Page 187 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 177
be exercised by external customers for media services—in particular, the multi-
national companies which buy advertising space, or any advertisers who channel
their custom through multi-national advertising agencies, or both. Both media
and advertising organizations may have resort to multinational public relations,
market survey, and opinion-poll organizations in order to appraise the size and
social composition of media audiences and the potential audience demand for
various commodities. Advertising itself ranks as part of programme content and
as such exerts influence, but it also exerts influence on the content of other
programming. The extent of such influence depends, first, on how far media
executives consider it necessary to maximize audiences or to attract certain kinds
of audience for the benefit of advertisers; second, on the extent of competition
for advertisers’ custom; and third, on the extent of government or professional
regulation of the volume and range of advertising. Next there is the question of
programme contents that are imported or simply received from extra-national
sources. The role of imports should also be seen in the light of the objectives and
economics of the exporting organizations. This introduces, for example, questions
concerning the conditions of sale: are the sales package-deals or is there
collusion between the major exporters to maintain given price levels? The notion
of ‘exporter’ should be defined broadly enough to encompass both those
organizations whose primary concern is organizational profit, and those whose
primary concern is to promote general or specific attitude change in relation to
given political, religious or other objectives.
It is not only specific programme contents that are exported. Directly or
indirectly there is also the ‘export’ from the stronger economies of particular
conceptual models that affect, for instance, prevailing views as to how
programme contents should be arranged or presented, or the components which
are deemed to constitute an appropriate ‘schedule’ or ‘format’. These models
incorporate certain profound assumptions: for example, that certain complexes of
media technology should be applied in particular ways. The news-entertainment-
advertising mix of the daily newspaper is an instance; likewise, the association
of media technologies with certain periodicities of use as in the daily or weekly
newspaper, the weekly or monthly magazine, or evening television. But the
technology itself, not just its application, is cultural, and occurs in the form that
it does for complex social and economic reasons which have to do with the
histories of social relations in the metropolitan centres and which embody certain
consequences of class relations (as in élite-mass one-way communication). The
adaptation of particular kinds of media receiver to given international
communication facilities (radio, cable, satellite) raises issues to do with the
ownership and control of such facilities, differential rates of access to them, and
procedures for international allocation. These considerations overlap with the
process of the transmission of situationally-specific professional ideologies from
metropolitan to peripheral centres of the world economy, through such means as
formal education and training schemes, or simply through constant exposure to
imported media products.