Politická ekonomie médií Monika Metykova m.metykova@sussex.ac.uk; 32153@mail.muni.cz Základní definice Mosco: The study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources, including communication resources. •3 semináře věnujeme tematickým okruhům: Politická ekonomonie internetu, Politická ekonomonie žurnalistiky, Feministická politická ekonomie médií Jaký je náš vztah k obrazovkám a k internetu? •Reviews.org is hosting a “24-Hour Digital Detox Challenge” amid surge in screen time due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic https://people.com/human-interest/this-company-will-pay-you-2400-to-turn-off-your-screens-for-24-ho urs-heres-how-to-apply/ •Citigroup CEO ordains Zoom-free Fridays to ease 'relentless' pandemic workday https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/23/citigroup-ceo-ordains-zoom-free-fridays-to-ease-re lentless-pandemic-workday •Internet Minute – co děláme na internetu? https://localiq.com/blog/what-happens-in-an-internet-minute/ Úkol v menších skupinách •Kolik je v ČR uživatelů internetu? Které internetové portály jsou nejpopulárnější pro hledání informací, zpravodajství, online nákupy, finanční služby apod. •Sociální sítě – kolik je uživatelů, které jsou nejoblíbenější apod. ? •Streamovací služby – co je k dispozici v ČR? Netflix, Disney+, Spotify atd. Kolik mají předplatitelů? Jaké jsou ceny? Povinná četba The Political Economy of the Internet: Social Networking Sites and a Reply to Fuchs -historie internetu- od veřejného vlastnictví k privátnímu: By the late-1970s, other entities entered the field when the public agency that controlled and exploited the network, the National Science Foundation (NSF), granted these same capacities to the private sector. In 1979, the first information service, known as Compuserve, was created. In 1985, the Domain Name System (DNS) ranked machine connections over the network. At the same time, the Bulletin Board System (BBS) started to be used as one of the first communications services through the network. It was developed by America Online, which became the world’s first major Internet service provider (ISP) in the 1990s. The NSF made good use of these first backbones for the system it created. Besides these technical advances, people looked to create the necessary hardware to access the Internet. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau, both scientists from the Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), developed the web and released it in 1991 as the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW involved a new language pattern that allowed multidirectional hypertext and required an Internet browser. The year 1995 marked a disruption between these two models of organizing the Internet. The NSF solely managed the network infrastructure, while private companies, such as Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve, and Teletel (France), became the first major ISPs (Bolaño et al. 2011). This new regulation allowed these companies to explore the market for the new network and profit from it. Mýtus člověka, který se sám vypracoval •The possibilities of transforming small businesses managed by young college students to large Internet firms help to restore the old myth of “self-made man” brought into the Internet business environment. In fact, it is an example of a spatially concentrated cluster of innovation firms that benefited from political decisions, linked to important university centers, and was supported by major venture capital companies (firms specialized in earning money by owning equity in the new companies, usually start-ups and other high-risk and innovative businesses), the first investors of early staged businesses. Další fáze ve vývoji internetu The Internet is not only an information and communications technology (ICT), nor it is not only some kind of new industry, but actually it is a space for the convergence of all industrialized cultural production. The Internet is the result of the development of new technologies and its interpretation through global expansion (Bolaño et al. 2011). The technological development that resulted in the creation of the Internet was only the first step in establishing a new model of profit based in another model already known by the Cultural Industry, namely, the audience commodity. The audience commodity is an intermediary product, traded in an intra-capitalistic market (Braz 2011), that may attract the commercial and state interests at the same time. Much like the U.S. television market, in which programs are offered for free to the audience, many Internet services (e-mail, news, communication, weather, games, and freeware) are offered free of charge to the users in order to get their attention. As with television, the audience is the product. “The audience buyers are exactly the sellers of goods and services, authorities, politicians, or, in just one word, everyone who needs to communicate with the audience” (Bolaño 2000, 115-116). Or according to Monteiro (2008), “The migration of major trade companies, media and entertainment to the Internet transformed the international network into another Culture Industry and social commoditization vehicle.” Before the Internet, companies never had as many opportunities to track and keep so much information about their customers. Today, the consumer’s data chase the advertiser, not advertisers chasing consumers. This happened exactly because the new platform permitted so much data storage that then could be repurposed and exploited (Fuchs, 