ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an outline of how the dynamics of the media field in Australia have changed in relation to the economic field, the cultural field and the power of the state over the course of the last two decades in a way that foregrounds the two key themes of commercialization and the more equivocal activity of the process of ‘nationing’ at a number of levels. A part of this history is, of course, the dramatic changes in platforms of delivery and consumption, particularly for video content, and the manner in which these changes have been integrated (or not) into the regulatory environment. While free-to-air television remains clearly dominant in Australia, its capacity to address a national audience as a matter of course has begun to shrink. As entertainment content prevails over information in the marketplace, significant reconfigurations of media markets have occurred which privilege the commercial considerations of media owners. These decisions, collectively, have consequences for the broadcast media’s nationing capacity, but also for the assumptions underpinning policy frameworks – to do with, for instance, the role that the national media play in making national culture. None of this is news internationally, of course, in a world where the digital has transformed the largest media markets. However, the Australian media industries had long taken for granted their geographic exemption from many of the digital disruptions that had taken place in other markets. This chapter outlines the demise of such assumptions as it assesses the current impact of the digital in Australia, how much of a role the Australian media, and television in particular, can now play in the process of nationing and, indeed, to what extent the media is any longer interested in playing a role in such a process. If the media are now less engaged in such a process, and if their interests are now far more focused upon their commercial rather than their cultural interests, we need to consider just what has changed in terms of the location and provenance of their social and cultural power.
In considering this, it may be appropriate to question to what extent the media, given the changes outlined, operates as a distinct field (such as was more or less the case for Bourdieu’s account of the ‘journalistic field’ when he turned towards analysis of the media). Arguments about the ‘mediatization’ of culture, such as those advanced by Andreas Hepp, suggest that this is no longer as simple a question as it might once have seemed. Nick Couldry is only one of a number who have argued that the generation of a form of ‘media meta-capital’ has taken us to a point where it is no longer of greatest interest to examine what happens within the media field, but rather that it is now necessary to examine how the media field, through its meta-capital as well as through other forces, now significantly influences the internal dynamics of other fields - sport would be an obvious example of this. To highlight just one category of media meta-capital, celebrity, as Olivier Driessens has done, is to show how pervasive such an influence it has become, and how rarely it is contained within the media field alone. It is time, then, to re-think standard assumptions to do with media influence and to do with the media’s precise contemporary significance in making national cultures.
