Read different articles and answer all the questions

WEEK 6 (May 8 & 10) Advertising and Commercialization

• What role does advertising continue to play in our economy, society, and culture?
• How did we end up surrounded by advertising? (and constantly trying to avoid it?)
• What impact does advertising have on communication, institutions, and power?
• How should we understand advertising as a system or institution?
• How is the advertising system morphing in the digital age? Are we morphing along with it?

Our discussion of the advertising system starts with the market model of media and continues with rise of broadcasting. As we saw in the previous section, advertising-supported radio began in 1922 when AT&T experimented with “selling time” to advertisers on its NYC station, WEAF (Czitrom, p. 75). In his chapter about the history of radio, Czitrom draws a connection between advertising-supported radio and the rise of consumer culture broadly speaking: “The triumph of commercial broadcasting represented a substantial victory for the ideology of consumption in American life….Advertisers sold not merely products but a way of life: happiness through buying, personal fulfillment from the purchase” (pp. 76-77).

6. What does advertising-supported Internet look like? How important is advertising to the way the Internet works, and the ways we use it?

(1) Deborah Cohen. May 25, 2017. More Is More. The New York Review of Books. Vol. LXIV, No. 9. pp. 42-44. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/25/consume…

This article is a review of a book by Frank Trentmann called Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers.

7. What does Trentmann argue was important in this modern transformation of people into consumers?

8. What is his answer to the question Deborah Cohen poses: “How did we come to be such voracious, irrepressible consumers?”

(2) Joseph Turow. 2011. Introduction. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. Yale U Press, pp. 1-12.

9. What does Turow argue is the central driving force of the advertising industry of the 21st century?

10. What does this reading suggest about how advertising-supported media has changed since the broadcasting era? What is different about the advertising system in the digital age?

(3) Kate Kaye. May 9, 2016. You Are What You Play: Spotify Expands Data Use. Advertising Age. http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/spot…

11. What is Spotify’s business model, and what does it have to do with the advertising-supported Internet?

12. What does it mean for “music streaming behavior” to be “a new currently for advertisers”?

13. What is Spotify’s relationship to companies like Esurance?

14. What is the main benefit to users in paying for Spotify’s premium service?

WEEK 7 (May 15 & 17) The Political Economy of the Internet / INTERNET SEARCH

Robert McChesney. 2013. EXCERPT FROM Ch 5: The Internet and Capitalism II: The Empire of the Senseless? Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. The New Press, pp. 146-158.

In this excerpt from Ch 5 of Digital Disconnect, Robert McChesney continues the discussion of the advertising system in the digital age.

• How did developers of the Internet feel about potential commercial applications?
• What drove the commercialization of the Internet?
• How do people feel about the extent to which companies are collecting data about their online activities?
• What do Google’s critics suggest that it’s doing wrong in the business of Internet search?
• Why is the EU suing Google?
• What does European Union Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager suggest that Google is doing to warrant being sued by the EU?

WEEK 8 (May 22 & 24) Net Neutrality / Intellectual Property

(1) What Worked in the Fight for Net Neutrality. The Gettysburg Project on Civic Engagement. 2015.

21. What do the Net Neutrality advocates want?

22. What do the Internet Service Providers want?

23. Where does the Federal Communications Commission stand right now? How does that differ from the previous FCC, if at all?

(2) Gillian Doyle. 2013. Ch 7: Copyright. Understanding Media Economics. 2nd Ed. Sage, pp. 121-140.

24. What are the 2 entitlements that copyright recognizes for authors/creators?

WEEK 9 (May 29 & 31) The Entertainment and Culture Industries

Charles R. Acland. Consumer Electronics and the Building of an Entertainment Infrastructure. In Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (Eds.) Signal Traffic. U of Illinois Press, pp. 246-265.

In this article, Charles Acland is looking at how the consumer electronics business became more tightly integrated with the blockbuster entertainment industry in the digital age, after an initial period when it was assumed that the Internet and new digital devices were disrupting the established dominance of the Hollywood film and television industries. Although charting ownership structure remains important for understanding these industrial strategies and relationships, Acland takes another approach.

25. What does he turn his attention to instead?

Acland also expands the media industry concept of the “tentpole” film (a film that serves as financial and promotional centerpiece or franchise for a slate of releases), to introduce the concept of “technological tentpoles” (works that promote both cross-media products as well as “new generations of devices, platforms and hardware” p 247).

26. What is an example of a “technological tentpole”?

Guest Lecture: Prof. Shawna Kidman

27. What is the length of copyright?

28. Why are there so many superhero movies?

WEEK 10 The Journalism Crisis

Nicole S. Cohen. Entrepreneurial Journalism and the Precarious State of Media Work. The South Atlantic Quarterly. July 2015, pp 513-533.

29. What is meant by “entrepreneurial journalism”?

30. Why is Nichole Cohen skeptical of the move to promote “entrepreneurial journalism”?

31. What a kind of model of media production is promoted by characterizing journalists as entrepreneurs, according to Cohen?

32. In what ways is being a “freelance” journalist empowering, and in what ways is it disempowering?

Guest Lecture: Prof. Dan Hallin

33. What was the U.S. news media like in its “golden age”?

34. What were the “special market conditions” that created what appeared to be a “natural harmony” between privately owned media and the public interest?

35. What are the forces that have contributed to the current crisis in journalism?

36. What are some possible solutions?