Media convergence, intermedial relations and the role of ideology

 Discussion of media convergence has constituted one of the major discourses in European media environment during the last decade. As with any discourse, in a Foucaultian sense, convergence talk has also had real and material consequences: it has reformulated media economics and politics in the European Union, nation states and media companies, it has precipitated reorganisation of media companies and changed radically media environments in the name of digitalization. Thus, convergence has raised new kinds of challenges to media research,.

As Graham Murdock notes, different levels in media convergence can be defined.[i] Basically convergence deals with at least three areas: media technology, media forms and contents and media economics. Most discussions on convergence have been focused on technological changes, i.e. the so- called digital revolution of media.[ii] Another much discussed, but not so much researched area, has been the impact of convergence on media economics: merger of companies, concentration of ownership and converging markets of communication technology and media content.

Maybe the most important challenge that convergence has set for media research is that it emphasizes different kinds of intermedial relations. From a  technological perspective, digitalization makes it more and more important not to rigidly separate different media as almost all media content is now produced, edited, distributed and stored digitally. This does not mean that there still are not huge (historically constructed) differences in media institutions, audiences and responses – an aspect that seems to be quite often forgotten in the most enthusiastic techno-discourses. On the economical level, convergence can be seen in the increasingly horizontal concentration of media ownership, with the merging of  different media sectors as parts of the same huge media conglomerates and markets. As a result of economical convergence we have seen an  invasion of cross-media products and marketing as well as several reorganisations of media companies. From the consumers’ and the audiences’ point of view, convergence means that different media products are often linked to each other – not only intertextually but more profoundly and materially in production, distribution and marketing. Even the very same products are circulated in different forms of media.

The CMCE’s programme has therefore focused its research projects precisely on the different intermedial relationships. As part of team 1’s work, my research concentrates on the intermedial relation between commercial television and the popular press in Finland. I am studying both the impact of television on the content and aesthetics of the popular press’, and competition between the two media corporations – SanomaWSOY and Alma Media – which own the most popular afternoon papers (Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti) and two national commercial television channels (Nelonen and MTV3) in Finland. I am asking if there is difference in the way the popular press constructs publicity for the company’s own or the competitor’s television channels. My hypothesis is that television, as a major medium of 1990’s and as a result of technological convergence – has influenced both the content and the aesthetics of the popular press. I call this phenomenon ‘televisualization’ of the press, meaning a new kind of visual aesthetics (series of pictures, frame captures from television, television style graphics etc.) and an increase of coverage of issues and celebrities made popular by television..

As such, my research is linked to the political economy of mass communication as I propose that media research has overestimated technological convergence at the expense of economic convergence. But there have been many problems in using  Marxian political economy as a research method. As Peter Dahlgren puts it, political economy “raised issues [such] as those of ownership and its implications for journalism” but it “often left unclear the precise nature of the link between ownership and daily journalistic practises”.[iii] However, difficulties in finding causal relations between ownership and media production or content should not prevent research on these issues. On the contrary, in the current situation of converging media markets and practices we need to focus more precisely on economical and material circumstances formed by media ownership.[iv]

My suggestion is that we should rethink the concept of ideology in mass communication research. A more fluid concept of ideology might help us to understand a new kind of media environment with its fragmented audiences, tastes and meanings on one side and converging ownership, technology and media products on the other. It might also help us to understand the increasing tension between traditional news values and commercialization in journalist practices. It seems to me that ideology as a useful concept has been neglected in media research after the invasion of Gramsci’s hegemony theory (completing Marxian class theory and Alhusser’s idea of ideological state apparatuses) into academic writings during the late 1970’s and 1980’s.

It would be too easy to maintain that the commercial ideology of the market constitutes the present hegemonic ideology that also constructs the major discourse of media environment. As Foucault has shown, we should also seek the micro-level of power, and on that level – the practises of journalism, audience uses of media etc. – ideology is working on a more complex level than just posing us as subordinated consumer subjects. My point is, that to understand the micro-level of ideology we should think of it as a product or process that is constituted in different practises of journalism or media uses rather than as some (monolithic) power which supports leading groups’ interests or “inhales” us into certain subject positions. We should admit that not only does ideology construct subjects but also subjects construct ideology. Understanding ideology as a micro-level process, it may be possible to find the link between converging media ownership and daily journalistic practises – the very moments when competing ideologies of commercialism, reliable or “objective” news and personal, national or other group interests of journalists are confronted with each other in every day working practices.

Juha Herkman.

University of Tampere

Finland.