Value and the Media

Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets

Göran Bolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410485
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002826
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Value is seldom discussed in its own right, though it is of utmost importance to our relations with media texts and cultural objects, as we constantly make judgements of various kinds with respect to them. This book focuses on how value - aesthetic, political and social and economic value - is produced in contemporary media and cultural production. Contending that value is not constituted by the essence of a thing, but is rather produced in social relations, through negotiations and justifications, Value and the Media discusses changes in the cultural industries over the past two decades, emphasising the rise of new, digital media, and the opportunities that these afford for the production and consumption of media texts and objects. Richly illustrated with examples from the UK, USA and Europe, this volume explores a range of media: both old mass media and new personal media, with a constant focus on the importance of both for our understanding of the changes that have occurred on the media landscape and their implications for the production of value. As such, this book will be of interest to social scientists and theorists working in the fields of cultural and media studies, popular culture, and consumption.

Chapter 1
Media Production and Culture Industries

In the late 1930s and 1940s, leading theorists of the Frankfurt School in exile in the US (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal and others) were intensely engaged in the debate over the consequences of capitalist media and cultural production on cultural objects and art. Perhaps the most renowned example of this discussion is the culture industry essay that Horkheimer and Adorno published in 1947 (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947/1994), just a few years after it had been written and first circulated as a copied typescript in 1944 (Peters 2003: 60). The main concern of these two philosophically trained European scholars was the perceived transformation of cultural objects under capitalism, whereby the market logic and standardised production supposedly changed the meaning and function of art objects for their users. To Horkheimer and Adorno – as well as Leo Lowenthal (1961) in his writings about the emerging market for literature – this was an inherent feature of capitalism: The constant pressure for profit accumulation was the drive that forced the industry to seek new markets and new areas of production.

Naturally, the theory of the culture industry has been met with various kinds of criticism. Firstly, it has been criticised for being too elitist and one-sidedly negative, and for downplaying any attempts at resistance to the forces of capitalism (this criticism has been put forth not least from within Cultural Studies, where it has been likened to Althusserian Screen Theory; see for example, Fiske 1987: 93).

Secondly, it has been criticised for homogenising the culture industry into one sector. While Horkheimer and Adorno thematised their object of analysis in the singular, many have pointed to the reductionist effect of this and rather used the concept of culture industries in the plural. In the late 1970s, scholars such as Bernard Miège (for example, 1979) did this, and more self-consciously, David Hesmondhalgh (2007: 15ff) has argued for the use of industries in the plural, since each sector of media and cultural production lives under different production conditions, and hence their logics vary at least within the framework of capitalist production. This is also my position, and just like Hesmondhalgh I will use the term in its plural form. Patrik Wikström (2009: 12ff) argues that a more appropriate term would be copyright industries, but to me this seems like a narrowing of the field of analysis a bit, since – as I will show in more detail later – some of the culture industries have a very ambivalent relation to strong copyrights, and do not actually earn their revenues from copyrighted commodities.1 I will also term this sector the culture industries rather than cultural industries, on the grounds that these are industries for the production of culture and cultural artefacts. Cultural industries would rather imply a cultural dimension of the industrial production. There are, of course, such dimensions in various companies and enterprises, but this is not the focus of my discussion.

Thirdly, some have pointed out that although the culture industry might be a useful term, this industry has some very special features that distinguish it from other industries for commodity production. In an article with the illustrative title ‘Theodor Adorno meets the Cadillacs’, Bernard Gendron (1986) has argued along these lines, referring to both the Cadillac automobile as well as the doo-wop group with the same name. A major point in Gendron’s argument is that the analogy between the production of ‘functional artifacts’ (the car) and that of ‘textual artifacts’ (the song) should not be drawn too extensively. I concur with this criticism, and will in later chapters discuss more thoroughly the respects in which the media and culture industries differ from the production of other commodities and objects (since not all media production results in commodities). This is not to say that there are no aspects of standardisation and rationalisation connected to the production of cultural artifacts such as songs and musical pieces. The point is rather that the types of standardisation of intangible commodities are different from those of tangible objects. I will develop and deepen this discussion in Chapter 6.

