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

[Andrew Feenberg]

I have to agree with Ekaterina Petrovna's comment. By focusing exclusively on corporate strategies we risk overlooking the interactive character of Internet politics. Users matter, as we have come to realize in technology studies. Their intiatives are not reducible to the intentions of the powerful nor are they necessarily oppositional as Marxists understand that term. We need to rethink such concepts as cooptation, which tend to limit agency to the powerful, to understand the interactions in which initiatives from below play a role. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Ekaterina Petrovna" <epetrovna at gmail.com> 
To: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net 
Sent: Sunday, February 12, 2012 1:21:02 PM 
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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