Discussing convergence can only get
us so far in our attempt to understand contemporary media ecologies. For
certain methodologies, medial shifts and articulations and erasures are mere
epiphenomena of political-economic processes that have drastically changed circulations
of labor and products around the world. The contemporary state of global media
industries and their distribution patterns can, on their surface, appear to represent
positive, decentralizing outcomes of global liberalization.
Of course, the possibility of
arriving at such conclusions involves bracketing or subverting prevailing ‘imperial’
approaches to media production and circulation. Many contemporary film scholars
would agree with Priya Jaikumar, who claims that “we must abandon the rubric of
national cinemas if we are to consider the multiple, conjunctural pressures
applied by decolonization on the political entities of an imperial state and
its colony.”[1]
This specific case can and should be abstracted to the general state of media
industries. Michael Curtin isolates a few essential elements underlying the
development of ‘global media’ as a complex, diffuse, yet central economic
trend.
The first of these involves capitalism’s
overall ‘logic of accumulation’. Here, Curtin follows Marxist economist and
political geographer David Harvey in emphasizing the important roles played by “the
concentration of productive resources” and “the extension of markets” in the
process of achieving “the greatest possible return on investment in the
shortest amount of time” (12). As previously dominant national media industries
lose their assured hegemony, and previously dominated but newly formed or
liberalized media industries enter into competition, they all seek to achieve
economies of scale through the minimization of cost and the maximization of
market reach.
Both of these corporate needs
require, paradoxically, the hyper-localization of productive forces. Instead of
the perhaps expected diffusion of satellite production units around the globe,
we see the reification of media corporations in major metropolitan areas, and
these often resonate with the idea of the ‘global cities’ forwarded by Saskia
Sassen. Despite Curtin’s optimistic rendering of such hubs of cultural
production, I doubt that the affective bonding between workers who gather in
particular global cities can make up for their general exploitation and alienation
from the globally-dispersed products of their labor. If there is any silver
lining to such a situation, it would the correspondence between class consciousness
honed within close spatial limits and a potential labor aristocracy subverted
by a knowledge of the often problematic trajectories of global media distribution.
[1]
Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in
Britain and India (Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006), 1.
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