Page 155 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

134 Critical investigations in political economy

inexpensive software and hardware, resources are in proportion to the ability to
monetise or cross-subsidise online activities.

Conclusion
Networked communications have transformed the capacity for messages to be
exchanged. Critiques generated in response to twentieth century media power
need to be revised accordingly. This is not because mechanisms of control and
filtering no longer exist – far from it – but they cannot (and never could) provide
a totalising account. Yet this chapter has shown that problems of scarcity and
control remain evident. There is undeniably increased digital plenitude but
claims for digital pluralism need to be carefully qualified and assessed in regard to
public media provision and consumption. There has been a ‘media explosion’,an
accelerating expansion in the capacity to distribute and access information, but
myths of digital plenitude ignore real (and in some areas growing) scarcities, and
continuing patterns of dominance. The myth of digital abundance is problematic
less because it is overstated and more because it is mobilised to suggest that
market mechanisms can alone secure the pluralism hitherto sought through
public policy. A key theme for critical political economists is that the Internet is a
vital resource which has been allowed to develop according to corporate interests
as a commercial medium with minimal consideration of public interest, democratic
accountability or supervision. The ‘tremendous promise of the digital revolution
has been compromised by capitalist appropriation and development of the
Internet’ (McChesney 2013: 97). The Internet remains a contested, and richly
diverse, space. This marks a huge advance for expression and exchange amongst
individuals and groups. But if we take the claims seriously – for digital pluralism,
for a networked public sphere – then we must pay attention to vertical structures
of power – not least the dominance of media and communications conglomerates
that continue to structure and shape its development.

Notes

1 Castells’s concept of mass self-communication is useful, but fails to distinguish public
facing content creation from public and private communication exchange (Fuchs
2009).
2O’Reilly acknowledged that the formulation of Web 2.0 was ‘designed to restore
confidence in an industry that had lost its way after the dotcom bust’ (O’Reilly and
Battelle 2009: 1).