Main objective of this course is to trace the development of the Cultural and Creative Industries as an idea and as concept and to identify the key points of changes within it in relations with contemporary digital connected world. Another important task of this course is to provide the deep understanding of the difference between cultural and symbolic meaning products (such as films, recorded music, book and periodicals, online media content etc) and other kind of goods. This course will help you to: - Identify main peculiarities of cultural and symbolic goods in their difference with other branches of economy in terms of production chain, risks, relationship between different stages of production. - Be able to analyze cultural products and symbolic goods from the organizational, economic, business model point of view. - Be able to invent new business models and analyze cultural products in terms of their productions risk. - Be able to analyze cultural policies and creative industries/clusters policies. Main prerequisite to this course is to be able to produce analytical texts in humanities. Normally the course addresses all students of master level interested in peculiarities of media and cultural economy and management. This course is strongly not recommended for those who: - Analyse any market or industry only in microeconomic terms (supply and demand, level of competitions etc). This course is not about market but about peculiarities of symbolic goods; - Try to interpret culture only in terms of marketing and management (i.e. culture is considered like a simple good to be sold to the consumer). This course considers it more broadly like a human agency to produce meanings of everyday life. That’s why cultural goods are different and can not be interpreted exclusively in terms of consuming and need more or less state support; - Try to interpret culture like pure “art” and consequently are absolutely not preoccupied by organizational aspect of its working. This course uses a large number of concepts coming from different fields of science: political economy of communications, cultural studies, sociology etc. Some aspects of the course are commented by known scholars in this field such as David Hesmondhalgh (University of Leeds), Phillipe Bouquillion (University Paris 13 Nord), Bernard Miege (Grenoble Alpes University).
Contemporary challenges in digital world
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From the course by National Research University Higher School of Economics
Cultural and creative industries
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From the lesson
Theory of cultural industries
This module gives an overview of main theories of cultural industries. We'll also talk about theories of creative industries and notion of creativity in general. You will get “research optics” to analyze cultural goods.
Meet the Instructors
Iliya KiriaProfessor
Department of Media
Now, we'll have deal with how
contemporary cultural industries are challenging in the digital world,
how they are evolving in digital world.
So, why the theory moves on finally?
In my opinion, there are three probably most important things and we will
speak about it during their fourth week of the course.
There are three basic transformation which we can observe.
First of all, we can find some kind of changes within a relationship,
with a triad: artist, publisher, consumer.
And such, changing are linked,
of course, with the new digital technologies,
which makes an impression among the first and the last
one that they don't need any intermediary and we can
see a proliferation of a particular practices such as
auto publication or the crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, et cetera.
So, the idea that artists don't need a publisher to be,
we'll say, consumed to be visible to consumer.
Second change, in my opinion,
resides in the idea that digital technology change
the scale of labor for creative or artistic teams and product concept.
So, the appearance of teams that
are far from the logics of industrial production, the little teams,
the so-called craft principles of teams working on their little internet sites,
for example, or little multimedia production et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, this is probably the second challenge.
And the third challenge is the model of
the flow which is one of two main editorial model is distorting.
The model of flow, it's the classical model of
the so-called advertising-based television.
And today, we have deal with
their either scheduled broadcasting or shifted broadcasting based on the catalog model,
which means that it implicates some changes in business models and in higher status quo,
say, in practices of their television and where their usual product consumption.
Of course, we can also speak about the changing the distribution of
time because media users are not passive anymore.
They are getting more and more involved into
the content production and this is also
one of the most important challenge which we call UGC,
user generated content, and we will speak about it in the fourth week of the course.
And consequently, it becomes more difficult to impose the media content to the consumers.
Then, media users are more actively grouping into
communities and exchanging the information by themselves.
We should decrease their agenda function of professional media,
and of course, we can observe some political implications of that.
And finally, we can speak about the functionality of
modern digital devices which is more and more
oriented toward the creation of media content by users themselves.
It means that the contemporary smartphones,
phones, tablet, PCs, et cetera,
et cetera, are more and more friendly to produce the content,
not only to consume it.
From this point of view,
the border between the consumer and the producer is distorting.
Another important thing is,
of course, the generation challenge.
We can see that younger generations
consume less the television and consume more the internet,
consume less the print media and consume more the internet.
But of course, we can observe some kind of intercountry differences.
But the general trend is that older ages are consuming
television much more than the younger generations.
Then, another implication and
another shift is the problem of copyright and authorship or author's right.
Because as we know,
copyright or author's right are coming from the years when they're most important,
protected by copyright and authorship product was the printed one.
So, the physical product on the physical medium, on a paper,
and actually, how it works in
the immaterial electronic distribution of what these electronic documents?
In forms of electronic documents, of course.
Actually, it shifts some kind of changes within the small lift.
For example, the appearance of such models as
the creative commons or other open licenses et cetera, et cetera.
So, we can see that the number of content producers increases
significantly because the quality of copying is high and the cost price is low.
And, of course, the internet usage and
new information communication technologies change
social relationship between author, editor, and user.
