Reading 2 - Industry & Institution - Regulation Part 2

In this week’s lecture and set reading, we explored further into industry, institution and looked into regulation. We looked into exploring how regulation relates to political economy from the previous week, to understand the concept of moral panic and to be able to research regulations within the media. Regulation “concerns legal or self imposed controls or restrictions of media organisations, involving their ownership, production, processes and output, as a means to achieve a policy goal.” (Long & Wall (2012) p.209) It could be argued whether the media should be regulated, however, I personally believe that it should simply because content could be potentially harming emotionally and mentally, therefore the regulations help to keep content within a fine line. It can prohibit the notion of freedom of speech, however, if certain information or messages which cross that fine line and do reach viewers then certain media corporations or individual themselves would risk legal actions.

The reading then talks further about regulations and policies and discusses the meanings behind policies. As opposed to regulations which effects the media industry as a whole, policies are “deliberate plans of action that set out what is to be achieved in directing or influencing decisions made by media companies.” (Long & Wall (2012) p.208)       

As the lecture and set reading only briefly touched on moral panic, I decided to explore the concept in the reading I found myself. The reading I found was a piece called Moral panics: The social construction of deviance by Erich Goode. From the text Erich Goode cited “In a moral panic, a group or category engages, or is said to engage in unacceptable, immoral behaviour…. And is therefore seen as a threat to the well being, basic values and interests of the society.” (E Goode (2009) p.35) This concept of moral panic can be explored in many ways in relation to new media as there is a wide range of new media areas to consider. Looking at the idea of moral panics in regards to social media as this is operated by a wide range of age groups from young to old, therefore there is a topic of discussion when discussing moral panics. A common occurrence on social media that is a topic of discussion for moral panic is cyber-bullying, this tends to be quite a common occurrence on social media it causes a moral panic on such sites like Facebook and Twitter as cyber bullying can cause a large amount of emotional and psychological damage and these do have policies which have been put in place to counter act these actions.   

 Reference:

P.Long & T.Wall (2012). Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. 

Erich Goode (2009). Moral Panics: The social construction of deviance. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.