Critical Communications Inquiry: A Manifesto for Uncertain Times

Critical Media Analysis :A Manifesto for Turbulent Times

Graham Murdock

Communications Research Centre

Loughborough University

Critical Media Analysis

• Focuses on the economic, political ,social and cultural formations that allocate resources for reflexive action

• Examines their transformations over time• Explores the dynamic connections

between innovations in media and broader currents of change

• Judges outcomes by their impacts on liberty, equality and solidarity

Competing characterisations of contemporary change

• Information society, e-Society

• Risk society, global society

• Late modernity, liquid modernity

Critical analysis starts with the persistence of capitalism and its globalisation

The global market ‘turn’

• Push Factors• The militant promotion of ‘free’ market ideology• Its adoption by key US led global institutions- The World

Bank, the WTO

• Pull Factors• The collapse of the Soviet Union• The market turn in India and China

• The crisis of developmental states • The move from welfare states to market states in

western capitalism

Marketisation is a double process

• Structural shifts enlarging the scale and scope of capitalist enterprise

• privatisation / liberalisation/ re-ordering regulation/ corporatisation

• Ideological shifts

• Cementing consumerism as the master legitimating ideology

Marx on contradiction

Capitalism as the magician’s apprentice

Unleashing forces it cannot control

Marx’s blindspots

• The consolidation of consumerism

• The rise of the nation state as the key political unit / the centrality of nationalism as a legitimating ideology

• The problematic legacies of the end of empire

• The escalating risks of technological ‘progress’

Three competing ideological movements

• The globalisation of consumerism

• The resurgence of fundamentalisms

• The emergence of cosmopolitan citizenship

Everyday life and thinking has become progressively colonised by consumerism

• Media retail disposition

• Press dedicated shops separation

• Movies department stores display

• Network TV supermarkets flow• Multichannel TV malls immersion• Digital platforms on line shopping integration

From the local high street to the cybermall

Consumerism has become progressively globalised

• The rise of the new middle class in emerging economies - from living standards to life styles

• Large cohorts of young people who have grown up in a consumer landscape

• The increased availability of credit• The explosion of advertising• Media tabloidisation and the rise of celebrities as

investment advisors in the stock exchange of styles

The new colonialism?From territorial occupation to imaginative

annexation ?

The localisation of consumerism

Key shifts

• From workers to consumers

• The market as the key arena of action and identity

• From collective fate to personal advancement

• Private solutions to public problems

From workers to citizenscitizens v patriots

• The rise of the nation state as the key unit of political organisation

• The struggle for democratisation and full citizenship

• The rise of nations as ‘imagined communities’

• The centrality of nationalism and appeals to patriotism

The problematic legacies of empire

• Nations v states- contested borders and partitions-demands for secession and autonomy

• The legacy of humiliation- demands for restoration and redress

The revival of fundamentalisms

• Fundamentalisms defend purity against hybridity

• The revival of nationalism-redefine shared histories, essences, and destinies

• The resurgence of fundamentalist movements in the world’s major religions

• Reinforced borders and exclusions

The globalisation of risk

• The dark side of ‘progress’

• The unanticipated consequences of technological innovation

Negative dialectics

• Western capitalism’s refusal to surrender its current life style

• Demands by emerging economies for comparable levels of consumption

• Biofuels- accelerated loss of forests and expansion of desserts –increased carbon emissions

• Land taken out of agricultural production- increased food shortages

• GM crops- unknown and unrecallable impacts on ecological diverisity

Networked communications

• From analogue to digital- from separation to convergence

• multiple platforms- PC, TVs, mobile phones

• Multi-media -text,images,data,sound

• Hyper linked-networked

• Interactive- vertical and horizontal pathways

‘Ghost hunting’from binaries to trinities

• Missing third terms• The Critical political economy of communications

focuses on capital-state relations- commodities v public goods- ignores gift economies

• The romantic narrative of internet development pitches the gift economy of the open source movement against commercially driven development – Linus Torvald v Bill Gates

• Ignores public goods

Contested digital economies

• commodities public goods gifts

• Personal shared collaborative• Possession use production• Prices taxes reciprocities

• Consumers citizens communards• Markets nations networks

Three trends

• the expansion of digital gift economies

• the extended commercialisation and commodification of the Web

• The revivification of public cultural institutions

The new gift economies

• Pooled expertise – open source software, Wikipedia, social recommendation sites

• Shared experience and commentary- blogging, bulletin boards

• Non money exchange- book sharing, goods and services exchanges

• Vernacular archives- video and photo sharing

• Collaborative production -OhMyNews

problems

• Persistent global and national inequalities in access and use

• The intensification of state and commercial surveillance-tracking and classifying

• The move from mass to personalised media inncreasessegmentation and self selection- the erosion of shared space

Extended commercialisation

• The extension of copyright in time and space and to new cultural forms

• The commodification of public goods- the Google digital library project

• The corporate capture of interactivity and P2P exchange- viral marketing

• The commodification of vernacular production- Second Life

• Commercial challenges to Net Neutrality

The revivification of public goods

• From place to space- from positional goods to open access

• From intellectual property to the Creative Commons

• From professional monopolies to co-production

• From events to gateways

The ‘Second Life’ of public institutions

Networked contradictions

• Emerging digital media provide resources for reinforcing

• capitalist relations and the globalisation of consumerism

• Fundamentalisms and the insistence on strengthening imaginative separations and physical borders

• Enhancing global co-operation and the ethos of cosmopolitan citizenship

The struggle for cosmopolitan citizenship

Is the key struggle of our time

It is essential to addressing the globalisation of risk in ways that guarantee transnational and generational justice

the future organisation of digitalised media are central to this struggle

critical inquiry has a vital role to play in identifying barriers and contributing to debates about how they might be overcome

key question- how do we build the global digital commons ?

how can we combine the non commercial resources presented by the revivification of public cultural goods and the emergence of new communicative gift economies ?

Challenging consumerismFrom products to commodity chains

Reconstructing shared fate

• The Asian Tsunami

• The New Orleans flood