Week 1
Media company: a company whose primary function is to produce or distribute media content.
- print, film and recording industries
- Advertising, marketing, PR
- Social media companies
Mass media key characteristics:
1. One to many, one-way identical message to mass audience
2. Experiential goods after we consume it, it’s not ‘gone’
a. Value = immaterial attributes originality, intellectual property, stories told
3. High fixed/’first copy’ costs
a. Low marginal costs
b. Economies of scale = price per unit decreases as quantity/output increases
4. Potential for (cheap) re-versioning
a. Re-selling in different formats, leads to economics of scope (the cost decreases when the
variety increases)
b. Spin-offs branded products, merch
5. High risk
a. Consumer taste is ‘fickle’ hard to predict
b. High first copy costs regardless of # of consumers
Media market
- Dual-product market media companies produce 2 things
o Content, sold to audiences
o Audiences, sold to advertisers
- ‘Attention’ economy
o Attention is the real product being sold/bought
- Result: advertising goals will influence content/strategy
o Problematic for journalism, particularly
- Broader inherent tension:
o Creative industries versus commercial needs
Media market is changing digital shift 4 outcomes:
1. Convergence: previously separated channels fused channels, content & computing
2. Interactivity: two way replaces one-way: users become (mass) producers (e.g. social media)
3. Diversification: heightened user control & choice: fragmentation/expansion of content
4. Mobility: media ‘on the go’: becomes norm: ‘always on’ culture (phones, social media)
Media organizations (or at least some) should be socially responsible
- Forum for exchange of ideas/opinions
- Integrative influence for diverse societies
- Protection of core values/vulnerable audiences
McLuhan’s optimism:
- Technology itself matters (medium is the message)
- New tech extends senses
- New ‘cool’ media
o Liberate audiences from hierarchies, isolation
, o Away from official down toward ‘everyday talk’
o Toward a global village
- Hot media: high intellect, high intensity, high informativeness
Postman’s pessimism
- Print age: detailed, relevant, localized, coherent, rational
- Post-telegraph: dazzling stories from afar outweigh the relevant, local news.
- TV-images superficial
- Decrease in attention and rationality
- This ‘cool’ media makes us think that we understand more, while we actually understand less
- Passive audience
Critique of positivism and pessimism
- Both: technological determinism technological itself is the primary cause of social change
- Simplifies and overplays tech: ignores social context
- Ignores power relations behind development/use
o Optimism: tech as a solution to man-made problems
o Pessimism: blames tech for social problems
Both ‘let the powerful off the hook’
Tech’s significance best understood through 5 processes (circuit of culture)
- Production: how/when/why was it developed?
- Representation: how is it talked about?
- Regulation: how is it controlled?
- Consumption: how do we use it?
- Identity: what does it say about us, when we use it?
Media life: approach to theorizing media
- Media now are so central to our life that we don’t notice them (media ecology)
o We don’t live with media, but in media
- Two clear manifestations
o Personal/individualized information space SLIDES (book)
o Always-available global connectivity
- Two min consequences:
o Liquefied boundaries between work/play/alone/interaction
o Life now changed to accommodate/exploit media
Diversification, interactivity, mobility, convergence are all reflected here
Technological changes/responses create this new individualized connectivity
Key concepts
- 5 characteristics of mass media
- Economies of scale
- Dual product market
- Convergence, interactivity, diversification, mobility
- Media’s cores responsibilities
- Technological determinism
- Circuit of culture
- Media life
,Week 2
Chapter 2
There have been two general approaches to understanding the role of technology in society
1. Technological determinism: technology itself causes change, often in unintended ways we’re not
even aware of more emphasis on role of technology
2. Social constructionism: technology is made up of inanimate objects and ultimately people decide
how (not) to use it more emphasis on human agency
These two are considered to be the opposite poles of a continuum
Langdon Winner, autonomous technology: a general label for all conceptions and observations to the
effect that technology is somehow out of control of human agency. Political, economic, social and cultural
conditions shape the creation of technology, but technology is so vast and complex that it has unintended
consequences that users and society cannot control A.I., machine learning, algorithms.
Thomas Hughes, technological momentum: technology’s influence changes over time. When new,
humans have agency over the way it’s developed, deployed and used. As time passes, a technology
becomes established, routinized and institutionalized, making it hard to contest or change a culture
develops around it and it gains permanency that is difficult to alter.
