Reading 1 - Political Economy

In this week lecture and related reading, we covered the concept of political economy in the media industry. Political economy is referred to as ‘the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that manually constitute the production, distribution, and consumptions of resources’ (Long, 2012: 173). This set reading and lecture explore ways in which media products or commodities generate revenue and offers a series of questions for one to ponder, such as “Who pays for media at the point of production?” or “What is the primary commodity of any medium?”.

The lecture explored the acronym FOR in relation to political economy. The acronym stands for Funding, Organisation and Regulation and these three factors are all implemented in the reading from Paul Long and Tim Wall’s book of Media Studies: Text, Production, Context. As stated previously, the quote from Vincent Mosco discusses the ways in which media products are ‘made, circulated and experienced’ (Long, 2012: 173) and the power of different people involved in the process and the type of role they play within the process.

Many media companies across the media industry compete with each other over audiences, sales and other revenue streams, such as advertising in order to gain some sort of return on any investments so they can deliver and maximise profits for their shareholders. Companies use methods such as Synergy to help them to maximise profits. Synergy derives from the Greek word Syn (together) and Ergon (Work). This refers to how media and other entertainment industries work together to generate greater audiences, publicity, sales which all would essentially result in profits.

To understand this area of new media better I looked at an extract from an author named Steve Jones of University of Illinois, Chicago who wrote New Media & Society. This maybe a book from an American author, however the content within it can be extracted and used as relevant material for this piece on political economy, considering that America has a strong hold on media as a whole with big organisations such as Google, Apple and Microsoft who media through internet or provide media through products. I also looked into an article by Robin Mansell and to understand the relevance of new media he cited in his piece “the relative neglect of political economy analysis in research on new media means that the overall social economic dynamics of the production and the consumption of new media continue to be subjects of speculation” (Robin Mansell (2004) p.2)

Reference:

Long, P and Wall, T (2012) Media Studies: Text, Productions, Context (2^nd Edition), London: Pearsons

Mansell, Robin (2004). Political economy, power and new media [online]. London: LSE Research Online. Retrieved February 3, 2014. Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/762/1/NMISsnt2.pdf