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and Gricis Université du Québec à Montréal, within the ACI programme
« Les mutations des industries de la culture, de l’information et de la communication : bilan, cartographie, observation ».
| Panel 1 - Panel 2 - Panel 3 - Panel 4 - Panel 5 - Panel 6 - Panel 7 | |
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Panel 6 : The CMI : new approaches |
Chairman : Speakers : | |
«The children’s products: a playful transformation» Gilles Brougère Waiting for abstract «Cultural opposition to the dominant medias and cultural industries. The case of the United States» John Downing  >>> Download
the communicationA forthcoming book by veteran British media researcher Jeremy Tunstall is entitled The Media Were American: U.S. mass media in decline (Tunstall 2006). On the face of it, his data certainly show that for broadcasting and cinema, the global trade in these U.S. cultural products has retreated from a high point some thirty years ago, when he wrote an earlier study, The Media Are American (Tunstall 1977). One might argue in consequence that forms of opposition to the U.S. cultural industries outside the USA are of declining significance, and perhaps even inside as well. However, the trade in media formats, the continuing impact of the popular music industry, the transformations of Bollywood, advertising and public relations strategies, including political public relations, all suggest that if for the term “media” we substitute the term “culture,” the saga of U.S. “soft power” is a long way from over. Furthermore, inside the USA itself, the Bush regime’s ability to pursue its catastrophic course in West and Central Asia owes a great deal to the media and cultural industries for at least two reasons. The first is the conspicuous failure of U.S. news media to point out the emperor’s nakedness during the build-up to the war on Iraq. The second is their cumulative, longitudinal impact over generations. I cannot explore this second point at any length here, but I have argued in a forthcoming study (The Imperiled ‘American’) based on a conference presentation earlier this year at Paris 4, that the Hollywood Western and many films since the Western genre’s decline have encouraged Americans to see themselves as constantly in danger, and thus to be highly susceptible to government alarms and alerts (Downing 2006). The 9/11 massacres fiercely underlined this already entrenched cultural trope, as did the Pearl Harbor attack some sixty years before. The question of internal opposition within the USA to its media and cultural industries is therefore one of great moment, internally and externally, just as was the case during the South East Asia war thirty to forty years ago. I propose to focus here on three cases of internal opposition to these industries. The first two are from the right of the political spectrum, and consist of the Christian fundamentalist right’s organized opposition to the mainstream entertainment media industry, encompassing cinema, television, popular music and videogames, and the secular right’s organized opposition to the mainstream news media. The third case, to which I will devote rather more attention, is the Indymedia network, which is definitively on the left of the political spectrum and in a number of ways constitutes a neo-anarchist global media project. «The industrialization of training » Pierre Mœglin Waiting for abstract «Creativity : speeches and practices » Philipp Ronald Schlesinger |
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