The Cultural Industries

11.
The cultural industries
Vilmantė Liubinienė
[email protected]
Confusion of terms
– The cultural industries are often referred to
interchangeably with the ‘media industries’,
– the most often preferred alternative to ‘cultural industries’
is ‘creative industries’,
– ‘information industries’,
– ‘the leisure Industries’,
– ‘entertainment industries’.
Definition
– If we define culture, as ‘a “whole way of life” of a distinct
people or other social group’, it is possible to argue that all
industries are cultural industries in that they are involved in
the production and consumption of culture.
– For by this definition, the clothes we wear, the furniture in
our houses and workplaces, the cars, buses and trains we
use for transport, the food and drink we consume are all
part of our culture and they are nearly all produced
industrially, for profit.
Cultural industries – definition
– The term ‘cultural industries’ has tended to be used in a
much more restricted way, based on a definition of culture
as ‘the signifying system through which necessarily a social
order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and
explored’.
– The cultural industries have usually been thought of as those
institutions (mainly profit-making companies, but also state
organisations and non-profit organisations) that are most
directly involved in the production of social meaning.
List of cultural industries
– Nearly all definitions of the cultural industries would include
– television (cable and satellite),
– radio,
– the cinema,
– newspaper,
– magazine and book publishing,
– the music recording and publishing industries,
– advertising and the performing arts.
– These are all activities the primary aim of which is to
communicate to an audience, to create texts.
The Core Cultural Industries
– Broadcasting: the radio and television industries, including their
newer cable, satellite and digital forms.
– Film industries: the dissemination of films on video, DVD and other
formats and on television.
– Music industries: recording, publishing and live performance.
– Print and electronic publishing: including books, online databases,
information services, magazines and newspapers.
– Video and computer games or digital games.
– Advertising, marketing and public relations.
– Web design.
Is Google a cultural-industry company?
– No
– Because it is not really involved in the production of content or
texts.
– All the same, like other institutions, it is extremely important for
understanding the cultural industries.
– Google increasingly acts as a crucial gateway for content produced
by cultural businesses.
– Google Books project makes available enormous amounts of
cultural content that would otherwise be much more difficult to
find.
The Cultural Industries - origin
– The concept of cultural industries was coined by two
German-Jewish philosophers Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer (1944).
– ‘The Culture Industry’ was part of the title of a chapter
in their book Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of
Enlightenment), which they wrote in the USA in the
1940s while in exile from Nazi Germany.
– The book was born out of a conviction that life in the
capitalist democracy of the USA was as empty and
superficial, as life in the Germany they had fled.
The Cultural Industries - origin
– ‘Culture Industry’ was a concept intended to shock. Adorno and Horkheimer,
equated culture in its ideal state with art, with special, exceptional forms of
human creativity.
– For them, art could act as a form of critique of the rest of life and provide a
utopian vision of how a better life might be possible.
– In Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, culture had almost entirely lost this
capacity to act as utopian critique because it had become commodified – a
thing to be bought and sold.
– Culture and Industry were supposed to be opposites but, in modern capitalist
democracy, the two had collapsed together.
– Hence, Culture Industry.
Commodification
– By the late 1960s, it was clear that culture, society
and business were becoming more intertwined than
ever as transnational corporations invested in film,
television and record companies and these forms
took on ever greater social and political significance.
– Introduction of industrialisation and new
technologies into cultural production did indeed
lead to increasing commodification, but that it also
led to exciting new directions and innovations.
Transformation since the early 1980s:
– Some of cultural industry companies are now vast global
businesses and are among the most discussed and debated
corporations on the planet.
– The ownership and organisation of the cultural industries have
changed radically. The largest companies no longer specialise in
a particular cultural industry, such as film, publishing, television
or recording; they now operate across a number of different
cultural industries.
– There are also more and more small- and medium-sized
companies in the business of culture.
– Digitalisation, the internet and mobile telephony have multiplied
the ways in which audiences can gain access to content, and
have made small-scale production easier for millions of people.
– They have also enabled powerful corporations from the
information technology sector to compete with more
established cultural-industry and consumer electronics
businesses.
– Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon are now as significant as
News Corporation, Time Warner and Sony for understanding
cultural production and consumption.
Transformation of texts
– Texts (the best collective name for content and for cultural
‘works’ of all kinds: the programmes, films, records, books,
comics, images, magazines, newspapers and so on produced by
the cultural industries) have undergone a radical transformation.
– There is an increasing penetration of promotional and advertising
material into previously protected realms.
– There is more and more product of all kinds, across a wider range
of genres, across a wider range of forms of cultural activity than
before.
Pessimistic point of view
– Digitalisation has transformed cultural production beyond

recognition.
– The internet and the mobile phone have triumphed.
– The music industry is dying or already dead.
– Television is over.
– Book publishing, as we knew it, is finished.
Optimistic line of thinking….
– Some optimistically see a new age where distinctions between
producers and audiences disappear, and ‘users’ become the new
creators.
– The old notions and models need to be thrown out, and the
history of cultural production is irrelevant because we are now
living in an ‘information age’ rather than an ‘industrial age’.
– Others see transformation just over the horizon.
– In many cases, it is unclear whether we are analysing of what is
happening now, or a prediction of the future.
Global aspects
– Cultural products increasingly circulate across national borders.
– Images, sounds and narratives are borrowed and adapted from
other places on an unprecedented scale, producing new hybrids.
– The long-standing domination of cultural trade by the USA may be
diminishing.
– The way that the cultural industries conceive of their audiences is
changing.
– There is greater emphasis on audience research, marketing and
addressing ‘niche’ audiences.
Global tendencies
– Government policy and regulation have altered drastically.
– Longstanding traditions of public ownership and regulation
have been dismantled.
– Key policy decisions are increasingly carried out at an
international level.
– There has been a huge boom in the amount of money that
businesses spend on advertising.
– This boom helped to fuel the spectacular growth of the
cultural industries.
Why do the cultural industries matter?
– The importance of the cultural industries in modern societies
rests on three related elements:
– their ability to make and circulate products that influence our
knowledge, understanding and experience (texts);
– their role as systems for the management of creativity and
knowledge;
– and their effects as agents of economic, social and cultural
change.
Tasks for Seminar 12
Prepare for discussion on the Media trends for the future.

How do you envision the role of New Media Language in the
context of Digital Culture, Network Society, Software Culture?

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11.

The cultural industries

– Digitalisation has transformed cultural production beyond

Prepare for discussion on the Media trends for the future.

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