I must admit, I’m not a fan of
industry studies. I don’t think I’ve encountered anything quite so successful at
sucking the joy out of T.V. as studying the corrupt, banal industries that
produce it. Of course, I recognize that there is a necessity to studying the industry.
I think Caldwell’s point that “studying television’s ‘production of culture’ is
simply no longer entirely convincing if one does not also talk about television’s
‘culture of production’” (45) is a good one. It is important to be aware of the
industrial changes that have occurred across T.V.’s history of production,
particularly as media becomes consolidated in fewer and fewer wealthy hands, a
history which Holt kindly lays out for us at the end of her article. And
Jenkins is an excellent rejoinder to Holt and Caldwell, reminding us that “convergence
is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven
process” (37), or that corporations do not hold all the power, even if they hold
most of it, which is perhaps where his optimism that public intellectuals might
speak back to and correct the powers wielded by “policy makers and industry
alike” stems from.
But
does industry studies really need to be this banal, or is it just me? I find it
difficult to keep up with Caldwell’s argument not just because his writing is encyclopedic
and the subject matter is not all that thrilling, but because I don’t quite
understand how raw knowledge of the industry empowers me and I don’t see much
possibility of a dialogue in industry studies – there doesn’t seem to be anything
to argue about. Caldwell’s conclusion seems to be simply that Television adapted
well to the digital age, finding that it could still be profitable after a
brief scare. I find Jenkins’ form of industry studies more promising than
Caldwell and Holt’s, as, though he might be overly optimistic about the role of
public intellectuals, at least he offers some paths, though loosely set out,
for changing the industry and the media landscape, for how we might form a new
media politics, for the types of regulations we want and don’t want. Of course,
we need to understand the industry in order to change it, so Caldwell is once
again right about the “culture of production” – but, in order to figure out
what we want the industry to become, we still need to understand the “production
of culture,” and in order to do that we still need textual analysis and speculative,
theoretical thinking; those things that tend to get erased in moves towards
more material “truths.”
I suppose, in other words, I want
to know why industry studies seems so safe. What keeps Holt and Caldwell from
making claims like Jenkins does about what the industry should be doing and how
intellectuals should be talking back to the industry (perhaps they do in other
places)? Also, how might we connect today’s industry studies all the way back
to McLuhan, who seemed to practice a type of industry studies (though definitely
very different from Holt and Caldwell) fused with speculative, flamboyant
ideas?
Josh, I definitely share your frustration with industry studies. There seems to be so many limitations to looking solely at the economic and political context behind a medium, especially when the goal is to provide more than just a history. Holt seems to think that deregulation and technological advancement (the "supreme catalysts") are the only factors involved in creating a new television culture. After spending so many weeks reading works based in cultural studies, it is hard to see how such a view is at all sufficient, when so many other factors contribute to media convergence. Dan was helpful to point out in his post that while Caldwell and Holt approach convergence from specific "social and economic foundations," Jenkins thinks much more broadly in terms of culture. The latter, which you pointed out, is open to other fields, such as textual analysis and theory, which can offer more prescriptive paths for TV. I think someone like Holt is too preoccupied with proving the connection between a carefully plotted history and the present moment to be able to fully consider where the medium might be headed.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that your wonderful discussion brings up in my mind is that the focus on the political economy of television within industry studies is largely done from a disengaged sensibility, in that there is a pervading sense of pre-determination to the causal chain of events discussed and that there is little room for much other than a faithful exposure of the cold hard facts. It seems to me that they treat the industry as a closed system that is not subject to non-economic (and by extension non-technological forces). Jenkins has a more positivist project; he believes that cultural forces can organize themselves and exert power upon the industry to effect change. If we see then industry studies as a dialectical struggle between these two conceptual frameworks, the question then is what is the synthesis, or perhaps what is the use value of a theory of media convergence? I don't have a useful answer to this question, but I know for me that I am most interested in how these industry changes reflect a change in subjectivity, i.e. how we see ourselves in relation to the world, and how a Habermasian revival of the public sphere through direct democracy action might function in the wake of these changes. This is where my disappointment with some of these arguments lies: that they are largely diagnostic, insufficiently prognostic, and not at all satisfying in their prescriptions for a cure.
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