The Willing Commodity

Before embarking on  close scrutiny of the relationship between any particular media technology and society we need to pause and consider the audience. When you are watching a movie you rarely think of yourself in the abstract.  You rarely consider yourself to be  a "face in the crowd", an anonymous member of a commodity that is recruited by the movies producers'.  Perhaps your relationship with a movie is an emotional one.  If your sentiments about say, The Pirates of the Caribbean, extends beyond an appreciation of the story it might be to compare notes with your buddies.  There are other ways of thinking about audiences.

There is another, more abstract way, of thinking about the audience.  This is a commodity, something that is bought and sold.  Sugar, oil, coffee are examples of commodities.  Their value changes according to the laws of supply and demand.  It requires and act of imagination to see yourself as something traded.  One theorist who conceived of the audience as a commodity was Dallas W.Smythe.  Read the summary of Smythe's ideas on the blog Dallas W. Smythe – Audience Commodity and its work

Dallas W.Smythe

Points to consider from this article are that

1.  viewing a movie or reading a book is work
2. in capitalist economics leisure time does not really exist
3. audience members are reduced to "mere consumers"

So in Smythe's view stories, events and indeed pleasure itself are made available as transactions rather than gifts.

Celluloid, Wax,Pirates and Bits

What did people do before there was television? Did your great grandfather forlornly walk the streets until someone invented the movies?  We cannot avoid the products and practices of media corporations.  But there was a time before electronic media became so pervasive.  What we take to be commonplace is but the latest development in a rather choppy line of inventors, artists, megalomaniacs and indeed pirates.

This series of posts will identify some of the major developments in Mass Media from the late 19th Century to the end of the 20th Century.We will look at the origins of Cinema (Celluloid), the transformation of popular music (Wax ) the rise and fall of Pirate Radio and the emergence of the digital era.  Every major change in Media has alongside it an enabling technology.  What is not always so clear are the shifting social conditions that connected Medium, Technology and Expression.  It is the links between these that this blog will explore.