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

[Goddard Michael]

Hello,

While in agreement with Ekaterina that a diversity of approaches, addressing ICTs and their users on a number of scales, is desirable, I would question whether 1980s cultural studies, especially in the work of Fiske is the best resource for this diversity (Stuart Hall is a somewhat different case since he actually engaged with information theory in such as a way as to leave something salvageable for thinking ICTs at Matt Fuller has argued).

Other productive lines of inquiry might include materialist media theories/media archaeology, which while depoliticising in some instances, nevertheless provides useful resources for a materialist account of media, media ecological approaches of the post-Guattarian/Matt Fuller variety at least, that go well beyond concerns with e-waste to engage with how specific media generate and interact with a variety of milieux or, on a more pragmatic level some of the approaches developed in the recent Transgression 2.0 collection which to engage with network phenomena like the use of social media during the Arab Spring but also problematise easy assumptions about what this means.......interventions that in some cases might be understood as continuing the perspecitves of autonomous Marxism and to strongly critique the more normative Frankfurt School version of Marxist cultural critique that still seems dominant in many political economy approaches.....just a few suggestions for pre-conference  discussion,

Michael Goddard

Dr Michael N Goddard
Lecturer in Media Studies
School of Media, Music and Performance
University of Salford
MediaCityUk
Salford
M50 2HE
UK

Reviews editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (SEEC)
Co-Editor of Reverberations: Noise, Affect, Politics, Continuum, 2012

________________________________
From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net [discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net] on behalf of Ekaterina Petrovna [epetrovna at gmail.com]
Sent: 12 February 2012 21:21
To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the media and cultural studies

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)
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