A fourth criticism can be mentioned, which, rather than forefronting the dominance of the culture industries, sees them as arenas for creativity and innovation. Hence, one speaks rather of creative industries that actively involve users and consumers in the production process, for example through user-generated content (see for example, Hartley 2005 for a representative collection, and Cunningham 2009 for an international overview). I will deal with this discussion in more detail in Chapter 4, but suffice it to say for now that the perspective on creativity fits my purposes less well, as it so one-sidedly focusses on individual activity and less on structural constraints. It is my position that we need to take both these aspects into account; that is, both individual agency and structural frameworks for that agency. Structural constraints are most often socially produced, and we will need to take this into consideration as well. As David Morley (1992: 275f) argues, macro structures can only be reproduced by micro processes (cf. Morley 1997: 126f).

Lastly, there have also been attempts to update the culture industries perspective. Scott Lash and Celia Lury (2007) take issue with Horkheimer and Adorno and argue that we have reached a new phase of global culture industry (in the singular). In doing so, they contrast the ‘old’ culture industry that was dominant from the 1930s through the 1970s with the new ‘global culture industry’. The difference, they claim, is that cultural objects were previously determined, circulating as identical objects, while today the objects (which I would rather call commodities) are undetermined and ‘take on a dynamic of their own’ (p. 5). I would say that this is not so much a change that has happened to the object/commodity, but rather a change in how research has come to evaluate the object/commodity. If there is one thing that reception research (even uses and gratifications research from way back in the 1940s!) has taught us, it is that audiences/customers are (and always have been) using commercial commodities in unpredicted and plural ways (that is, unpredicted by the culture industry). However, although this fact is not new, what could be argued is that representatives of the culture industry today do not care about how the commodities are used (to put it bluntly): As long as commodities circulate on the market, the reasons they do so are of little importance to the producers or right-holders. To me this is a distinction that Lash and Lury do not make in their book, and thus overstate the newness of the culture industry.

Lash and Lury try to make a similar move when they distinguish between the ‘classic culture industry’, which was supposedly ‘dialectical’, and the ‘global culture industry’, which is considered to be ‘metaphysical’ (p. 15). I think this is a matter of confusing ontology with epistemology; that is, confusing what is with what is regarded as. And I do not believe Adorno – if we could ask him – would agree that the culture industry of his day was ‘dialectical’. He might rather say that he analysed it dialectically, but that is a different thing altogether.

So, I have used some space to discuss the argument of Lash and Lury, because their departure is similar to mine (something has indeed happened with the circulation of commodities and objects), and they are fascinated by the same phenomena. They also focus on value, although they use this concept undefined in a somewhat vague way, somehow using the concept of value as a floating signifier that is adopted in very loose and pragmatic ways.

However, and to be fair to their writing, there are also parts that resonate with my analysis: for example, those parts that deal with brands (see also Lury 2004, Arvidsson 2006). I will return to this discussion in later chapters of this book.

An ideological shift also occurred in the debate. While the culture industry concept was adopted to describe a negative development (or at least an ambivalent one – admittedly, Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectical position also included utopia), today the industry metaphor is sometimes used in a celebratory fashion, and concepts like the experience industry, the creative industry, etc., are used by policy-makers as a positive value. In political rhetoric, the cultural and experience industries are often regarded as emerging market sectors, to be developed to reach more overarching national economic goals. The change in discourse in cultural policy ‘from cultural to creative industries’ (Garnham 2005) is not a national phenomenon, as these are processes of discursive changes that appear internationally (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt 2005).

Marketisation

The culture industries perspective brings with it a focus on the relationship between capitalist economy and its development, and the consequences of the order of capitalist production for cultural objects and commodities. Thus processes of marketisation are at the centre of this theory, and we need to say a few short things about this process initially. Although media and cultural production have long been affected by capitalist market economy, this has occurred to varying degrees and in a variety of ways depending on the media form (print, broadcast and music media, film, art, etc.), as well as on which geographical, historical or national context you look at.

