ABSTRACT
The boundaries of “media industries studies” often seem obvious and settled. This chapter considers the benefits of unsettling the field’s concept of “media.” It introduces the term “industrial media” to expand our view beyond the systems and technologies involved in producing, distributing, and consuming news and entertainment. Instead, the chapter conceptualizes media as means of organizing and maintaining industrial operations. The chapter emphasizes materials and practices related to information and knowledge, suggesting that these are important levers of power and control in the administration of many unseen industrial processes. The commodification of audience attention and behavior via advertising and marketing provides a useful case for exploring a part of traditional media industries where the essential operations have more to do with data, calculation, and knowledge claims than with typically creative texts. From the perspective of “industrial media studies,” these ways of seeing, knowing, and managing represent crucial vectors of continuity and change in the production of culture and the mediation of social life. This expansive view of media and mediation invites a synthesis of research areas that are critical for analyzing cultural production today and for contributing meaningfully to interdisciplinary conversations. Accounting for the industrial media that serve as infrastructures of audience commodification offers an opportunity for integrating the political economy of communication, science and technology studies, organizational sociology, media archaeology, and various streams of economic, business, and cultural history.
