Strategy, Positioning And Projection In Digital Television: Channel Four And The Commercialization Of Public Service Broadcasting In The UK  

Oleh:

Born, Georgina

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Media, Culture & Society vol. 25 no. 6 (Nov. 2003), page 773-799.
Fulltext: 774MCS256.pdf (129.66KB)

Isi artikel

The article offers a critical evaluation of the current state of C4, one with wider implications for the hybrid model of PSB that it represents – that is, advertising-funded and externally regulated. It is a model that became influential in the 1990s.7 The analysis of C4 given here confirms some of the basic tenets of a political-economic approach to the contemporary media economy. In sum, intensified competition following the growth of multichannel television in the UK has apparently forced C4 to commercialize and diversify. But this reading, while true, under-represents the complexity of C4’s response. It is here that a discursive analysis is necessary and instructive, one that probes the collective thinking and the rhetorics employed by C4 executives in their struggle to keep the corporation buoyant. For there is agency, given the powerful structural forces; but it is an agency mediated by the discourses ascendant in the international broadcasting field. The strategic rationales offered by C4 executives for their DTV ventures provide a window onto just these prevailing discourses. They provide evidence too of the ‘virtualism’ identified by Carrier and Miller: the growing power in contemporary institutions of prescriptive economic abstractions that ‘seek to make the world conform to their virtual vision’ (1998: 2). One of the points of this article is to show, through the example of DTV, how this tendency is epitomized in the ICT industries, with their expansive technological logics and futurist projections.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali