Politická ekonomie médií Monika Metykova m.metykova@sussex.ac.uk; 32153@mail.muni.cz Zakladatelé – úkol v menších skupinách •Adam Smith •David Ricardo •John Stuart Mill •Thomas Malthus •Karl Marx Procesy, které nás budou zajímat •Komodifikace (zhodnocování) •Zprostornění (spatialization) •Koncentrace •Strukturace Komodifikace (zhodnocování) •Proces, v němž se určité soc. statky, jako láska, právo, boží milost atd., stávají zbožím. Z lásky se stává prostituce, z práva korupce, z odpouštění hříchů prodávání odpustků. •Zdroj: Sociologická encyklopedie Zprostornění (spatialization) Zprostornění – proces ve kterém překonáváme limity geografického prostoru, mediální a komunikační technologie tady sehrávají roli. Giddens time-space distanciation: the stretching of social relations and systems across time and space, resulting from advances in human techniques of transport and communications and hence social control Harvey time-space compression Diagram Description automatically generated Koncentrace Proč se máme zabývat tím kdo vlastní média a kolik jich vlastní? Mediální magnáti Forbes 2016 •Michael Bloomberg - Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Media •Rupert Murdoch - News Corp •Donald and Samuel "Si" Newhouse - Advance Publications •Cox Family - Atlanta Journal-Constitution •Jeff Bezos - The Washington Post •John Henry - The Boston Globe •Zdroj: https://www.forbes.com/sites/katevinton/2016/06/01/these-15-billionaires-own-americas-news-media-co mpanies/?sh=5a628268660a Globální mediální „velmoci“ •https://www.forbes.com/sites/abigailfreeman/2022/05/12/the-worlds-largest-media-companies-2022-net flix-falls-in-the-ranks-after-subscriber-loss-disney-climbs-to-no-2/?sh=1f821f2f7442 A co technologie? •Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates a kdo další? https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2022/04/05/here-are-the-richest-tech-billionaires-2022/ Česká republika - Mediální magnáti •Aktualizovaná mapa z roku 2019: •https://www.mediaguru.cz/clanky/2019/03/aktualizovana-mapa-vlastniku-ceskych-medii/ •https://forbes.cz/lists/media-2022/ Úkol v menších skupinách •Mediální magnáti a jejich impéria Strukturace - process of creating social relations, mainly those organized around social class, gender, and race. Social action takes place within the constraints and the opportunities provided by the structures in which action happens. Novější generace politických ekonomů/ek médií •Dallas Smythe •Herbert Schiller •Vincent Mosco •Dan Schiller •Robert McChesney •Janet Wasko •Graham Murdock Medailonek představitele/ky politické ekonomie médií s důrazem na jejich přínos pro tento přístup (rozsah 700 slov bez odkazů na literaturu a další zdroje). Doporučená četba – hlavní teze •Wasko: The IAMCR Political Economy Section: A Retrospective. •Článek popisuje dějiny sekce Pol ek v mezinárodní organizaci International Association for Mass Communication Research IAMCR. Jako hlavní cíle sekce Wasko popisuje mezi jiným takto: •The Political Economy Section examines the role of power in the production, distribution and exchange of mediated communication. Drawing from the rich history of political economic theory, section members study social relations in their totality, consider how they have developed historically, evaluate them according to standards of social justice, and intervene to bring about a more just and democratic world. •The research interests of section members include the development of a richer theoretical foundation in communication research by incorporating an understanding of how structures of power operate, particularly in the process of transforming messages into commodities. •Other research interests involve the battles for control over communication resources. •Political economy has an historic commitment to praxis or the unity of research and social intervention. As a result, it has attracted members with a wide range of commitments to social change. Over the years this has included involvement in the movements to bring about a New World Information and Communication Order, now focused on the McBride Roundtable process. In addition, the section has attracted members with commitments to the rights of workers in the communication industries and to the rights of citizens to access the means of communication. 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. Kara Swisher – Apple iPhone monopoly •https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfx7PM1VlCg&ab_channel=RealTimewithBillMaher •0:23 – 3:16 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.