Deuzeblog

Media Work Book Review (6)

2009-07-10T13:31:00.012-04:00

As I blogged earlier this week, it has been a fantastic ride with my last book, Media Work (Polity Press), especially in terms of the feedback I've been getting. The latest issue of The Information Society contains yet another (by my count 6th) scholarly review piece on the book - after earlier ones in the International Journal of Media Management, the European Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Ecquid Novi:African Journalism Studies, and Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly.

The review in The Information Society was done by Greg Downey of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin, Madison (US). Greg is an expert in the field of (the historical analysis of) information labor, and his work and teaching - check out his excellent information society course materials - are a source of inspiration for me. His review of the book is critical, but overall I am pleased with the comments he makes.

Greg Downey particularly laments my lack of historical grounding - which is true, and as a historian by way of my graduate training I should know better - and the rather limited use I make of my empirical material (in-depth interviews with 600+ media professionals in the US, The Netherlands, South Africa, and New Zealand), or my theoretical framework (particularly Zygmunt Bauman's concept of liquid modernity). Again, I have no qualms nor excuses here.

Other than that, I'm thrilled that he described the book and my writing style alternately as "lively", "readable", "useful", "effective", and generally part of what he calls an "important niche", whereas he considers Media Work especially powerful when read next to his own work, citing his 2004 edited volume (with Aad Blok), Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750–2000 (published by Cambridge University Press). I must admit I did not know that book, which is my bad.

Overall I must admit that one thing bugs me about this book review - something which I have noticed a bit too often in the responses of scholars in more or less established (read: older) fields of study to work that is explicitly done or located in the realm of new media and digital culture (which Polity's title for the book series, Digital Media And Society, alludes to): a tendency to dismiss many of not all of the work, theorizing, and claimsmaking done in new media studies as intrinsically overemphasizing the "new". Although this is a valuable critique, it is also a bit too easy. As Greg and other historians know, nothing is ever really new, as everything is caught up in micro, meso, and macro flows of history. To claim that someone is not articulating the history his or her argument enough (simply by stating that whatever he or she signals today has been signaled one way or another before), is something that can be pretty much stated about almost any scholarly work.

Furthermore (and I may be mistaken), I do not think I am actually stating anywhere in the book that whatever I found to be happening in media work today is exclusive or unique to the situation right now, but I do argue that the historical categories we have used to this day to explain things in (media) sociology and social theory are perhaps different, less useful, or run the risk of turning our field into a (as Giddens and Beck among others argue) "shell" and "zombie" sociology. Considering Greg's valuable thoughts and comments, I should do a much better job exploring and articulating such notions.

Some highlights from the (copyright-protected) review:

Media Work, by Mark Deuze. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. 278 pp. $69.95 cloth/$22.95 paper. ISBN 978-07456-3924-6 (cloth), 978-07456-3925-3
(paper). Reviewed by Greg Downey, School of Journalism and Mass Communication and School of Library and Information Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

"Mark Deuze’s Media Work is a useful but limited attempt to situate and synthesize recent literature on what it means to be a creative professional in four cross-cutting industries: advertising, journalism, screen entertainment, and video games. This lively and readable account demonstrates that the study of new media through the lens of labor—both the increasingly contingent labor of media professionals and the increasingly interactive labor of their fragmented audiences—is an important and vibrant area of interdisciplinary scholarship, sitting at the intersection of communication studies, labor studies, technology studies, and cultural studies.

Although Deuze falls short of his goal to present a rich global ethnography of these industries, the anecdotal firsthand data that his students and colleagues have collected does add flavor and perspective to his narrative. And while a lack of theoretical breadth and a frustratingly shortsighted view of media history will limit the usefulness of his book for most graduate students and media scholars, Media Work would make a provocative and productive text in any undergraduate course on mass communication, cultural theory, or new media technology.

[...]

In his very brief conclusion, Deuze seems to reject wholesale a century of media sociology, stating that “It is tempting to analyze this kind of media life in terms of the boundaries and parameters that have well-established meanings such as social institutions (the family, the company, the state), and corresponding conceptual categories (culture, economy, creativity). However, the overview of the lives and identities of people professionally employed as media practitioners if anything suggests that these analytical devices are not particularly helpful if we want to make sense of media work—and thus of the problems and solutions people in overdeveloped capitalist democracies increasingly face on a day to day basis” (p. 233). But if the category of “media work”—or, more broadly, “knowledge work” or “information work”—is worth defining and analyzing, it is precisely because such a concept must be productively used together with those “well-established” analytical categories that Deuze derides as “not particularly helpful.” Arguing that these categories might be more “fluid”—interpenetrating, impermanent, contingent, or just changing historically—is not the same as accepting that these categories are useless.

[...]

As a snapshot of present-day working conditions and recent interdisciplinary scholarship around the question of professional media work, Deuze’s short and readable volume fills an important niche. But in the end, the broadest conclusion Deuze is able to make is that “a structural sense of constant change and permanent revolution is the strongest guide or predictor of the human condition in the digital age” (p. 235). Rather than always seeing historical discontinuity around digital networked infrastructures, perhaps we must admit that “constant change,” especially when it comes to practices of cultural creation, knowledge production, and information circulation, has been a hallmark—if not the hallmark—of what has been called “modernity” for a very long time indeed."

Coming Soon: Special Issue on "Newswork"

2009-07-09T10:21:00.010-04:00

After two years of exciting work with friend and colleague Tim Marjoribanks (University of Melbourne), our special issue on "Newswork" of the journal Journalism Theory Practice & Criticism is coming out soon; I just got the page proofs this week. As a sneak preview, please find the table of contents below.

By the way: the authors' version of the introductory essay Tim and I wrote for the special issue (on the changing conditions of work and labor in the global news industry) is available for download at IU Scholarworks. It features a broad discussion of the changes and challenges facing journalists in terms of labor, working conditions, and management, as well as a brief summary of all the wonderful articles that are featured in this special issue.

Journalism Volume 10 Number 5 October 2009

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Newswork
Mark Deuze and Timothy Marjoribanks 555

ARTICLES

Between tradition and change: A review of recent research on online news production
Eugenia Mitchelstein and Pablo J. Boczkowski 562

Compressed dimensions in digital media occupations: Journalists in transformation
Amy Schmitz Weiss and Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce 587

An actor-network perspective on changing work practices: Communication technologies as actants in newswork
Ursula Plesner 604

Token responses to gendered newsrooms: Factors in the career-related decisions of female newspaper sports journalists
Marie Hardin and Erin Whiteside 627

The performative journalist: Job satisfaction, temporary workers and American television news
Kathleen M. Ryan 647

Structure, agency, and change in an American newsroom
David M. Ryfe 665

Watchdog or witness? The emerging forms and practices of videojournalism
Sue Wallace 684

The shaping of an online feature journalist
Steen Steensen 702

Changing journalistic practices in Eastern Europe: The cases of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia
Monika Metyková and Lenka Waschková Císarová 720

Media Work Book Review (5)

2009-07-01T10:30:00.010-04:00

My last book, Media Work (Polity Press), is now out for almost two years. As far as I can tell, about 2,000 copies have been sold, roughly half of which in the US. Beyond all of that, it is really cool to see it get noticed and picked up for review in several scholarly journals: the International Journal of Media Management, The Information Society (forthcoming issue), the European Journal of Communication (as a booknote), New Media & Society, and Ecquid Novi:African Journalism Studies.

