MIGRAIN: Hesmondhalgh - The 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 creation, production, and distribution of products of a cultural or artistic nature.

2) What does Hesmondhalgh identify regarding the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable? Cultural industries are seen as adding value to society and individuals. As they are often focused on intellectual property, the cultural industries are knowledge-based and require a large number of people in their production, therefore as an industry, it will create employment and wealth.

3) Why do some media products offer ideologies that challenge capitalism or inequalities in society? Because this will enhance economic performance.

4) Look at page 2 of the factsheet. What are the problems that Hesmondhalgh identifies with regards to the cultural industries? Risky business, creativity verses commerce, high production cost and low production cost, 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 audience 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. 
 
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? I think the form of artistic expression plays an important role in society because it is important that the media can think about the audiences preferences and what they nay not like in order to stop the audience from turning against them. This is because the media can lose profit and money f this happens. 

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 use strategies like vertical/horizontal integration, creating formatted products, generating artificial scarcity, leveraging big data/marketing and relying on 'big hits' to cover failures.

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 believe that the creative minds behind media products deserve more credit and should get better rewarded for their work because it is a big achievement to create a media product that us a success within an audience, so therefore, it deserves credit and praise.

10) What is commodification? This is the process of turning something into something that can be bought, sold or even traded in a marketplace, often losing its original intrinsic or social value in the proces.

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? Yes because no everyone's opinion can be heard or taken into consideration and the media often do not treat diversity fairly.

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. Containment and commercialisation of the internet, concentration of ownership and cross media conglomerates and intensified risk aversion through formatting and repetition. These are the most important because these developments help improve diversity in the media the most including social diversity and genuine diversity.

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