Global Entertainment Media: A Critical Introduction

Lee Artz

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118955444, 9781118955437
• eBook ISBN: 9781118955468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

Balancing provocative criticism with clear explanations of complex ideas, this student-friendly introduction investigates the crucial role global entertainment media has played in the emergence of transitional capitalism. 

• Examines the influence of global entertainment media on the emergence of transnational capitalism, providing a framework for explaining and understanding world culture as part of changing class relations and media practices
• Uses action adventure movies to demonstrate the complex relationship between international media political economy, entertainment content, global culture, and cultural hegemony
• Draws on examples of public and community media in Venezuela and Latin America to illustrate the relations between government policies, media structures, public access to media, and media content
• Engagingly written with crisp and controversial commentary to both inform and entertain readers
• Includes student-friendly features such as fully-integrated call out boxes with definitions of terms and concepts, and lists and summaries of transnational entertainment media

1
Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Transnational Relations

In a world of entertainment media filled with consumer advertising, who does not know about iPhones, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, or the World of Warcraft and Guitar Hero? At the front end of the twenty-first century, media broadcasting and wireless messages relentlessly promote these and other must-have consumer goods. Yet, how many happy consumers know that Apple uses poisonous chemicals in its Chinese manufacturing plants (Walters, 2012)? Know that Coke depletes ground water aquifers in Rajasthan, India, threatening agriculture and the lives of thousands of farmers (Indian farmers, 2008)? Which coffee drinker is aware that a German equity firm bought Caribou Coffee to close down 80 stores in the Midwest? Do beer drinkers taste the added water in their Budweiser, put there as part of a profit strategy by the Brazilian CEO of the company’s Dutch owners? Do gamers linked on-line in the World of Warcraft or Call of Duty find irony in a French firm producing and marketing those military games even as French citizens protest real military action in the Mideast? Most likely, few consumers are aware of the investment, production, and marketing campaigns of the corporations responsible for the personal goods and services of daily life.

Even fewer know that making possible the slick advertisements and the immediate gratification of these and similar consumer products are thousands of workers around the world, some making as little as 21 cents an hour. Women and children work 12 hour days in firetraps for Disney, Sears, WalMart, and Sean Combs in Bangladesh (Hart, 2012). Likewise, workers for Apple’s iPhone and iPad Chinese supplier are forced to work in unsafe factories under inhumane conditions (Qiang, 2013). While major media tout competitive free market globalization as the way to improve the quality of life for all, major transnational corporations (TNCs) pursue an eternal fight for greater profits as global poverty and inequality worsen (Chossudovsky, 1997). Worldwide viewers have seen Yo soy Betty, la fea (Ugly Betty), the telenovela by Fernando Gaitan, that has been translated into 13 languages and broadcast in 74 countries (Kraul, 2006). Few know that Colombian media success is partly driven by the low-cost, non-union labor of creators, producers, and technicians working under repressive anti-labor laws. We watch. We enjoy. We buy.

Knowledge of and attraction to consumer goods result from global entertainment media that extol the “myth of consumer agency to convince consumers that they are empowered by what they consume” (Galbraith & Karlin, 2012, p. 25). These are the same transnational media corporations (TNMCs) that do not inform us about the conditions of production or the social and environmental consequences of our consumerist lifestyles. Entertainment for profit, the norm for all capitalist media, does not encourage news and information for the common good. Advertising-driven entertainment wed to codes and conventions of mundane formats does not even meet elementary levels of artistic creativity. This is not a question of high or low culture, but a recognition of the structural constraints on access to cultural production and creativity by all. In the interests of democracy and an informed global citizenry that deserves access to the creative use of media, this book investigates how entertainment media contribute to the globalization of capitalism and the creation of a global consumer culture.

The world is undergoing dramatic changes in the organization of production, trade, communication, and culture. Because these changes seem to be occurring everywhere, globalization has become the catchword to describe various dimensions of a dynamic, complex process. In popular and academic literature, globalization has been used to explain “a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age” (Steger, 2005, p. 7). In fact, enough has been written about globalization to fill a small library (see Ritzer, 2009). This book will not attempt to review or unearth the lineages or contours of the ongoing conversations on globalization. However, the many competing and sometimes contradictory versions of what globalization involves should not obscure its existence or its consequence.

Capitalism and Social Class

Scholars in International Political Economy and world systems theory have identified and documented the development of transnational corporations (TNCs) led by an emerging transnational capitalist class (TNCC) (van der Pijl, 1998; Sklair, 2001; Robinson, 2004; Carroll et al., 2010). To make sense of these discoveries and put them into meaningful context for understanding global entertainment media, which also is an industry mass producing standardized cultural goods (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2007), this chapter reflects on capitalism, social class, and class formation. Entertainment media are integral to almost all social, cultural, and political activities of society (Golding & Murdock, 1991, pp. 17–22; Artz, 2006, pp. 14–23).

