Re-Inventing the Media

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317381464
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Re-Inventing the Media provides a highly original re-thinking of media studies for the contemporary post-broadcast, post-analogue, and post-mass media era.

While media and cultural studies has made much of the changes to the media landscape that have come from digital technologies, these constitute only part of the transformations that have taken place in what amounts of a reinvention of the media over the last two decades.

Graeme Turner takes on the task of re-thinking how media studies approaches the whole of the contemporary media-scape by focusing on three large, cross-platform, and transnational themes: the decline of the mass media paradigm, the ongoing restructuring of the relations between the media and the state, and the structural and social consequences of celebrity culture.

By addressing the fact that the reinvention of the media is not simply a matter of globalising markets or the take-up of technological change, Turner is able to explore the more fundamental movements and widespread trends that have significantly influenced the character of what the contemporary media have become, how it is structured, and how it is used.

Re-Inventing the Media is a must-read for both students and scholars of media, culture and communication studies.

PART I Rethinking the media

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675206-2

1 RETHINKING MEDIA THEORY

DOI: 10.4324/9781315675206-3

This first chapter addresses the question of how we might begin to rethink media theory in the light of the decline of the mass media paradigm. It does this by examining two important directions within the discussion of the contemporary media, before returning to a question that, in my view, has tended to be put on the backburner as a result of the political optimism that has coloured the digital era – the analysis of media power. First, I consider the usefulness, in this context, of theories built around the concept of media convergence, something that has occupied a great deal of media and cultural studies thinking about new and connective media over the last decade. Second, the chapter looks more briefly at theories of mediatisation as a means of providing a more comprehensive overview of the contemporary media that extends the focus of media theory beyond the consideration of new media and the digital. Third, and in some ways extending the critique of ‘digital optimism’ I have developed in previous work (Turner, 2010), this chapter asks how we might reconfigure theories of media power in the current conjuncture. Finally, and this is a theme that informs the arguments throughout this chapter, I question whether media and cultural studies have sufficiently confronted the implications of the increasing commercialisation of the media, and its effect on the character of the interests served by the deployment of the media’s symbolic power.

In many locations today, it is possible to argue that we have moved from living in a ‘mass-mediated’ to a ‘multi-mediated’ culture (Couldry, Livingstone and Markham, 2010: 35). Whole sectors of the media no longer address us as a mass audience, as the way that the media industries now think of their audiences is significantly changing. Without necessarily completely abandoning their earlier business models, in which they gathered mass audiences to sell to advertisers, media industries have also had to develop new ways of tracking, targeting and attracting much thinner slices of the population. These slices are defined by, and accumulate their commercial value through, their patterns of consumption. In a cruel inversion of the politics of Jay Rosen’s (2006) utopian manifesto for audience empowerment, it seems as if ‘consumers’ is now the most applicable label for ‘the people formerly known as the audience’.

As Joseph Turow argues in The Daily You (Turow, 2011), this tendency is not confined to the media, as only attributable to the changing affordances of media technologies, for instance, but rather it is embedded within larger societal, political and economic shifts as well – such as those elements of what is often called neoliberalism which have successfully built the discursive connection between consumerism and citizenship. In her analysis of 21st century brand culture within the US, Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that, in ‘advanced capitalism, connections between consumerism and citizenship’ no longer need to be ‘justified or qualified’:

In the era of mass consumption, such connections had to be sold by advertisers (so that buying a product was crafted as a choice afforded by democratic freedoms); in the 1970s and 1980s such connections had to be justified by market segmentation (as identities became products like any other material good, marketers could naturalize the position of politics with commercialism, or citizenship with consumption, as a relationship). However, the consumer citizen is the central category of analysis for today’s advanced capitalist culture. Individual freedoms are guaranteed not by the state or another institution but by the freedom of the market and of trade. (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 44)

Banet-Weiser goes on to suggest that the emphasis on the ‘mass’ she identifies in the era of mass consumption and production, as well as the focus upon identity groups within the niche market era (what she describes above as market segmentation), have, in the contemporary era, been ‘redefined as an emphasis on “the particular”’ (ibid.).

Of course, and while Banet-Weiser’s analysis would certainly resonate across most Western democracies, there could be a quite different narrative of change in other locations – where there are different social and economic histories, or where capitalism’s influence is mediated by other political forces, for instance. The heterogeneity and diversity of media experiences around the globe has increased at the same time as the pace of technological and structural change has accelerated. There is reason to see a connection, as I have noted earlier: to suggest that, ‘as mass media lose their massness, they become much more conjunctural, much more volatile and contingent in response to the precise configuration of the forces of change in particular social–historical circumstances’ (Turner, a: 48). Given this volatility and its varied outcomes, the traditional paradigms for the analysis of the mass media require reassessment if media and cultural studies are to better understand the altered states of the media today, and to find ways of mapping their coordinates.

