Although there is a long tradition of paying attention to the variety of contexts within which cultural production takes place, political economy differs from much of media studies in that it places the focus of research on the circumstances of production. First, it asks the question
The opening line in The Internet Galaxy, Manuel Castells’s book of reflections on the Internet, business and society. At the heart of Castells’s position lies a belief that the impact of the Internet is as great as that of electricity distribution or the development of the modern corporation
to what extent is the production of culture a practice of material production? This is not to say that Media Studies has not been concerned with the circumstances of the production of texts as well as with their content. In the 1980s and 1990s there was, however, a turn to a greater concern with the text, to audience interpretation and the reception of media texts. Work by Ien Ang on how the audience of the glossy American series Dallasrelated to the programme and David Morley’s work on viewers’ relationships with the UK current affairs programme Nationwideare good early examples of this approach (Ang 1985; Morley 1980). Earlier work, for example the Glasgow Media Group’s study of news media, was much more concerned with the ways in which content maintained and replicated existing relationships of ownership and power in society. The move away from the use of political economy intensified, with the- orists such as McRobbie and Radway using studies of female experience to argue that economics did not necessarily determine cultural experience (see Tulloch 2000). There have been attempts by proponents of the application of Political Economy to the study of com- munication to reach a rapprochement with Cultural and Media Studies, including a substantial essay by Nicholas Garnham (Garnham 1995). Others such as James Curran have argued for a need to move back towards the study of the contexts of production of media texts, but without losing the insight generated by more recent work (Curran 2000: 9–11). Perhaps two of the most significant contributions along these lines have been made by Henry Jenkins (Jenkins 2004) and Toby Miller (Miller 2004). The latter has argued that any analysis of media must pay attention to economic social and political issues whereas Jenkins has identified these issues as lying in the province of business as well as cultural practice. More typical of the divide has been Vincent Mosco’s contribution which analyses, the myths, as he puts it, associated with the development of New Media (Mosco 2004). However there is some irony in that Mosco’s concern with how myths influence discussion of the web is rather less useful in analysing the political and economic phenomenon that is the web itself.
McChesney et al. (1998) state the theoretical basis of the political economy of commu- nication as follows:
The scholarly study of the political economy of communication entails two main dimen- sions. First, it addresses the nature of the relationship of media and communications systems to the broader structure of society. In other words, it examines how media (and communication) systems and content reinforce, challenge, or influence existing class and social relations. Second . . . looks specifically at how ownership support mechanisms (e.g. advertising), and government policies influence media behaviour and content. This line of inquiry emphasizes structural factors and the labor process in the production, distribution and consumption of communication.
(McChesney et al. 1998: 3) Our understanding of political economy in this context is very broad, but central to what follows is a materialist grasp of the circumstances of new media production and consump- tion. This means we are concerned with ownership, the economics of production and consumption, competition and the role of the state, law and regulation in determining both how we experience new media and how they in turn shape our world. In other words, the central questions in this section echo those encountered elsewhere in this volume; namely, how far do our existing methods and analyses continue to be useful for understanding new media and how far do we need to reinvent them for networked media, a newly emergent object of study? We have attempted in what follows to outline some of what have become ‘orthodox’ ideas about the economic significance of new media, while at the same time
See ‘Culture is ordinary’ in N. McKenzie (ed.)
Conviction, London: Monthly Review Press (1959), pp. 74–92
providing enough critical analysis to open up the debate. If we apply this tradition of political economy to new media, we might develop a number of central areas of research including considering the patterns of ownership of new media; how regulation and the policies of state and supra-state organisations influence the ‘social form’ of new media. We might also inves- tigate the conditions of access to new media including the impact of associated costs on social distribution
Because the very forms of new media that are made available for use depend on the interaction of these forces with the activities and interests of users we also consider the early practices in the use of new media and information and communications technologies (ICT) and the potential for new types of media activities and interactions. As Graham Murdock has argued, in this way we can move towards an understanding of cultural practices and the con- ditions in which they take place: situations that include the process of political and economic development (Murdock 1997).
Production in a capitalist society is primarily, but not exclusively, organised around the production of goods and services (i.e. commodities) for profit. In media production, a capi- talist model of production therefore leads to the creation of cultural commodities such as books, television programmes, music CDs, websites, CD-ROMs, DVDs, computer software and so on. With these types of commodity, the ways in which profitable distribution can be achieved can be quite complex. For instance, in commercial television this happens prima- rily through securing audiences so that advertising space can be sold. Indeed, Dallas Smythe has argued that it is the audience viewing figures or ‘ratings’ that are actually for sale (Smythe 1981). In fact we can see this very clearly in the way in which Google’s business model actu- ally functions on the basis of the number of clicks that an entry provides (Van Couvering 2004).
Production also increasingly takes place for the purposes of programme or programme format sales. In the US, the major studios have long been directly involved in programme pro- duction for sale to an international array of customers. In all of these cases, there is the production of a commodity that has real monetary value in the marketplace. The production
Vincent Mosco provides a useful overview of the political economy of the cultural industries in his book The Political Economy of
Communications: dynamic rethinking and renewal, London: Sage (1996)
Google.com
The success of Google has been built on providing a mechanism for automatically providing a rank- ing on the returns from searches. Most search engines use a web crawler (otherwise known as a web spider) to locate web pages. These are software applications that visit Internet servers and note the contents and links in web formatted pages. The pages are subsequently retrieved for indexing. Such crawlers provided the earliest search engines but were unable to indicate how useful the page might be. The founders of Google went a stage further and developed an algorithm (a series of steps and calculations) to weight the number of links made to a particular page. In this way a measure can be made of how useful the page might be considering how many others have links to it. Put simply the more links the higher the ranking. Google Corporation stores all the original pages on ‘server farms’ made up of linked PCs. Subsequent development has focused on providing mechanisms to include links to what might be considered to be appropriate adverts. Google now offers a variety of ways in which advertising strategies are sold to a wide range of small, medium, national and global enterprises. Google has accumulated considerable cash reserves and is cautiously expanding into related net based services such as mail and mapping.
of culture also requires the development of studios, the purchase of kit and the utilisation of the labour of real people. Into this process of cultural production also enter less tangible fac- tors of taste, aesthetics, audience desire, novelty, and so on, which are difficult to predict but nonetheless are important arbiters of commercial success. In all these ways, and no less in the case of new media, there is an actual process of production underway. The problem is to explain how cultural commodities are both part of the economic base of society but also function symbolically or ideologically as cultural artefacts and texts. For example, regulations claiming to ensure taste and decency in television exist in the US and the UK and are increas- ingly being sought for new media as well. Breaching social mores might increase profitability in one area but cause considerable difficulty in terms of public opprobrium. Precisely this process was seen in the use of video cassettes in the 1980s for the distribution of horror films that had a limited and controlled distribution within film distribution networks (Barker 1992). Political economy tells us there is a balance to be discovered between how the power rela- tionships in society, corporate and state, interact with social attitudes and audience taste to determine what is possible in a particular media arena. It is necessary therefore to look at the ways in which the actions of users, the development process and the re-articulation of those uses can impact on the intentions of the original developers to bring new uses and practices into existence. The process has been identified as comprising the social forms of media and it is to this that we now turn.