Page 224 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media power, challenges and alternatives 203

The task for CPE, in my view, is not to cement an orthodox reading but to
continue to pose and investigate critical questions of power. One requirement
concerns research design and agendas. A strength of the CPE tradition is the
capacity for making empirically testable propositions, within a theoretically
reflexive critical realism that rejects naïve positivism. As Fuchs demonstrates, we
can pursue sets of claims through empirical research into market provision and
social usage. In this way, critical Internet studies can generate more empirically
rich, situated analysis, serving not least as forms of ideology critique. A second
key requirement is to attend to the complexity of power dynamics and modalities
of power. The ‘free’ distribution of public cultural goods, and gift relations based
on the reciprocal exchange and pooling of services, are both cultivated and vie
with the dominant modality of commercial transactions. CPE analysis insists that
we must understand the workings and influence of economic power on both
Internet provision and on policy-making in order to assess how the social uses
and capabilities celebrated by writers like Benkler may be realised and restricted.

Contesting media power

There have been four main types of activity through which media power has
been contested: integration, alternative media, media reform and protest. The first,
which I call integration, refers to efforts to gain access to or influence symbolic
meanings in public media. The second, alternative media, refers to media production
and communications that challenge, at least implicitly, central concentrations of
media resources. The third, media reform, refers to action to democratise media
systems by means of changes in policy and governance. The fourth category, protest,
differs in that it can be directed at a variety of actors or structures affecting commu-
nications and may not seek or value remedies from policy reform. Common to
each are efforts to alter the conditions in which media resources are organised.
This description fits present conditions but it also reflects the logic of mass media
arrangements, characterised by sharper divisions between mainstream and
alternative than exist today. Approached more dynamically, the mapping can be
used to explore how these activities are connected and combined.

Integration
At its broadest, integration reflects the tensions between creativity and autonomy
of cultural workers and efforts of managers to discipline and organise them on
behalf of commercial or other purposes. As the literature on cultural work
examines, there are problems for capital in organising creativity to both cultivate
and capture value.
More narrowly, there are moments of social action to contest media power by
attempting to reshape media production. This is one reason why the binarism
mainstream/alternative media is problematic, because there can also be fluid
movement and merging across these spheres. Social movements in the 1960s and