What do you already know?

Running head: The Industrial production of meaning 1

The Industrial Production of Meaning 5

The industrial production of meaning

Chunho Yim

BISMCS 333A

2020/9/11

Western European bourgeoisie, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, came up with institutions that up to date cultural industries depend on. The institutions were formed to employ professional communicators and arrange them in managerial hierarchies and mechanistic labor routine to create meaning on an industrial scale. Media institutions used a standardized assembly line to develop routines and processes for producing meaning. In the nineteenth century, a new type of communication was created, the production of cheap paper and ink, the rotary printing and press typesetting machines that breed the essential technology for mass-produced newspapers. The industrial revolution also impacted different areas, such as improving road and railway transport, which led to the expansion of the newspapers' market.

In the twentieth century, the production of culture was industrialized in different institutional forms. They include; private-owned media, state-licensed media, public service broadcasting, state-subsidized media, communist media, and development media.

Privately- owned media.

This is the media institution that people are familiar with in their daily lives. The private-owned media got its roots in small presses generated by the emergent middles classes of north-west Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (smith 1979). The purpose of the media is to produce and sell audience attention and advertisers. Advertisers take advantage of advertising their products to reach the audiences (Smythe 1981).

State- licensed media

The state- licensing media is the oldest form of the public sector that is involved in the cultural industry and not entailed in the ownership of the media. In the nineteenth century, the European governments used state- licensing of newspapers, stamps duties, and censorship to regulate who to produce media (Smith 1979). Emerged middle classes came up with economies and trading networks like the printing press, which were considered meaningful. The state-licensing and censorship system effectually came to challenge the use of the old elites successfully.

Public service broadcasting

British Broadcasting Corporation came up with the public service broadcasting that is state-owned and funded corporations (Briggs 1961: 229-249). According to Reith, broadcasting is the best mode of educating people. These corporations are in the communist model that the government appoints a board responsible for a charter given by parliamentary legislation that offers independence from direct political interference.

State- subsidized media

These are the states that determined market-driven media systems skewed meaning-making by generating and serving audiences. They use state subsidies to secure that all demographics, classes, regions, and political viewpoints are adequately represented in the media. Parliaments appoint the board members responsible for allocating the available funds (Fox 1988).

Communist media

In 1929, communist media was developed by Lenin’s interpretation of Marxism. In the Lenin’s model, the workers discovered that the media requires to capture the state to advance worker interests in the face of capitalist exploitation and repression of workers. The communist media produce government intervention into the meaning-making process that creates enormous state-run systems (Bahro 1981).

Development elites and media

Elites strived to settle the legitimacy where privileged minority granted enormous power by the retiring colonial rulers; however, their states were underdeveloped. The people who run them were unskilled and inexperienced. The result was that these elites established authoritarian control to maintain stability in the new countries while the new post-colonial leaders looked fair within their own countries. The authoritarianism took the media's power to promote a unified national identity that led to the New World Information Order's formulation to control, manipulate, educate, manage, and develop their populations. (Masmoudi 1979).

In the twentieth century, meaning-making was institutionalized, and mass audiences were spread. Mass media have increased the reach of professional communicators and narrow the recipients who widen passive receivers and circulators of meaning made by others. Communicators construct techniques for assembling and addressing other people to reach the number of audiences they target. Since media technologies have developed, organizations have come up with the capacity to watch and monitoring their audiences. The audience is removed to listening to the organization participating in circulating content within the organizations' networks.

References

Carah, N. & Louw, E. (2015). The industrial production of meaning.  In N. Carah & E. Louw, Media and society: production, content, and participation. Sage publications, Ltd. (pp. 39-58)