Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe: Consequences of global convergence

By Richard Collins

An integrated analysis of the central issues in contemporary media policy. Chapters focus on technological change and its impact on cultural and political identities, the role of the cultural industries in the 'New Economy' and the impact of European integration on national institutions - public service broadcasting in particular. Because technological change in broadcasting has enabled us to open up media markets, the shape of media and of society has become more internationally-oriented. Indeed, modern international media has bought into question the very legitimacy of national communities and ideologies. And this is a phenomenon whose greatest impact has been in Europe. These studies address the future of public service broadcasting and the power of national regulators to shape trans-national media relationships. The author takes an empirical approach to analysis of these issues, exploring media and communication studies very much as a social science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781841508665

Richard Collins

Richard Collins is Visiting Professor at the LINK Centre; Visiting Professor at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne; and Professor of Media Studies at the Open University, United Kingdom.

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Media and Identity in Contemporary Europe

Consequences of Global Convergence

Richard Collins

First Published in Great Britain in Paperback in 2002 by

Intellect Books,PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in USA in 2002 by

Intellect Books, ISBS, 5824 N.E. Hassalo St, Portland, Oregon 97213-3644, USA

Copyright © 2002 Richard Collins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Electronic ISBN 1-84150-866-7 / ISBN 1-84150-044-5

Contents

1 Introduction

Europe

2 Challenges and Opportunities. Broadcasting in Multi-national States

3 Television, Identity and Citizenship in the European Union

4 Locked in a Mortal Embrace. The European Union Audiovisual Policies of the UK and France

Public Service Broadcasting

5 Public Service Broadcasting and Freedom

6 Two Types of Freedom. Broadcasting Organisation and Policy on both sides of the Atlantic

7 Public Service and the Media Economy. European Trends in the late 1990s

8 Supper with the Devil. A case study in public/private collaboration in broadcasting. The genesis of Eurosport

Policy and Regulation

9 Cultural Development in an Open Economy. Trading in Culture: the role of Language

10 Paradigm Regained? Where to in Media and Communications Regulation

11 Back to the Future. Digital Television and Convergence in the UK

Bibliography

The Author

Richard Collins, is Professor of Media Studies at the Open University. Formerly, he was Deputy Director and Head of Education at the British Film Institute. He has worked as a teacher and researcher in leading departments of media and communication studies: notably at the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster), Goldsmiths’ College University of London and at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His tenure of fellowships in Australia, Canada, South Africa and the USA, his experiences as research director of the media and communications programme at one of the UK’s leading ‘think tanks,’ the Institute for Public Policy Studies (IPPR), and as advisor on broadcasting and convergence issues to Don Cruickshank, when he was Director General of Telecommunications at Oftel, give these essays strongly international and practical policy perspectives.

Richard Collins’ books include: Culture Communication And National Identity: The Case Of Canadian Television. (1990b) University of Toronto Press. Toronto. p. 388. (Nominated for the Smiley Prize of the Canadian Political Science Association 1991, reprinted 1994). New Media, New Policies. [With Cristina Murroni]. (1996) Polity Press. Cambridge. p. 243. From Satellite to Single Market: The Europeanisation Of Television 1982–1992. (1998) LSE Books/Routledge. London. pp. xiv and 297.

1 Introduction

The social sciences have never given the media so much attention. In geography, sociology, economics, social psychology and in political science the media are increasingly taken as an object for study, not least because globalisation is conditional upon communication between locations, identities, trading partners and communities that were hitherto separate. By definition, if people and places are connected – as is axiomatic in globalisation – they are communicating. And if they are not communicating, they are not connected. Formerly, communication was slow, expensive and of limited practicability. New technologies have changed all this. To take two convenient examples: satellite communication has abolished the customary interdependence between cost and distance in communication; and the Internet is paradigmatic of both the convergence of hitherto distinct media and, increasingly, of the decoupling of duration and price of communication.

This is not to assert that location is unimportant and that everything and everyone is globalised, or to deny the robust continuing existence of the recognisably distinct and different media of radio, television, film, book and newspaper publishing, etc. But their importance has declined. Less and less does location define the limits of markets and possibilities of co-operative working relationships. The new media are growing faster than the old and reshaping the time honoured relationships, identities and structures of power that grew around the old media.

