Political Economy and Cultural Studies Column: Political Economy, Cultural Studies and Postmodernism

Babe, Robert E.

doi:10.3138/topia.15.91

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Nonetheless, the postwar rise of the theory of political economy of communication, while rightly critical of media power, and pioneering in tracking the increasingly global transformations of media companies along with the gradual capture of the state by corporate power, has been persistently vulnerable to charges of technological and economic determinisms because of its equally persistent neglect of social, psychological, and cultural processes (Babe 2009). Empirical audiences—plural, located, reflexive—are easily lost in the abstract nouns of political economy theory (market, civil society, population, public opinion, the digital divide).…”

Section: Lessons From Audience Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

Livingstone

2018

Television & New Media

139

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This article critically examines how fears of audience gullibility, ignorance, and exploitation impede media studies' response to the pressing challenges posed by the growing power of social media platforms and their innovative datafication practices. I revisit the history of audience research to show how empirical findings contested the pejorative conception of the audience problematically yet persistently imagined by theorists of media power during the twentieth century. As media studies joins other disciplines in responding to the growing datafication of society, I propose that the circuit of culture model can help theorize media (including platform and algorithmic) power by opening up the hermeneutic and action space between production and consumption. In this way, critical scholarship might more effectively analyse such metaprocesses as mediatization and datafication precisely by recognizing rather than erasing audiences' relation to both the everyday lifeworld and the public world of citizen action, regulatory intervention, and the wider society.

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Section: Lessons From Audience Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

Livingstone

2018

Television & New Media

139

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“… 2. In this sense, Freitag’s approach – which we can qualify as symbolic materialism – allows us to bridge the increasing gap that has developed between the political economic and cultural studies perspectives in communications studies. See Babe (2009). …”

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confidence: 99%

The Dialectical Sociology of Michel Freitag and the Critique of Communication Society

Leduc,

Ouellet,

Mondoux

2023

Critical Sociology

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Michel Freitag developed a ground-breaking sociological theory synthesizing the thought of sociology’s founders into the form of a dialectical sociology that conceives of the symbolic as ontological to social reality. After outlining his conceptualization of the historical evolution of society through its ‘modes of reproduction’, we will see how his analysis of contemporary societal transformations rests on a critical theory of communication and technology that, while entering a dialogue with the works of the Frankfurt school, especially those of Habermas, seeks to overcome their inherent contradictions. According to Freitag, the development of capitalist globalization alters the very substance of society as it tends to morph itself into a self-regulating cybernetic system. His sociology allows us to apprehend phenomena tied to the development of contemporary digital technologies such as the drive towards a new form of algorithmic governmentality fueled by digital oligopolies that increasingly dominate globalized capitalism, the rise of fake news in the era of post-truth and the transformation of subjectivity. Finally, his critique enables potent reflection on the dialectical possibilities of overcoming the dynamics of contemporary alienation.

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“…Theoretically, these books sidestepped the debate between some political economists and cultural studies adherents that took up a considerable amount of the relevant scholarly oxygen in the early 1990s in the US and UK (see Babe 2009). The use of ‘middle-range theory’, an intervention widely referenced in subsequent major works, to study the intersection of industrial and cultural dimensions of media – and television specifically – also provided methodological intervention that avoided the quagmire of competing critical approaches to culture and its production (Gray and Lotz, 2019; Havens and Lotz, 2017; Steemers, 2004).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

New Patterns of Flow and Rethinking International Mediascapes: The Influence of Stuart Cunningham on Theories of Television's Travels

Lotz

2021

Media International Australia

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Stuart Cunningham contributed to important publications that advanced thinking about transnational media flows, much of which remains relevant a quarter of a century later. This essay explores Cunningham's collaborations with Elizabeth Jacka and John Sinclair in ‘Australian Television and International Mediascapes' and ‘New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral View’ to explore the prescient and productive theoretical innovations these books offered the field.

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Political Economy and Cultural Studies Column: Political Economy, Cultural Studies and Postmodernism

Cited by 3 publications

References 13 publications

Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

Audiences in an Age of Datafication: Critical Questions for Media Research

The Dialectical Sociology of Michel Freitag and the Critique of Communication Society

New Patterns of Flow and Rethinking International Mediascapes: The Influence of Stuart Cunningham on Theories of Television's Travels

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