Page 94 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media cultures, media economics, media problems 73

Table 2
Control Chaos
Information scarcity Information surplus
Sealed (closed) Leaky (open)
Opacity Transparency
Exclusivity Accessibility
Homogeneity Heterogeneity (diversity)
Hierarchy Network
Passive (Inter)activity
Dominance Competition

An overlapping model of change but one that is more explicitly critical
of radical accounts of media is proposed by McNair (2006), who argues that
there has been a paradigm shift from a mass media ‘control’ paradigm to a
chaos paradigm. McNair (2006: 199) summarises the paradigm shift as seen in
Table 2.
McNair’s central claim is that the ‘vastly expanded supply and availability of
information’ has resulted in a ‘power-shift from the traditionally information-
rich elite to the no-longer so information-poor mass’ (2006: 199). Both of
the above mappings display common characteristics. First, they are stagist.
Change is regarded in evolutionist terms as a progression from one stage to the
next, even though this may be qualified by some unevenness and acknowl-
edgement of co-mingling. Second, they tend to conflate changes which need to
be distinguished analytically. For instance, these are sets of claims concerning
changes in industries, markets (supply and demand), media forms and processes,
political, economic and social and cultural changes. Conflating these tends to
naturalise processes of change and render them self-acting and self-generating,
characteristics of technological determinist thinking which tends to suffuse such
accounts. A third feature, very evident in McNair’s model, is to crudely position
positive over negative value-terms. These are mappings that stack the deck in
their favour. One consequence is that even if we might agree about the salience
of shifts they identify, the alignment with positive terms tends to bracket out
considerations of gains and losses in such changes. There is also very compelling
evidence to indicate that in place of a stagist transition from one state of affairs
to another, there are contradictory tendencies at work across media: concentra-
tion and disaggregation; convergence and deconvergence; control alongside
chaos; disempowerment as well as empowerment. The mobilisation of values
is clearer still if we contrast these positive accounts of communications with
Croteau and Hoynes’s mapping of market versus public sphere models.
Affirmative maps, such as McNair’s tend to equate private provision with
openness. Notwithstanding these critiques, media political economy must engage
with the claims and arguments put forward by McNair and others. These
include: