Political Economy

In our first week we looked at Political Economy, we covered and defined the term ‘’Political Economy’ ‘in our workshop – “The study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption

of resources” (Vincent Mosco (1996) ). We briefly looked at who owns Facebook and how many companies Google owns- it was much more than I personally expected. Now in the media industry there are a few large corporations like Google who control most of the media which we consume- they control what the public can and can’t see and decide on what content is and isn’t appropriate to the public.

These weeks set reading was Chapter 5 from Long & Wall’s textbook – it was based on study of the business of media, this chapter discussed three different researchers and their different approaches. Golding and Murdock are covering the equality and justice of the media as well as the equality and ownership (Long and Wall 2012:173). These two researchers are looking at how these things have an affect on the public and political economy. The third researcher was Moscos idea is slightly different as he is looking at the power and social relations. He emphasises the importance of knowing the way in which media industries are formed and how they work to circulate the media products which they have produced, his approach covers who pays for the media products which we consume daily and what is the reason doe them paying. His idea and approach was linking a bit more with what we discussed in the lecture- he focused on the monopoly of media corporations.

For my further reading I chose to read Walter Benjamin’s theory – he is referring to photography industry in political economy as another instance of capitalism. He belives this because of the way the images today are reproduced and are losing their ‘’aura’’ as a piece of art. As W.J.T Mitchell questions ‘Is photography a fine art or a mere industry’ (The Photography Reader, 1986)

“The photographer has to gain recognition as a creative artist in order for the law to find grounds for ownership of photographic images” (W.J.T Mitchell, 1986)

If I wanted to research this further I could study an audience and look at the way in which they would view work from a large photography company and does the fact that this image was created by a certain company would impact the way they view it. Another group of people could be viewing the image without knowing who produced it.

References:

Long, Paul and Wall, Tim (2012) Media Studies: Texts, Production, Context. London: Pearson

W.J.T Mitchell (1986) Benjamin and Political Economy of the Photography in Wells, L (ed.) (2003) The Photography Reader London: Routledge