2011). Sociální sítě SNSs allow users to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system (boyd and Ellison 2007). The first major SNS was Friendster. It had so many users that Google intended to buy it in 2003 (Dybwad 2009). Even though it lost some users to MySpace, the second big SNS, especially in the United States, Friendster received more than US$50 million in venture capital. One of the main investors was MOL Global, the biggest Internet Company in Asia. Based in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, MOL acquired the company in 2009 for more than US$26 million (Arrington 2009). The company changed the focus of the platform to online games and other entertainment products for Asian consumers. Another notorious SNS since 2004 was MySpace. It was propelled by musicians and indie groups using the SNS to publish their work and to host mp3 music files. In 2005, News Corporation bought MySpace from Intermix Media for US$580 million. In the following year, the site faced phishing attempts, spam, and malwares, leading Uživatelé sociálních sítí jako komodita What makes the capital accumulation process for the Internet different from broadcasting is precisely the way it acquires the audience commodity. Television advertisers buy statistics about potential viewer attention to advertisements, a passive audience model. Internet companies instead may offer and refine information collected from an active audience when users spontaneously provide data about their personal tastes, preferences, desires, and pathways through their browsers (see also Pariser 2012). Internet advertisers thus can more accurately target the audiences they intend to reach. We are not affirming that this is the only model of capital accumulation on the Internet. Many different kinds of business organizations and models coexist with many other forms of communication that are not necessarily mercantile-based. In the case we are discussing, however, the final consumer does not pay anything; every product or service offered by the companies are financed by a third party, the advertiser, who buys the audience commodity obtained in this business model, also known as “the club logic” (Tremblay 1997). Business model sociálních sítí The user receives the SNS service for free because there is a “third-payer” (tiers payant in French) that finances the process. Individuals do not pay, in other words, because advertisers pay for the process, also called “indirect commoditization” by Herscovici (2009, 9). In this case, the server (human or electronic) plays the central role and negotiates the rights of circulation through elaborating the marketing strategies and offering the products or services in exchange for a subscription (Tremblay 1997). At the same time, as we have argued, the audience is also produced as a commodity, with its own exchange-value, specific use-value, just as it was in the old broadcasting industry model. What is sold by Google, by the way, is not the users themselves, as Fuchs proposes in the above excerpt, because the advertiser does not buy any individual users or even their singular information. Advertisers buy only an amount of data about a target audience based on categories, as we have outlined. Politicko-ekonomický pohled je specifický •Co z něho schází? Proč používáme sociální sítě? Jonathan Haidt: How Social Media Drives Polarization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9ofYEfewNE&ab_channel=AmanpourandCompany Scott Galloway on Instagram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_dytZfzGTI&ab_channel=CNN Scott Galloway on dating apps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3l-wPn8N5Y&ab_channel=TheDiaryOfACEOClips Představy z 90-ých let o tom jak internet změní společnost •Morozov: Net Delusion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU •Eli Pariser: Filter Bubbles https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles?language=en Úkol v malých skupinách •Vidíme snahu regulovat technologické giganty, proč je tomu tak? •Jaké jsou problémy, které se regulace snaží řešit v případě: •Facebooku •Googlu •Amazonu •Twitteru? A co na současnou situaci říká vynálezce internetu Tim Berners-Lee? •“The forces taking the web in the wrong direction have always been very strong,” Berners-Lee said. “Whether you’re a company or a government, controlling the web is a way to make huge profits, or a way of ensuring you remain in power. The people are arguably the most important part of this, because it’s only the people who will be motivated to hold the other two to account.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/24/tim-berners-lee-unveils-global-plan-to-save-the- internet Materiální charakter internetu •Can the internet ever be green? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct0xbc Doporučená četba – hlavní teze Fuchs, C. a Winseck, D. (2011) “Critical Media and Communication Studies Today. A Conversation,” Triple C: Communication, Capitalism and Critique, 9(2). Komodifikace publika v díle Dallase Smythe a Fuchse Lee, F. and Björklund Larsen, L. (2019) “How should we theorize algorithms? Five ideal types in analyzing algorithmic normativities” Nabízí 5 ideálních typů pro analýzu algoritmů: •the logic of the algorithm appears like a deus ex machina impinging on society’s material politics •practice - the human negotiations drawing on contexts, materialities, or even face masks, become foregrounded. •ideal type that approaches algorithms, and technology, through an analysis of nonhuman agency and relationality •an interest in infrastructures of classification and their interaction with human biographies. Here, the politics of infrastructures and classification become the focus. These types of analyses highlight how people’s lives become ‘torqued’, or twisted out of shape, by classification systems •a meta-reflexive and meta-analytical attitude toward algorithms opens new avenues for inquiry. Pickren, G. (2018) “‘The global assemblage of digital flow’: Critical data studies and the infrastructures of computing” -Kritické studium dat by mělo mít i dimenzi geografickou a materiální: •The individual device, such as an Apple iPhone, may fit in a pocket, but the background network is immense, stretching across cities and encompassing much of the world. The last leg of the infrastructural support is wireless and immaterial, but the rest of the system exists as distinct spaces of network equipment embedded within the landscape. Politická ekonomie žurnalistiky ●Mocenské vztahy ●Produkce, distribuce a konzumace žurnalistiky Cohen, S. (2019) At Work in the Digital Newsroom, Digital Journalism, 7:5, 571-591, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2017.1419821 • A labor perspective will become increasingly important for journalism researchers: as journalism further digitizes, conflict and struggle around the conditions of those who produce journalism intensifies, as the ongoing unionization wave in digital newsrooms demonstrates. In just two years, 24 digital newsrooms have formed or joined unions. Digital-first, or born-digital companies— high-profile examples include The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE—are growing in number, spreading geographically, and are circulating “unprecedented amounts of multimedia content” (Daum and Scherer 2017, 2). Venture capital and investment funding is pouring into news start-ups and established companies alike (Carlson and Usher 2015). As privately owned companies, digital media outlets do not publicize revenue and profits, and journalists note that digital media companies are not meeting “revenue target[s],” yet commentators—and especially company executives—insist on digital media outlets’ fortunes. VICE is valued at $5.7 billion, for example, and Buzzfeed at about $1.7 billion (Sharma and Alpert 2017). While digital media companies continue to hire journalists, they are also reorganizing, merging, and shedding staff—the “new” journalism industry, it turns out, looks a lot like the old. In this rapidly evolving context, we need to better understand the material conditions of digital journalism production. Existing academic research on the implications of digital technologies for journalists’ working conditions shows that journalists face increased pace and intensity of work as they are pressured to publish instantly and continuously; are required to multitask and be multiskilled; often feel stressed, exhausted, and overworked; and that work is marked by temporal and functional flexibility, job insecurity, and uncertainty (Deuze 2007; Paulussen 2012; Reinardy 2012; Anderson 2013; Comor and Compton 2015). Many of these work pressures are not inherent to digital technologies themselves, but rather flow from management and production strategies, which now require media companies to produce massive amounts of content for a variety of media platforms—over which companies have no direct control—due to media concentration, declining print advertising revenue, shrinking staff, strategies of social media platforms, and competition, all stemming from for-profit logics of capitalist media production (McChesney 2013; Daum and Scherer 2017). The focus is on labor–capital dynamics as they stem from specific corporate ownership models and practices under a general mode of capitalist production, whereby companies exploit labor power to produce a commodity—in this case, media—by continually pressuring labor costs down and rationalizing production to increase profits (Braverman 1974). Contemporary labor focused research, however, must expand to address the complex ways media corporations are entangled with new, often very powerful actors that are situated outside of the direct labor–capital relationship but which have enormous influence on how media corporations operate and how journalists work. Today’s media capitalism is constituted not only by media corporations—which themselves are best understood as “network media industries” (Winseck 2011, 3)—but also by a network of external, digital-based corporations of various sizes and influence whose operating logics exert new pressures and forms of control on journalists. The most influential parajournalists are Facebook, Google, and other social media corporations that Smyrnaios (2015) identifies as the new news intermediaries, as they exert influence over “the whole ecology of [journalistic] production, distribution, and consumption.” Their influence extends beyond capturing media companies’ potential advertising revenue to setting journalistic standards and shaping journalistic practices. As the New Republic’s former editor writes, “tech companies dictate the patterns of work … their influence can affect the ethos of an entire profession” (Foer 2017). (Poell 2017) calls this process platformization, whereby journalists “become increasingly oriented towards and organized through the platform ecosystem.” Journalists are bound to tech giants’ ever-changing requirements. When complex and secret algorithms frequently change, journalists must quickly adjust