Capitalism is a social system in which resources and the means of production are privately owned. Capitalism, as a social system based on the creation of private profit from production by wage labor, requires the constant expansion of production and consumption. Capitalism’s ceaseless drive for profits leads to a never-ending search for resources and markets. In the late nineteenth century, many advanced industries, having reached the limits of expansion within their own national boundaries, turned to other regions for resources and markets. Competition and conflict led to two world wars among emerging imperialist powers. The industrial expansion of capitalism following WWII was complemented by a renewed search for more resources and markets in the developing world. Still, capitalism has not escaped the recurring contradiction of overproduction – more goods and services are produced than the working and middle classes can purchase, even with extended credit. Consequently, capitalists continue their quest for more consumer markets, even as they continue the onslaught on wages and social welfare. Since the 1970s, leading sections of the capitalist class found the international integration of national production to be appealing and ultimately more profitable: outsourcing, off-shore production, subcontracting, and decentralization of production for local markets brought increased profits by decreasing labor and transportation costs. In the United States, employment declined, job security and wages went down, while work hours increased and production became more regimented. This new global system of production and distribution has led to new social relations and a global capitalist class.

Production and Class Formations

All societies have used natural resources like wood, metal, water, and agricultural products from nature and developed by humans, but as long as the raw materials remain in the ground or standing in the forest, as long as the fruits and vegetables remain on the trees or vines or in the ground, they are useless. It takes human labor to transform natural resources into usable goods (a fact obscured by advertising and the consumer culture, from Nike and Budweiser to Honda, Disney, and McDonald’s). A variety of techniques and practices to sustain human life have been used over the thousands of years of our existence. In expropriating nature and the production of goods and services, men and women have entered into social relations reflecting the organization of productive activities. All productive practices include and reproduce particular social relations – practices and relations, even when contradictory, are organically interconnected. Societies have arisen through this combination of production and social relations in a multitude of ways, from primitive communism, feudalism, chattel slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and socialism to name the more well-known. In the twenty-first century, transnational corporations have instituted new productive activities from joint venture investment relations to integrated decentralized production chains and standardized distribution methods. Transnational corporations comprise new social class formations (integrating capital classes across national borders) and new global social relations (the de-industrialization of developed countries and the rapid industrialization and consumerization of developing nations), including the remarkable transformation of social classes – peasant and farmers have become repositioned as agricultural and industrial workers at the rate of 50 million per year (Kalb, 2011, p. 2), although many will become casual or unemployed workers. In 2012, as corporate media rhapsodized about the economic recovery, more than 200 million were out of work.

Capitalism is a social system in which resources and the means of production are privately owned and operated for individual profit, not necessarily for social use or the common good. Capitalism requires labor power to obtain the natural resources and put the machinery in motion for production. Wageworkers are paid for their labor time and skill, but not the total value of their work. The commodities produced are sold on the market, but workers are paid less than the value of what they produce. Capitalist profits come from this sleight of hand. Capitalists keep the difference between the value of the commodity and the price of labor, including the labor necessary for manufacturing machines and transporting materials. The value of labor appears in Wall Street business reports as labor productivity – expressed as the value produced by one hour of work. After factoring in the costs of material, machinery, and transportation – all costs dependent on labor, as well – the difference between the hourly wage and labor productivity is the hourly profit appropriated by the corporate owners. Workers are paid for their labor time and skill, but not their productivity. This understanding makes abundantly clear why corporations would strategically become transnational: by moving production to low-wage countries, the value of the commodities remains about the same in the international market, but the cost of labor is significantly lower, providing increased profits on all goods sold (International Labor Organization, 2013; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012).

Transnational corporate relations are necessary if firms hope to maximize local economic, political, and cultural benefits. Thus, international and multinational corporations “merge” with national or other multinational firms, increasing access to local labor and markets, and usually defeating national competitors in the process. Machinery, technology, and skill embodied in machines and technology, through science, invention, and innovation improve the efficient use of labor power. National firms often willingly integrate into transnational firms to have access to capital and the latest technology and technique – or face failure given superior capitalist operations. Modern capitalism organizes the immense productive capacity of international wage labor with the latest technology and machinery available. In striving for increased labor productivity, businesses now even use technology to monitor employee behavior, enforcing a work regime of stricter productivity (Semuels, 2013). Not technology for democracy. Technology to improve profit. Technology to extract more from labor.

The social relations of production of capitalism are not as advanced, progressive, or socially egalitarian as the productive capacity and the means of production would allow. Production is highly socialized: the labor process is collectively organized with an extensive division of labor, increasingly on a global scale. For the most part, individuals do not sew their own clothing, grow their own food, or build their own furniture. Instead, to meet the needs and desires of society, clothes, cereal, sofas, music, and most other socially useful goods are mass produced by tens of thousands of working people – albeit contained in privately owned enterprises. Individuals with many different skills perform many different tasks: discovery, design, extraction, transport, manual labor, skilled machining, assembly, packaging, quality control inspection, and machinery maintenance. This is a social pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Twenty-First Century Capitalism and Transnational Relations
• 2 Leading the Charge
• 3 Transnational Media
• 4 From Regional to Global
• 5 Cultural Hegemony
• 6 Power Decentered
• 7 Superheroes to the Rescue
• 8 Media, Democracy, and Political Power
• Conclusion
• Index
• End User License Agreement