[ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies

[Ekaterina Petrovna]

Hello,
by looking at the abstracts for the conference in May in Uppsala, I see
that the main focus so far is on the political economyc of media (or
critical studies of media), which is actually the topic of the conference,
but shouldn't we also look at the theme of the relationship between the
political economy of media (more, macro-context from studies so far) and
cultural studies (so, far, as Christian Fuchs rightly points out it has
been more 'celebratory cultural studies of media" (2011). However, by
focusing on both macro and micro at the same time and by incorporating such
works as John Fiske (1989), maybe we could have a new perspective on media
studies today? Fuchs (2008, 2010, 2011) proposes abolishment of capitalism
(quite an old proposition) or searching for alternative media. The
question, however, is:  would the users of Facebook actually switch to
anything else (the answer is no...at least from my ethnographic studies)
and shouldn't we look at facebook itself for these kind of alternatives?
After all, recent examples (Arab Spring) show that facebook can be used
effectively for organising popular protests, - could Facebook be used for a
good cause also in other cases? And another question: by abolishing
capitalism, - which society do you envision?

Graham Murdock says:  "where users labour in their leisure time to boost
corporate profits" (from paper abstract, 2012) by looking at the use of
digital media. If we focus only on this perspective, aren't we in danger of
missing an important part of popular culture, as elaborated by John Fiske
(1989) and many others (Stuart Hall, etc)? The problem with focusing only
on marco context is that we can totally misunderstand the perspective of
the user (something which Christian Fuchs discussed in one of the articles
with Dwayne Winseck (2011). Users don't consider that they work for free
for facebook when they use it, - if anything they have fun and engage in
many ways in 'trickering' Facebook (by organising many groups either
against Facebook or by making fun of it, on Facebook itself). Also what
about the fact that many users use Facebook actually at work (it was banned
as a result in many workplaces, but the application to use facebook through
phones, somehow, overpassed this problem)? Isn't in some way a kind of
sabotage to capitalism in a trickery sort of way?



Ekaterina Netchitailova (PhD student at Sheffield Hallam)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.icts-and-society.net/pipermail/discussion-icts-and-society.net/attachments/20120212/483bfbd1/attachment.htm>