Making media: Production, Practices and Professions Lectures & Summary
Week 1: introduction to theory
Lecture 1 + chapter 1:
Three sections of the book:
1. Media production: issues within, across and around the institutions that create our media,
our information, our culture: management and economics, media policy, markets, consumers
- In a short time intermediars (hardware manufactures (Apple), software
developers (Microsoft), platforms (Facebook), online services (Netflix) have
uprooted and disrupted the way in which legacy media work
- All institutions across media computerize and digitalize all elements of
making media forming entire divisions, new professions or companies OR
job cuts and leading to ‘doing more work with fewer people’
2. Media practices: various ways in which media professionals make media: innovation, working
conditions, affective labour
- Legacy media under pressure. Historically they oriented towards scheduled
production processes around societal systems (press conferences, release
schedules, routinized advertisement, events determined by season) this is
aggressively replaced by new media logic with less predictable cycles
3. Media professions: those more or less demarcated fields of work that make up professional
life in media industries including: journalism, advertising, marketing communications, public
relations, digital games, television, music and recording and social media entertainment
- Today can be described as a lived experience of precarity and fragmentation:
constantly moving within and between professions
- Often the various developments affecting the industry (new business models,
technologies, media policies, changing audience taste) are perceived as
coming from the outside and as something happening to the industry and its
workers. For media practitioners whose identities are tied to the specific way
they perform these changes can be experiences as a profound threat to their
profession
Introduction to theory:
Key take-aways
- One of the fundamental drives of fundamental change in media is technology: changed
everything. Information technology (internet): most powerful sector shapes how media
content gets produced, consumed and experienced: key mega players: facebook, apple,
amazon, Microsoft etc. intermediary’s between media and consumers (depends largely on
them)
o Everything is centered around information, data and algorithms (who are our
consumers and what do they want (in products and advertisement)): fundaments of
media distribution cycle
Full media production cycle we talk about logics media logic in this case
- Today’s media logic changes production in many ways, for example:
o just-in-time productions (goods produced to meet the customer demands at the
right time, quality and quantity they build models that predict our actions
(emotional state etc.))
o Also: increased product/market diversification for example first as a musician
you produced music, made an album, sell it and play at concerts. Now you have
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, merchandise, you have your social media, promoters, streaming devices, advertisers,
talk shows, online concerts, commercials, campaigns etc.
o Also: networked production cycles: on the organizational level the media diversified
their activities across multiple media markets. On the individual level if you work as a
media professional you are expected to have cross-media skills, also you can be part
of a professional production process with peers etc. without being in the same
building, city or even country. Media production cycles have become networked
(little over a decade old).
Key is that the work of making media is clearly recognizable set of distinct industries: practices and
professions, while, at the same time it can be considered to be transforming, destabilizing, and even
de-professionalizing in the process
Key concepts in understanding how making media works (and what all media practioners
experience):
- Collapse: overall feeling of feeling that the traditional way of working has collapsed, revenue
fragmented, in state of one central business model there are now multiple models also
traditional advertising collapsed, it is now means co-creating with the consumer (social
media sharing etc.), some genres of storytelling collapsed, digital platforms are the new
platforms collapse of other media like newspapers
- Affordance: new media offer new possibilities, new story forms (transmedia storytelling,
extended media reality etc.), enable more people than ever to make and participate in
media, allowing new perspective on autotomy and creative freedom. It gives more
opportunities to monetize media, giving more autonomy. The rise of new media has created
many creativities, from which many people enjoy.
- Power: related to the power shift: the consumers/audience and the intermediaries (owners)
now have the power instead of the content makers. As a consequence, the media makers see
their work as insecure, because today everybody can be photographer for example: so much
competition. The media makers are undervalued, underpaid, they don’t organize themselves
really well (also because their work is fragmented), in general they are individuals, giving
organizations leverage to do everything they want
- Flexibility: to be flexible (as firm or professional) means many things: it disrupts established
practices as well as consolidates. Flexibility brings presentism to making media: a form of
limiting and defusing concern for one’s work and career prospects by focusing on the present
to the determent of historical understanding and rational anticipation. Flexibility occurs on
different levels
o Managerial: media organizations are flexible with workers, often hire cheap labor
from outside etc.
o Functional: a situation in which a core of multi-talented employs work with
freelancers
o Temporal: freelancers have no distinct working hours
o Financial: rewards are on equal, individual and not uniform
o In general: disruptive nature of the industry, project can stop at any time requires
a mindset of working here and now, not looking ahead, consolidation, being ahead of
the competition
- Precarity: meaning: coming to terms with having little to no control over ‘what happens next’
in your career. Permanent insecurity and change that befits the creative industry and on the
other hand creates stress. The realism is not only the joy and creativity but also the pressure,
stress and constant insecurity. Precarity means having no control over what’s coming next:
both an adventure and a hardship
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, o Hope labour/aspirational labour = working temporarily with the expectation that
you will one day be compensated for the work (only do this when it is strategic for
you because otherwise it just increases the power imbalance, often unjusted)
o Because there are no unions for media workers they often start living around the
same places in big cities (Soho, Hollywood etc.)
