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

[Jernej Prodnik]

Andrew, I think most strands of Marxism never neglected questions of
resistance by subjectivities or the possibilities for (counter)power
produced by social movements (i.e., they never neglected subjective aspects
or considered people as being passive dopes, if anything, they could be seen
as too idealist at times), which is nevertheless not a subject matter of
critique of political economy as such, or is it? I'm not sure it is. I feel
critique of pol-econ basically gives progressive movements one of its key
weapons for resistance, but that's about it, it doesn't provide
organizational prescriptions or really set up any specific goals (unless
seriously paired with critical political theory). This doesn't mean they
can't be inspired by Marxism of course. Unless you're a stringent
dialectical materialist in a Stalin's mould, and I don't think there's many
left, you can't really overlook agency in a broader perspective of how
changes in society occur and how to look at society as such. Autonomist
(and/or (post)operaist) Marxism have been perhaps most exceptional in these
accounts since the seventies, focusing especially on the role of subjects in
the production process and how resistance can be set about. Lately it was
especially Negri's and Hardt's trilogy (Empire, Multitude, and Commowealth)
that focused exactly on the questions of agency and resistance of the
multitude. They are all remain materialists though :)

 

Why would users leave Facebook? Well, I don't know, but if they feel like
they have to protest against Facebook on the Facebook itself, I'm not sure
they're doing it the right way :) It's up to the users to decide what to do
and I fully understand it would be a very difficult decision to leave
(social exclusion, inter-personal pressures and so on). But you just have to
ask yourself whether you prefer a model worked on by Wikipedia or the one
favored by Facebook? The latter is grounded in surveillance over its users,
invading their privacy, and selling their private information to the
third-parties, it's using quite suppressive techniques of control and
monitoring. It's probably a no-brainer looking from this perspective, but
taking any another one would probably make it all more difficult to leave.
And while economically both approaches are in fact sustained by free-work of
their users, Facebook hugely profits from this, while Wikipedia has built
one of the most amazing knowledge-databases in the world that is available
to everyone, demanding nothing in return (sustaining itself through
contributions). It's also a question whether one wants to be included in
decision-making process when it comes to the platform he's basically
sustaining with his work - there are some options to influence decisions on
different levels on Wikipedia, but almost none on commercial platforms.

It's quite depressing however, when you see Google's yearly profits are
somewhere on the level of the whole tax income of Republic of Slovenia (a
silly example, but still), latter being just another in the long line of
countries going through painful austerity measures recently, while Google
formally employs around thirty thousand people (and at the same time you
read how a near 30% rise in revenues last year failed to impress Google's
investors;)). 

 

Best,

Jernej

 

 

From: Ekaterina Petrovna [mailto:epetrovna at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 7:11 PM
To: Jernej Prodnik
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the
media and cultural studies

 

That's a very good point actually,as the analysis from the perspective of
political economy does not preclude the micro-analysis and actually any good
study of the media today should focus on the political economy aspect. My
point was that there seems to be a great division today between critical
approach: focussing on exploitation mostly and 'celebratory cultural
studies'. My point was that both pluses and minuses have to be taken into
account, both macro and micro and the analysis of popular culture (again I
refer to works of Fiske) seems to me to be a good example where there is a
serious analysis of the critique of exploitation and the response of
ordinary people to this exploitation. I quote Fiske:

"Until recently, the study of popular culture has taken two main directions.
The less productive has been that which has celebrated popular culture
without situating it in a model of power....The other direction has been to
situate popular culture firmly withing a model of power, but to emphasise so
strongly the forces of domination as to make it  appear impossible for a
genuine popular culture to exist at all...Recently, however, a third
direction has begun to emerge...It, too, sees popular culture as a site of
struggle, but, while accepting the power of the forces of dominance, it
focusses rather upon the popular tactics by which these forces are coped
with, are evaded or are resisted." (Fiske, 1989, p. 20)

My point was that we should maybe look more into this third direction.
Looking at facebook's users as passive dopes misses an important fact about
Facebook: it does do something in our lives, people love it (in their
majority) and while it is a capitalistic organization, it actually did start
as project in a student dormitory...Why, in fact, would people do a massive
exodus to something else? Why? And how alternative mediums would sustain
themselves?

