Contradictions of Media Production and the Heterogeneity of Products

Abstract

This article confronts theoretical predictions, according to which innovations of information and communications technologies will spur the media production towards greater diversity and variety, with basic contradictions of the currently-prevailing media economy. In actuality, the promise of the ubiquity of media content and plurality of possible mediated experiences is contested by the constraints that the production side has to meet in order to divert the trend of the rate of profit to fall—to alleviate the consequences of the law, with which Marx explained the circular movement of the economic activity in general. Special attention is devoted to the contexts which especially information society theorists claim might bring diversity of supply; however, diversity is usually postponed by managerial strategies that choose between many possible equilibriums of supply and demand. Critical scholars have so far been regularly demonstrating that investments in technology most often bring about increases in distribution capacities instead of fulfilling the promise to increase diversity of content and media, whereas the author of this article uses the classical tools and the basic laws of Marxian analysis to explain the internal drives and the contradictory forces that propel media supply towards the decisions to preserve the existing range of products and not to risk changing it.

KEYWORDS:

• media
• innovations
• tendency of the rate of profit to fall
• diversity
• contradictions
• creative labour

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Moseley valuated only the productive capital and demonstrated that in the USA the organic composition of capital increased by 28 per cent between the years 1947 and 1976, whereas the rate of profit fell 15 per cent, from 0.40 to 0.34 (Moseley 1988, 300–301). Cockshott, Cottrell, and Michaelson (1995) demonstrated for the years from 1855 to 1989 that in the United Kingdom the rate of profit was heavily conditioned by the active capital accumulation; that is, by the investment activity. In recession, the rate of average profits is actually falling, which can be observed in contemporary crisis. Kliman analysed property incomes for the US domestic corporations (data from input–output tables of the US Department of Bureau of Economic Analysis), showing that from 1929 to 1939 the rate regained 78 per cent, which it lost in the Great recession; profits experienced a steep rise during the Second World War, and at the end of 1950s a long decline started that lasted until the beginning of 1980s, when the profitability drastically declined and has not recovered ever since—from 1982 to 2001 the rate fell by 26.9 per cent, followed by a short but steep recovery trend (the rate was equal to that in the 1980s) that lasted until 2006, when a steep fall occurred (Kliman 2011, 75–79). During that time the organic composition of capital rose by an annual rate of 1.5 per cent on average (Kliman 2011, 133).

2. Economies of scale apply if the relative rise of the output is higher than the relative increase of all inputs. Economies of scope exist when it is cheaper to produce two or more products in one company than in two or more companies.

Additional information

Peter Sekloča (corresponding author) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia.