This theme examines the role of the media as key catalysts of cultural, economic and social change. Such research has become more urgent as claims about the media's capacity to bring about change have become increasingly overblown, speculative, value-laden and contradictory. Some theorists, for example, hold the media responsible for all manner of social ills: increasing tendencies towards individualisation, privatisation and fragmentation. Others argue that the media promote community, democratisation and participation. Some believe that the media industries spearhead new business models and economic practices and are key drivers of change, others that the media merely react to economic change. How are we to asses such contradictory claims about media and change? The research in this theme evaluates the available evidence. We analyse how the media are implicated in cultural, economic and social change, and offer measured assessments of the nature, pace and scope of change in national and transnational media cultures and economies.
Our approach to tackling these questions is distinctive in three ways. First, we are an interdisciplinary group of researchers (from the fields of sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, economics, accounting and business studies) who have come together to develop new ways of understanding media and change. Second, we draw on existing and new empirical evidence, both quantitative and qualitative, in order to develop new methodologies and theories of media and social and economic change. Third, we use historical and comparative analytical frameworks in order to grasp cyclical and long term processes of transformation. We also examine how change in one part of world affects change elsewhere.
Key Issues
Media technologies and change
Whether and how new technologies are involved in cultural, economic and social change. How media producers and consumers, entrepreneurs, advertisers and regulators perceive, drive and respond to technological change. How new technologies impact on private and public spheres. The relations between new forms of interactivity and geographical mobility. The cultural, economic and social effects of new media networks.
Media as cultural institutions and creative industries
Transformations in how the media are organised: size, ownership and internationalisation. How media industries (the British, USA and Indian film and television industries in particular) operate and how they are regulated. Business models and practices in both private and public media sectors, how they intersect and differ. Labour processes in the media industries, the nature of creative media work and pay, and the role played by different kinds of creative workers as drivers of change.
Media representations of change
How the media represent cultural, economic and social change. Media texts as a resource for negotiating change. The regulation of media content: new media and changing regulatory regimes. The transnationalization of media and its impact on media genres and the politics of representing change. Current media policy agendas on equality and diversity rights issues as a markers and discourses of socio-political change.
Media audiences, users and publics
The effects and uses of old and new media. What's new about new media? Researching audiences, users, consumers and citizens. The mediated public sphere, citizenship and democratization. Media, intimacies and private lives. The consequences of changing patterns of media consumption for knowledge, values and beliefs. Transnational national and local audiences. Disaspora media.
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