Entry 1 - Political Economy

From reading chapter 5 my understanding is that the media is overly controlled, down to the staff working for various companies or even the news stories that are broadcast.

Starting the chapter it discussed how we as an audience don’t know the creators of what we consume, but that we care more about who is in the TV programme or who is in a music video. The book illustrates an example of this where it states that if a celebrity is tied to a certain product it’s more likely to ‘encourage repeat purchases’ (Long & Wall 2012:177) whereas if this person wasn't involved, the product might not do as well.  This should then be a concern for a company, but from the reading, you are able to pick up the fact they know exactly what they’re doing.

The main factors from this reading are that the conglomerates and all involved have certain jobs to do and they know how to do them. Not only this, but the more a company has, the better it is for them in terms of winning over a market. As well as this, the reading has allowed me to see the power that these various media sources have, one main example in the book being a story of the singer Sandi Thom, who was allegedly signed to Sony due to the 100,000 people who tuned into ‘her nightly live web stream’, however legit this seems, the story was apparently leaked after the signing which just shows how much is controlled.

However even with all this in mind, with the rise of the internet, this has initially changed in some ways. From further reading, it is clear that many of the things I have previously discussed will be different. For instance, the fact that using a celebrity in a film would entice someone to buy a variety of products is no longer the case as there are now websites that you can watch films on, listen to music and even read the newspaper. With this issue not a worry years ago the media world as a whole is ‘suddenly vulnerable’ (Ulin 2012: 293).

Overall, the use of money is no longer as powerful as it once was now the internet has been introduced. As a keen photographer, in some ways the internet is great as it allows me to share photos, but in others it’s bad as there are a lot of ways that could potentially stop you making money, just like what’s happening to the larger media companies.

Bibliography

Long, P and Wall, T (2012) Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context (2nd Edition), London: Pearson.

Ulin, Jeff. 2012., Business of Media Distribution. The: Monetizing Film, TV and Video Content in an Online World. [Online]. Focal Press. Available from: <http://www.myilibrary.com?ID=234516> 26 March 2015