o So important concept: As a media maker you have little control, work is organized in
small short projects, self-promotion is important, you are as good as your last
project, don’t have a steady income and may need money outside the media
industry
o One way to master the art of living with precarity is cross-subsidize work: doing what
you have to do in order to do what you want to do
- Hybrid: the boundaries of the profession blur, media products hybridize: has caused for
professions and practices to blur. For example, more branded content in journalism, what is
real, what is paid for (this distinction is getting harder especially in social media), musician
who sing and promote at the same time, you have to be a specialized and a generalist, you
have a lot of responsibilities that now belong to an individual (first it was firms). One of the
problems of the media industry are the uncertainties that surround income, social and job
security
- Entrepreneurship: framed as individual solution for the systematic problems,
entrepreneurship success depends on revenue rather than on quality of the goods.
Entrepeneurship is also seen as someone who searches for creative solutions for social
problems (in that frame you don’t see Individual gain but serving a community). It
propagates a playful mindset and sees disruption as a force of good, it equates work of
passion thereby celebrating and naturalizing overwork. It reinforces the idea that making
media is not just making a living, it is your identity
- Affect (beinvloeden): relates to feelings and moods (not equitant of emotions (feelings that
emerge from a situation: anger etc.).
o Emotional engagement: really important. It is not just getting people to pay attention
to your product/service, you want people to get engaged, suspend their disbelief,
keep them coming back for more
o Working environment: here affect is also important (emotional labour: workers are
expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules
and guidelines)
o Emotional impact of identifying with product
o Social skills
o Passion (emotion) as the driving force in the media world
- Agency: force field of the industry: content, commerce, connectivity and creativity each
professional needs to bring these in balance (your professional identity). In the domain of
media work these forces centre around the creativity of storytelling. On a macro level you
see the overall industry wants to work on a programme, on the individual level you also want
to send this out
Chapter 2: Media industries: A decade in review
Developments in the global media industries:
- Increasing threats posed by technology companies (Facebook, Amazon etc.)
- Increasing surveillance of online activities and data eroding individual rights to privacy
- Related acceleration in targeting and personalizing media
- ‘gig economy’ and reliance on free labour
- Decline of physical media sales (DvD) and rise of streaming services
- Emergence of ‘digital native’ media forms such as podcasts and web series
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, - Lag between media policy and technological developments impacting free speech, internet
access etc.
- Heightened monitoring and control by governments and corporations
- Ongoing waves of acquisitions and mergers by upstart technology operations
- The collapse of business model for (print)journalism and subsequent restructuring and
reorientation of that industry and its professional practices in the digital realm
- The launch and circulation of #blacklivesmatter #metoo etc. followed by a wave of news
stories about sexual and racial abuse via social media
Research in past decade in media industry:
Creative labour and media work: debate on how to conceptualize creative work has shifted
alongside changing roles and contributions of those described as users, audiences, fans etc.
Also, terms likes ‘hope- and aspirational labour’ and ‘good work’ rose up.
Digital distribution: research on how distribution itself functions as focus for great deal of
cultural and political power. Also, the ways that new markets have been formed with the
expansion of the sharing economy
Platforms and algorithmic culture: these studies have grown dramatically. The role of
personal data, algorithm’s and streaming media platforms have come to define much of
industry’s digital distribution strategies. Research looks into the degree to which big data and
surveillance of our online activities have tailored our choices, dictated our preferences and
shaped our everyday lives
Chapter 6: The platformization of making media
There is a new mode of production, distribution and monezation, first look at what is trending in
topics and genres, calculate costs, revenue potential, produce, aggregate, this media circulation
generates data which is used to calculate whether it is profitable to further optimize or not.
Cultural production is progressively ‘contingent on’, that is dependent on a select group of powerful
digital platforms. Content developers systematically track and profile billions of users in their
activities. This increasingly close relation between cultural producers and platforms is a form of
platform dependence, affecting all forms of media making. Media products and services are also
contingent because they become contingent commodities 1; malleable, modular in design, informed
by datafied user feedback, constant revision etc.
(Contigent = wat bestaat zonder dat daar een dwingende of logische oorzaak voor is)
Platformization = penetration of economic, governmental and infrastructural extensions of digital
platforms into web and app ecosystems, fundamentally affecting operations of media industries and
production practices. Platforms not just facilitate socioeconomic, cultural and political interaction but
very much organize and steer this interaction; platforms are anything but neutral.
Theorizing platformization
Business scholars understand platforms as ‘platform-mediated networks who interface among sides’,
constituting multi-sided markets whereby digital platforms insert themselves as new cultural
intermediaries between media markets and users (at times bypassing or replacing existing businesses
such as film and music publishers or broadcast organizations).
Business literature is relevant here, it provides insight in the economic and managerial strategies
underlying platforms; these mechanisms help to explain the dominant position of platform
companies and their control over end-users (consumers) and complementors (institutional actors).
Business literature also discusses the strategies of multisided markets. How network effects allow
platform holders to set pricing structures where one side of the market (money side) covers the
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Commodity = een bulkgoed, een massa geproduceerd product
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