lecture 4: technology and economy

cultural studies

technological determinism, social determinism, economic reductionism

technology studies

• emphasis on the development of the tools/systems (to produce, store, distribute meaning) rather than on the production of meaning

technological determinism

• type 1: technological determinism, faith in progress and utopianism

  • science and technology changing the world, enabling communication when none had been possible before, storing and retrieving information in increasingly paperless spaces…

  • stage theories of society: printing (origins modern, industrial society) and ICT (origins post-modern, post-industrial society)

  • ICT changes society for the better: giving everyone chance to voice opinions, diluting hierarchy and power structures, making markets transparent

  • change = progress

• type 2: media technologies as harful and a threat to society, often children and young people

  • luddism - sabotage as form protest against the technological progress with textile machinery

  • way to think of causality that assumes that discrete causes have linear effects

    • discrete causes (self-contained): ignore that social forces that contribute to development, implementation, adaptation, incorporation of a technology

    • linear effects: ignores reverse causality and transactional forces

    • example: early telephony

      • development: in search new telegraphic system

      • implementation: cable-radio

      • adaptation: local interactive communication

      • incorporation: system for interpersonal comm.

social determinism

• technology not determining, but determined by variety of social intentions at each stage o ftechnology development

• in radical form, it denies anyy role of technology in social change and grants social institutions and social and pol. elites, absolute power over technology and thus power over society and social change

reductionism

• way of thinking about causality in which everything is expression of some essence

• economic reductionism: Marxist orthodoxy according to chich technology reflects economic inequalities/power relations

• largely dehumanized vision on technological change

an alternative: the social construction of technology

• emphasizes need social constructivist approach towards study of science and technology, both scientific and technological artefacts are to be understood as social constructs

• social construction of technology without denying that technology to certain extends influences society and social relations

• development of technology (and its meaning) as interactive process among technologists and social groups

• users as one of relevant social groups who play part in construction of a technology

the social construction of technology (by the media): case of gender

social shaping and advertising

• int echnology, advertising can play important role in shaping meaning that social group gives to an artifact

• machines and services don’t enter household naked, are packaged by purchaser and user with meaning (dreams, fantasies, hopes, anxieties): imaginaries of modern consumer societies

• individual use of technology highly discursive when people use technologies to generate distinctions or to support their identity construction

• role advertising: important locus for linking object to particular consumer segment (group os people with common characteristics)

gender and technology

• how do material objects acquire gendered meanings?

• technology: materializations of social discourse of gender

• producers develop and market products bearing in mind values and symbold they see as central to targeted consumer groups ( (un)consciously drawing on assumptions and discourses on gender)

case of the shaver

• gender script as analytical category

  • representations of gender relations and gender identities, that artifact’s designers have and then inscribe into materiality of that artifact

  • maintaining/reinforcing of prevailing gender definitions

  • script can’t determine bahviors of consumers, but they surely act invitingly and/or inhibitingly

the domestication of media technologies

cultural studies: centrality of users

• users most relevant social gorup in construction of a technology

• main point is how users make sense or give meaning to tehcnology

domestication: the concept

• at metaphorical level: when users in variety of environments are confronted wiht new technologies; strange/wild technologies have to be house-trained, have to be integrated into the structures, daily routines and values of users and their environments

domestication process (appropriation)

• acceptance: how entry of ICTs into personal space is managed

• objectification: how these technologies are physically located within personal environment

• incorporation: how thes technologies fitted into tome structures and routines

• conversion: how we display them to others, and by so doing giving messages about ourselves

appropriation as symbolic process

• different social groups can construct different meaning of a technology = interpretative flexibilty

• eventually, stabilization of a technology occurs and predominant meaning and use emerge

• technological development and use of technology are both responses to societal circumstances, dominant ideologies, and existing power relations

cultural studies vs political economy

• both concerned with social shaping of technology

• pol. economy entry point is social system, with preference for characteristics of economic system, cultural sutdies puts emphasis on how developers imagine and users make sense of technology

• pol. economy: media part of structuration process, are contributing to shaping environment by which they are being shaped. this process taes place in environments articulated in dominance. This doninance is base don economic inequeality at its origins

political economy

information society, post-industrial society…

today the tables are turning

• technological determinism

• ICT creating revolution in economy, different type society/power relations

rationalisation and expansion

• technology not revolutionary role in history, but evolution

• mechanisation → telegraphy

• automation → telephony

• informatisation? → internet

what is information society?