Most of these reviews I reproduced on this blog - find them here.

I just came across one more review in a scholarly journal - Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Spring 2008 issue (volume 85, issue 1, pages 212-213). Although most reviews of the book have been complimentary, and all reviews - also those that have been more critical - have been respectfully written, the one in JQ by Ohio University's Professor Emeritus Guido H. Stempel III is the odd one out. Unfortunately, the journal is not online, so I'll reproduce the review below.

It is safe to say I do not agree with just about every point Stempel makes - except for his final conclusion about the book, which is excellent: "The issues discussed in this book are important, but Media Work represents only a starting point for the conversation" (admittedly, I would prefer to replace "but" with "and", while deleting "only").

Media Work. Mark Deuze. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. 278 pp. $64.95 hbk. $22.95 pbk. Reviewed by Guido Stempel III in Journalism Quarterly.

"This book bills itself as a "primer" on working in the information age, based on interviews with media professionals in the United States, the Netherlands, South Africa, and New Zealand.

The author, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University and a professor of journalism and new media at Leiden University, deals with the impact of digital age technologies on the people who work for media and for media organizations.

He divides media into four categories—advertising, public relations, and marketing communications; journalism; film and television; and games. Each is the subject of a chapter, which is appropriate because work differs so much from one to another.

For journalism faculty, the chapter on journalism will be a good deal more useful than the others. Those teaching advertising and public relations also will find the chapter dealing with those areas helpful.

The chapter on film and television deals only with entertainment, not with television news. The chapter on games deals primarily with games themselves, not how they fit into the configuration of the mass media environment.

The main thesis of the book is that media work will become individualized — that full-time freelancers will replace media companies. The worker will go from job to job rather than working continuously for the same organization, Deuze predicts. Then the author deals with the impact of this on the individual and on family life. Yet I feel the author underestimates how individualized newswork is already and therefore overestimates how much of a change this will be.

What the author does not deal with very much is the implication of all this for news. Where will the news come from? Might the Associated Press become the model for news coverage? If the Internet is the main medium for news and information, what kind of news will we have? How will a freelancer covering the mayor of Indianapolis differ from the reporter from the Indianapolis Star, representing that established institution, covering the mayor? Will freelancers maintain the ethical standards that media institutions maintain, or might they perhaps maintain higher ethical standards? There is also the question of how news will be paid for. Bloggers and Web sites use information gathered and paid for by media organizations. If those organizations seek to exist who will pay for the news?

The issues discussed in this book are important, but Media Work represents only a starting point for the conversation."

Spreekbeurten in Nederland & Denmark

2009-05-08T19:02:00.008-04:00

In mei en juni ben ik twee weken in Nederland (en tussendoor in Denemarken) voor een aantal spreekbeurten. Als je in de buurt bent en zin/tijd hebt, kom graag langs!

27 mei 2009, avond [UPDATE]: presentatie "Journalistiek zonder Journalisten" (op basis van een oudere bijdrage in het NRC Handelsblad en een binnenkort te verschijnen publikatie als co-auteur samen met Leopoldina Fortunati met als werktitel "Journalism Without Journalists") op de Universiteit van Leiden. De presentatie is zowel openbaar toegankelijk en gratis. Plaats: Lipsius-gebouw zaal 003, van 19.00-20.45 uur. Voor meer info, neem graag contact op met Peter Burger (p.burger at hum.leidenuniv.nl).

29 May 2009, ochtend: workshop "Internet for Journalists" at the Radio Nederland Training Centre in Hilversum.

2 June 2009, 14:00 uur: for those in Denmark: I'll be speaking/giving a workshop with the Mediatization of Culture group from 2-5pm at the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication (Film & Media Section) of the University of Copenhagen. This workshop will center on the first couple chapters of "Media Work" (Polity Press, 2007) and the opening chapters of a forthcoming book on "Media Life"; see the working paper at IU Scholarworks for more info.

5 juni 2009, 14:00 uur: lezing over toenemende publieksparticipatie en de veranderende inrichting/ organisatie van het journalistieke werk op het Symposium "Nieuws: Maak het mee! Televisiejournaal, nieuwssites en burgerjournalistiek in beweging" (13.00-17.30 uur), in de Theaterzaal van het Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid te Hilversum. Kosten: €27,50 (studenten €15.-). Tip: voor mij spreekt Huub Wijfjes (RUG), hetgeen altijd bijzonder de moeite waard is.

11 juni 2009 [UPDATE]: I was scheduled to deliver a plenary session at the Cross Media Impact congres of the Hogeschool Utrecht but alas, the conference was cancelled. Keep watching this space - I hope to be able to still come to Utrecht for a presentation/workshop, as I have fond memories of the journalism school there (I used to teach classes in online journalism in Utrecht back in the late 1990s), and professor Crossmedia Content Piet Bakker is an old friend.

Media Life, Baudrillard, Plato, and the Real

2009-04-27T12:14:00.004-04:00

This week we're finishing the Spring Semester here at Indiana University, which also means our University Division, 400-student course T101 Media Life is drawing to a close. Let me take this moment to embed the final slides of this course (all slideshows are available at Slideshare, search slides tagged with "T101").

In this lecture, I'm making the argument that media do not reflect nor direct us, but instead make reality (by providing the key ingredients for meaning-making). Using Baudrillard's critique of the Platonic allegory of the cave-based treatment of reality (as the simulation it is) in The Matrix trilogy, I move on to consider our experience of a media life as that of Truman Burbank in the 1998 movie The Truman Show, with one exception: there is no exit. I end with Baudrillard's call for "theoretical violence, not truth" - something that inspires everything I do (I hope, I wish).

T101 Media Life Lecture 26

View more presentations from Mark Deuze.

Human Technologies

2009-04-10T13:41:00.003-04:00

Great (short) TED talk by my friend and always awesome Renny Gleeson (Wieden + Kennedy, Portland). I especially like the idea of always fluid, always constructed identities - a key feature of media life.

The End of Newspapers

2009-03-17T10:50:00.004-04:00

(This post also appears on Polity Press' Digital Media and Society blog)

European and North American newspapers have been in decline for decades. Slowly but surely, all indicators of a more or less healthy product - circulation, audience penetration, advertising effectiveness, credibility and trust - have been eroding to the point where, today, they are in freefall. None of this is surprising given the historical trend, but it still features in feverish debates online and offline as to what the future of democracy is without newspapers.

The link between newspapers and democracy is tenuous, and also rather uninspiring as a basis for debate - as one can find similar discussions in the professional and academic literature in the 1920s (economic depression, general distrust of media as vehicles for wartime propaganda, rise of radio as a mass medium), the 1980s (TV news trumps print news, increased media concentration, decline of political and other forms of civic participation), and the early 1990s.

What seems to be lacking from the current debate - about the end of an era for local newspapers in the UK, or the demise of one or more national newspapers in The Netherlands, and the shutting down of at least 10 or more prestigious newspapers in the US - is a critical awareness of the workforce restructuring of journalism that runs parallel to this process. This process shifts the economy from one based on the production of commodities (such as news) at specific places (as in the office buildings of news organizations) using the skills of specific employees. It is perhaps useful to interpret the demise of newspapers as an important step towards the liquefaction of all these categories.

Economists for years have been predicting or advocating the emergence of a global weightless economy, where ideas are the primary form of capital (rather than, say, machines). Such a weightless economy centered on information and communications technology (ICT), the Internet, and (copyright-protected, trademarked) intellectual assets, in turn produced by immaterial labor. Immaterial labor produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity, which content is valued on the basis of impermanent, unstable, and generally unpredictable categories: creative norms, user preferences, consumer taste, seasonal fashions, and so on.

I would argue that another element defining the "weight" of a weightless economy - next to factories and machines - are people, as in: employees. People that are owned - and taken responsibility for through contracts and other formal social arrangements - by companies. The majority of journalists in countries all over the world has always been employed by newspapers. The newsroom sizes of newspapers can run into the hundreds of reporters and editors, whereas broadcast and online teams tend to be just a fraction of this.

Another difference has been that newspaper staffers generally have had the most stable kind of employment arrangements, often working in fulltime, open-ended contractual capacity. This compared to their colleagues in online, magazine, and broadcast news, which operations are more often than not staffed with contingent workers (parttime, temporary, freelance) in "atypical" or otherwise casualized labor conditions - often even working without a contract. Interestingly, in these areas of the profession the gender balance tends to be almost neutral, whereas in newspapers men dominate the workforce in countries such as The Netherlands, the UK, Germany, Australia, and the US - often by a margin of up to 80%.

At the heart of the demise of newspapers and the restructuring of a global weightless economy is the permanent uprooting and letting go of the majority of employed, contractual workforce in the news industry, and the overall casualization of labor.

Journalism is losing weight. Its weight is its workforce, and with that the remaining labor protections that still governed the profession. That is the real tragedy of the end of newspapers.

My Research and Teaching

2009-03-06T13:43:00.003-05:00

A bunch of us (colleagues at Indiana University) started a series of online video introductions to what we do in our teaching and research. Partly for fun, partly to get our work out there in a personalized way, partly in the hopes of attracting a wide and global range of undergraduate and graduate student applicants to our program.

Below is my (way too long and overly self-important) intro, and I hope you'll check out the work of my awesome colleagues and friends - videos collected and produced by Jim Krause. See links to better quality video at our departments' website here: my 2 cents, Lee Sheldon, Rob Potter, Norbert Herber, and Julia Fox.

Even More Media Work Reviews

2009-03-02T14:34:00.006-05:00

Excited to learn of two more academic journals publishing reviews of my Media Work book: the International Journal of Media Management (appearing in issue 11/1), and The Information Society (this after earlier scholarly reviews or booknotes in the European Journal of Communication, New Media & Society and Ecquid Novi).

The review in the International Journal of Media Management is extensive, and the editor has asked me not to copy and paste the whole thing on my blog. Fair enough, but I cannot resist at least quoting a concluding comment by the reviewer, as I am very pleased with it, and indeed have been hoping this is what people would get from the book:

"In sum, Deuze’s book makes at least three significant contributions to the analyses of the interactions between media, technology, and work. First, he is able to clearly trace the transformative impacts of technology across key sectors of the media, showing both their unique features but also the ways in which processes and practices are converging. In this regard, his argument makes a clearly stated case for the need to explore how global macro processes interact with national and local microlevel practices in our analyses of the media industry. These interactions have a significant impact on how media professionals understand and experience their work.

Second, his book shows that media now goes well beyond traditional understandings of the media as being the domain of experts who provide information and entertainment to the masses. Deuze’s analysis clearly shows how the distinctions that have marked much media practice and analysis are being transformed very rapidly, with pre-existing understandings and practices coming under severe threat and challenge. For example, for media workers in journalism, old hierarchies between producer and consumer are increasingly irrelevant as audiences are now content producers, as well as content consumers.

Third, Deuze’s book makes a convincing case that if we are to understand contemporary society, we must analyse the media. Crucially, in one form or another, we are all part of the media now."

Especially the third point is important to me, as it provides the lead-in for my next/current book project (next to an edited volume on media management), titled Media Life, which should be finished by Fall 2010...

The Media Logic of Media Work

2009-02-22T11:15:00.004-05:00

The inaugural issue of the new open-access academic Journal of Media Sociology just came out, featuring some excellent work that I warmly recommend to be checked out. I'm excited to have a piece included in this opening issue, titled "The Media Logic of Media Work", which is a hopefully more or less coherent take on my recent book, Media Work (Polity Press, 2007). The abstract is cut and pasted below, the journal can be downloaded in its entirety for free at the Marquette publishers' website (Link to PDF).

Title
The Media Logic of Media Work

Abstract
Culture creation is quickly becoming the core industrial (and individual) activity in the globally emerging cultural economy. This process gets amplified through the increasing conglomeration of media corporations, as well as the widespread diffusion of information and communication technologies. This paper combines insights from research on (professional and amateur) media production from disciplines as varied as institutional sociology, organizational psychology, cultural economy, management, media studies and economic geography to present a review of trends, developments and values co-determining media work. The concept of media logic is used as a mapping tool, articulating contemporary institutional, technological, organizational, and cultural trends as they co-determine media work. This hermeneutic analysis identifies principal components of workstyles in the media production industries across disciplines and genres, including journalism, advertising, film and television, and digital game development.

Link to PDF

Black Box Fallacy

2009-02-16T11:40:00.005-05:00

The video embedded below is a great example of the media industry's black box fallacy (BBF) - a concept referring to the tendency of many to see convergence exclusively in terms of the combination of different media functions within the same device, rather than at the very least additionally understanding its cultural component. The BBF was introduced, if I'm not mistaken, by Henry Jenkins (link to a BBF-related post on his blog) in the context of his convergence culture argument. Anyway, check out the clip if you have not done so already (its making the online rounds)... hilarious.

Media Life Slides

2009-02-12T10:40:00.003-05:00

As the basis for my new book project I'm working on these days (titled "Media Life"), I'm giving talks using the slideshow below... as always, comments are appreciated!

Media Life 2009

View more presentations from Mark Deuze. (tags: media life)

Media Work Blog @ Polity Press

2009-02-11T12:09:00.003-05:00

As from this week, I'll be blogging more or less regularly at the brand new Digital Media And Society book series website of my publisher, Polity Press.

The blogposts will follow the daily news coming out of the media/ cultural/ creative industries, focusing on the working lives of people across these industries and disciplines - including, but not limited to journalism, advertising, computer and video game development, marketing communications, PR, film/TV production, and music. Of course, the topics/themes selected relate to my Media Work (2007) book, but you can expect other Polity authors to join in the discussion soon.

Some early posts cover the "Content is not King" debate and focus on new business models in the global motion pictures industry.

I hope to see you there, please leave comments, and feel free to (re-) tweet, post and link any of the material there.

FYI: for regular linksharing and brief posts on all things media work/media life, the best place to find me is at my Facebook newsfeed; for midsize blogposts on media work please check out the Polity Press DMS site, and for longer pieces on (forthcoming) articles, books, and working papers, I'll use this "Deuzeblog". The shortest blurbs can be found at my Twitter account, of course.

