Education
Hello, and welcome back to COMM one twenty two Podcast. We are now on episode twelve. The topic of this week is the Circuit of Cultural Production. While this concept may s eem alien to you, the underlying reasoning is fairly simple. It views innovation in media technology not just as a technical advance, but a gradual process of social construction. In that process, the characteristics, usage, and identities associated with innovation is shaped not by its technological features nor its inventor. Instead, they are shaped by consumers who use it, business interests that profit from it, and by regulators who seek to control it.This view on the circuit of cultural production is a stark contrast from technological determinism. Technological determinism a school of thought arguing that a society's technology determines its social structure and cultural values. To some degree, that is true. In the early part of the semester, we discussed how media content shape ideologies and cultures. In our daily conversations, we may also hear arguments that mirror technological determinism, such as that social media makes us depressed, video games make people violent, so on and so forth. But the reality is, as technology influences a lot of aspects in a society, the technology itself is shaped by many societal factors.We emphasize five components in the circuit of cultural production. They are: representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation. Regarding representation, it refers to the intended use of the technology by its inventors. When radio technology was first invented, it was intended for long-distance point-to-point communication, as in marine rescues during the sinking of the Titanic and military communications during the two world wars. If we look at the more contemporary example of social media. What was their original intended use? When Mark Zuckerberg first built Facebook, Facebook was meant to be a student directory featuring photos and personal information. As it evolved to become a global social platform, it adopted the mission to “give people the power to share, and make the world more open and connected.'' What about YouTube? YouTube started as a platform for user-generated content, meaning it emphasized grassroots and amateur production.As you can see, Facebook clearly has failed its mission to make us more open and connected. Nowadays, the platform is not used so much to build bridges but to sort people further into like-minded silos. Instead of having an open dialogue, people become more guarded in expressing opinions and suspicious of others’ motives. Facebook is no longer just a platform for socialization. It has grown into a giant platform for friendship, event planning, coordinating and mobilization social movements, news consumption, gaming, and etc. YouTube, which started as a platform for amateurs, is now dominated by professional content producers. YouTube itself also produces original shows. Historically, that shift also occurred in the development of radio. Starting as a point-to-point communication tool, radio technology later was widely used as a one-to-many broadcasting tool, which ushered in the era of mass communication. So, as a new technology evolves, its actual usage, characteristics, and attributes will change over time, and will depart from the original intent of its inventors. This is the second component in the circuit, identities, which is defined as attributes, characteristics, and purposes that come to be associated with technology.The third component is the production. As a new technology expands its domain of usage, it faces business pressures. For example, who is going to fund its continuing expansion. When commercialized, the involved business decisions can impact the design of the technology. Let’s focus on two important business decisions: patents, and corporate development. Patents are sets of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state, to an inventor or a