Hence the prominence of the two new buzzwords, ‘Globalisation’ and ‘Convergence.’ These terms signify the re-orientation and new foci of concern of contemporary social sciences and media studies. ‘Globalisation’ and ‘Convergence’ both signal themes of integration. Once, media studies could address separate media – film, television, telecommunications, the press – each in a distinct national context. Now, the national context has given way – through globalisation – to a wider international connectedness (in Europe, particularly interestingly, by Europeans’ choice to create a trans-national economic, political and – perhaps – cultural community) and the media themselves are increasingly hybridised, substitutable and interdependent – through convergence.

None of this is unprecedented. Steinberg (1969), for example, showed how rapidly printing changed the diffusion of knowledge across Europe and accelerated the integration of markets (not least in printed books themselves). Marvin (1988) develops this theme in her well-named ‘When old technologies were new.’ But, putatively at least, the scale and pace of change has itself changed. That is why the phenomena and processes that we identify as ‘Globalisation’ and ‘Convergence’ demand attention. But how much? ‘How much?’ is the question that lies behind much of what follows.

‘Convergence’ and ‘Globalisation’ are more than contingently connected. For media and communication are central to globalisation for two reasons.

First, there can be no division of labour without communication between those who divide their labour. And the integration and interdependence of economies, which constitute one of the principle themes of globalisation, is a re-structuring of established patterns of labour division. The cost, functionality and accessibility of means to produce, store, process, transmit and receive information have all changed dramatically. ‘Moore’s Law,’ (which asserts that the price of a given quantity of computing power halves every eighteen months), is paradigmatic of these changes. Now it’s cheaper and easier to communicate globally than ever before. Indeed, new communication technologies have decoupled price and distance. Globalisation is intimately interdependent on global communication systems. As communicative networks grow, their utility increases exponentially as ‘Metcalfe’s law’ states (see Chapter 11 for a discussion of ‘Metcalfe’s Law’). The growth of global systems of communicative interconnection is thus self-reinforcing.

Second, information has itself become an increasingly important traded commodity – the media and its contents are themselves traded internationally more and more. They constitute one of the components of the increasingly ‘weightless’ international economy (see, inter alia, Coyle, 1997 and Quah, 1996). Here too there is a fundamental ‘law’ at work. Because information is non-rival, it is not exhausted by consumption (you read this work and it remains available for others to read), development of cheap and effective reprographic technologies (technological change again), tends to extend and integrate markets across time and space. This trend is characteristic of the ‘weightless’ economy but is more marked for information than for other elements of the ‘weightless’ economy.

Again, there is nothing particularly new about this. Writing is a technique and printing a technology which permit partial realisation of this intrinsic potentiality of information. Through these technologies information is captured, recorded and made available for consumption through time. As written and, a fortiori, printed works were transported from place to place so the same information was made available for consumption through space. But what is new is the acceleration and intensification of the realisation of this inherent potentiality of the information economy. Electronic communication – telegraphy, telephony, radio, television and the contemporary convergence of all these formerly distinct media of communication into interactive multimedia – have further contributed to realisation of the inherent potentiality of information to be consumed by many across time and space at zero marginal cost.

But though these integrative trends are so salient – both in the academic literature of media and social sciences and in the daily experience of all of us – they are realised and experienced in highly situated ways. The past lies heavily – but weighs differently – everywhere. Realisation of the potential of modern media and communications to call into existence a seamless, integrated, global communicative community has been, and continues to be, conditional not only on technological change but also on the context, historical, political and cultural, in which media and communication operate. It is not only that the past shapes and situates the present but also the extent to which the future is realisable.

My evaluations of policies, institutions and informing ideologies centre on two themes: the role and future of one of the most distinctive features of media and communications in Europe, and of what Louis Hartz (1964) called ‘the daughters of Europe’ – public service broadcasting (Chapters 5–8). And on the power and limits of the nascent integrative regulatory paradigm for media and communications in the era of convergence – competition policy (Chapters 10 and 11). In these there is a close interdependence of themes. I argue for both public service and the market. The striking consequences of the surprisingly recent introduction of competition in European broadcasting has, overall, benefitted European consumers of broadcasting services. But, I argue, a ‘one size fits all’ roll-out of competition based policy and regulation is not sufficient to secure the public’s interests.

Because the economics of information are different from those of other goods and services, different institutional arrangements are required to realise these interests. Public Service Broadcasting potentially (and to some significant extent actually) provides a good solution to the problems of securing the public interest in broadcasting (and in the new media post-convergence). The question is how to balance and reconcile the different institutional structures and traditions represented by competition policy and authorities on one hand and public service broadcasters and broadcasting on the other. I attempt to address these conceptual problems in Chapters 5, 6, 7, 10 and 11 and offer Chapter 8 as an account of an intriguing instance of the messy, concrete, empirical entanglement of principles and institutions that academic discourse customarily rigorously distinguishes.

The concerns which I’ve outlined above are explored in three principle domains. First, the relationship between media and communications and between multi-national and multi-linguistic societies – notably the European Union but also Canada. These have been the two chief instances on which I’ve reflected and examples from these inform empirically much of what follows. Second, the contemporary position of public service broadcasting in a radically changed policy and institutional environment. And third, the regulatory and policy consequences of ‘convergence.’ Though each chapter foregrounds one of these areas of concern, each echoes through other chapters. For each chapter, distinctive though its focus may be, addresses the inescapable contemporary connectedness of what hitherto was once comfortably separate.

A seamless, integrated, global communicative community? How so? If (big if!) the history of media and communications is a history of technological and institutional change directed to the realisation of an intrinsic potentiality in symbolic systems to offer instantaneous communication to any and all through time and space at zero marginal cost, then a seamless, integrated, global communicative community is the end point, the telos, of that history.

If assent can be given to this teleological historical explanation which asserts, at least for heuristic purposes, that technology is no longer a major constraint then it follows that other factors chiefly shape and constrain the realisation of this potentiality. Technological change has been sufficiently important for there to be widespread, if not universal, acknowledgement of globalisation. The ‘removal’ of that variable from the equation throws into sharper view, and greater relative importance, the ‘other factors’ – economic, institutional/political and cultural/linguistic – which constrain and shape the situated and incomplete realisation of the potential for a seamless, integrated, global communicative community.

Time for an obvious caveat. Doubtless, future writers will regard what now seems to be the leading edge of media and communication technology in the year 2000 as impossibly constraining. Media history is full of accounts of the gleeful optimism that attended the introduction of old technologies when they were new. See, for example, some of the comments at the birth of the telephone in de Sola Poole, 1983a.

What of these ‘other factors’? The economic is an obvious one. The exploration of the distinctive economic characteristics of information constitutes an underlying theme throughout these essays (see, in particular, Chapters 7 and 9). But I should acknowledge something of also what’s not here. In these studies, I pay scant attention to the problem of the (half) empty glass. Though I recognise (who could not?) that different parts of the world and different classes within any particular society dispose of very different levels of resources, my interest has rather been focused on the societies, and the kinds of societies, in which I’ve lived. My examples, and the problems which I’ve addressed, are drawn from the developed world (and mostly from the North Atlantic world). Where I allow the North Atlantic ‘have nots’ to enter these essays it’s mostly under the comforting rubric of reductions in communicative inequality. I have preferred to take comfort in the affordability of the ‘quality’ press, the striking increases in penetration of telephony to the home and the rapid diffusion of Internet connectivity rather than reflect on the information poor and increased social stratification around cleavages marked by access to media and communications. I tend to look, in short, at the half full rather than half empty glass. See my discussions of the international context for audio-visual production in Canada (Chapter 9) as a case in point.