They’re examples of how technology can exert some autonomous influence over actors in society (tech
determinism), while acknowledging human agency in creating technology (social constructionism)
Social reality is produced in 3 steps:
1. People create society through ongoing processes of physical and mental activity
2. Over time, these creations come to seem objectively real, separate from human activity
3. People internalize the norms and values of their culture being influenced by their own
creation.
Communication innovations and their social links
With the coming of the printing press (or some early form of it), social change could be perceived: when
written texts were still rare and expensive, only the elite could afford it. Now with more affordable and
bigger numbers of texts, even the poorer layers of society could educate themselves: they could ‘rise up’
if they wanted to too (e.g. reformation). However, even the printing press had its limitations: their
physical existence meant that ‘news’ could only spread as fast and far as people could physically carry it.
Therefore, news was often local, resulting in a highly fragmented and isolated media landscape.
With the coming of the telegraph, though not a mass medium, allowing near instant communication over
long distances, this wired medium unified previously highly fragmented and localized news culture.
Sound recording, and the technology behind it, enabled significant change, for listeners and musicians.
- Prior to sound recording, people had to go live performances in group setting. Now it could be
played in privacy, making it a much more intimate listening experience.
- Because recordings could often only be max 3 minutes (LP 20), musicians tailored their music to
the medium. Because of expensive live performances, amateurs would often sing for friends and
family. Now with records upcoming, amateurs were doomed to disappear, according to ??
- Prior to recording live performances were the main income of musicians, but now studio
recording replaced this: by mid-20th century, concert tours were mainly only used as promotional
vehicles for selling records. The sound recording gave way to sound editing that could not be
, replicated live. When pirating and streaming become more prevalent, musicians swung back to
concerts again for the bulk of their income: now the special effects could also be used here.
The internet era has several characteristics with significant social consequences:
1. Its design was built to be an open decentralized platform, accessible to anyone using its basic
language and protocols. It was not privatized or controlled by industry corporations. Its pioneers
encouraged a culture of public service this enabled rapid experimentation and innovation
2. The internet’s structure was designed to give users considerable control over their experience:
enabling user interactivity regardless of location.
a. This sometimes blurs distinctions between interpersonal and mas communication.
b. Internet users decide what content to access and when.
c. People with little financial resources and basic tech literacy can use digital media tools to
create and share original contents the creating of widely sharable media content is
within grasp of more people than ever before.
3. The internet is the first medium to embody digitization (shift from analogue to digital media) and
convergence (blurring of boundaries among types of media)
4. The internet is a global system of communication whose governance structure transcend the
regulatory reach of any single country: vast grey area of customs and laws.
Chapter 3 Why the cultural industries began to
change late 20th Century
Technological determinism: lends too much weight to a single factor at the expense of others
Reductionism: technology has no determining role, but the role is overemphasized, reducing complexity.
Symptomatic technology: the view that technologies re merely by-products of wider social processes
‘tech should never be seen in isolation but always understood in relation to other processes and factors.’
Economic determinism: the view that systems of values and beliefs have causal primacy
Political economic change
The two decades after WW2 (1950-early 1970), Europe, North America and Australasia saw steady growth
in their capitalist economies, rising standard of living and relatively stable system of liberal democratic
governments. However, in the early 70’s, the advanced capitalist economies hit the beginning of the Long
Downturn that continued into the 1990s. In the G7 countries, profits fell significantly across all sectors.
The long downturn had profound consequences, one of them was political in nature. The various
advanced capitalist states responded in numerous different ways. The view that human needs are best
served by an unregulated ‘free market’ made a comeback: ‘neo-liberalism’*. Especially in UK and USA, far
right conservative governments were selected (by a small minority of the eligible-to-vote population),
because an influential minority benefited from such policies, but also because the labour movement being
in disarray (traditionally leftist politics), were in complete disarray, making the right wing look competent,
in spite of record levels of unemployment and inequality.
Information society: the view that information and knowledge are now central to the way that modern
societies and economies operate.
The idea is that the information society will succeed industrial society, just like that succeeded agricultural
society. While in the industrial era, prosperity was rooted in manufacture and manual labour, in the
information era, this is based on information and knowledge manufacturing to services. This idea too
derives from the increasing importance of research and development and of science and technology.
