Hegemony

Media mostly exercise power by enabling the creation and circulation of ideas we take to be ‘common-sense’. This notion of ‘common-sense’ ideas can be understood as ‘hegemony’:Societies are cohesive when a particular way of life and its associated ideas are taken as common sense by a population. Powerful groups are hegemonic when their preferred ideas seem natural and inevitable.In this recording we consider writer Helen Razer's take on how social media are used to police what meanings are taken as ‘common-sense’, to very clearly judge what can and can’t be said.Notes | Quotes from Helen Razer's 'From Hipsters to Racists, everyone suffers the 'idiot reflex' of outrage' in Crikey, 27 January 2016.