Cultural Industries: blog task

 1) What does the term 'Cultural Industries' actually refer to?

The term ‘cultural industry’ refers to the creation, production, and distribution of products of a cultural or artistic nature. Cultural industries include television and film production, publishing, music ,as well as crafts and design.

2) What does Hesmondhalgh identify regarding the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable?

Hesmondhalgh identifies that the societies in which the cultural industries are highly profitable tend to be societies that support the conditions where large companies, and their political allies, make money. These conditions being: constant demand for new products; minimal regulation outside of general competition law; relative  political and economic stability; workforces that are willing to work hard.

3) Why do some media products offer ideologies that challenge capitalism or inequalities in society?

Instead, texts tend to offer ideologies which challenge capitalism or the inequalities of gender and racism in society. This happens because the cultural industry companies need to continuously compete with each other to  secure audience members.

4) Look at page 2 of the factsheet. What are the problems that Hesmondhalgh identifies with regards to the cultural industries?

• Risky business

• Creativity versus commerce

• High production costs and low reproduction costs

• Semi-public goods; the need to create scarcity

5) Why are so many cultural industries a 'risky business' for the companies involved?

the cultural industry company is reliant on other cultural industry companies to make audiences 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 judgments 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 believe that it should be a mix of both as media products need to make profit in order to keep the business running and I believe that profit is a sign that the audience do you like what is being produced, and therefore it attracts many people leading to profit. should have an artistic element towards it as it’s quite important for them to be original. The app has to have some originality and some store qualities and features which come from artistic side to attract the customers/audience.

7) How do cultural industry companies minimise their risks and maximise their profits? (Clue: your work on Industries - Ownership and control will help here) 

The production process provides audiences with the media products they want. It needs to consider the audience’s desires and should provide the gratifications the audience expects.The promotion process researches

and identifies the target audience for the product, and uses advertising and marketing strategies to inform and persuade them of the value of the media product. The distribution process uses the most appropriate methods for

getting the product to the audience and making it as easy as possible for them to access it.

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 content creators should have more power, and they should be rewarded better by having a big, your name and paid more as there’s normally one person who takes the main credit and everyone knows their name however, in media it’s a bunch of people as a collective who produced a piece of work. However, most of them do not get credit for it, even though they work hard. This is quite unfair due to the fact that many people is hard work is getting disregarded and they are not earning as much as maybe they should be earning. So I do believe that they should be getting awarded more for that.

9) Listen and read the transcript to the opening 9 minutes of the Freakonomics podcast - No Hollywood Ending for the Visual-Effects Industry. Why has the visual effects industry suffered despite the huge budgets for most Hollywood movies?

on one movie, there was 1300 people working on making a digital tiger for a year. several hundred visual effects artist had protest outside the Oscars after our company went bankrupt, claiming the industry was being crushed by outside economic and political forces. While  are the box office was reaching new highs, the visual effects industry was struggling to keep their head over water. The state of the industry was beginning to lose artists which was what they were recognised for.

10) What is commodification? 

turning everything into something that can be bought or sold.

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?

I partially agree with this as I believe that there’s a lot of cases where magazines have received backlash as they made me have one ethnicity or gender and people may find it offensive as they would like to see a more diverse people. However, I do believe that magazines like vogue have started off where they were not very diverse, but I do believe that they’ve improved their magazine quite a lot and produce magazines about other cultures genders, and are quite careful what they produce to make sure that they are not receiving backlash for not having enough diversity. Chatting, absolute dog

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. 

Cultural products can now be shared across national borders. This increased the adaptation, reinvention and hybridity of genres and products. It also enables cultures to reaffirm their values, reducing the cultural influence of the USA.

Ownership and organisation of cultural industries is now much broader - the largest cultural companies now operate across a  range of cultural industries (for example, TV, publishing and film). 

Digitalisation, the internet and mobile phones have multiplied theways audience can gain access to cultural content. This has  made small scale production much easier for millions of people (think self-representation + prosumers).