler, 1990; Fox, 1993b; Game, 1991; Rosenau, 1992; Silverman, 1987; Stanley and Morgan, 1993; Tyler, 1986). From within a framework of postmodern social theory, an interest in writing and intertextuality rejects distinctions between " real" and representation (Stanley and Morgan, 1993). All texts, in this view, are fabrications and as such are subject to deconstructive re-writing and re-reading. Social science texts, like any others, are to be read and re-read, not as representations (accurate or flawed) of the social world, but as contested claims to speak "the truth" about the world, constituted in the play of disciplines of the social. Social research writing becomes a narrative in which, as Maines (1993) has put it, “sociology's phenomena are seen as significantly constituted by stories and in which sociological work is seen as narrative work.”

          Moreover, feminism defines and taxonomizes itself in the United States today. I am not claiming that these attributes are essential in the sense that they are absolute or natural; rather that they are essential in the sense that current conventions seem to require them as a disciplinary matter. Feminisms can be distinguished in many ways. It has been helpful to me to suppose that about half of feminism in the United States today concerns itself with male power and female subordination in sexuality, and that the other half concerns itself primarily with reproduction, care work, work in the paid economy, and related matters. Of course these overlap, but people seem more or less comfortable with treating them as the "phyla" of this intellectual kingdom. Further, across the full range of these issues, feminism often concerns itself in very sustained ways with powers that operate not across the M/F distinction, but along the many distinctions that we refer to when we speak of "class," "race," and "empire." We could call the results socialist, antiracist, and postcolonial feminisms. I like to think of these as "hybrid" feminisms, because they set out to examine (at least) two incommensurate modalities of power at once.

TV Programs Dealing With Social Issues

          One of the controversial TV program is the music videos of Madonna and her self-conscious use of female stereotypes and subcultures in her videos. Her video has caused various uproars since there are people especially in conservative countries who became offended in her portrayal of stereotypes. On the other hand, there are people who idolize her performance and labeled her gutsy for being able to perform such roles in front of hundred viewers regardless of the consequence that there might be people out there who might disagree with her actions and the videos. Madonna is just one example of programs dealing with social issues. Another example is the portrayal of female heroines which obviously depicts that men cannot be the hero all the time and that female can be strong and do things the way men does. Female heroines also depict that they too can make difference in the world, fight for their rights and even fight men. Some of these stories have offended especially the males because for several years, we got used to the ideas that men rules the world and that men are the bosses in the family. Females are the soft hearted one, one who does all the house works, care for the child while males do the hard works.

          Furthermore, cultural studies theorists began studying popular culture when they began to distinguish between high culture, the cultural texts and practices of the elite and powerful, and those cultural texts, practices, and artifacts belonging to, or emerging from, the lower classes of an industrialized society. In contemporary debates about the academic canon, for example, these issues are crystallized into arguments over, "what is worth teaching in a liberal arts curriculum?" Cultural studies theorists are likely to argue that texts such as Madonna's music and live performances, or cultural practices like tattooing or graffiti, are just as important to study and understand as are the plays of Shakespeare, or the history of American Westward expansion. Yet even cultural studies theorists have had disagreements over what we mean by popular culture. For some, popular culture describes culture "made by various formations of subordinated or disempowered people out of the resources, both discursive and material, that are provided by the social system that disempowers them" (Fiske, 1989,). In this definition, popular culture is made by and in the interests of those who are subordinated in a society. By this description, the original street raps of hip hop in the 1970s, or the raw music and style of British punk of the same era, represents popular culture, since these cultural forms represent cultural practices, texts, and artifacts that emerged from the lived experience of working class people and racial or other minority groups. Popular culture, in this definition, is not produced by Hollywood or Ted Turner, but by the expressions and practices of subordinated people in a society.

          But for others in cultural studies scholarship, popular culture means anything that is popular by average Americans. Seinfeld, under this definition, represents popular culture, even though it is not the creation of the disempowered in our society but the product of the huge, powerful American entertainment industry. This second definition of popular culture does not make distinctions about whether popular culture is imposed upon subordinated people (by Hollywood, by corporations, etc.) or is derived from their own experiences and expressions (as was original hip hop, practiced in clubs and on the streets rather than in major recording studios like Sony or Warner). In other words, is the viewer of Seinfeld a "passive receiver of predigested meanings,"(Kellner, 1995) or an active, autonomous participant in meaning-making of this cultural text? Is the viewer of Seinfeld a passive recipient of the values of the Seinfeld writers, actors, and advertisers, or is the viewer of Seinfeld engaged in a (semi) autonomous creation of meaning? "What 'counts' as popular culture depends to some extent on whether you're interested in what meanings are produced by and for 'the people,' and whether you take these meanings as evidence of 'what the public wants' or of 'what the public gets'" (O'Sullivan, 1994).

          The second broader definition of popular culture does not distinguish, between media culture, consumer culture, and the cultural expressions of subordinated groups in our society. This second definition, the one to be used throughout this essay, does not help us differentiate between the interests of the working classes, for example, and the interests of the entertainment industry served in a cultural practice such as World Wide Wrestling. Therefore, when we encounter examples or descriptions of popular culture, we must be aware of the ambiguity in operation with this term (Kellner, 1995). Further, we should examine both the sources and political/economic interests of the pop culture text or practice, the intended audience for the text or practice, and the meanings that are made of the cultural form. Let us take, as another example, the two examples of graffiti and of Barbie. Both are, under the broadest (second) definition, artifacts of popular culture. Under the first definition, however, these material artifacts of popular culture are very different. Graffiti is produced, typically in urban areas, by marginalized youth as a form of self-expression and resistance to state (police, governmental) authority. A variety of meanings might be made from graffiti: police see it as vandalism and evidence of delinquency, other youth might see it as a social critique, etc. Barbie is produced not as a form of self-expression or resistance, but as a cultural commodity sold to consumers at a profit. Barbie's meaning may be imposed on girls (meanings about gender roles, about women, about women's bodies), or it may be created by kids who play with Barbie (kids creating their own interpretations of Barbie in terms of gender roles, women, etc..). Or, meaning may be a construction of both received meanings (from producer to consumer) and created meanings (by the consumer/user). Culture is produced with various motivations (self-expression, profit, etc.), for very different audiences, and with various effects (imposing meaning, helping create new meanings). Part of our work, as readers of culture, is to examine the production of cultural artifacts and the meanings and effects that these artifacts produce in our society.

          When we examine popular culture in our society, we examine the world of production and consumption of commodities. By the production, consumption, and usage that we make of various and endless commodities, we create and re-create culture: Commodities make an economic profit for their producers and distributors, but their cultural function is not adequately explained by their economic function, however dependent it may be on it. The cultural industries are often thought of as those that produce our films, music, television, publications, and so on, but all industries are cultural industries to a greater or lesser extent: a pair of jeans or a piece of furniture is as much as a cultural text as a pop record. All commodities are consumed as much for their meanings, identities, and pleasures as they are for their material function. (Fiske, 1989). When we study popular culture, therefore, we are looking at a wide range of productions, practices and texts. We are engaged in the world of commodities to analyze the meanings these commodities have for those who produce them, and those who consume them. Now, let's turn to youth as consumers and producers of culture and commodities.

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