 

Thank you for the reference to the book about surveillance, - i will
certainly read it!

 

Ekaterina Netchitailova

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Jernej Prodnik
<jernej.prodnik at fdv.uni-lj.si> wrote:

Hi,

 

just a short observation: both exploitation and commodification actually
have little do to with playfulness or having fun on the Facebook or Twitter
(or anywhere else, where these processes might occur). It's not what
political economy analyzes and it's actually not that important question,
because it's simply not its subject matter. Which doesn't mean it's not
important. This is a common misunderstanding that has been retained in
cultural studies for decades now, for reasons unknown to me. But I guess it
stems from another misunderstanding - of what is actually the goal of
critique of political economy. It's definitely not to transparently moralize
about an ongoing world-situation and corruption of the ugly capitalists
(focusing on bad apples in an otherwise perfectly working system is, quite
on the contrary, approach of the non-critical economy), but to try to give
an explanation of an objective fact through means of abstraction (even if
this can, indeed, be fundamental ground for people's moral outlook and
political action, which was of course the underlying goal of Marx).
Abstraction in the given example meaning: if the system were in fact to
function perfectly, would capitalists still need exploitation? Of course,
how else would they extract surplus value? Both concepts, exploitation and
commodification, are therefore quite "technical" and don't focus on the good
and the bad (... historically, conditions in the production process were of
course terrible, but Marx could've easily omitted these examples  there are
plenty - from Capital and the argument in the abstract would be no
different).

 

These are quite different levels of critique you're mentioning, with
different epistemological presuppositions, and there weren't so many authors
that would successfully bridge this divide (Vincent Mosco in his Digital
Sublime being one of the celebrated exceptions). There has been a huge
debate in the nineties regarding these questions and I guess most of the
people, participating in it, simply got tired of it. But cultural studies
and political economy are not necessarily differentiated when it comes to
the macro/micro questions ... Neither commodification nor exploitation are
for example 'macro questions', they develop and happen in everyday-life
situations that actually need to be analyzed on the micro-level, at least in
the beginning, to construct a viable macro-theory (besides, why joyful
exploitation so easily occurs could be critically analyzed on another,
ideological level).

 

So, to put it shortly: people can be exploited in the production process
even if they crazily enjoy what they're doing at the same time. Neither of
these processes preclude people from rejecting these processes if they find
them worth struggling against  - for example through making fun out of
Facebook in different Facebook groups. How effective the latter is should be
quite obvious though: it's not. To put it in Marx's terms: they're just
writing about Facebook, but the point should be to change it (if these
people are so "critical" about it). And the only way to stop exploitation by
Facebook is probably a mass exodus from the Facebook to another platform or
to give as little information to FB as possible. Making fun of Facebook in
groups can actually even increase passivity and be quite cynical.

 

I'm just finishing my review of the volume "Surveillance on the Internet",
which includes some very good chapters from the perspective of critique of
political economy. You might find it interesting, especially considering the
fact these chapters mostly focus on the micro-level to demonstrate how
exploitation is carried out on social networks (mostly through surveillance
and data mining).

 

Michael, I guess you're not talking about Marxist understanding of
materialism in this case?

 

Best,

 

 

From: discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net
[mailto:discussion-bounces at lists.icts-and-society.net] On Behalf Of
Ekaterina Petrovna
Sent: Monday, February 13, 2012 1:45 PM
To: Goddard Michael
Cc: discussion at lists.icts-and-society.net
Subject: Re: [ICTs-and-Society] relation between political economy of the
media and cultural studies

 

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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