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CONVERGENCES, TEXTUALITIES AND CONTROLS
I began this chapter by referring to the villagers of Sri Lanka, drafted into a
world of capitalist social, economic and political relations as a result of their
adoption of new fishing technologies. These same fishermen (or maybe they
were some others) in addition found themselves on the edge of a cultural
precipice with their adoption of new media technologies. Television, with or
without electricity, provided a link to a world which was new, but at the same
time it offered, in its materiality—in its objectification as well as in its
symbolisation—a potential space for their own cultural work: work which could
only be understood in the context (albeit rapidly changing) of their own locale,
their own everyday lives. An account of the tele-technological system must
include, therefore, not just the environments in which media are consumed
but an account of the environments—the political, industrial and cultural
environments—in which they are produced.
For the moment I want to focus on the first part of this equation: the emergent
structures of the tele-technological system as they are manifested in and through
three levels of convergence: the convergence expressed in the political economy
of the medium; the convergence expressed in the technological culture of the
medium; and the convergence expressed in the content of the medium. Perhaps
convergence is too strong a word. It certainly expresses something different in
each of the contexts in which I will be discussing it. Likewise the various levels
of convergence are not to be seen either as simply reinforcing one another, or as
being themselves unproblematic or uncontested. The globalisation of culture
and society which has become the byword for one of the, albeit major, dimensions
of post-modernity is neither a homogeneous nor an uncontentious process.
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However, recent theories of cultural change and transformation have focused
on what appears to be an entirely new aspect and dynamic of the world
environment: the globalisation of culture (Featherstone, 1990; Harvey, 1989).
This globalisation is not perceived as an homogenisation but is described in
various ways: as a hybrid culture, as a cosmopolitan culture, as a culture of
networked and mutually reflexive differences. The globalisation of culture
follows (or precedes, or accompanies) the globalisation of economic relations,
which itself follows (or precedes or accompanies) the globalisation of the
movement of information and communication—as commodities—which are
in turn released by the new generation of electronic technologies. At stake in
these discussions is the significance of the Nation State as a focus for identity
The tele-technological system
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and cultural change; at issue are just those questions of individual and collective
identity which are perceived to be threatened by the new heterogeneities and
fragmentations of contemporary cultural forms and products.
Industrial societies have moved from a Fordist to a post-Fordist world: a
move from the regimes of order, control and mass production both of
commodities and of labour, towards what Harvey (1989, 127, following Piore
and Sabel, 1984) calls a regime of flexible specialisation (but it is also called
other things: for example, disorganised capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987)).
Such a regime is one in which industrial organisation and distribution adopts a
much more flexible and responsive pattern of production and consumption
(specialisation, sub-contracting, inter-firm cooperation; ‘just-in-time’ stock
control), and work (flexible hours, flexible contracts, flexi-time). It also
generates a much more ‘flexible’ product (the rapid changes of fashion and the
increasing diversity of objects) and it results in a much more ‘flexible’ set of
life-styles (local and neo-local cultures, gendered, aged and or ethnic, cross-
cut by class, ideology and geography).
Within this overall, and highly generalised, scenario, a number of different
things appear to be happening. Many of them are directly related to
developments within the media industries themselves, and are both product
and producer of the overall shifts in the organisation and regulation of national
and international culture.
The two terms ‘concentration’ and ‘globalisation’, while indicating
dramatically new dimensions in the development of media industries, have
also provided, in many recent accounts, the basis for an analysis of a
fundamental shift in the wider organisation and control of the cultural industries.
Together with the breaking up of a Fordist regime of accumulation and the rise
of flexible specialisation (Harvey, 1989) or flexible integration (Robins and
Cornford, 1992), these industrial developments have led to a convergence of
sorts within national and international media: a convergence of ownership, a
convergence in the regulatory regimes, and a convergence, expressed in the
internationalisation (Europeanisation or co-production) of the product.
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In relation to the first, the convergence of ownership, it has long been argued
that the media industries have lent themselves to a steady concentration and
conglomeration in their organisation (Murdock, 1982, 1990). The political
economy of the industry in the UK and the US, and of course increasingly in
Japan and worldwide, has been one of both horizontal and vertical integration,
as companies have sought to control all aspects of their own market (as Sony
have attempted to do in the purchase of CBS and Columbia pictures) as well
as diversifying into a broad range of interlocking but not necessarily
interdependent companies (Rupert Murdoch’s News International being only
one among many of such conglomerates).
These developments are not to be understood in isolation of course. They
are part of an increasing internationalisation of the world economic order, an
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Television and Everyday Life
internationalisation that is itself predicated on, and facilitated by, changes in
information and communication technologies, changes which enable, above
all, the rapid transfer of information and capital around the globe (Schiller,
1989, 113). As David Harvey (1989, 161) notes:
The formation of a global stock market, of global commodity (even debt)
futures markets, of currency and interest rate swaps, together with an
accelerated geographical mobility of funds, meant, for the first time, the
formation of a single world market for money and credit supply.
And not just for money and credit supply, but increasingly also for information
itself and for television, both for its hardware (the current battle over HDTV
standards is a battle very much for the world market in the next generation of
television) and programmes (within the ‘satellitisation’ of television news
(CNN) or music video (MTV) or programming
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