Media Life [abstract]

2009-01-28T11:22:00.003-05:00

As I've blogged before, I'm currently working on a book titled "Media Life", further exploring the argument in the opening chapter of "Media Work" - suggesting our lives are lived not with, but rather in, media. See also some of my tweets on the topic, as well as posted items on my Facebook profile (only visible to friends, so friend me...).

In the run-up to actually writing the book, the plan is to condense the overall media life argument into a more or less coherent paper. Right now, that particular piece is a work in progress, but for a couple of upcoming talks and book chapter commitments, I'd like to offer a draft extended abstract. Comments, as always, are deeply appreciated!

“Media Life” abstract (dated: 28 January 2009)

Life in today's liquid modern society (Bauman 2000) is all about finding ways to deal with constant change, whether it is at home, at work, or at play. As I have argued elsewhere (Deuze 2007), Over the last few decades, all these key areas of human existence have converged in and through our concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of, and immersion in media, information and communication technologies. Our media environment has become a key site of how we give meaning to the converging context of how we live, work, and play, as media connect us to each other, to our entertainment, and to our work - all at the same time.

Media are both the directors and reflectors of human behavior and social organization. Manuel Castells (2001) for example suggests that “We know that technology does not determine society: it is society. Society shapes technology according to the needs, values, and interests of people who use the technology.” Yet somehow, this pluralism of viewpoints does not seem to do justice to the different ways all those taken for granted products and experiences that make up our day-to-day existence have become automated, augmented and organized through media. A secondary problem is the (often implicit) insistence on maintaining some kind of conceptual or even normative boundary between “media” and “society”. In this contribution, I therefore argue for a perspective that seeks to dissolve such boundaries, suggesting that the whole of the world and our lived experience in it can be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by media.

This world is what Roger Silverstone (2007) labels a mediapolis: a mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences of everyday life (where, in his words, “technologies don’t care”). Instead of continuing to wrestle with a distinction between media and society, I propose we begin our thinking with a view of life as lived in media – media that have, as Lev Manovich (2001) argues, pervasive, ubiquitous, remixed and remixable properties. This paper addresses the most fundamental aspects and themes of everyday life - such as work, family, love, play and work - such as these can be understood in the context of a life lived in media.

A media life is analogous with living inside our very own Truman Show: a world characterized by pervasive and ubiquitous media that we are constantly and concurrently deeply immersed in, that dominate and shape all aspects of our everyday life. As a case in point, I will discuss the recent suggestion by psychiatrists Joel and Ian Gold that the combination of pervasive media, classical syndromes such as narcissism and paranoia, and an emerging media culture where the boundaries between the physical and virtual world are blurring produces a new type of psychosis (as documented in patient case histories): a “Truman Show Delusion” (TSD).

TSD is coined after the motion picture “The Truman Show” (1998), in which actor Jim Carrey portrays the life of a man who does not know his entire life is one big reality television show, watched by millions all over the world. People who suffer from TSD are more or less convinced that everything around them is a décor, that the people in their lives are all actors, and that everything they do is monitored and recorded. McGill University’s Ian Gold attributes TSD in an interview with Canadian newspaper the National Post to “unprecedented cultural triggers that might explain the phenomenon: the pressure of living in a large, connected community can bring out the unstable side of more vulnerable people […] New media is opening up vast social spaces that might be interacting with psychological processes” (July 19, 2008, p.A1). In a background story in the International Herald Tribune several experts confirm TSD and suggest that “[o]ne way of looking at the delusions and hallucinations of the mentally ill is that they represent extreme cases of what the general population, or the merely neurotic, are worried about” (August 30, 2008, p.7).

The British Journal of Psychiatry describes the common symptoms as follows: “First, there is the sense that the ordinary is changed or different, and that there is particular significance in this. This is coupled with a searching for meaning, which, in this case, results in the ‘Truman explanation’. The third feature is a profound alteration of subjective experience and of self-awareness, resulting in an unstable first-person perspective with varieties of depersonalization and derealization, disturbed sense of ownership, fluidity of the basic sense of identity, distortions of the stream of consciousness and experiences of disembodiment” (Fusar-Poli et al. 2008, p.168).

The Truman explanation can be considered an example of looking at the definition and role of media as completely woven into the fabric of our lives. This is not so much a normative warning against the presupposed “effects” of media on society, but rather an investigation of the integration of media with society. This perspective ultimately begs the question: given the “open source” nature of a lived reality through pervasive, ubiquitous, and remixed/remixable media, what do people and insititutions do with this newfound power and emerging read/write literacies in what John Hartley describes as our contemporary “redactional” society?

References

Zygmunt Bauman (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Manuel Castells (2001) The internet galaxy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mark Deuze (2007) Media work. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Paolo Fusar-Poli, Oliver Howes, Lucia Valmaggia, Philip McGuire (2008) ‘Truman’ signs and vulnerability to psychosis. British Journal of Psychiatry 193, p168.
John Hartley (2000) Communicational democracy in a redactional society: the future of journalism studies. Journalism Theory Practice & Criticism 1(1), pp39-47.
Lev Manovich (2001) The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Roger Silverstone (2007) Media and morality: on the rise of the mediapolis. Polity Press, Cambridge (UK).

Shadow Media, Creative Work, and Organized Networks

2009-01-10T15:12:00.005-05:00

Media professionals are, like everyone else, hit hard by the economic downturn - but not just that. In an age of egocasting, consumers turning mediators and producers (or: produsers/prosumers), and behaviors of media firms signaling those of the people formerly known as the employers, mass layoffs, outsourcing and other forms of contingency have great impact on the employment, morale, and creative process in media work.

All of this is particularly problematic if one assumes work to take place in the specific context of media firms and companies – if one understands media work in the traditional sense of employment. That model for media work is (and has been for quite a while) not very realistic for many professionals across the media industries, as their work relationships can best be described as contingent and "atypical", which means: work takes place often without contract, without any kind of formal responsibility or accountability system, is dependent on fluctuations (for example in the market, consumer demand, pricing and financing arrangements) beyond the control of the professional(s) involved.

In 2009 we can add to this caveat on media work the emergence of what Businesweek’s Jon Fine predicts as a shadow media, consisting of

“properties created and staffed by those pink-slipped in '08 and '09. This sets the stage for epic clashes with existing players in '10 and beyond.”

Indeed – clashes with those still under some form of employment. Yet those numbers are declining fast, according to a brief but powerful overview in The Hollywood Reporter:

“Layoffs in the media industry, which includes film and TV companies, amounted to 28,083 last year, the highest since 43,420 staffers were let go in 2001 following the bursting of the dot-com bubble.”

The question is: how can we make the shadow media economy (or rather: ecosystem, if we do not necessarily assume the creative work involved is done to further commercial enterprise) visible?

One way is through the emergence of formal, semi-formal, and informal organized networks (see the work of Ned Rossiter, Vincent Mosco and Catherine McKercher in this context) of creatives (in advertising, film/TV, journalism, games, and so on). These are often not unions, but rather loosely integrated collectives, often local yet increasingly transnational in nature that act as some kind of bulwark against the intimidating nature of the global marketplace for media/cultural/creative industries.

