Javnost - The Public, Vol. 22 - 2015, No. 2

Contradictions of Media Production and the Heterogeneity of Products

Peter Sekloča, pages: 129-144

This article confronts theoretical predictions, according to which innovations of information and communications technologies will spur the media production towards greater diversity and variety, with basic contradictions of the currently-prevailing media economy. In actuality, the promise of the ubiquity of media content and plurality of possible mediated experiences is contested by the constraints that the production side has to meet in order to divert the trend of the rate of profit to fall—to alleviate the consequences of the law, with which Marx explained the circular movement of the economic activity in general. Special attention is devoted to the contexts which especially information society theorists claim might bring diversity of supply; however, diversity is usually postponed by managerial strategies that choose between many possible equilibriums of supply and demand. Critical scholars have so far been regularly demonstrating that investments in technology most often bring about increases in distribution capacities instead of fulfilling the promise to increase diversity of content and media, whereas the author of this article uses the classical tools and the basic laws of Marxian analysis to explain the internal drives and the contradictory forces that propel media supply towards the decisions to preserve the existing range of products and not to risk changing it.

Full text (available at Taylor & Francis) | Export Reference | Link to this article