Cultural Industries

 Cultural Industries

Go to our Media Factsheet archive and open Factsheet 168: David Hesmondhalgh’s ‘The Cultural Industries’. Our Media Factsheet archive is on the Media Shared drive: M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets or you can access it online here using your Greenford Google login. 

Read the Factsheet and complete the following questions/tasks:

1) What does the term 'Cultural Industries' actually refer to?

The term ‘cultural industry’ refers to the creation, production, and distribution of products of a cultural or artistic nature. Cultural industries include television and film production, publishing, music, as well as crafts and design.

2) What does Hesmondhalgh identify regarding the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable?

Hesmondhalgh identifies that the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable tend to be societies that support the conditions where large companies, and their political allies, make money.

3) Why do some media products offer ideologies that challenge capitalism or inequalities in society?

Because the cultural industry companies need to continuously compete with each other to secure audience members. As such, companies outdo each other to try and satisfy audience desires for the shocking, profane or rebellious. There are also longstanding social expectations about what art and entertainment should do, and challenging the various institutions of society is one of those expectations.

4) Look at page 2 of the factsheet. What are the problems that Hesmondhalgh identifies with regards to the cultural industries?

• Risky business
• Creativity versus commerce
• High production costs and low reproduction costs
• Semi-public goods; the need to create scarcity

5) Why are so many cultural industries a 'risky business' for the companies involved?

• Risk derives from the fact that audiences use cultural commodities in highly volatile and unpredictable ways – often in order to express the view that they are different from other people.
• Risk stems from consumption and is made worse by 2 factors: firstly, limited autonomy granted to symbol creators in the hope that they will create something original and distinctive; secondly, the cultural industry company is reliant on other cultural industry companies to make audiences aware of the existence of a new product or of the uses and pleasure that they might get from experiencing the product. Companies cannot completely control the publicity a product will receive, as judgements and reactions of audiences, critics and journalists etc. cannot accurately be predicted.
• Cultural industries can be highly profitable in spite of high levels of risk, but it may be difficult to achieve high levels of profit for independent or individual companies.

6) What is your opinion on the creativity v commerce debate? Should the media be all about profit or are media products a form of artistic expression that play an important role in society?

Media should both be for profit and form of artistic expression as audience can entertain themselves with different shows, movies etc. You can also make lots of money by working in the media industry. However, creativity is very important as the audience wouldn't be as entertained if shows that similar storylines, which would be boring so the media should create new and better content so that audience won't get tedious.

7) How do cultural industry companies minimise their risks and maximise their profits? (Clue: your work on Industries - Ownership and control will help here) 

Cultural industries minimise their risks by vertical integration.

8) Do you agree that the way the cultural industries operate reflects the inequalities and injustices of wider society? Should the content creators, the creative minds behind media products, be better rewarded for their work?

I agree that the way the cultural industries function reflects the disparities in society at large because many of the people who work in them receive little to no recognition or compensation, while the actors who play the lead roles in the films receive all the respect and attention from the public. In other industries, on the other hand, the people who create the products would go largely unnoticed even if the product itself became very successful.

9) Listen and read the transcript to the opening 9 minutes of the Freakonomics podcast - No Hollywood Ending for the Visual-Effects Industry. Why has the visual effects industry suffered despite the huge budgets for most Hollywood movies?

The goal of visual effects in its early years was to complete the work as soon as possible. Though the VFX studios were generating large sums of money on a picture, by the mid to late 2000s, they had signed fixed contracts with the film companies. This meant that the studios might not even be making any money at all.

10) What is commodification? 

Commodification is turning everything into something that can be bought or sold.

11) Do you agree with the argument that while there are a huge number of media texts created, they fail to reflect the diversity of people or opinion in wider society?

I agree to this statement as some religions/races are being under recognised. Even in the news, whenever an important matter arises in a country, it is not recognised due to media not spreading awareness to the world. It's mostly the government that stops matters from spreading around on media and media producers naively leave some information out instead of sharing it. Media texts created probably have failed to reflect diversity as they are biased, stereotypical and discriminate races due to society nowadays.

12) How does Hesmondhalgh suggest the cultural industries have changed? Identify the three most significant developments and explain why you think they are the most important.

• Cultural industries are no longer seen as second to the ‘real’ economy. Some are actually vast global businesses.
• Traditions of public ownership and regulation have been dismantled 
• Huge increase in the amount companies spend on advertising which has helped to fuel the growth of the cultural industries.