Unit 4: The Business of Culture

Question 1

List Media Forms and give their advantages and disadvantages

Answer 1

1. Radio:
   Disadvantages - space biased media, subject to propaganda, no visual elements, little audience participation, advertising
   Advantages - auditory medium, local interpretations, ability to reach low-income audiences, quickly disseminating information, cultural immersion, low recall
2. Television:
   Disadvantages - space biased media, subject to propaganda, injecting the dominant ideology, advertising, misinformation, passivity in the audience
   Advantages - education, auditory visual medium, global and local interpretations, dissemination of information, cultural diversity, low recall

3. Print media: 
Disadvantages - elitism, perpetuates the class system, time biased media 
Advantages - active audience interpretation, promotes literacy, high recall

4. Internet:
   Disadvantages - space/time biased media, misinformation, creating cultural hegemony, data farming, advertising,
   Advantages - globalization, high audience control, combines all media representation,

Question 2

Discuss the dynamics of media interdependence and competition

Answer 2

• A new technology is adopted by the elite, who can afford it, and then, as the price drops, by the rest of society. Then, a new medium forces the old medium to specialize and use its specific advantages wisely. Various media have been hampered by new technologies, but bounced back to find an audience niche. While radio, movie, and television have seen declines in their audiences since their respective peaks, these media have each adapted and found a role to play and profit to make.

Question 3

Address problems with corporatization and the consolidation of media into fewer producers.

Answer 3

• It gives total control of cultural products into the hands of the large media conglomerates.
• Allows for corporate advertising to use artists as a means to sell commodities.
• Not autonomy for artists who end up tied greatly to corporate sponsorships.
• Funding can be dropped by corporates.
• Leads to standardization and pseudo-individualism
• Corporate power extends over public institutions (universities and libraries, for example); public space, as malls replace downtowns in city geography; and public media.
• Corporate takeover of public expression has made it impossible to distinguish between businessmen and artists, between advertising executives and poets.

Question 4

Identify the roles played by business in the creation and propagation of popular culture, particularly in the field of advertising.

Answer 4

• Advertising is a useful thing to the businesses that use it, and that’s all of them if they expect to have any customers. It’s a means of informing choice, and it’s vital to new entrants in any market.
• Advertising may be encouraging society to save less, borrow more, work harder and consume greater quantities of material goods
• While it reflects society to a certain degree, it also has the effect of ‘normalising’ values or behaviours.
• By subtly manipulating its audience, it may in fact stifle choice. Much advertising is subliminal, drip-feed, all about creating positive associations without prompting conscious thought.
• Advertising has infused American culture with mass images and ideas, creating a nation of consumers and shaping how people view themselves and others.
• Creates false needs by speaking to the emotions of the audience, rather than the quality of the product.

Question 5

Reading - “Music, Corporate Power, and Unending War”