Essays in Media and Cultural Studies

In Transition

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367338961
• eBook ISBN: 9781000760583
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Spanning a decade of key research, this collection brings together a selection of essays and chapters from leading media scholar Graeme Turner for the first time.

The organising theme of transition focuses on both the state of the media as it continues its evolution into the digital era, and the fields of media and cultural studies as they grapple with modifying their approaches and assumptions in response to the changing dynamics of the systems they study. In their own attempts to understand a range of contemporary moments over the decade, these essays also provide a personal history of Graeme Turner's participation in the key debates within media and cultural studies. The essays deal with the shifting states of television, with the changing relation between the media and the state, the rise of celebrity, and the role of a critical agenda for media and cultural studies in the future. The collection is introduced and concluded by two new essays, respectively assessing the recent past and the necessary futures for these fields of study.

Providing key insights into a range of topics, this book is ideal for students and scholars looking to deepen their understanding of the transitionary nature of media and cultural studies.

1
IN TRANSITION

Media and cultural studies for the digital era

Introduction: processing transition

The essays in this book were originally published in journals and in collections edited by colleagues from 2010–2019, a period in which the media, media and cultural studies, and most significantly, the media’s participation in the construction of the social, have undergone dramatic change. In certain respects, these changes have been so dramatic as to be transformative, but any likely end point to the processes in play is still quite a way off. The present conjuncture remains overwhelmingly one of transition – hence the title for this chapter and for the subtitle of this collection. The essays which follow, each in their own way, provide something of a personal record of that transition to date; not only through the processes upon which they report, but also through the shifts they address in relation to media studies’ approaches and to its objects of attention.

The last decade has been punctuated at various points by the ascendancy of key terms held to reflect the most pressing concerns for the media industries and for media studies at the time: a selection of these could include convergence, democratization, customisation, commercialisation, participation, platform, and the interrelated triplet of the global, the transnational, and the local. Recently, ‘datafication’ (Livingstone, 2019) and ‘disruption’ (Sharaf and Ferrari, 2019) have become prominent tropes. However, at the same time as each of these concerns have proven to be broadly influential and largely transnational indices of change, they have also been accompanied by an increasing awareness of the diversity of the ways in which such change has actually played out in various local, national, and regional contexts. That awareness extends beyond looking for the exigencies of reception in particular ‘zones of consumption’ (Pertierra and Turner, 2013). It has also led to the development of new approaches to production and distribution: areas of media studies research and enquiry such as critical industry studies (Havens et al., 2009), production studies (Mayer et al., 2009), and, more recently, located studies of media and communications infrastructure (Lobato, 2018; Parks and Staroslieski, 2015). Furthermore, and in yet another sphere of analysis under development now which intersects with the more narrowly defined field of internet studies, we have media studies’ expanding engagement with the problem of how to approach the machinery of the algorithm (Andrejevic, 2013; Carah and Angus, 2018) and the world of social media analytics (Highfield and Leaver, 2015).

While all this is going on, it is also noticeable that some of the emerging influences on the next phase, both of industry development and of media studies critique and research, appear to be pushing back against the prevailing commercial models and reminding us of an earlier, public interest, conception of the media. As the by-products of corrosive behaviours within an expanding social media landscape have seriously qualified projections of the emancipatory potential of the digital era, ‘moderation’, ‘regulation’, and ‘community standards’ are returning to the lexicon of policy makers, academic analysts, public interest advocates, and even some industry leaders. News executives invoke the need for their publications to generate ‘trust’ (Loechner, 2017), while political commentators of all colours express their dismay at the way social media appears to have hijacked politics and turned it into a cacophony of unruly voices, untrammelled by standards of civility, tolerance, or truthfulness (see, for instance, Taplin, 2017). Some jurisdictions, notably in Europe, have developed regulatory initiatives such as the EU’s GPDR protocols on privacy and the protection of personal data, the various attempts to extend government oversight of social media networks’ management of online content, and taxation levies upon transnational media and communications corporations aimed at funding the subvention of the production of local content in the public interest. Many more jurisdictions have criminalised online behaviours such as those involved in revenge porn, identity theft and online bullying or harassment.

It is not hard to find summative accounts pulling the threads together of what is now an extraordinarily diverse and complicated history of the changes to the media landscape that have accompanied the unfolding of the digital era; I have produced one such account myself (Turner, 2015). It is indeed the roiling industry dynamics that have driven these changes which are the subjects of this collection, and each of the essays that follow constitute an attempt to reflect on and understand particular aspects of them at particular points in time. However, while the selection of these essays produces an account of the media in transition, it also reflects an interest in another field of transition: that is, the transition underway within media studies itself.