• post-industrial society, development in capitalist economy

• radical innovation

  • discontinuous, new economic activity

  • product innovation → new product

  • process innovation → new production techniques

  • system innovation → when it changes sector organisation

• technological revolution

  • introduction new technological paradigm

  • new ways of doing things that change the way the economic system is working profoundly

  • innovation change the way society is working

kondratief waves (long wave theory)

• period upheaval: new stuff, people buy stuff (technology consumerism)

  • at some point people have their technology stuff and stop buying it, saturation, but firsm put money into making technology and can’t just take that capital they invested back (stickyness of capital)

  • = contraction of the economy, downward turn

• period bad economy: entrepreneurs/smart people try to find new products, a way out of bad economy period

  • = new technology, economy gets better

media as industries

profits vs costs

• first interest media industries is maximising profits. In first place, companies pursue own interests

fundamental drivers

• not just revenue drives capitalist development; under conditions relative competition capacity of firms to increase profit margins is limited. ALternative is search for increased productivity through more efficient deployment of invested capital

• investment machinery and pressure on wages → declining purchasing power → economic downturn → crisis (link long wave theory)

fundamental tendencies

• one of most significant features of media organisations capitalist era is increasing presence and importance of large corporations in cultural production, monopolies, oligopolies, strategic allignment (divide market into segments, companies take different parts of society to focus on)

neo-classical economics: recapitulation

• neo-classical model based on assumption that economic equilibrium is possible in which resources are optimally allocated

• to reach equilibrium certain number of conditions needs to be fulfilled

• these are conditions under which perfect competition will arise

• perfect competition holds that no individual buyer or seller has negligible impact on market price (formal theroetical model, equally powerful competitors)

• perfect competition may not be possible because of conditions that need to be fullfilled

industrial economics

• material characteristics of the market

• neo-classical model of marginalist production si formak theoretical model

• industrial economics developed inr eaction to this, investigate real circumstances under which firms operate

• it recognises value of marginalist model, but focus more on remediation of market failure

markets

• theory, characteristic market —————— reality

• buyers and sellers are rational (know theit needs, can distinguish their needs and wants —— bounded rationality (decision makers intendedly rational, goal-oriented and adaptive, but sometimes fail because of human cognition and emotions

• buyers and sellers have accurate and complete market information ——- market transparancy is problematic, most markets information asymmetry; information has a cost, well documented strategy is strategic deception

• economic actors strive to profit maximisation (fosters innovation, no excess profits; competition will see that only normal profits are earned) ——— profit maximisation: firms should always try to maximise profits

• no single player can determine market price or market conditions ——- predatory pricing is pricing strategy firms use to deter other firms from engaging in competition, dumping is another strategy (selling product at price below production cost, or selling it on foreign market at lower price than domestic market)

• products are homogenous, substitutable products means opportunity for price and quality comparison ———— to avoid price competition, sellers might use product differentiation strategies so no easy comparison possible, diversification also marketing strategy, it’s attribution of some quality to a product, so it stands out from the pack (different products are offered

• production costs are proportionally supported by all consumers (all users equally share in cost of producing the product) ———— costs not always evenly distributed, some markets characterised by positive/negative externalities (example: pollution is negative externality. Buyers and sellers not paying for this cost, but someone else, the tax payer, is.)

• market entry and exit is costless so that when markets saturate, firms can easily move to another market ———— costless entry and exit = firms can easily extract their capital from one market in order to invest in other markets. However, firms often have sunk costs (costs that a firm has incurred and can’t be recovered

two basic concepts

• economies of scale: reduction in the per unit cost of production of a single as volume of production of that product increases → cost less because you produce more of it

• economies of scope: reduction average cost of production when two/more products are produced using the same production facilities → cost goes down because more products in same facilities

network effects

• customer lock in: strategy to make customers dependable on type of product by increasing exit costs for customers

• network externalities: important in comm. networks and social media. Network externalities means that benefit that user gets from a good changes when number of other users consuming same good changes. In info and comm. networks, amont of connection between users grows exponentially as amount of users grow, and also value of the network (advantage for large players in the market)

vertical integration

• supply chain: shows how product goes from raw material to the costumer

• value chain: indicate that as product moves along chain, value gets added

transaction costs

• comm. cost, contract cost, control cost

conclusion

• concentration tendencies

• theory of markets doesn’t work in reality

• market needs to be constructed

• monopolies, oligopolies, strategic alignments, technological lock-in