And from this point of view,
the great challenge of copyright is
just the problem of the changes of relationship between author,
editor, and the user,
and we can find a lot of some tricky questions inside: how to interpret violation,
what is the fair use,
if I invited my friends to watch a DVD on which I bought in
a store by myself and I will invite a couple dozen of people,
which will consume the film I bought by myself,
is that fair use?
More or less. Especially, if I will not charge such people to pay me.
But how to interpret the way when I'm taking the legal copy of the film
and sharing it for my hundreds or thousands friends in Facebook or on social media?
It's much more difficult to interpret as a fair use.
Finally, how to distinguish fair use from abuse of copyright
if user is able to create anything right now.
Another thing is the user generated content, of course.
User generated content actually is one of the challenge for professional content,
of course, because people are consuming more and more UGC.
And UGC attracts more and more financing, of course,
because people sometimes don't want to pay a grassroots, big companies.
They prefer to pay a little group,
even craft production, et cetera.
And from this point of view,
we can speak about the intention of producers,
what we call it actually prosumers as a hybrid form
between producer and a consumer to create new content,
and it's the values of the function of mediators,
the values of the function of editor.
I don't need an editor if I would like to do a content by myself.
I will turn it.
I will film it on my tablet, PC,
or on my good quality camera inside my smartphone.
And then by myself,
I will mount it and will produce by myself the video.
I don't need any particular editor.
Then, I will place this video in YouTube and I can obtain
a quite high number of followers of people who will watch it.
So, it follows to the rise of self publishing,
crowd-producting, crowdfunding, self-producting of music, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, it's in a particular extent devaluate the function of this editor
as their entity articulating their artistic creation with a technical or a production.
Authors don't see any sense in publishing books in
paper format and prefer to use self-publishing platforms,
which means that they don't need any more or any kind of intermediary,
especially the publishing house.
Finally, it's not only the production,
it's not only user generated production.
It's also use it to distribute production,
what we call UDP, user distributed production.
So, if traditional media use UGC for programming,
for agenda setting, setting the priorities of news for example,
et cetera, but media produced by consumers use the content of
traditional media for setting individual agendas that users can share between them.
And from this point of view,
traditional media compete not only on
the media market but on the market of links and social networks.
And finally, it became a very important marketing technology,
who will be the first and who will obtain more shares,
more likes, which content will be more visible.
And of course, we can absorb some kind of ethical implications here,
because sometimes the most visible content it's not for sure the most important one,
or even it's not for sure,
the real one, it could be fake news.
And of course, it creates the new model of media consumption which we call share or pass.
So, we can find three models from this point of view of media consumption,
the push model, pull model, and pass model.
Push model, is the model where the user is
just turned on or tuned
on a particular channel of television or radio broadcasting, et cetera.
Pull model, is the model when users coming to the particular internet site,
and downloading particular content or for example,
coming to the store and buying a book.
And the third way of consuming is the pass,
instead of consume by myself,
I consume it and share it for my friends.
And this is the third we'll say,
model of media consumption in some way.
Another you think which drives
the theories of what is the rise aggregation?
Because as we can see aggregation becomes
a second model of information usage from agenda,
or fixed program of television for
example the classic traditional broadcasting television.
We are moving toward the catalog of information,
or aggregator of information.
This is the particular function of,
we'll say, coming with this era of aggregation,
which is driven in a great extent by the powerful devices,
by the high speed distribution channels such as telecommunication networks, et cetera.
So, from this point of view the main transformation
here is a full separation of information production from distribution channel.
Because, you can produce a television program,
and then this program can be distributed either by agenda, model,
program mode, or could be distributed by either way,
by I will say catalog aggregation et cetera.
And of course, the distribution and aggregation of
the content can be performed by many alternative ways,
and not only by those who are producing the content.
And this model is implemented in
the internet when news aggregators don't produce their own content,
by convey it from various production point.
So, it's what we call the another,
will say challenge in TV model is the model of access.
Model of access to the content is not new for television, radio,
and movie industries especially when we speak about for example, cable television,
which was paid for,
but actual technological trends such as growth of broadband capacities,
computational capacities of devices,
replace download model by streaming.
And this is very important,
this is the challenge,
because in this case such platforms as Google,
YouTube, and either apply
the classic ad-based model for distribution of non-flow media products.
And this model affects us.
Physically the file with the product remains on the cloud server of the media company.
So, of course under the influence of such aggregation market,
we can observe some kind of media business models which are evolving.
We can see that classic advertising model is
much more peculiar actually for social networks and search engines,
which are generally not media companies,
or are much more based on the IT technologies,
software technologies et cetera.
And the classic pay model when the media product is paid on by the consumer,
moves toward restricted platforms connected with devices,
such as iPad for example where you cannot buy any kind of content otherwise,
than by iTunes by a particular platform which is linked technically with a device.
Of course, and we will speak about it in the fourth week of the course.
Finally, the market distribution becomes separated from market of production,
because distribution could be performed in many ways.
And finally, of course their final question is,
how can we speak,
or really can we speak about the death of wide-range channels,
and proliferating of new channels?
Yes of course, the new channels are proliferating we can observe
a number of new and new television channels,
but at the same time can we really speak about
the massive shift of the audience to new channels and the death of wide-range.
Finally, we can't speak about it until now.
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