Making Media 2019 Course Introduction

Editor's Notes

• #2: Making Media 01 introduction Readings: Making Media: Production, Practices, and Professions 13 Mark Deuze and Mirjam Prenger Media Industries: A Decade in Review 31 Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren Media Production Research and the Challenge of Normativity 45 David Lee and Anna Zoellner Access and Mistrust in Media Industries Research 61 Patrick Vonderau
• #3: what does it take to make it work?
• #4: some recent academic books on media production very few on what it is (really) like.
• #5: Media production considers issues at play within, across, and around the institutions and forces that create our media, our information, and our culture: management and economics, media policy, markets, consumers Media practices involve the various ways in which media professionals make media (and, importantly, how they ‘make it work’ in the media industries): innovation, working conditions, affective labour. Media professions are those more or less demarcated fields of work that make up professional life in the media industries, including (but not limited to): journalism, advertising, marketing communications, public relations, digital games, television, music and recording, and social media entertainment. Absent: FILM.
• #6: Mirjam Prenger: Historica Mirjam Prenger (Enschede, 1964) is coördinator van de masteropleiding journalistiek en media van de UvA, afstudeervariant research en redactie. Voordat ze naar de UvA kwam werkte ze lang bij de Volkskrant: de buitenlandredactie, de nieuwsdienst en de opiniepagina en Historisch Nieuwsblad. Ze publiceerde onder meer een studie over journalistieke onafhankelijkheid, Schuivende grenzen (2004), een bundel over zelfcensuur in de Nederlandse journalistiek, Een selectieve blik (2007), en – in samenwerking met Leendert van der Valk, Frank van Vree en Laura van der Wal – het onderzoek Gevaarlijk spel. De verhouding tussen pr & voorlichting en journalistiek (2011). Darren Carter: Vivid Image was set up by Darren Carter in 1992. The company has made animations, commercials, motion graphics for TV, video for events, documentaries, promo films for the Internet and commercial DVDs. With this background and experience, Vivid Image is effectively a one-stop address for a wide range of moving image projects. Here (www.vividimage.nl) is a small sample of the original work, highlighting different styles, concepts and solutions...all produced with a minimum amount of fuss, very sensible budgets and a lot of serious creative input. Freelancer for UNICEF, RTL4, Veronica, Frame Factory,
• #10: in recent decades there has been a marked shift from consumer electronics to information technology as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how media content gets produced, distributed, and experienced Automation, data, and algorithms play an increasing role in all forms of media work, acting as demand predictors as well as content creators
• #11: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/feb/02/what-2000-job-cuts-tell-us-the-free-market-kills-digital-journalism Big commercial online news providers are shedding staff in large numbers as social media firms swallow advertising revenues
• #12: the digital realm introduces a new media logic, one that seems oblivious to industrial-age schedules or more or less predictable production cycles, forcing organizations to aggressively replace ‘analogue’ production practices with ‘digital’ ones.
• #13: Toyota "Just-in-Time" means making "only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.” As a response to new media logic explained by Big Bang Theory
• #14: Toyota "Just-in-Time" means making "only what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed.” As a response to new media logic
• #15: “We realized we had a brand that filmmakers took great comfort in,” says Nick Smith, Pinewood’s commercial director, who oversees the international studios. “It soon became obvious through our research that if you took that brand and put it on a set of boxes (i.e., soundstages) somewhere else in the world, you’d gain great traction.” http://variety.com/2013/biz/features/production-services-help-filmmakers-around-the-world-1200501477/ http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/pinewood-toronto-studios-global-reach-1200501326/ Pinewood: The company, which owns and operates the U.K.’s two oldest, largest and most prestigious studio complexes, Pinewood and Shepperton, had watched on the sidelines in the 2000s as vendors and clients dispersed around the globe, chasing the latest production incentives. In the intervening four years, Pinewood has applied the model to another pre-existing studio — in Berlin — as well as to new facilities in Malaysia, the Dominican Republic and Atlanta. Films at Pinewood: The Mummy (1999) PG-13 | 124 min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy. ... Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) PG-13 | 121 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy. ... Doctor Strange (2016) ... Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) ... Eyes Wide Shut (1999) ... The Princess Bride (1987) ... Ex Machina (2014) ... Me Before You (2016)
• #16: Kraidy/Wasserman: First, they demonstrate that in some parts of the world, media industries are entangled in a political-economic-cultural nexus that is ever shifting and the consequences of which are often unintended. Second, new patterns of creative migration emerge within a region that shares a language and a transnational media industry Third, Third, the work of creative resistance, often created and disseminated under extremely difficult security conditions, gives a new meaning to the notion of precarity in creative labor, broadening its prevailing understanding as economic contingency to include torture-risking and death-defying creative work. More attention needs to be paid to how the dynamics of media globalization play out in various parts of the world, especially in the global South. Too often there is an implicit assumption that the changes that media industries in media-saturated countries of the North are undergoing have implications for the future of media—the imminent demise of newspapers or the political power of social media via smartphones, for example, are universally true. Yet the flows and contraflows of global media, and the shifts that media industries undergo as a result, require a more nuanced social reading informed by a study of the contextual factors and dynamics. For instance, while the demise of newspapers in the global North is widely believed to be merely a question of time, the newspaper industry is still vibrant in many regions in the South.
