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

[Ekaterina Petrovna]

Hello,

why Fiske would not be appropriate? While it is somewhat outdated, he gave
an excellent oveview, I think, of the relationship between domination (and
culture industries used for the purposes of indoctrination and domination)
and popular culture, where people engage in making culture industries
'their own'. Engaging in a playful way on Facebook can be seen as an art of
making everyday life, and some instances of trickery on Facebook (like
numerous pictures making fun of Facebook as corporation) are an example of
excorporation (Fiske, 1989). The main point is that while political economy
of the media is very important, how users use the media in everyday life
and what they think of it, should also be taken into account. The problem
with engaging only with critical approach and political economy of the
media is that the focus becomes too much on the macro, ignoring the
micro...Boyd's studies (2008, 2010), on the other hand, focus, for
instance, only on the user, ignoring totally the aspect of the bigger
picture (as David Beer rightly pointed out in one of his articles in 2008),
- shouldn't we try to go somewhere in the middle?

I am not familiar, I have to admit, with materialist approaches towards the
media, - could you, please, Michael, give me some examples?

best regards,
Ekaterina Netchitailova (PhD student at Sheffield Hallam)
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Goddard Michael <M.N.Goddard at salford.ac.uk
> wrote:

>  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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>
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