Media Production: time and space

• Profit motive 
• Competition
• Merging of capitalist enterprise and technological development makes a continuous revolutionising of 'the screen' 

• Who/ what owns media? 

Media concentration - "as a result of mergers, takeover, deregulation, privatisation, globalisation and technological change, a substantial amount of mainstream media ownership increasingly rests in fewer hands" (Devereux, 2009, p. 91) 

• Cinema, radio, TV, newspapers, magazines
• Marketing, advertising and 'sales cultures'. 

• The massification of media
  • Large scale - can reach most people
  • Homogenised -standardised products
  • Centralised - controlled from one place
  • Collective - identity and coping with modern life

• Mars Attacks - H.G. Wells, 'War of the Worlds' broadcast as radio programme in US (1938); 6 million people listened; Narrated in style of real news broadcast; 1 million people panicked

• The masses' = the 'miltitude', 'mob' - revolutionary potential of numbers (French revolution and overthrow of capitalism) 
• Why was revolution not happening? - the rise of fascism; persecution of Jews; growth of 'visually dazzling' media and consumer culture. 
• The problem of 'the mass':
  • Thoughtless crowd
  • Easily manipulated by leaders
  • No connection with others (alienated) 
  • Dangerous
  • Only thing in common: message in the medium

During the expansion of media in the first half of the 20th century, Marxist scholars elaborated different critiques of what they termed mass culture

• Frankfurt School = critique of mass culture
• Althusser = ideology
• Gramsci = hegemony
• Habermas = democratic potential

Suggests economic domination and ideological domination

Institute for Social Research, University of Frankfurt, Germany established in 1923

New York (Columbia University, 1933)

Returned to Frankfurt in 1949

• Mass Culture Industry
  • Creative art - created for its instrinsic worth and that makes you think
  • Mass produced media - created to make moeny and that stops you think

Standardisation

• Media content is repetitive and formulaic 
• Songs are all the same; musicials are all the same
• Also in production - promotion, distribution

Veneer of individuality and creativity (pseudo-individualism)

• Concentration in media business - fewer and larger media corporations 
• Movement of various media products (e.g. film, news) from 'the West' to 'the Rest' 
• More, but selevt media content on 'the world' (national, local and international)

• The US is the largest producer and exporter of media products
• EU exports and imports
• Mexico and Brazil produce and export in Latin America. 

The consequences: 

• Cultural imperialism (homogenisation, Americanisation) 
• Cultural mixing (hybridisation and creolisation) 

Development of local/ regional media markets

• In 1980's, 80% of US products went to West Europe, Japan and Australia
• Brazilian TV 'Globo' exports to 178 countries
• Satellite - Egyptian Space Channel 
• Bollywood - Al Jazeera 

National/ cultural diasporas increasingly look to (spiritual) homeland for media entertainment and news.