• #18: what is good work in media work? table from: David Hesmondhalgh & Sarah Baker, “Creative Labour” (2011: 39) Bantz the news factory: dilemma of productivity over quality? bad work but productive, good work but low sales?
• #20: collapsing units of analysis: system, social institutions, organizational, routines, individual, but not a flattening of hierarchies Overall, we see an ongoing convergence of different domains, sectors and disciplines within and across the creative industries, bringing new challenges for managing media firms, business models and production processes. convergence/blurring of boundaries: between roles, disciplines, genres Ik zou business models onder collapse schuiven: trad. modellen werken niet meer of nog maar deels, allerlei modellen lopen door elkaar heen, integratie van modellen etc; evt ook bij technology: the consumer as commodity/new commodity form. Business models (verschuivingen/disruptions in manieren om geld te verdienen door digitalisering, van leveren van content naar verdienen aan intermediair zijn, turning consumers into commodities) vgl Bilton’s disappearing product
• #21: Media products are becoming increasingly hybridized and are thus difficult to place into categories that can be isolated and therefore effectively managed. making/promoting/distributing 4c model: content and connectivity, creativity and commerce
• #22: transmedia storytelling and all the other opportunities for digital innovation and creative potential, cheaper and easy to use technologies, access to a truly global market
• #23: shift over the last twenty years from consumer electronics (CE) to information technology (IT) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how music and culture are mediated and experienced rise of new publishers: the frightful five: The business model of FAANG/frightful 5 or scary 6 incl Microsoft devalues media content and marginalises media producers. key: they figured out distribution as key to profitability: no responsibility for content nor for channels. challenge: how to get people to find and access your content…
• #25: more focus is placed on user-generated content and consumer engagement as well as digital (Big) data algorithms as demand predictor as well as content generator
• #26: House of Cards: When the program, a remake of a BBC miniseries, was up for purchase in 2011 with David Fincher and Kevin Spacey attached, the folks at Netflix simply looked at their massive stash of data. Subscribers who watched the original series, they found, were also likely to watch movies directed by David Fincher and enjoy ones that starred Kevin Spacey. Considering the material and the players involved, the company was sure that an audience was out there. As Jonathan Friedland, Netflix’s communications director, told Wired in November, "We know what people watch on Netflix and we’re able with a high degree of confidence to understand how big a likely audience is for a given show based on people’s viewing habits."
• #29: a general shift in power away from professional content creators to users and owners
• #30: a general shift in power away from professional content creators to users and owners
• #31: flexibility as key governing principle in media work: numerical: the creative use of workforce numbers to manage more effectively the organization functional: the division of the workforce in a multi-skilled core of employees and a periphery of freelance professionals temporal: the lack of dependable, well-organized (such as ‘9-to-5’ type) working schedules financial: individualized and performance-based systems of rewards and remunerations (instead of unform salaries).
• #32: Labor conditions (vesrchuivingen in work/life-balance, opkomst gig-economy, noodzaak voor permanente profilering op social media etc) also for those with steady jobs (see game industry) learning to live with uncertainty (vgl Bauman: ropewalking without a safety net)
• #34: 4C Model of Media Work see Lampel/Shamsie: artistic value vs mass entertainment; product differentiation vs innovation
• #35: freelancers have had to find creative and experimental ways to address work-related challenges outside official legal regimes, including visibility projects, organized campaigns, and collective organizations
• #36: #metoo #balancetonporc
• #37: research: we need to pay attention to how making it work is all about integrating the creative self with system-based creativity; that can be selling out, but is ALSO about finding a voice, a place of work-life balance, a way to be financially secure as well as pursuing creative/artistic expression. consider affective, emotional, immaterial and passionate labor Passion (als buffer/motor/zelfrechtvaardiging voor alles - inclusief uitbuiting cq laten uitbuiten) 'Black Panther' Wins Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the 2019 SAG Awards
• #39: passionate work: extreme emotions as part of making the work meaningful (suffering from exploitation, glass ceiling etc but “cannt believe I’m getting paid to do this”)
• #40: rise of entrepreneurship framed as individual solutions to systemic problems alternative conceptualization of e.: not as business savior, but as social support system.