Can Media Policy do Without "Culture" and "Society"?

Year 2001, Volume: 4(2) Issue: 8, 55 - 83, 07.07.2001

Rob Schaap

Abstract

The profound changes that have beset Australian communications policy over the course of the last thirty years are often thought to have had their genesis in the technological shake-up which became manifest in Austraia in the mid-1980s, in primarily local developments, are in the apparently, autonomous realms of 'discourse' (O'Regan, 1993; Cunningham & Turner, 1997; Spurgeon, 1997). I think such analyses constitute a focus on symptom rather than pathology, often imply a dangerously anti-humanist technological determinism, and distract us from a wider and more decisive context - that of the profound political economic changes which occurred in the United States in the 1970s. In fact it was there and then that the institutional power relations which were to mark the rest of the century, in America and Australia alike, were forged.

This paper is based on the suspicion that the twin ideologies of technological determinism and economism have so permeated the Australian debate that the po!icy community's many critics there effectively share the world view of the objects of their decision. In its postmodern turn, the left has constructed far itself a worldview thoroughly incapable of critiquing, never mind surmounting, the current orthodoxy. A consequence of this effective conflation of views is that categories like 'society' and 'culture', the ontological mainstays
of the nation-building ethos that sustained Australian media policy before the mid-1970s, are being effaced by a new hegemonic structure. Since the mid-70s, 'Media policy' has been left with ever less rationale and coherence.

Can Media Policy do Without "Culture" and "Society"?

Abstract

The profound changes that have beset Australian communications policy over the course of the last thirty years are often thought to have had their genesis in the technological shake-up which became manifest in Austraia in the mid-1980s, in primarily local developments, are in the apparently, autonomous realms of 'discourse' (O'Regan, 1993; Cunningham & Turner, 1997; Spurgeon, 1997). I think such analyses constitute a focus on symptom rather than pathology, often imply a dangerously anti-humanist technological determinism, and distract us from a wider and more decisive context - that of the profound political economic changes which occurred in the United States in the 1970s. In fact it was there and then that the institutional power relations which were to mark the rest of the century, in America and Australia alike, were forged.

This paper is based on the suspicion that the twin ideologies of technological determinism and economism have so permeated the Australian debate that the policy community's many critics there effectively share the world view of the objects of their decision. In its postmodern turn, the left has constructed far itself a worldview thoroughly incapable of critiquing, never mind surmounting, the current orthodoxy. A consequence of this effective conflation of views is that categories like 'society' and 'culture', the ontological mainstays
of the nation-building ethos that sustained Australian media policy before the mid-1970s, are being effaced by a new hegemonic structure. Since the mid-70s, 'Media policy' has been left with ever less rationale and coherence.

Keywords

culture and media, society and media policy, technological determinism and economism, Australian media

References

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• Arrow, Kenneth (1981). "The Economy." The Boston Globe. 21 May 1981.
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