Examples of formal global media professional networks: the International Federation of Journalists, Global Unions, and the Media/Culture/Graphical sector of the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Examples of semi-formal global networks are the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), and Artbox.

Examples of informal networks: any and all nodes and hubs online where media workers come together, such as at numerous Facebook groups and Twitterfeeds (at Twitter I warmly recommend following themediaisdying).

Some personal favorites on Facebook are: "Don't tell my mum I'm in advertising - she thinks I play piano in a brothel” (5,162 members as of 10 January 2009), the Newspaper Escape Plan (2,413 members on Jan.10), "Trust me, I’m a Journalist" (with 18,230 members on Jan.10), the Film Industry Network (18,051 members on Jan.10), and the "People who have had their souls broken by working in the games industry" group (with 513 members on Jan.10).

It should be fascinating to follow these intitiatives or "spaces of flows" as Castells uses the concept. How this all translates to better conditions for creative work to flourish and professionals to be rewarded for their expertise, I do not know. But the inspiration is certainly there, and our research should follow suit.

More Media Work Reviews

2008-12-19T09:09:00.008-05:00

End of the semester (hence the radio silence - I am finding time now and then to update my Twitter feed), and some more Media Work book reviews have come my way, such as at the "Reinventando los medios" blog (in Spanish), and the VideoonScreeN blog (in Portuguese). Earlier reviews are published and link through elsewhere on this blog.

Also, Polity Press now has the Digital Media and Society book series website up and running, which includes an Fall 2008 semester syllabus for a course on Media Organizations based on the book... it still needs work, though.

Below is the full text of the book review that was published in the excellent journal Ecquid Novi - African Journalism Studies by Myriam Redondo of the Universidad SEK-IE de Segovia, Spain.

Media Work
Mark Deuze
Cambridge: Polity Press. 2007. Pp. 278.
ISBN: 978–07456–3924–6 (hardback), 978–07456–3925–3 (paperback)

Flexibility, contingency, ongoing change, and endemic uncertainty. If you do not like these terms, stop reading. This is the review of a book that refers frequently to words of this type in order to describe how journalists will work in the near future.

Media Work is the story of a happy find. The one that occurred when its author, Mark Deuze, read Zygmunt Bauman’s proposal of “liquid life,” an accurate expression to describe the constant insecurities faced in contemporary society. According to Bauman, this is a world full of fast-moving events, trends, and needs, and thus full of worries about every new skill that should be learned to cope with such changes. In the hands of Deuze, “liquid” becomes also the perfect adjective to describe modern media, understood as institutions that reporters -and citizens- inhabit in a nonpermanent way, because everything is unstable in this twenty-first technological century.

How is it to work as a journalist nowadays? How will it be in the near future? Using Bauman’s contribution as both supportive theory and connecting thread, Deuze pinpoints the features characterizing the different types of media activity in present times. He refers to journalism in its widest possible sense, as a creative process that involves many actors. In order to write the book, interviews were conducted not only with print press workers, filmmakers, and television makers but also with public relations staff, marketing communicators, and computer game designers. The author talked to professionals in Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. Data are not broken down by country, mainly because, according to the author, there were more similarities than differences in each of the places selected.

What Deuze sees in each of these fields and countries are exhausting requirements, such as ongoing learning skills, compulsory social networking, and blurring of work and family time. There is also a challenging need for open attitudes (especially in favor of technological convergence and in favor of convergence between media producers and media consumers). The conclusion is clear: journalism, as we remember it, is coming to an end. But it is not necessarily a pessimistic affirmation.

Deuze prefers to attach to rationality and not drama when describing the situation. He reasons that the negative features mentioned above are paradoxically essential to achieve some very much appreciated goals of today, such as creativity, independence, and recognition/differentiation from the others. These aspirations are the positive aspects of the situation, the strong forces that justify and push liquidity forward. Precariousness, stress, and insecurity make the reverse of the coin. Some reader might miss a stronger opposition to these forecasts, a call to rebellion that is never present in the text. Deuze does not complain openly, although he does not hide either that endemic uncertainty, while highly beneficial for elite workers, might have disastrous consequences for some of the rest.

Either centrally or tangentially, Deuze updates theoretic journalism postulates related to news values and news judgment. He replaces classic expressions like "media routines" by others such as "occupational ideology," "culture of newswork," "media logic," and "operational closure" (the internalization of the way things work and change over time within a newsroom or at a particular outlet). According to the author, this terminology fits better the growing power of the individual and the declining role of institutional constraints in the daily operations of gatekeeping and news decision making. We operate in a network, but media work takes place on an intimate level, states Deuze. The proposal sounds appealing and suggests further approaches to patterns of digital practices in journalism.

The book is highly recommended for students of journalism, who can benefit from an early immersion in pros and cons of the profession: it avoids romanticism, it explains the plain truth. The text is both easy reading and deep, with good bibliographical choices, so educators will find it inspiring, too. Scholars coming from disciplines other than Communication may find some objection, as, in order to follow the main argument of the book, it will be necessary to accept an important starting point: we all work and live in the media, whether as journalists or not. Media are, according to Deuze, the key examples and drivers of economic and cultural shifts accompanying globalization. Media are modern life, liquid life itself. Our life is lived through, or rather in, the media: "I consider the management of creativity, the culturalization of work, and the processes of giving meaning to one's professional identity in the creative industries (of which media are part) crucial indicators for life as lived in contemporary liquid modernity” (p.X).

Actors of the creative process, journalism students, and citizens: liquid life (media life) is a precarious but thrilling life. And there is no way to escape it.

review by Myriam Redondo, Universidad SEK-IE de Segovia, Spain.

Media Work Book Review

2008-11-15T13:06:00.006-05:00

Thrilled I am indeed with the latest issue of the scholarly journal New Media & Society (NMS) (disclaimer: I am on the editorial board, but have no say over content), as it features an extensive review of my Media Work book.

After earlier reviews in the trade press (in The Netherlands by Huub Wijfjes who questions my overreliance on the work and ideas of Zygmunt Bauman, and in the UK by Natalie Fenton), and a short booknote in the European Journal of Communication (EJC), the December 2008 issue of NMS features a review of the book by Cornell's Joshua Braun.

Barring protest from Sage, I reproduce the review below. Of course, I will link to or republish reviews of the book regardless whether these are primarily critical (like Wijfjes and Fenton) or whether the reviewers have been too kind (as in the EJC and NMS). Safe to say, I am excited that the book gets noticed at all!

UPDATE: reviews of Media Work have also appeared online, such as on the Masters of Media grouplog at the University of Amsterdam (link in English), and at the Industrias Culurais weblog of Rogério Santos (link in Portuguese).

Several other places online have used the book (or parts thereof) in evaluative contexts, such as at Dmitry Epstein's ThinkMacro blog, at Mark Hamilton's Notes From A Teacher blog, and elsewhere. I'll update as much as possible.

New Media & Society 10(6): 957 (2008)

Mark Deuze, Media Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. xiii 1 278 pp. ISBN 9780745639253, $22.95 (pbk). Reviewed by Joshua A. Braun, Cornell University, USA.