In Europe, for example, radio and television broadcasting has been organised quite differently from in the US, but also differently from in the Soviet Union. While the US radio and television were run commercially already from the start, the organisation in Western Europe was mainly in the form of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) and in Eastern Europe broadcasting was under state control. Gradually, the strong public service broadcast institutions were met by commercial competitors, and by the end of the 1980s Europe consisted of a dual situation with strong public service and strong commercial broadcasters. This changed the overall broadcasting landscape and also affected the ways the public service broadcasters organised their content, with, among other things, an increased focus on scheduling (Ytreberg 2000).

The print media have also been organised differently in different parts of the world. Of course there is no such thing as public service newspapers (although many journalists regard themselves as working in the service of their readers), and the main form of organising newspapers has been through subscriptions and advertising. An exception to this is naturally in nations under dictatorship, where the control over newspapers is in the hands of the state. In modern democracies, however, the main business model has been subscriptions or the selling of individual issues, in combination with advertising (see, for example, Gustafsson 2009 for a discussion on the ratio between these two forms historically). Indeed, the print media and the press have also changed due to changes in media technology (for example, the growing importance of the Web) and in the advertising markets, the rise of free newspapers (for example, Metro), and an increased emphasis on niche audiences to meet demands from advertisers.

The music industry has developed more refined means of distribution and marketing, as has film production. New ways of distribution in the form of streamed content have surfaced for both film and music, some of which build on new business models by which content is free and revenues come from advertising. In Sweden and six other European countries, the music service Spotify (www.spotify.com) launched such a service in 2008, which has been met with considerable success among listeners.2 The service also comes in a ‘premium’ version, without breaks for advertising and with better sound quality and some other features that are not included in the advertising-based version (for example, the ability to use the service through an application on your smartphone). A corresponding service has been developed in Sweden for the distribution of film – Voddler (www.voddler.com) – but has not yet reached the same degree of popularity although it was launched as early as 2005.

Another general trend that has made its mark over the past few decades is that media commodities are often coordinated across media forms and genres, so that a film is released together with its soundtrack, a computer game, etc. In such ways, the markets for cultural commodities have become integrated.

However, far from all cultural production is organised on commercial grounds. Many countries have subsidy systems in order to balance the commercial pressure on cultural production. Just to mention Sweden as an example, there are subsidy systems for the press (to uphold a plurality of newspapers), film production (the Swedish Film Institute) and the Swedish Arts Council (Statens kulturråd, www.kulturradet.se), whose task it is to ‘implement national cultural policy determined by the Parliament’ by allocating ‘state cultural funding to theatre, dance, music, literature, arts periodicals and public libraries, and to the fine arts, museums and exhibitions’. In addition, one could consider the public service system within the broadcast media as being included in the national cultural policy in Sweden, although it is not financed via taxes but rather licence fees (also determined by the Swedish Parliament), just as it is in the UK and several other European countries. However, it is also true that these systems at times have been under fierce attack and questioned on neo-liberal grounds with the argument that culture should be economically self-supporting. The debates on and the organisational forms of the subsidy systems naturally vary between countries, but wherever they appear, they counterbalance the economic logics of cultural production.

A related tendency in late modern commercial production, generally, is that commodities have symbolic or semiotic qualities that add to their economic (exchange) value. The increasing emphasis on design and brand names has complicated the way we can understand the valorisation of commodities in media as well as other commercial production. Beginning in the late 1950s, economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith (1958/1964: 145ff) pointed to the increased emphasis on marketing and advertising, and the problems it posed for traditional economic theory. This was further elaborated on by Jean Baudrillard (for example, 1970/1998; 1972/1981; 1973/1975), who introduced the concept of ‘sign value’ as a complement to the traditional concepts of use and exchange value. The basis for this was a perceived shift in the production-consumption circuit, whereby the symbolic dimensions of material commodities became more important for the circulation of commodities in society. The importance of signs for the organisation of production within the culture industries is undisputed, and arguably, sign value has always been a major component of cultural commodities. However, today many (if not most) cultural commodities are entirely made of signs, produced through signifying practices.