their strategies. Úkol v menších skupinách Financování a nové trendy v žurnalistice v ČR: 1.3 nejčtenější deníky v ČR – čtenost, druh média, cena, co je k dispozici zadarmo online, kdo je majitelem 2.Média veřejné služby – nejpopulárnější pořady, jaké jsou poplatky 3.Inovativní business modely – DeníkN (CR) nebo DenníkN (SK) – druhy předplatného, majitel, spolupráce s jinými médii; příklady crowdfunding, hyperlokální média 4.Umělá inteligence a žurnalistika – jak AI funguje v Associated Press a The New York Times? Máme příklady z ČR? Stav české/slovenské žurnalistiky ●Co charakterizuje českou/slovenskou žurnalistiku? ●Vidíme podobné trendy jako v případě USA? ●Jaké jsou hlavní tlaky/problémy? Jak se liší v různých typech médií? A jaký je rozdíl mezi médii veřejné služby a médii komerčními/neziskovými? Propojení kapitalismu a internetu v digitální žurnalistice je problematické McChesney (2013 Digital Disconnect How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy) uvádí dva aspekty: 1.Online žurnalistika bude výdělečná pro velké centralizované společnosti, pravděpodobně monopoly nebo téměř monopoly. 2.V jádru business modelu je předpoklad, že platy žurnalistů je možné dramaticky snížit a zároveň je možné zvýšit množství jejich práce. Zachrání žurnalistiku neziskové organizace a nadace? McChesney je v tomto ohledu skeptický, má 3 argumenty: 1.Filantropické organizace nemají dostatek financí na subvencování značné části žurnalistiky. 2.Tyto organizace nejsou neutrální - často prosazují určité politiky atd. 3.Jejich podpora není dlouhodobá. Jaká je situace s neziskovými/subvencovanými médii v ČR? ●Nezisková – komunitní – média, vysílatel je nezisková organizace (třetí pilíř mediálního systému): Rádio Proglas, TV Noe ●Ministerstvo kultury poskytuje dotace: Kinematografie a média https://www.mkcr.cz/ii-vyberove-dotacni-rizeni-v-oblasti-kinematografie-a-medii-470.html TV, rozhlas a tisk pro národnostní menšiny https://www.mkcr.cz/i-program-podpory-rozsirovani-a-prijimani-informaci-v-jazycich-narodnostnich-me nsin-469.html Inovace, nové směry ●Příklady „občanské žurnalistiky“ https://www.ushahidi.com/ https://www.bellingcat.com/ Rozhovor se zakladatelem bellingcat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3kuyc0zXo ●Inovace v žurnalistice, tzv. „slow journalism“, solution journalism, entrepreneurial journalism atd. https://www.slow-journalism.com/ TED talk se zakladatelem časopisu Delayed Gratification https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGtFXtnWME4 Doporučená četba – hlavní teze Hamilton, J. And Morgan, F. (2018) “Poor Information: How Economics Affects the Information Lives of Low-Income Individuals” V USA nízký finanční příjem znamená informační chudobu: Poor individuals have less access to digital technology such as broadband service, fewer years of formal education, and lower rates of literacy and numeracy. While debate about the digital divide highlights differences across income classes in the use of devices, less scholarly or policy attention focuses on the content gaps experienced in low-income communities. Obsahy cílené na skupiny s nízkým příjmem jsou méně kvalitní a jejich kvantita je taky nižší. Metykova, M. and Císařová, L. W. (2020) 'Closed doors, empty desks: The declining material conditions of the Czech local print newsroom.‘ Finanční tlaky mají za následek horší materiální podmínky v redakcích regionálních deníků. Tyto materální podmínky pak negativně ovlivňují profesní autonomii novinářů a novinářek. Benson, R. (2018) “Can foundations solve the journalism crisis?” Argumentuje podobně jako McChesney: Foundations are shown to place many nonprofits in a Catch-22 because of competing demands to achieve both economic “sustainability” and civic “impact,” ultimately creating pressures to reproduce dominant commercial media news practices or orient news primarily for small, elite audiences. Further, media organizations dependent on foundation project-based funding risk being captured by foundation agendas and thus less able to investigate the issues they deem most important. Reforms encouraging more long-term, no-strings-attached funding by foundations, along with development of small donor and public funding, could help nonprofits overcome their current limitations. Jinrong Tong: The Taming of Critical Journalism in China: A combination of political, economic and technological forces Conclusion The analysis in this article offers an example of where the market, the state and digital communication technologies have a combining effect on journalism. The case of China discussed here has demonstrated that the market and digital communication technologies have turned out to be a powerful constraining force. Alongside strong political control, commercial and technological forces have transformed the whole environment into one that is unsuitable for the development and sustainability of critical journalism. In the external environment where critical journalism is practised, when political control remains the same or even becomes worse, what greatly matters is the power of the market and digital communication technologies. During the Jiang and Hu eras, the market acted as an opposing force against media control in most cases, although it could limit media autonomy too. Likewise, at that communication technologies in general—and in particular the capitalisation of digital communication— in Chinese society. The commercial and technological factors exacerbate the vulnerability of critical journalism in the face of media control.