Page 53 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

32 Mapping approaches and themes

such as the BBC as a site of struggle between undemocratic and democratic
forces. Williams (1974: 151) wrote:

Over a whole range from general television through commercial advertising
to centralised information and data-processing systems, the technology that
is now or is becoming available can be used to affect, to alter, and in some
cases to control our whole social process.
[ … ]
We could have inexpensive, locally based yet internationally extended television
systems, making possible communication and information-sharing on a scale
that not long ago would have seemed utopian. These are the contemporary
tools of the long revolution towards an educated and participatory democ-
racy, and of the recovering of effective communications in complex urban
and industrial societies. But they are also the tools of what would be, in
context, a short and successful counter-revolution, in which, under the cover
of talk about choice and competition, a few para-national corporations, with
their attendant states and agencies, could reach farther into our lives, at
every level from news to psychodrama, until individual and collective
response to many different kinds of experience and problem became almost
limited to choice between programmed possibilities.
In continental Europe key founding figures include Kaarle Nordenstreng (Finland),
Armand Mattelart (Belgium) and Bernard Miège (France). Nordenstreng has been
a leading academic and activist engaged in efforts to establish a New World
Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s and subsequent
drives to establish more equitable communications exchange and people’s com-
munication rights in forums such as the World Summit on the Information
Society (WSIS). He collaborated with Herbert Schiller (1979; 1993) and both
were closely involved in developing the International Association for Media and
Communication Research (IAMCR), which brought together political economists
within the longest established international network for media scholars. Armand
Mattelart was educated in France and worked as a professor at the University of
Chile until the US-backed coup toppled the government of Salvatore Allende,
when he took up a professorship at the University of Paris. The anthologies he edited
with Seth Siegelaub (1979; 1983) presented and developed political economic work
on Communication and Class Struggle with volumes on Capitalism, Imperialism and
Liberation, Socialism. Bernard Miège’s (1989) work on the capitalisation of cultural
production rejected Adorno and Horkheimer’s bleak and pessimistic account of
industrialisation to offer a more nuanced, microanalysis of forms of commodifi-
cation of culture. Miège’s attention to the ‘limited and incomplete nature of
attempts to extend capitalism into the realm of culture’ (Hesmondhalgh 2013: 25)
informs a ‘cultural industries’ approach that highlights the ambivalent and con-
tested process of commodification and seeks to incorporate a positive appreciation
of the gains from industrialisation and new technologies.