Curran and Seaton
POWER - The media industries are motivated by power and profit. Power is concentrated in the hands of a few extremely wealthy corporations.Makes it hard to individual users and independant corporations to compete.
Livingstone and Lunt
REGULATION - Media industries are regulated in a variety of different ways. However, there are serious flaws in each method of regulation, primarily due to digital technologies.
Underline
"All media products are purely created to ensure financial success". To what extent do you support this statement? Make reference to the set editions of Woman and Adbusters
Possible argument
Most magazines are driven through profit and power, for example woman, however Adbusters is a clear exception to this rule
A response like this would typically ping-pong between examples, demonstrating how Adbusters and Woman are practically diametric oppositions. However, it would also be possible to create an argument stating that Adbusters too is driven through profit and power, considering it's high cover price, 'edgy' brand identity and examples of commodity fetishism through the luxurious cardstock of the magazine, the cultural capital tat buying it provides its niche target audience and the fact that the website sells a range of fetishised products based on their 'subcultural' value. This might be the focus of a great 'however' paragraph. For this essay though, we're sticking to the clear and simple argument: Woman is driven by profit and power, and Adbusters challenges this capitalist paradigm!
Industrial contexts/plan/***facts***
WOMAN
- Cultivates hegemonic capitalist ideological perspective
- Founded in 1937
- 7d cover price (approx 80p) - cheap cover price for a mass mainstream audience
- Target demographic: 30-50 year old working class, housewife, heterosexual, white
- Singular stereotypical representations
- Reflects the social historical context of the time
- Circulation 3 million copies sold each week: big market share!
- (12 million women's lifestyle magazines sold in UK each week)
- IPC also owned several other women's lifestyle magazines
- Published by IPC, a horizontally integrated corporation
- IPC buys out rival magazines, reducing competition and increasing specialism
- Lack of creativity
ADBUSTERS
- Not for profit
- Anti Capitalist
- First published in 1989
- Broadly left wing ideology
- £10:99 UK cover price - expensive cover price targeting a niche and middle class audience
- 120,000 readership/circulation
- Bimonthly frequency
- Self published: Adbusters Media Foundation
- Complete lack of anchorage, and a complete lack of commercial intent
- Culture jamming/detournement/brandalism
- Ill defined target audience
- Lacks brand image - masthead changes every issue
- Lack or corporate intervention leads a less restricted, more creative magazine
Content
(Michael will see if it's possible to come up with an example paragraph without using the word 'hegemony'...)
I pinched the notes for the next two headings from U block!
Creatively stunted Woman!!!
Woman is creating a standardised product for a standardised audience. Woman ensures its financial success through constructing an audience that it can immediately appeal to. By constructing a singular and specialised audience, Woman magazine is able to sell this audience to advertising which will appeal to the specific target audience.The fashion presented within the magazine is conservative and conformist to stereotypical 1960's style.
Creative and independent Adbusters!!!
Within Adbusters the copy occupies very little of the page, while the main of the page is used by a white gutter for both aesthetic and ideological reasons. Most of the pages of adbusters look damaged in some way, presenting their ideology of the damage we have done to our earth. To a mainstream audience this would be unappealing due to the defaced appearance.
Sexualised gender stereotypes to sell magazines!!!
One clear example of a magazine driven purely by financial success and the concentration of power is Woman magazine. Throughout the edition, we see examples of how dominant ideological perspectives are cultivated and reinforced to construct and maintain a target audience. In the 1964 set edition, we see a clear ideological perspective being constructed which is highly appropriate to the sociohistorical context of the time it was made. This is typified by the relentless promotion of a hegemonically acceptable heterosexual, working class lifestyle. An excellent example of this is the advert for Breeze soap, which features a mid-shot of a stereotypically attractive young woman wearing no clothes. Her body is emphasised through the mise en scene of soap suds, and the bath itself has been removed to provide the target audience with the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing a hegemonically attractive nude woman. This clear example of sexual objectification is included as means of manipulating a singular and mass market audience. The advert reinforces and cultivates the ideology that woman purely exist to be the subject of a heterosexual male gaze. By reinforcing a patriarchal hegemonic ideology, the producer encourages the primary mass audience to take on this role, ensuring that they adopt a subservient lifestyle. This is a clear construction of a mass audience, and a key way in which producers can use power and profit to ensure financial success.
Adbusters deliberately lacks anchorage and seeks to be as uncommercial as possible!!!
However Adbusters subverts the commonly held perspective that all media products are solely motivated by power and profit. In fact Adbusters is a resolutely anticapitalist magazine, that seeks to break the standard conventions of commercial magazine. In the set edition's front cover, the coverline 'POST-WEST' encodes the ideological aftermath of decades of terrorist attacks on the western world. The cover is splattered with a 'digital mud' which partially obscures the masthead, further reinforcing the ideological perspective that Adbusters is not motivated by profit. While a conventional magazine may present an ideological preference (for example criticising global terrorism)Adbusters routinely lacks anchorage. There is nothing on the front cover to explicitly suggest any preferred reading, leaving the audience facing a particularly uncomfortable direct mode of address. Instead, the audience are positioned in such a way that they must form their own conclusions. This makes Adbusters highly unconventional and goes against the notion that all media products are solely focused on profit and power. This anti-commercial ideological perspective is only made possible through Adbuster's ownership. Self-published through the Adbusters Media Foundation, Adbusters does not need to please shareholders or make vast profits, but instead must only break even, freeing up the potential for presenting thought provoking and unpopular opinions.
Further paragraph ideas:
- Niche vs mainstream audience
- Major conglomeration owned vs independent ownership
- (differences in regulation practices - save the planet kill yourself)
- Ethics of being purely motivated by profit: lack of creativity