Let me spend a little time elaborating, then, the two primary areas of interest to which this collection addresses itself. The first, as I say, is the located and highly contingent ways in which the media has been ‘reinvented’ for the digital era. Some of the drivers of this reinvention are extremely widespread, while others are more localised or context-specific; some, also, mark points at which we can discern the tensions between contradictory tendencies. For instance, in relation to this last category, even though media convergence is a constant theme in this respect, there are also plenty of discussions of divergence (as in Chapter 3 of this volume) or ‘de-convergence’ (Sparviero et al., 2017), as well as cogent arguments against the standard case made for the salience and definition of the notion of convergence itself (Allen, 2017). Despite the blizzard of buzz words circulating within the industry as part of its existential attempt to get ahead of whatever is deemed to be the next front of disruption, to properly account for any particular complex of change today requires detailed and instantiated attention. Within the industries themselves, however, as commercial pressures raise the stakes on getting it wrong and as the actions of competitors shorten the timeframe within which adaptive strategies need to be activated, it has to be said that the attention span can be quite short and an appreciation of history often lacking. There is a highly volatile climate of prediction, commentary and post-hoc justification that generates a welter of self-serving industry spin that may not have much to do with what is actually going on.

Consequently, and notwithstanding the volume of public commentary, the challenge of how to deal with, for instance, the on-the-ground competition between traditional media companies, telcos, communications, and technology companies continues to confound many within the industry. To draw on just one example from my own recent research, the media industries in Australia where I work have proven extraordinarily slow to appreciate the threat to their businesses represented by digital platforms and by the intervention of communications, not just media, companies into the Australian media market. This was evident, first, in the reluctance of the leading print media companies to undertake the task of modifying their business models in response to the leakage of advertising revenue to the online environment, and second, in the failure of the commercial free-to-air television broadcasters to appreciate the threat to their business represented by on-demand subscription online streaming services, such as Netflix (Turner, 2018), until it was too late. As Lobato (2018) has demonstrated, that latter development has had both widespread and diverse repercussions in many national media systems. In another area, the influence of the transnational information and social media networks is now on a scale that has taken it well beyond the control of any one national jurisdiction. The commodification of consumer data collected as a product of e-commerce, social networks, and the ‘culture of search’ together with the role of the algorithm in directing consumer choices, while widely acknowledged as among the most transformative changes to the business models which organise the media and communications industries, are also among the least transparent, the most corporately concentrated, and therefore the most socially concerning elements in this new media landscape. Now, too, there are categories of content – such as celebrity – and of industry ‘players’ – such as the influencer – which were either non-existent or much less demanding of consideration two decades ago but which are now fully embedded and increasingly significant components of the industry in many locations today.

All of that understood, it is also worth acknowledging the note of caution expressed in Sharaf and Ferrari’s (2019) commentary on the rise of the trope of ‘disruption’ within the media industries and within media studies itself. Expressing reservations about the impulse to follow the latest ‘new, shiny object’ that has certainly shaped how many have dealt with this period of change, they point out that it would be unwise for those in media studies to forsake their close attention to the continuities that are also in play. Approvingly, they quote Levina’s warning against a single-minded focus on ‘conflict, discontinuity, and constant alterity’ (154). Toby Miller (2016, 19) puts this position more emphatically in his attack on what he calls the ‘cybertarian mythology’: the proposition of a world in which ‘the prevailing media credo’ is ‘upheaval’ (such as in Facebook’s frat-boy slogan ‘move fast and break things’). According to this mythology, he says with some sarcasm, ‘new media technologies are obliterating geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty’ (21). Against such claims, Miller argues, the work of ‘scholarship’ within the rich tradition of media history and political economy ‘melts into air’. This is a critique which is built upon the discrediting of what I have elsewhere described as ‘digital optimism’ (2010), the premature celebration of the inherently emancipatory potential of user-generated media content and social media. Miller’s polemic emphasises how easily industry-led fashions can divert an academic discipline such as media studies from its necessary mission – that is, from independent, critical, empirically and historically informed analysis. While industry does have a legitimate commercial interest in supporting its own spin and is understandably committed to using every means possible to make its dreams come true, the interests of media studies are, and must be, different.

Such concerns raise questions about how media studies should respond to this era of change, and take us on to this collection’s second area of interest: that is, in how media studies has also been forced to reinvent itself in order to deal with new and complex media industry configurations of convergence and de-convergence, and as the manner in which the media constructs, or intervenes in, the social has dramatically changed. As digital optimism has lost its lustre, and as the rise of the algorithm has come to manage, monetize, and mystify the relationship between the media industries and their users, there are serious questions about what media studies research and analysis should do now. What is the best course of action for media studies to take as it sets out to critically understand the datafication of the media economy, say, or the commodification of rumour achieved through the interaction between the news and social media, or the social and political consequences of the unregulated circulation of malign social media content, or the transnational dominance, both commercial and social, of the online giants Facebook, Google and Amazon? These are not only strategic and political questions, although they are certainly, and urgently, that. Addressing them also requires significant changes to research practices in media studies that would enable it to do its job. Some of this is already under way, of course; Chapter 3 in this book, originally published in 2011, cites Amanda Lotz’s early call (2007, 241–242) for just such a reassessment, issued as we were coming to the end of the era of mass media. More recently, we are seeing research collaborations with data analysts, computer scientists, and media law scholars, as well as calls for more rigorously observational audience research that might help us better understand what consumers actually do with the media in the current conjuncture and in their various locations (Evans et al., 2017).

The big picture questions overlaying all of this are to do with the various assessments of the social and political role played by the media. In my view, for instance, the contemporary media are participating, both directly and indirectly, in nothing less than the transformation of the public sphere. As I argue in Chapter Seven, for example, there is reason to fear that the fundamental connection between an independent news media and the democratic governance of the state is under threat. Sources of that threat would include, among many, what Andrejevic (2013) has called ‘infoglut’ or the supply of information outstripping our capacity to manage and prioritise it; the phenomenon of confirmation bias, ‘cyberbalkanisation’ (Sunstein, 2009) and the proliferation of information bubbles in the distribution and consumption of news and information; the ‘culture of search’ (Hillis et al., 2013) contributing to the ‘death of expertise’ (Nichols, 2017); the declining authority of news organisations and the consequently rising influence of misinformation including rumour and so-called fake news; and what seems in the West to be a set of shifts in how the game of politics is played through news, advertising, and other media formats and platforms, and in whose interests. Outside the West, there are additional considerations as a globalising media becomes embroiled in local and regional struggles between competing versions of modernity (Kraidy, 2014; Lewis et al., 2016), or in complex articulations to the state that can serve diverse and at times regressive commercial and political objectives (Voltmer, 2013; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2016). In all of these areas, we are seeing new formations of behaviour, practice, desire, belief, and power reflected in or prosecuted through the full range of media platforms, devices and technologies.

The elephant in the room for the contemporary media studies practitioner is the practical impossibility of any one person now being able to consume, or perhaps even to be fully informed about, the full range of media content, platforms, applications, portals, or media sources available to them. Some time ago, my son asked me if I made much use of social media such as Twitter or Instagram. When I said that I didn’t, he then asked me how I could write about them in my professional capacity. My answer was that I couldn’t. Twenty years ago, I would have had a very different answer to such a question about the comprehensiveness of my media consumption; at that time, the options available to someone whose primary media diet was still the mass media were much more limited and our capacity to cover the field much less of a challenge. We are now in very different territory. As recently as 2015, in my Re-Inventing the Media, I argued for a media studies teaching program that dealt with the whole of the media landscape in ways that understood the range of media forms available; this argument was part of a critique of the fracturing of the field consequent upon the establishment of convenient but poorly conceptualised binaries such as old and new media, legacy and digital media, passive and active consumption, and so on. While this might be still, in principle, a desirable pedagogic objective, I don’t think I could be quite so sanguine about the likelihood of achieving it now. The fragmentation of media studies around competing media devices, platforms and portals may have passed the point of no return. The field has become exponentially larger and more diverse, and the strategies for working within it increasingly necessitate collaboration, sharing expertise across the fields. While I might have ethical and political concerns about the social effect of the algorithm on the population of Facebook news feeds, for instance, currently I don’t have the expertise required to properly interrogate how these algorithms work. Given the complexity of that problem, it is hard to imagine an alternative to cross-disciplinary collaboration as a means of addressing it. It seems highly unlikely that any one researcher in media studies today might maintain a level of knowledge and expertise over the contemporary landscape that was equivalent to the kinds of command many of us were previously able to achieve during the era of mass media.

Relevant here, and something I will touch on in the concluding chapter of this collection, is the relationship between media studies and cultural studies. In most locations, these fields have long been closely related; indeed, in terms of method and approach they have been almost indistinguishable at times. It is probably true to claim, as a generalisation, that media studies’ focus on emerging technologies and the transformation of the industry in recent years has sharpened the operating distinction between the two fields of research practice. From...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• 1 In transition: media and cultural studies for the digital era
• PART I Television
• PART II The media and the state
• PART III Celebrity
• PART IV A critical agenda
• Index