While there has been a massive expansion in media provision and consumer choice, globally, and while there is also evidence that in some markets the audience for the mass media is shrinking, the current conjuncture does not simply present us with a straightforward scenario of multiplying choices, fragmenting audiences and a growing engagement with the application of new media technologies. It is more complicated than that – and, indeed, it has played out in ways many did not expect. For a start, despite predictions that Web 2.0 would transfer some of the power held by the mainstream media into the hands of the audience (Rosen, 2006) or to the so-called ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2008), it now appears that what we might call Big Media have gradually colonised the online environment, creating what Napoli, with some prescience, described as ‘the massification’ of the internet (Napoli, 2008: 60). Geert Lovink, among others, has lamented the fact that ‘in most countries’ today, the new media spaces are ‘owned by literally three or four companies’, giving them ‘phenomenal power to shape the architecture of such interactions’ (Lovink, 2013:10). Among the first to recognise the progressive political potential of the Web, but also among the first to warn against that potential being squandered, Lovink is clearly frustrated by this situation: ‘whereas the hegemonic internet ideology promises open, decentralised systems, why do we, time and again, find ourselves locked into closed, centralised environments? Why are individual users so easily lured into these corporate “walled gardens”?’ (10), he asks. For Lovink, in this latest book (Lovink and Rasch, 2013), the most important questions to be raised about social media today are not about the politics of user empowerment, but about the political economy of social media monopolies (11).

José van Dijck’s account of the history of YouTube suggests that it was probably never going to be otherwise, given the long history of the trends towards ‘personalization, mass customization, commercialization, and the blending of public and private space’ that preceded the current configurations, as well as the persistent encroachment of the market into ‘the culture of connectivity’:

[I]t is easy to understand why YouTube’s alternative image, which thrived on a cultural mood of participation and community building, could never hold up in the face of the powerful commercial incentives propelling the site into the mainstream. The neoliberal ideology of technology pushing economic needs is not always conducive to the ideal of creating a sustainable environment that nourishes community-based platforms. Commercial owners favour – over the need for sustainable communities – quick turnovers, short-lived trends, celebrities attracting mass audiences, attention-grabbing experiences, influential power-users, and a large pool of aspiring professionals. (van Dijck, 2013: 130)

As van Dijck points out, even as the operation of this commercial logic actually pushed the platform ‘back the other way from connectedness’ (131), it is ‘remarkable how often the participatory ideal of connectedness is invoked to warrant the needs for commercial exploitation of connectivity’ (130). Notwithstanding its continuing invocation, YouTube’s embodiment of this ideal is looking increasingly threadbare: most of its menu is derived from television in the first place, the material uploaded is mostly ‘user-copied’ rather than ‘user-generated’, and it has moved away from being structured like an open database towards something that is becoming more like a multi-channel television network (119).

There is also the fact that the politics underlying the performance of participatory culture can turn out to be deeply conflicted. Banet-Weiser has discussed the contradictions embedded in, soap and cosmetics manufacturer, Dove’s interactive Campaign for Real Beauty. On the one hand, she says, Dove’s beauty products are ‘created for women and girls to more closely approximate a feminine ideal’, that is, on the other hand, made the object of critique through the Campaign for Real Beauty’s promotion of a ‘wider definition of beauty’ (that is, less idealised and more ‘truthful’) and through its invitations for consumer participation in the production of that critique (Banet-Weiser, 2012: 41). Banet-Weiser shows how successfully these contradictions are managed, rather than reconciled, as the Dove campaign relays ‘feminist critiques of the beauty industry while at the same time deflecting those same critiques from Dove onto other brands’ (41). The key to that success is the campaign’s incorporation of significant elements of consumer co-production from women interacting with the campaign’s website; as Banet-Weiser points out, however, this doesn’t displace the basic ambiguity that underpins their participation. The contribution of these women’s labour to Dove’s campaign enables ‘both creative activity and exploitation simultaneously’ (44).

Such an observation engages with what is now quite a history of debates within the field about the contradictory politics of participatory media of all kinds – from reality TV (Andrejevic, 2004) to micro-celebrity websites (Marwick and boyd, 2011). That history, though, has some twists and turns in it. While the early adopters may have engaged with the highest ideals in mind – the potential for online creativity, the construction of community, and so on – over time they have become more aware of, and progressively more pragmatic about, the corporatisation of these platforms and the monetisation of their participation. It is claimed that users have ultimately resigned themselves to a situation where they implicitly agree to contribute their labour – or more recently, their data – as the price of connectedness (van Dijck, 2013: 158). It is not then a simple opposition between the empowering and expressive potential of these media (Bruns, 2008), and the commercial exploitation of those contributing their labour (Terranova, 2000); both of these remain genuine (and, as Banet-Weiser says, ‘simultaneous’) capacities of participatory media. The contradiction is in fact constitutive, and it is a consequence of how connective media have evolved in association with egalitarian or communitarian ideals as well as with a culture of commercial entrepreneurism.