Although marketisation as a process has a long history it also comprises some prominent new features, most notably the increased importance of sign qualities, but the production of culture has also increasingly become subsumed by other ends, and cultural commodities and events are increasingly being produced not to bring revenue in themselves but rather to market other things, even nations. Take a phenomenon such as the Eurovision Song Contest, broadcast since 1956 on European public service television (that is, for non-profit motives). When Estonia became the first post-communist country to win the competition in 2001, and accordingly was to arrange the final in 2002, they hired the British PR agency Interbrand for a project called Brand Estonia, with the ultimate aim to effectively brand the nation in connection to the cultural event, especially to attract foreign investment and tourists as well as increase the awareness of Estonia in the eyes of the world more generally. Through this strategic move the Estonian government used the Eurovision Song Contest as a form of cultural technology to promote Estonia, and to market it to the world (for a fuller account, see Bolin 2006 and, extending the example to the commodification of India, Bolin and Ståhlberg 2010). When such a mix of stakeholders meet in cooperative efforts, each representing different spheres and interests in society, there will also be a mixture of value forms involved – political, economic, social and cultural.

Digitisation

The development within commodity production towards increased marketisation and an emphasis on sign qualities can be said to have been intensified with the technological development of digitisation, the process whereby media texts are broken down into digits and are hence reproducible without a loss of quality. But digitisation not only simplifies reproduction; It also affects distribution since digital media texts become much easier to disseminate to customers, as the examples of Spotify and Voddler above indicate. As texts become more easily spread from producers to customers, they also become more easily shared between media users. This fact puts pressure on record and film production companies to develop more refined tools for the restriction of markets in order to secure future profit through copyright legislation – the debate around file-sharing being a case in point, as file sharing does not involve ‘tangible carriers’ for the textual commodities (cf. Wallis et al. 1999: 7). However, copyright is only applicable to (artistic) works, and accordingly other techniques of market restriction have been developed for other symbolic commodities like television formats or fictional characters in literature, film and popular culture in general (trademark) (cf. Gaines 1990).

The need for such legal techniques has also increased as digitisation allows the same basic narratives to be distributed via several different technical platforms. We may think of this as a shift on par with the one noted by Walter Benjamin (1936/1991) in his essay on the fate of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction, and see digitisation as another stage in this process, with qualitative consequences for the cultural object at its centre. Indeed, digitisation has led to important shifts in the ways commercial value is generated. Along with this process a need has arisen for the industry to regulate, but so has an increased need for more refined ‘means of consumption’ to enable audiences/readers/users to use digitised texts: When commercial commodities circulate in digitised form we need complex software and hardware to ‘decode’ the digits into accessible, consumable form. In order to download a film we need a computer, access to high-speed Internet, and appropriate software to be able to take part in or consume it, and thereby realise its value (Bolin 2005).

George Ritzer (1999) used the concept ‘means of consumption’ to describe theme parks, shopping malls and related spaces of consumption. I would, however, rather reserve the term for the technical gadgets needed by media consumers to read media texts – television sets, computers, MP3 players, portable DVD players, mobile phones, etc. The difference between Ritzer’s and my uses of the term is thus between the means needed for the purchasing of (tangible) consumer goods and the means needed for consuming (intangible, symbolic) texts. These are means that appear at different points on the production-consumption circuit.

Several attempts have been made to understand the effects of digitisation and new means of consumption for the generation of economic value (for example, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf 2007). There are also quite a few studies on the use of digital commodities and objects, especially downloading (for example, Blomqvist et al. 2005). The general results are inconclusive, not least due to the difficulties involved in estimating economic gains or losses (Lucas 1999, Kretschmer et al. 2001, Rosén 2008). However, there are few studies on the effects of the general processes of production and how they relate to the production of other kinds of value besides the economic ones (but see for example, Ross 2000, Kenney 1997). In relation to television production, I have elsewhere analysed how the value of being ‘public service’ can be struggled over, and how the political and cultural conn...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Media Production and Culture Industries
• 2 Fields of Cultural Production and Consumption
• 3 New Organisational Forms of Value Production
• 4 New Roles for Media Users: The Work of Consumption
• 5 New Textual Expressions and Patterns of Narration
• 6 The Production and Consumption of Signs
• 7 Digital Markets and Value
• Bibliography
• Index