6.6 The Special Conditions of the Communication Context:

1. What is the product:

Hardware vs. software (information/entertainment/ideology) vs. consumer attention (TV sets, TV content or viewers?)

2. Challenge of reducing communication messages to products (communication as commodities):

• message/products that people want to buy
• message/products that make people feel good about buying message/products
• message/products that appear to be about communication as creativity, but are pre-packaged non-creative message units.

3. Meaning belongs to everyone. How do you stake out ownership of ideas/communication? Public resource vs. private ownership.

• problem of copyright.
• buy it/ buy limited access to it (pay-per-view society)

4. Conflict between freedom of expression/of the press and the commodification of communication. Tension between political goals of

democracy and market goals.

5. Communiciation: the perfect product or the perfect nightmare.

• Once the costs of production are paid the first time, you can make a million copies at little additional cost. Doesn’t wear out after each use.
• Market becomes the gatekeeper over what stories we tell about ourselves and our society and what stories don’t get told. Culture is the very stuff that holds our society together. What are the implications of looking only at its commercial value and not its cultural role. Cultural strip mining? (Lewis in Downing, pg. 149).