The political economies of media : the transformation of the global media industries / Dwayne Winseck, Dal Yong Jin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part One!! Introductory Essay -- The Political Economies of Media and the Transformation of the Global Media Industries / Dwayne Winseck, Carleton University -- Part Two!! -- From the Singular to the Plural: Theorizing the Digital and Networked Media Industries in the Twenty-First Century -- 1 Principal Ongoing Mutations of Cultural and Informational Industries / Bernand Miège, University Stendhal of Grenoble (France) -- 2 Media Ownership, Oligarchies, and Globalization: Media Concentration in South America / Guillermo Mastrini and Martín Becerra, University of Buenos Aires -- 3 Media as Creative Industries: Conglomeration and Globalization as Accumulation Strategies in an Age of Digital Media / Terry Flew, Queensland University of Technology -- 4 The Structure and Dynamics of Communications Business Networks in an Era of Convergence: Mapping the Global Networks of the Information Business / Amelia Arsenault, Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania -- Part Three!! -- The Conquest of Capital or Creative Gales of Destruction?-- 5 Hard Jobs in Hollywood: How Concentration in Distribution Affects the Production Side of the Media Entertainment Industry / Susan Christopherson, Cornell University -- 6 Financialization and the 2Crisis of the Media3: The Rise and Fall of (Some) Media Conglomerates in Canada / Dwayne Winseck, Carleton University -- 7 Deconvergence and Deconsolidation in the Global Media Industries: The Rise and Fall of (Some) Media Conglomerates / Dal Yong Jin, Simon Fraser University -- 8 Navigational Media: The Political Economy of Online Traffic / Elizabeth Van Couvering, Leicester University -- 9 The Contemporary World Wide Web: Social Medium or New Space of Accumulation? / Christian Fuchs, Uppsala University -- Part Four!! -- Communication, Conventions, and 2Crises3 -- 10 Running on Empty? The Uncertain Financial Futures of Public Service Media in the Contemporary Media Policy Environment / Peter A. Thompson, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand -- 11 Mediation, Financialization, and the Global Financial Crisis: An Inverted Political Economy Perspective / Aeron Davis, University of London -- 12 The Wizards of Oz: Peering Behind the Curtain on the Relationship Between Central Banks and the Business Media / Marc-André Pigeon, Carleton.

Some advocates and more than a few critics have misconstrued the political economy of media as a unified field of inquiry. The authors from this volume, by contrast, draw from a more diverse stream of the schools of thought signified by this tradition: Neoclassical Economics, Radical Media Political Economy, Schumpeterian Institutional Political Economy, and the Cultural Industries School. The book as a whole is as alert to developments in our main objects of analysis -- media institutions, technologies, markets, uses and society - as it is to changes in the world around us, including current trends in communication and media studies. The contributors show that digital media are disrupting entire media industries, but without erasing the past. Throughout, the impact of the unprecedented wave of media consolidation in the late-1990s and the financial crisis of the past few years loom large. The authors also suggest that there is no {u2019}supra logic{u2019} of {u2019}total system integration{u2019} that spans the network media, while insisting that one media sector is not the same as the next. Social networking activities often beg, pilfer and borrow {u2019}content{u2019} from {u2019}traditional media{u2019}, but it remains the case that Time Warner, Comcast, the BBC and News Corporation are very different creatures than Apple, Baidu, Facebook or Google. In other words, even in the age of convergence and remix culture, different media continue to display their own distinctive political economies, as the volume{u2019}s title -- The Political Economies of Media - signals.