Mark Deuze's Media Work is an intricate, theoretically informed and invaluable portrait of what it is like to work professionally in today’s media marketplace which, he argues, has begun to change rapidly, tumultuously and constantly. Throughout this excellent book, the author excels at identifying emerging trends within the various 'creative industries' and in bringing an impressive diversity of scholars into conversation with one another, ultimately seeking to use the media professions as examples of larger changes to contemporary life ushered in by globalization and the Information Age.

Deuze begins the book with a general discussion of contemporary life and work in ‘overdeveloped’ (p.48) countries, proceeding first to a discussion of the ‘creative industries’(p.45) generally and then to digitization of the media. He moves on, in several subsequent chapters, to detail the changing work practices in specific media industries: advertising, public relations and marketing communications; journalism;f ilm and television production; and ‘game design and development’(p.107).

Obviously this approach will appeal to a broad variety of audiences, from students planning careers in these changing fields to industry observers and media theorists. No doubt it also encourages a lot of nitpicking on the part of these groups as to which theories or industries warrant discussion and how Deuze characterizes those he examines. However, to focus myopically on his discussion of any one researcher or media company would miss the point of the book, as the author brings a remarkable number of theorists and industry observers into dialogue. No doubt there are a couple of scholars discussed in Media Work who might not have been mentioned previously in the same breath, but Deuze manages to group them in generative ways. Were it not for his skill at organizing this expansive review of the literature, reading a book like this one might be akin to drinking from a fire hose.

But organize it he does, and in describing the changing face of work in the media professions, Deuze pulls from the literature a number of interesting themes, tensions and nuances. A full summary would be difficult here, but a nice example is his discussion of media concentration. While the vertical and horizontal integration of massive media firms is a visible trend, with repercussions for work in the media, Deuze points out how this tendency coexists alongside, and sometimes fuels through outsourcing and other means, an explosion in the number of smaller media firms. Moreover, the purchase by large media conglomerates of other firms does not necessarily lead to the assimilation of the latter. Deuze details the numerous ways in which large corporations are not as monolithic as they may seem and points out that even as the expansion of these firms adds layers of bureaucracy, the need for organizational flexibility in the changing global market increasingly has stripped out hierarchical aspects of media work, with more tasks being completed externally and internally by freelance workers and project teams. The workers involved face a double-edged sword – they have less job security and are forced to learn new skills constantly to stay employable on unfavourable terms. At the same time,even as media workers complain of the precariousness of their lifestyle, many experience excitement and freedom in the opportunity to work for multiple employers over time,on different projects, utilizing different skills.

The book contains a great deal of fine-grained detail, supporting its claims with myriad citations and figures from academic, government and industry studies,b ut it makes relatively little use of the original research that was done in its writing. Deuze and his students conducted interviews with industry professionals and offer quotes from these throughout the work. However, they seem in the main almost superfluous to the book’s well-versed reviews of the existing literature, which make up the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, this is an arguably logical use of the book’s real estate, given that it is intended in part for use as a teaching text.

While a good portion of Media Work has appeared before in the form of individual articles, Deuze has done a superior job of stitching these together into a coherent book. Still,at least one unresolved tension presents itself in the work. Deuze offers the premise that nearly all work is becoming mediated and involved in the production of culture, thus making a discussion of the media industries especially important, insofar as they are a harbinger of changes which have begun to sweep across other work environments in the face of globalization and the onset of the information economy. At the same time, he subsequently focuses on ‘trends that can be considered particular to the professional identity of media work’(p.63). Given the prior premise, it is possible that people in other industries increasingly construct their identities in a manner similar to media professionals. However, there is still a ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ aspect to treating media work simultaneously as a global indicator and a special case that seems too good to be true.

Deuze frames substantial portions of his dialogue using Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid life’ to great effect, painting a picture of societies generally and media professions in particular, undergoing massive alterations in the face of globalization, convergence and digitization. To the individual, he says, this upheaval presents itself as a blurring of the boundaries between work and leisure, public and private, global and local, mediated and direct experience – and it creates a situation in which we view change as the only constant. Some readers may find Deuze’s case for liquid life quite compelling, while I suspect others may see it as overstated or unappealing as a concept. However, even setting aside this particular discussion, there is plenty of value here for a wide variety of audiences.

Like every book, this one may give rise to discontents, but it accomplishes a great deal and opens up fertile ground for future discussions. It succeeds both as a college text and an exercise in theory, capturing not a snapshot of what media work was, but a glimpse of what it will be, while recognizing that change in the creative industries is both constant and uncertain, not static or teleological.

Media Life Book Prospectus

2008-11-09T13:39:00.003-05:00

Because of shifting priorities and an Obama-like sense of the "urgency of now" (yes we're all caught in the grips of immediatism), I am temporarily postponing work on "Beyond Journalism" (contracted with Polity Press), and just finished and sent out a brand new book prospectus, titled "Media Life". I'm nervous but also very excited! Below is the opening rationale for the new book. Will post news on whether it will be published (and if so, when) as soon as possible...

Media Life Book Prospectus

Life in today’s liquid modern society is all about finding ways to deal with constant change, whether it is at home, at work, or at play. Over the last few decades, all these key areas of human existence have converged in and through our concurrent and continuous exposure to, use of, and immersion in media, information and communication technologies. Research in countries as varied as the United States, Brazil, The Netherlands, and Finland consistently shows how through the years more of our time gets spent using media, and how multitasking our media has become a regular feature of everyday life. Yet at the same time, we tend to take our media for granted.

Our media environment has become a key site of how we give meaning to the converging context of how we live, work, and play, as media connect us to each other, to our entertainment, and to our work – all at the same time. Media have come to be part of every aspect of peoples' daily lives, facilitated by the worldwide proliferation of the internet and similar services that connect subscribers to a global, always-on, and increasingly mobile digital information and communication network. The whole of the world and our lived experience in it can indeed be seen as framed by, mitigated through, and made immediate by pervasive and ubiquitous media. This world is what contemporary social theorists (such as Roger Silverstone, Alex de Jong and Marc Schuilenburg) label a mediapolis: a mediated public space where media underpin and overarch the experiences of everyday life. However, the expanding body of literature -and particularly those texts aimed at higher education- seems to ignore the broader impact of these considerations, or focuses solely on the (production or consumption of) media content (movies, music, news, games), instead of how media are articulated to the contemporary human condition. The texts that do deliberately address the interconnected and mutually implicated nature of digital media and society are generally aimed at graduate or post-graduate readerships.

Although it is certain that media are both the directors and reflectors of human behavior and social organization, what remains underinvestigated are the different ways all those taken for granted things that make up our day-to-day existence have become automated, augmented and organized through media. This book addresses the most fundamental aspects and themes of everyday life – such as work, family, love, play and work – such as these can be understood in the context of a life lived in media.

Barack Obama President

2008-11-04T23:41:00.003-05:00

Big moment... watching CNN with a group of American friends in Bloomington, Indiana. Even though I am not a citizen, it is still an emotional moment. Picture taken from Foxnews' website.

The People Formerly Known as the Employers

2008-10-25T10:12:00.014-04:00

TPFKATA

In 2006, NYU professor Jay Rosen penned an astute observation about the changing power relationships in the media industries - and more specifically, the world of journalism - regarding the impact of internet. His analysis had the catchy title "The People Formerly Known as the Audience", and pointed towards a shift in access to reporting tools (news gathering, editing, and publishing) to what used to be imagined by newsworkers as the audience. Importantly, it is not just the tools of reporting now being available to "We the Media" (such as blogging, podcasting, vodcasting, and other forms of social or "our" media), but also emerging forms of legal protection (Creative Commons licensing), and increasing uses of users by professional media organizations, thereby giving the former audience the semi-official status as competitor-colleagues.

Examples of deliberately turning the media consumer into (co-) producer across different creative industries are viral and word-of-mouth (or: "social") marketing, interactive advertising, computer and videogame modification SDKs (Software Development Kits such as the Source SDK of Valve), and citizen journalism, where news organizations indeed call upon their audiences to reconstitute themselves as journalists - such as Yo Periodista at Spanish newspaper El Pais, iReport at American broadcaster CNN, and so on.

Flat Hierarchies

At the heart of this argument is the recognition of a new or modified power relationship between news users and producers, between amateur and professional journalists. It can be heralded as a democratization of media access, as an opening up of the conversation society has with itself, as a way to get more voices heard in an otherwise rather hierarchical and exclusive public sphere. In this scenario, some of the traditional and generally uncontested social power of journalists now flows towards publics, and potentially makes for a flatter hierarchy in the publication and dissemination of news and information.

By all means, this is an important intervention on the audience side. But what industry observers like Rosen tend to omit, underreport, or dismiss is another equally if not more powerful redistribution of power taking place in the contemporary media ecosystem: a sapping of economic and cultural power away from professional journalists by what I like to call The People Formerly known as the Employers. Employers in the media industries increasingly tend to withdraw from labor, that is, from taking responsibility for their creative workforce - instead giving them the feeling that they are just assets that cost money.

Primarily I owe this insight to my friend and brilliant colleague Professor Leopoldina Fortunati of the University of Udine, Italy (who visited us at Indiana University this week).

[update 27.10.08] Some more or less recent concrete examples of TPFKATE and power sapping away from reporters and other professionals in the creative industries, such as a survey in Summer 2008 among media workers at Fairfax (link to PDF) in Australia. The Fairfax study, similar to a survey last year among members of the US Newsguild, shows how media workers among other things report feel unappreciated, see their colleagues (1 out of 3 in the US) lose their jobs for no apparent reason, and experience early retirements without jobs being replaced (other than by temporary staffers, stringers, and freelance correspondents). One of the most crucial and foreboding remarks in the Fairfax report reads: "[...] younger journalists, in particular, [have] become demoralised. There is no sense that the company values its staff."

Recent news signaling powerdrain also comes from plans for mass layoffs at especially newspapers but also in broadcasting, such as in the American news market, and the media industry generally (see IWantMedia's archive from 2000-2006), as overall one in six jobs in the media has dissappeared over the last couple of years.

TPFKATE

Employers in the news industry traditionally offered most of their workers permanent contracts, included healthcare and other benefits (at the end of the 20th century sometimes even including maternal leave), pension plans, and in most cases even provisions sponsoring reporters to retrain themselves, participate in workshops, and serve on boards that gave them a formal voice in future planning and strategies of the firm. Today, most if not all of that has disappeared - especially when we consider the youngest journalists at work.

Today, the international news industry is contractually governed by what the International Federation of Journalists euphemistically describes as "atypical work", which means all kinds of freelance, casualized, informal, and otherwise contingent labor arrangements that effectively individualize each and every workers' rights or claims regarding any of the services offered by employers in the traditional sense as mentioned. This, in effect, has workers compete for (projectized, one-off, per-story) jobs rather than employers compete for (the best, brightest, most talented) employees.

Furthermore, newswork in particularly English, Spanish, and German-speaking countries gets increasingly outsourced: to subcontracted temporary workers or even offshored to other countries, where the People Formerly Known as the Employers practice what has been called "Remote Control Journalism." Journalists today have to fight with their employers to keep the little protections they still have, and do so in a cultural context of declining trust and credibility in the eyes of audiences (the few "audiences" that still exist given the Rosen formula), a battle for hearts and minds that they have to wage without support from those who they traditionally relied on: their employers.

Powershift

So what we see happening in the context of todays new media ecology and the emerging global creative economy is power slowly but surely slipping away from those who we rely on for our entertainment (ex.: the recent writers' and actor's labor disputes in Canada and the US), our advertising (ex.: the widely reported power shift occuring in agencies from creative towards account managers, media planners, and digital consultants), and - perhaps most disturbingly, our news.

For all the brilliance of those advocating a more democrative media system, there is generally nothing in their analysis that acknowledges this erosion of power, this wholesale redistribution of agency away from those who tend to crave only one thing: creative and editorial autonomy. No matter how excited I can get about user-generated content and the collective intelligence of cyberspace, this power shift erodes the very foundation of the way we know (and thus interact with) the world, and our ability to truly function in it autonomously, and on our own terms.

Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely exclusively on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass solipsism and paranoia - as the only truth we can still believe in has to be strictly our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be trusted. It is the perfect storm.

Paraphrasing Zygmunt Bauman: I am writing this down in the hope of preventing an inevitable disaster.

The Finest Hour of The Republican Party

2008-10-15T20:07:00.010-04:00

After first having the GOP chairman of Virginia proudly saying (in TIME magazine) about a connection between Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden: "Both have friends that bombed the Pentagon [...] That is scary", comes this image.

The image comes from the Sacramento Republican Party's Web site (an image they later yanked because of protests from all sides, according to FOX news, which news service immediately proceeded to put the image on its own website). No matter what you think about the policies and candidates at the Democratic or Republican side, but if this is what the Republican Party does at the time when it needs to shine the most, if this is its finest hour... wow.

Media, News, and the US Election (2)

2008-10-12T18:27:00.002-04:00

As The Guardian columnist Wajahat Ali remarks: the Presidential campaign in the US is now in the process of "fanning the flames of fear-mongering, racial hysteria and smear politics", courtesy of the Republican Party. At Republican rallies, people claim in interviews to be sure that Senator Obama is an Arab, a Muslim, a Terrorist, and All Of The Above (on a sidenote: and if we exchange "Terrorist" for its paradigmatic equivalent "Freedom Fighter", what would be bad about any of these three identities?). Furthermore, some of these enlightened individuals do not hesitate to translate these solipsistic convinctions into calls to have "that one" (quoting Senator McCain whilst referring to Senator Obama) bombed, killed, or otherwise removed.

The remarkable aspect of all of this is the apparent surprise with which these sentiments are greeted: by the mainstream news media as well as politicians and pundits on all sides.

But there is no surprise here. The middle class has been growing for decades now, and counts in most democratic market economies the vast majority of the people in its ranks. However, there are vast disparities within this class. Indeed, one of the reasons it is so large, is because a significant number (I would venture: at least half) of the members of the middle class are constantly balancing on the edge of falling "back" into poverty - into that dark realm of what Zygmunt Bauman calls "flawed consumers".

Flawed consumers are not just those that have no credit left to shop (or invest) - these are also people who have to face a failure to self-sell; as Bauman argues: no consumer unless a commodity first. Once you are unable to upgrade (yourself as well as the goods and services you acquire or have acquired in the past), you fall by the wayside. You become useless.

