polity
Copyright © Toby Miller and Marwan M. Kraidy 2016
This book has benefited from a publication subsidy from the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication Press, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
The right of Toby Miller and Marwan M. Kraidy to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
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ISBN: 978-0-7456-9306-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Toby, author. | Kraidy, Marwan M., 1972- author.
Title: Global media studies / Toby Miller, Marwan M. Kraidy.
Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016000784| ISBN 9780745644318 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745644325 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Communication, International. | Globalization.
Classification: LCC P96.I5 M55 2016 | DDC 302.2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000784
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Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, twins in real life, starred as babies, toddlers, and ’tweens in the US ABC TV network situation comedy Full House from 1987 to 1995, sharing the role of Michelle Tanner. During those years, a merchandising company emerged to capitalize on the girls’ prominence via music, books, and videos. By the time the teenaged twins launched a clothing line, Hollywood Reporter magazine nominated them as “the most powerful young women in Hollywood.” At 18, each was worth over US$130 million, derived from US$1.4 billion in sales (Shade and Porter, 2008).
Numerous Bangladeshi women (whose names we do not know) made the clothing that was owned and endorsed by the cute-as-a-button Olsens, clothing that the New York Times acclaimed as “ashcan chic,” “homeless masquerade,” and “[d]umpster dressing” (La Ferla, 2005). These employees worked for between US$189.28 and US$436.80 a year, and were denied mandatory paid maternity leave until the third sector intervened and embarrassed the cuddly designers (Mensch, 2006).
A New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL), of which more below, thus saw a fashion line neatly – and gruesomely – index the difference in choices between the Olsens and their employees. Meanwhile, pro-anorexia websites highlighted the twins as role models, and 2011 found the bubbly twosome releasing an alligator backpack retailing at US$39,000 (Shade and Porter, 2008; Lipczynska, 2007).1 The Times of India praised their “sisterly bond” and the Guardian called 2015 the year when they became “the go-to brand for minimal chic” (Cochrane, 2015).2
The Olsens’ careers have seen them move across shifting discourses of femininity, in a world where women may stand for domestic values, be high-profile actors in public life, or live as low-paid, exploited workers – sometimes next door, sometimes next continent. As part of that shift, from a very early age the Olsens were both embroiled in and representative of complex commodity and labor relations, for which they were held responsible. Their struggles with education, weight, and love made them subjects of identification for many others dealing with the impact of feminism – without its ideological, organizational, and interpersonal buttressing (Probyn, 2008). Their arms-length exploitation of others is less visually central to their image, but materially crucial to it.
The lesson of this anecdote is that the media engage a multitude of topics and sites and require multiple analytic approaches if they are to be understood, and that a purely media-centric approach, focused on, for example, the Olsens’ renowned TV program, will be as inadequate as a US-centric approach would be. A more comprehensive and varied view is required, one that takes into account processes of production, distribution, text, and use, including how the media reproduce sociocultural norms, values, identities, and ideologies on a regional, national, and global scale. This necessitates consideration of the conditions that underpin the Olsens’ world in order to draw attention to a dialectical struggle between their privileged, if sometimes traumatic, lives, which are routinely subject to public scrutiny, and the infinitely harsher, equally gendered, frequently invisible labor processes on which their affluence depends.
In keeping with that brief exemplar, understanding the media requires studying them up, down, and sideways. That means researching production and distribution, cross-subsidy and monopoly profit, national and international public policy, press coverage, meaning, audience interpretation, and environmental impact, inter alia. We must tease out the manifold complexities of media production, signification, and reception.
For that reason, this book covers a very wide terrain, and in varied forms. Each chapter is animated, either overtly or implicitly, by three elements that are at play in the Olsen twins’ labor narrative:
Those three tendencies are heuristic rather than substantive divisions; theories use genres and articulate to places. But we find the distinction useful because it enables three key forms of media analysis:
This book also engages some perennial questions that have been posed by and of media studies:
To engage such questions, the issues we address include policy, production, genre, audience, and environment. Our goal is to acknowledge the equal importance and achievements of work done in political economy, textual analysis, and reception, the principal fields that address such matters. We do so in a way that seeks to enlarge those fields both conceptually and geographically. We believe in mixing methods – connecting numbers to meanings (for instance, tying ratings analysis to textual analysis) and acknowledging that meaning matters when it is linked to numbers (such as discerning both the deep meaning of specific texts and how representative they are). We think the distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methods that underpin much of US social science need to be compromised.
Each section of the volume (i) presents relevant topics for debate, poses new questions, and opens new horizons; (ii) contextualizes theories, methods, and traditions of intellectual reflection and empirical research, giving recognition both to mainstream and marginal, established, and emergent voices and norms; and (iii) explains the historical, social, economic, and political conditions that have contributed to the inception, support, and decline of approaches, where appropriate. Our intellectual agenda is thematically internationalist, politically socialist, and methodologically promiscuous. It is equally influenced by feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and social movements. We seek a blend of market and non-market principles that derive from the French Revolutionary cry, liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, solidarity) and the Argentine left’s contemporary version, ser ciudadano, tener trabajo, y ser alfabetizado (citizenship, employment, and literacy). The first category concerns political rights; the second, material interests; and the third, cultural representation.
We are not the first to tread this path. One of our inspirations is Clare of Assisi, a teen runaway from the thirteenth century originally named Chiara Offreduccio. The first Franciscan nun, she is also the patron saint of television, having been canonized in 1957 for her prescient bedridden vision of images from a midnight mass cast upon a wall. Seven hundred years later, Pius XII decreed this to have been the first TV broadcast (Pius XII, 1958).3 We are indebted to her example as the earliest media celebrity and theorist – a rare combination.
The need for most academic books to be written in English militates against complex cultural analysis. We originally planned to mitigate this limitation, at least in terms of research, by writing this volume with South Asian and Chinese co-authors, but that did not eventuate. As veterans of such arrangements will know, many collaborations do not take root as first envisaged, and tend to develop organically. Our linguistic limitations as scholars therefore condition much of what follows. We are most fluent in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish, which immediately limits the purview of a book called Global Media Studies. That said, we hope that our years spent living and working across the world, and learning from others who think, listen, watch, speak, write, read, and live differently, will make the project worth our readers’ time.
Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the state of play. We begin with media studies – where it came from, what it does, and what it ought to do. This is followed by a contextualization of such work inside the shift in discourse from international communication to global media. Chapters 3 and 4 look at institutional methods for comprehending the global media. After explicating and illustrating how to undertake political economy, we examine global policymaking and rule. Chapters 5 and 6 look in depth at mobile telephony and the impact of the US media – two virtually universal phenomena. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to textual analysis, once more offering both metacritical and applied commentary and exemplification, with a heightened focus on reality television. We conclude with an investigation of audiences.
This book has been a long time in the making. Other projects and life situations have intervened, as sometimes happens. But our collaboration has been stimulating and even fun, and we hope you enjoy its result. Many people around the world have contributed in ways small and big to our understanding of the global life of media. We especially wish to thank our collaborators and friends Richard Maxwell and Bill Grantham, whose insights and prose make them co-authors of chapters 5 and 6 respectively.