These essays are rooted in a political economy approach to the media. But, as the foregoing remarks about preferring to see half full rather than half empty glasses suggests, my kind of political economy is not the usual kind. Most often, a political economy approach is seen to be synonymous with Marxism. Rather as the Frankfurt School sailed under the colours of ‘Critical Theory’ instead of Marxism so too is the political economy school of media studies seen as Marxism conveniently conforming to an acceptable academic dress code. It would be foolish to deny the importance of Marxism in my own formation. Evidence of my adherence to one of its many quixotic forms over much of the seventies and eighties is on the public record. And these essays continue, I think, to testify to my sense of the importance of this tradition. It’s one well worth arguing with. But the political economy of the media is more important and more interesting than an approach to the subject simply informed by Marxism could be. It’s not only Marxists who believe that resources are scarce and that the allocation and use of these resources both express and reproduce social power. It is not only left-inclined political economists who see media and communications as a locus of power of unprecedented importance – one which requires the expression of social power through politics and law to countervail commercial power – and vice versa!

Clearly, as the last provocative sentence suggests, my work bears the marks of its formation in more than one matrix – of Marxism certainly but no less clearly in the works of the ‘right’: in Daniel Bell (1976) and the Peacock Report (Peacock 1986) for example. My pluralism goes with the deep habits of a more generally sceptical and empirical turn of mind.

Accordingly, the ‘other factors’ that are most salient in these essays are ones which, I believe, have often been neglected in the mainstream of media studies political economy: the contradictory forces of language and culture, institutions and agency. My discussions of language and culture below are framed in the context of the media and communications of the multi-national, and multi-linguistic, ‘states’ of Canada and the European Union. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 9 are particularly relevant. I reach two major conclusions. First, language is of primary economic importance as a factor that shapes the economies of global media and communications. In the ‘weightless’ economy of a decoupling of the price of communication from time and distance of communication, it is language (and culture) which limit the integration of media and other information markets. But, although integration and globalisation are constrained by this factor, nonetheless, globalisation is taking place, not least because there are very high returns to economies of scale in media businesses because of the remarkable disparity (also a phenomenon that is conditional on technological change) between first and second and subsequent copy costs in this domain. And in this process of integration of markets, there are very powerful economic advantages for English speaking producers. Second, shared language and culture are rather less important for the cohesion of political communities than the dominant frame of reference, rooted in nationalist assumptions about the necessary congruence of polity and culture, has customarily supposed. Indeed, the media are rather less important than media studies has customarily proposed.

A pendant discussion follows from the question that obviously arises if these heterodox conclusions are accepted. If that is so, why then is so much importance given in policy and regulation to trying to achieve the putatively necessary congruence between culture (and language) and polity? I find an answer in history (and economic interest) rooting my explanation of the differences in French and British European policy (Chapter 4) in the formation and national ideologies of these two major societies and cases in point. Language and culture are important and so too are institution and agency. As will by now be clear, I’m not a technological or economic determinist. What people do, and what they do through political institutions, matters very much. Hence the importance of media regulation, the self conscious attempt of political communities to shape their communicative fates. Even in an era of globalisation this counts for a lot (but not as much, as I show in Chapter 11, as regulators and policy makers customarily wish).

We move, therefore, out of political economy and into media policy. Policy studies are fuzzily defined but I take policy to be the self-conscious social shaping reflexively undertaken by sovereign political communities to realise their values. Policy studies almost inevitably have a normative character whether explicitly or implicitly. Their normativeness testifies to their authors’ sense, whether well or ill founded, recognised or unacknowledged, that politics, policies and institutions can make a difference – that agency matters. I’ve sought to show throughout these essays (a theme that’s particularly evident in the chapters constituting parts two and three of this work – Chapters 5 to 11) that though people do not make history on the terms of their own choosing nonetheless they make – and can re-make – their own histories.

Hence the distinctive sceptical and empirical approach represented in these studies. Sceptical, in my interrogation of established theoretical wisdoms; empirical in my attachment to context and the obdurate specificities of the actual. Reviewing these essays, published over a decade, it becomes clear quite how attached I have become to some very specific contexts and landmarks. There is, I now recognise, a familiar corpus of referents – the favourite quotations and examples that knit together the different themes explored in each chapter. I have made minor editorial changes for publication here – largely to reduce repetitions and redundancies (that favourite quotation from the Hahn Report wasn’t needed quite so much!) and to harmonise bibliographical references. But I’ve tried to resist the temptation to exercise the advantages of 20:20 hindsight!