Among the enabling conditions for this novel ideological partnership is what van Dijck describes as ‘the seamless amalgamation of online platforms and mass media into one and the same connective economy’ (van Dijck, 2013: 130), echoing Couldry’s comment, quoted in the Introduction, that it is the ‘interface between interpersonal media and the old mass media that is the most radical change under way’ at present. There are all kinds of consequences for the standard categories from within the mass media paradigm that flow from the development of this interface. What we mean when we talk of a ‘public’, an ‘audience’, a ‘network’, or even ‘a community’,¹ for example, is now far less agreed than was previously the case. Marwick distinguishes the ‘broadcast audience’ from a ‘networked audience’ (the networked audience is connected to each other), while insisting that we should not refer to the viewers of ‘a piece of digital content’ as a public; it is, rather, an audience (Marwick, 2013; 212).² While Couldry describes micro-celebrities’ engagement in ‘sustaining a public presence’, he also acknowledges Daniel Miller’s problematisation of the use of ‘public’ in this context, with Miller preferring to describe the ‘public’ dimension of Facebook as ‘an aggregate of private spheres’ (Couldry, 2012: 50.) Nancy Baym explores some of the contradictions in linking the networked media to the formation of online ‘communities’, that comes from ‘a shift away from tightly bounded communities towards increasing networked individualism in which each person sits at the centre of his or her own personal community’ (Baym, 2010: 91). As she points out, this kind of formation might seem ‘empowering in terms of sharing and interactivity’, but it falls well short of constituting what we might otherwise think of as a community because ‘it challenges many of the qualities that can make these groups cohere into something more than the sum of their parts’: the network has no sense of place, its behavioural norms are difficult to maintain, the identity of the group is elusive, and so on (ibid.).

Another example of the complications introduced by this expanded and multi-platformed media system is the difficulty that arises when we now try to define once unproblematic terms such as ‘television’. With content produced for television now available via the online catch-up services of their originating channel, via downloads or streaming from video aggregator sites, and via numerous mobile devices, there is the question of whether or not television describes a particular content or, more narrowly, a specific platform for distribution and consumption. Michael Newman’s history of video argues that ‘video’ has become the generic label for the content we might once have called television. Newman lists the various locations where video has become the default term for audio-visual screen content: for example, on the iPod and the iPad, on desktop computer menus, as a search term for video-on-demand in cable and satellite programme guides, and in naming the products distributed by Netflix, Hulu and so on. The ubiquity of the term leads him to conclude that ‘digital video is the format for movies, television shows, web videos and whatever audio-visual texts fail to match these categories. It is, more and more, the [term for the] moving image’ (Newman, 2014: 77).

What drives Newman’s history of video into the present is an underlying story about the decline of the mass media. However, as I will go on to argue a little later in this chapter, it is important not to confuse the decline of the mass media paradigm with the decline in the media’s centrality or in its power:

[I]n the multiple-outlet digital media era, ‘centrality’ becomes an even more important claim for media institutions to make, as they seek to justify the wider ‘value’ they provide. The ability to speak for, and link audiences to, the ‘mediated centre’ becomes all the more important, even as its reference points in social and political reality become more tenuous. (Couldry, 2012: 23)

This, in a context where there is a dual process going on: one which, on the one hand, acknowledges the ‘actual evaluative and organisational plurality of everyday life’ but which still, on the other hand, registers ‘the universalising force of media discourse in everyday life’ (65).

All of which suggests the need for closer, more instantiated scrutiny of what functions the media now actually serves in all its spheres of operation. While there certainly are examples of such scrutiny, of course, and I will draw upon them throughout this book, it is nonetheless the case that, as I argued in the Introduction, a disproportionate number of these have used new media as their primary reference point. While many have focused solely on the affordances of new media, rather than on broader issues, there are certainly some who have focused their attention on the issue of new media’s cultural function; a central approach for many of these has been through the concept of convergence. I have reservations about the usefulness of this approach for understanding the re-invention of the media, and so this is what I want to discuss in the next section of this chapter.

Convergence

In Western, media-intensive, societies such as the UK and the US, the term ‘convergence’ became quite a buzzword over the early 2000s. As it was commonly applied at the time, it referred to the blurring of the differences between media and telecommunications platforms that came with the arrival of the digital, and the complex of networked interfaces enabled by Web 2.0. Initially, the term circulated most actively among trend-spotters within the media industries and telcos before migrating into the language of those working in media, communications and cultural policy who were charged with modifying the existing regulatory environments to accommodate these new media developments and their capabilities. Policy-makers faced what looked like, from their perspective, a clear break with the era of traditional mass commun...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Re-inventing the media
• Part I Rethinking the media
• Part II The media and the nation-state
• Part III The consequences of celebrity
• Bibliography
• Index