Media Economics

Your uncle

Yes, your uncle. The one who blames the “media” for everything. “The media has destroyed this country,” he says emphatically. It is their fault. He knows it. He wants us to know it. He is convinced.

Perhaps, you probe him further. You ask, “What do you mean by the media? The news? Television or print? Or do you mean mainstream films or do you mean sitcoms or reality TV? Do you mean social media like Instagram and Tiktok? Or do you mean the algorithms curating all the apps?”

“All of it,” he responds. “It’s all part of it.”

Perhaps this conversation isn’t verbatim, nor is it necessarily indicative of who to blame in a changing world order. But I bring it up as a reference for the growing discontentment around who gets to shape the world we build, the realities we share and the socio-economic orders hanging on by a delicate thread.

YOUR UNCLE is a metaphor for a dangerous generalization that occurs in the clumping of many things into one — The media. An entity so large that it encompasses often opposing factions — workers and owners, designers and builders, audiences and well now, AI agents.

With urgency, I argue that the depletion of media literacy is as dire as the following question - Why on green earth are we in such a mess?

The arrow points to decision makers.

A quick glance

What is media? Or what are media? Objects? Systems? Products? People? Concepts? Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “medium is the message” in 1964’s edition of Understanding Media.⁴ He attempted to push definitions away from a sole examination of content or technology towards something that would force us to think “through” or "from the perspective of media” as a voyeur of social change. While there is much critique around his theorizing, he is seen as a foundational figure in the field of contemporary media studies.

If you do a google scholar search of the words media AND economics side by side, the results should stop you in your tracks. There isn’t a dearth of information as much as a scattered array of sources, definitions and contexts.

In Media Economics³ by Stuart Cunningham, Terry Flew and Adam Swift, we find an overview description of sub-sections like ownership, platform economics, media piracy, cultural power etc. but also a desire to distinguish between what we understand as neoclassical economics [supply, demand, market behaviour and humans being largely rational] + critical political economy [power, inequality, relations and systems].

Media Economics seems to also be shaped by players attempting to write directly to financial managers within industries. In The Economics and Financing of Media Companies⁶, scholar Robert G. Picard provides a broad overview of how media and economic sectors intersect with a managerial class. He covers everything from business concepts around worfklows, supply chain and value chains alongside financing systems that provide different types of funding at different developmental stages. In Chapter 3, he examines distribution and sales as a broad-based topic that highlights the complex intertwining of physical and digital sales products as technology has shifted the game.

In a University of California Press book published in 2024, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, media studies scholar Andrew DeWaard lays out six meanings of the term Derivate Media. The six meanings pull from legal, economic, textual and historical contexts, all aiming to elucidate the following —

“The old models of ownership and management are outdated; the flows of finance are now dominant, but remain in the shadows.”

From an economic perspective, DeWaard writes —

“Derivative media simply refers to the many financial processes that influence the industrial organization of film, television, and music: dividends, stock buybacks, securitization, market power, asset managers, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, and derivatives trading.”²

Another more contemporary text is the 3rd edition of Alan B. Albarran’s The Media Economy ⁵which takes both a macro and micro level approach to global media economies. He notes the tendency of media economics to focus on either geographical location or specific practices like financing, offering his work as a portrayal of globalization, technology, regulation and social change.

Creative Technology, XR and Algae

You might be wondering how any of of this related to Algae or creative experiments with technology, [Our working definition of XR]

If we go back to the first newsletter, I did some digging into solidarity economics.

Then, in the second, we looked into the history of sound technology when it was new in 1930s Hollywood.

Both revealed that when newness arrives, it hardly declares itself with great pomp and grandeur. Instead, it creeps up, having slowly but surely made itself known in smaller spaces.

Compounded over time, we get innovation.

While we sit at the forefront of rapidly developing technologies, we are also witnessing seismic changes in human consciousness, political global power and an inevitable shift in audience appetite. Perhaps now is a time, better than ever to change how media is or are financed, supported and distributed to people. In doing so, we may at least attempt to move where power and equity are stored for generations to come.

Creative experiments with technology need not limit creativity to a sole artistic kind, but also, to a legal, economic, environmental and social kind. In order to do that, vested interest at the intersection of creativity and technology must come from an interdisciplinary base. Dominated only by technologists, artists and/or investors, we lose an opportunity to seriously consider a new media system as a system that drives…well, everything. 

In an interview on the gtalks! radio x NEW INC show at dublab, founder, creative producer and researcher Tuerhong Guliniali and I discuss the development of Algae, what symbiosis can do and a ton of other things. Give it a listen.

But uncle’s not really listening though.

Sometimes I wonder if we sit in a mess of our making. “Our,” of course, being a generalized term referring to the human species and centuries of intersecting cycles, networks, empires, revolutions and so on. If history is written by the victors, then the simple exact of being “historical” isn’t enough.

Unc may not listen to your explanation of the invisible financial structures upholding his latest favourite TV show. Or how the SAG-AFTRA and writers’ strikes affect his daily viewing. He doesn’t necessarily have to.

What does have to happen is that those who chose to either build or develop new structures must ensure technology does not DEPLETE human creativity, but pushes it forward. We’re already in a mess. The point is to not repeat it.

Without at least an effort, I fear creative experiments with technology, no matter how good in and of themselves, will continue to widen the gap between those who get to decide the fate of a rapidly evolving world and those who must remain mute to survive.

AI, XR and other technologies could enable a world that asks us to relate to one another and the land with far more care.

Only then can we begin to call it “disruptive” or “innovative”

Know what I mean?

1  Critical Terms for Media Studies [A fantastic book to get a sense of the field]

2  Derivative Media [Published in 2024, this book provides a more contemporary context]

3  Media Economics 

4  Understanding Media [Marshall McLuhan’s seminal text]

5  The Media Economy

6  The Economics and Financing of Media Companies