All this enquiry and reflection has taken place in a specific situated context – as does all such activity. It would be superfluous and simply banal to remind the reader of the obvious – but I’ll do it anyway. I’m a white middle aged male citizen of one of the most deeply rooted of modern political and language communities and this gives my work a distinctive character. Less obvious but no less important has been the remarkable good fortune which I’ve enjoyed in my professional life. First, employment at institutions which successively became leading academic centres of media and communication research in the UK; second, the opportunities which sustained periods of living outside the UK (but always within the global anglophone community) gave me to work with a less insistent presence of at least some of the endemic ills (‘toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail’) which Dr Johnson defined as the scholar’s lot; and third, again by chance, the opportunities which IPPR (the Institute for Public Policy Research) and Oftel gave me to see the policy community from inside and to try on the seductive dress of a policy and public intellectual. And of course the most significant sustaining context of all has been that of my friends, family and colleagues – in most of whom I’ve had remarkable luck. To you, I owe more than I can ever tell – my thanks to you all.

2 Challenges and Opportunities: Broadcasting in Multi-National States

Introduction

Europeans have often looked to Canada for a foretaste of the future and for field-tested solutions to broadcasting policy problems new to Europe but familiar in Canada. So much has the relevance of Canada’s experience for Europe been taken for granted that the cycle of changes to European television in recent times has often been described as a process of ‘Canadianisation’ (see Juneau, 1984; Gerlach, 1988; Raboy, 1994). Whereas ‘Canadianisation’ has customarily been discussed as a structural process (marked by the proliferation of channels, developing competition, fragmentation of the audience, and the erosion of cultural sovereignty), the changes signalled by the term ‘Canadianisation’ were nowhere more apparent than in the successful ‘reinvention’ of television drama in the United Kingdom which followed the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly by the introduction of commercial television in 1955.

In the late 1950s the Canadian Sydney Newman – who had worked both in NBC in the USA and for CBC in Canada and who later became Commissioner of the National Film Board of Canada – became successively the head of independent (that is commercial) television drama at ABC in 1958 and then of the BBC’s television drama department in 1963 (see Shubik, 1975, for an insider’s account of Newman’s legacy). Newman’s appointment to ITV’s Armchair Theatre in 1958 – and the cohort of Canadians, such as Ted Kotcheff and Alvin Rakoff, he brought in his wake – was rightly described as the ‘most important event in ITV drama – indeed in TV drama as a whole’ in the official history of Independent Television in Britain (Sendall, 1982 p. 338).

What is less well-known is that this Canadian influence had a specifically Quebecois inflection. The first episode of the most important British television soap opera Coronation Street (which has occupied an important place in ITV’s schedules since its first transmission in 1960) included a controversial scene showing one of the leading characters mending his bicycle in his living room – an everyday situation in working class houses (which lacked the garages, sheds or even the large kitchens of middle and upper class homes). This scene, because it made visible on British television screens a working class experience hitherto hidden, sent ripples of scandalised fascination through British society. Did the exotic English underclass really do such extraordinary things? It took a Canadian producer, Harry Elton, working for a Canadian Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, to show British television viewers, accustomed to relays from London theatres and a diet of the classics of English drama, that it did.

The Quebecois connection comes through La famille Plouffe,¹ the celebrated series written by Roger Lemelin, which began as a radio series on Radio Canada and ran on Radio Canada’s television service (and in an English version on CBC beginning a year later) from 1953 to 1958. Coronation Street’s transgressive representation of exotic working class life was foreshadowed in La Famille Plouffe which showed in the first episode – just as in Coronation Street – an everyday act transposed to a location unfamiliar to middle class experience. Instead of the bicycle repair shown in Coronation Street the first episode of La Famille Plouffe showed Theophile Plouffe shaving in his kitchen – in a home which lacked both a bathroom and constant hot water. Both series brought into the collective consciousness of their respective societies the day-to-day experience of social groups hitherto excluded from the collective realm of symbolic representation. La Famille Plouffe (which was still being screened in Canada the year Newman moved from Canada to England) was clearly a striking and influential precursor of Coronation Street.

However, there are now signs that ‘Canadianisation’ is giving