Useless people are understandably angry, mad, and eager to blame. In doing so, they invest in the last remaining avenue to self-commodification (because it is financially "free"): as a voter, a citizen. Their racial and class-based hatred of Senator Obama is like the logo on their t-shirts or the size of their car: something to sell yourself with, to have or shape an identity, to become a commodity.

Electing a President is an act of consumption. And there is no consumer unless he or she is a commodity first.

Video on Media Work and the News Industry

2008-10-03T11:53:00.002-04:00

Participated in a panel last August (2008) in Chicago, talking about the role of labor in assessing the future of the news industry. Barbara Iverson was kind enough to share the video.

Video of a CCJIG/AEJMC panel from August 5, 2008 featuring Jack Rosenberry, Ed Lambeth, Mark Deuze, Burton St. John, and Jay Rosen on the history of civic journalism and its relationship to citizen journalism today.

Twitter

2008-09-17T14:30:00.004-04:00

Now Twitter has a 422% growth rate, I guess its one more thing I should really check out. So as from today, I'll try to update my Twitter profile as much as possible.

It seems to be the ultimate marriage between this digital age's unbridled narcissism and perfect paranoia...

I would like to be followed now, please.

Media Work in Class

2008-08-15T15:50:00.010-04:00

This Fall Semester I'll be teaching a graduate course at Indiana University roughly based on Media Work (Polity Press, 2007), and a list of "best of" readings on the topics of media & social theory, media management, and the particular media industries (journalism, advertising/PR/marketing, film & TV, computer and video games, music and recording). Below is the outline of the course - feel free to contact me if you want the official syllabus.

Media Organizations
T505
Fall Semester 2008

Course Description

The world of media is changing rapidly, or so it seems: audiences for mass entertainment are dwindling, teenagers are more likely to blog than to ever read a newspaper, and job cuts in the US media industries are rampant as the production work gets outsourced internationally. Yet at the same time more media gets produced and consumed all the time. Every year we spend more time watching TV and movies, playing computer and video games, listening to music, following the daily news. Surely this must be a golden age for the media business?

This course explores this fascinating paradox by going deep inside the organizations across all the media industries (including journalism, advertising, marketing and public relations, film, radio, TV, music and recording, computer and video games) that produce culture for our global economy. Our focus is on understanding and analyzing the most current paradigms and key debates within these industries regarding financing, management, production, marketing and distribution of content and experiences.

The Media Organizations course expects students not just to understand and master the past and present of the ways media organizations function and media careers are made. A significant part of the grading in this course will be based on your ability to come up with new and innovative ways to think about future strategies for media professionals and organizations. The literature for this course focuses on academic and trade readings in the area of media production and management, including works on design, the management of creativity and innovation, legal and financial aspects, the economics of production and use, labor issues and work rules, ethics, and organizational communication.

In combining theories about media work, learning research methods for understanding media organizations, and developing conceptual strategies for media industries, students will learn all aspects of theory and practice regarding the way media are made.

Required Readings

This class will use a combination of a key book (“Media Work”, by the instructor, published by Polity Press in 2007) and key readings from academic peer-reviewed journals in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as profession-specific journals.

Additional Readings

For those interested in greater detail about the varies media, cultural and creative industries, issues related to media management and economics, and the creative process in general I suggest checking out my Amazon Listmania! list on “Working In The Media”.

Class Meetings

This is a course intended delve deep into the issues, debates, constraints and challenges facing professionals and audiences in the day-to-day operations of media industries. Students are expected to adopt multiple perspectives in your analysis of media work: of the seasoned professional or enthusiast newcomer, the manager or director, the marketing strategist or creative artist, the content-generating user as well as the passive consumer. Course lectures will include PowerPoint presentations, videos, and brief classroom exercises. Students are expected to subscribe to industry newsletters and blogs (through RSS feeds) as well as be prepared to introduce case studies and other examples to the class relevant to the issues under debate that day. As we will be with a relatively small group, a lot of what students will get out of this course will depend on what they bring to the discussions and presentations at class meetings.

Media Industry News

Industry Reports/Market Analysis
Media Info Center

Headlines/Newsletters
IWantMedia Headlines
Mediaweek Daily Briefing
Benton Foundation Headlines
MediaBuyerPlanner Daily
iMedia Connection News

Blogs/RSS Feeds
Jack Myers Report
Mediabistro Media News
Corante Media Hub
Polymeme/Media
Jim Romenesko’s Media News
MIT Convergence Culture Consortium

Assignments and Papers

Students' work in this class is based on three key elements:

•First, participation in the class. This will be measured by a combination of active contributions to class discussions and presentations, and by the quality of the materials (examples, discussion topics, case studies, news analysis) students bring to each class.

•The second element is a theoretical literature review paper that students will submit in one draft and one final version during the semester. This paper will cover all the relevant class readings plus a number of additional readings related to a particular topic this class covers.

•The third and most significant element of this course is a final individual project paper. In this work, the student will draft a manifesto of their own vision and idea(l)s regarding working, managing, or studying the media industry. This project paper will have practical as well as theoretical components, and can be used as the starting point for thesis work, an individual research program, or as a business and strategy plan for the students' own media organization and career objectives.

Grading & Evaluation

Participation/Media News Analysis 30%
Literature Review Paper 30%
Final Strategy Document 40%

Course Schedule

Topic/ Readings
Introduction/ Syllabus
Overview; Course Outline/ Preface to “Media Work” (hereafter: MW)
Media & Social Theory (I): Society and Visibility/ Terje Rasmussen; John Thompson
Media & Social Theory (II): Media and the Network Society/ Manuel Castells; Gustavo Cardoso
Media & Social Theory (III): Living a Media Life/ John Urry; Scott Lash
Media & Social Theory (IV): Liquid Life, Work, and Media/ MW Ch1

The New Cultural Economy and the Creative Class/ Allen Scott; Richard Florida
Media as Cultural and/or Creative Industries/ David Hesmondhalgh; Andy Pratt; Terry Flew
Media Work and Convergence Culture/ MW Ch2; Henry Jenkins; Yochai Benkler
Media Professions in a Digital Age/ MW Ch3; ILO 2004
Media Organizations and the Production of Culture/ Richard Peterson & Narasimhan Anand; Paul DiMaggio

Media Management (I): The Challenge of Culture, Creativity, and Innovation/ Lucy Küng; Edgar Schein; Emmanuel Ogbonna & Lloyd Harris
Media Management (II): The Challenge of the Transnational/ Amelia Arsenault & Manuel Castells; Susan Christopherson; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted & Byeng-Hee Chang

Media Industries: PR, Advertising & Marketing/ MW Ch4; Gernot Grabher; Sean Nixon
Media Industries: Journalism/ MW Ch5; Kenneth Killebrew; Ann Hollifield; ILO 2006
Media Industries: Television/Motion Pictures/ MW Ch6; Allen Scott; Helen Blair; Neil Coe & Jennifer Johns
Media Industries: Game Design and Development/ MW Ch7; Mia Consalvo; Greig de Peuter & Nick Dyer-Witheford; Jennifer Johns
Media Industries: Music and Recording/ Keith Negus; Jonathan Gander & Alison Rieple; Valerie Vaccaro & Deborah Cohn

Media Organizations, Work, and Management/ MW Ch8