Creating Technology for Social Change

The political economy of mass media class

Every week one of us is assigned to write a blog about the last Introduction to Civic Media class. So this week is my turn.

We started the class reviewing a few of the projects that were presented in this blog the week before. The projects are receiving faculty advice, either personally, through e-mails or blog comments on the posts.

Then we went through the theory which, for most of us in class, was very dense this week. The texts assigned for reading were all anchored on Marxist based communication theory. For starters, Sasha drove us through a review of some basic Marxist concepts, like capital, time and labor, modes of production, classes, means of production, base and superstructure.

Then, we reviewed the first of the readings, “Contribution to a political economy of mass-communication”, by Nicholas Garnham, from 1979. In what has been a very influential text over the years, Graham stands by the position that the analysis of communication structures in the capitalist world must be done from a political economy point of view. That means that not only the function of the media in society has to be analyzed, but also the ownership, geographic distribution and concentration of the media must be understood.

Garhan departs from the traditional Frankfurt School critique to analyze the media as an industry, with specific strategies to commoditize and industrialize culture. These strategies include copyright systems, box office returns, planned obsolescence, advertising and patronage, as well as resolution of labor disputes, expansion into new markets, privatization of public broadcasters and innovation in communication technology.

The next text for the class was the introduction of Paula Chakravartty and Yuezhi Zhao’s book “Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy”, from 2007. It is interesting to see how this one dialogues with the previous. It is like if you pressed a fast forward key. Almost 30 years have passed and now you have a whole new generation of intellectuals, all over the world, working on the concepts established by Garnham three decades before. The book is actually a collection of articles, from different authors, mostly from the developing world. The introduction outlines the content of the book’s chapters, where the political economy argument is utilized in a decentralized way, to analyze the cultural industry. Special focus is given to the concepst of neoliberalism, transculturation, media imperialism and hybridization.

Most of our discussion in class focused on the authors’ critique to Thomas Friedman’s notion of a flat planet, where power is decentralized and control mechanism of capitalist structures would be unnecessary.

Finally, the third set of readings was about Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and their Propaganda Model. Chomsky analyses the media discourse and gets to the conclusion that its language is subject to a series of filters: ownership of the medium, medium’s funding sources, sourcing, flak and fear.
With little time left, we then went to the practical activity in our class. We were divided in four groups, who then worked on models for a Theory of Change. It was interesting to see how the groups developed different types of models, some more concrete and conceptual and others abstract and symbolic. Time, however, was very limited to allow more interaction, debate and collaboration.

Sasha then released us 15 minutes earlier than usual, so that everyone could get to see the US presidential debate.