Transcript PPNotes on Smythe and Babe

Ain’t Nothing But a Free Lunch,
Baby!
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Dallas Smythe
Came to radical p-e slowly – life
experiences (Depression, work at US
Dept. of Labor-tracking media industry,
labor, trade unions)
Became first economist at FCC
1948-Inst. Of Communication Research at
Univ Illinois (first PhD program in Comm).
Smythe’s early academic
research
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Need for public broadcasting
Political economy of the electronic media
Audience commodity
With McCarthyism in US, Smythe returned
to native CA and set up program in comm.
At U Regina
1974 SFU>worked with Melody, pub’d
Dependency Road, died in 1992
Smythe contrasted admin vs
critical comm. research
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Criticizes administrative research in US
context:
Research emanating from government
propaganda activities in WWI and II
Rise of market research
Asks: why don’t they consider critique of
advertising?
Smythe is concerned with
audience commodity
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Consciousness Industry
Free lunch
The process by which we become
consumers
How are audiences constructed by the
mass media?
Smythe challenges
communication scholars
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Asks why haven’t western Marxist
analyses considered mass communication
a valuable object of critique?
We need to ask: what economic function
for capital do mass media serve?
A look at capitalist modes of production
and of ideology
Blindspot…
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In Marxist studies: mass media of
communication and PR, marketing, public
opinion, and advertising industries
Rich stuff to tackle: consumer
consciousness, leisure, commodity
fetishism, work, alienation
He said this in 1977. Do you think this is
still the case?
Smythe contends that…
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Audiences comprise the commodity form
of mass-produced, advertiser-supported
communications under monopoly
capitalism
Calls for a Marxist theory of advertising
and of branded commodities
And there’s a huge industry here:
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The media companies themselves
The advertisers that are attracted to the
specific media
The groups that track the impact of the
advertising on the media-watchers
Babe
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Looks at p-e of communication in light of a
critique of mainstream economics
Neoclassical economics origins – from Adam
Smith to Milton Friedman
Human relations subsumed as commodity
exchange relations, marketplace as pure
competition
Citizen vs. consumer debates, E-commerce vs.
e-commons debates
Administrative Communication
Research
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Dewey-Schramm-Lasswell
Shannon & Weaver
Lazerfeld-Hovland
(see Everett Rogers’ History of
Communication Studies for an
overview)…
Admin research…
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Positivist, empirical, individualistic
Surveys, polling
Quantitative methodology
Focus on attitudinal and behavioral
change
Making advertising more effective
Media effects
Theorizing political economy, a la
Babe
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Distinguish neoclassical economists from
political economists
PE are dissidents from neoclassical regimes,
concerned with power, change and inequities
They seek to address the “impact of laws,
regulation, political influence, and governmental
processes on economic activity, and conversely
the manner and degree whereby economic
activity & financial matters impinge upon
legislation & legislative processes”
Looking at the economy as a
system of power
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What are some examples of this?
Consider current Canadian
communication policy…
Neoliberalism
Harris cutbacks in education….
Clement and Williams definition
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“Study of processes whereby social
change is located in the historical
interaction of the economic, political,
cultural, and ideological moments of social
life, with the dynamic rooted in socioeconomic conflict” (my emphasis)
How does this compare with Mosco’s
entry points?
Liberal political economy (Babe)
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Neoclassical
Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
Concern with self-love- Interested in selfinterested & materialistic motives
Wealth of nations accumulated with greed and
self-interest of individuals in a competitive
marketplace
(for a contemporary criticism see Linda
McQuaig’s All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the
New Capitalism)
Marxist political economy (Babe)
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Critique of market system
Concern with worker alienation and
exploitation
Critique of neoclassical position for not
addressing social change
Paul Baran & Paul Sweezy – concern with
class analysis – Monthly Review
Institutional PE (Babe)
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Veblen, Innis, John Kenneth Galbraith
Concern with organizational structure of
society
Economies evolve – they look at technical
infrastructure – military-industrial complex
and corporate technostructure
Mythologies (Babe)
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Market as mythology
Technology – machine as mythology
Evolution or march of time as mythology
These Three M’s exemplify contemporary
neoconservatism