Public Service Broadcasting in the Information Battlefield: The Cultural Commons in the Massless Flow of the New Media

Tony Sampson

University of East London, UK

Abstract

This paper argues that increasingly congested digital media, an arena of competing signals and messages, is a problem for public service broadcasting (PSB). The established identity of PSB as a mass communicator is blurred in an overabundance of competing channels and payment options. Its mission to nourish a cultural commons of shared meaning could well be abandoned in an information battlefield. The mass communicator is faced with the dilemma of justifying itself to a demassified paying public. Its role as a producer of “meaningful” content, which relates to the mass, appears misplaced in the evolution of media and society. Subsequently, this paper argues that to survive the battlefield, PSB needs to be re-envisaged in terms of the ebb and flow of information. This marks a shift away from a traditional analysis grounded in a cultural politics of meaning-production towards a restoration of a cybernetic model of communication focused on the massless flows of the new media.

The paper begins by locating and then challenging two dominant media traditions that have rejected the cybernetic model. On the one hand, the Political Economy of Information (Schiller, Mosco & Wasko, Webster) looks to the effect of a marketized media on the social. On the other hand, the Cultural Studies tradition (Williams, Hall) identifies the struggle for cultural hegemony and meaning making as central to its media analysis. These two standard bearers have clearly rested on two distinct structures – economy and culture. However, both approach the problem of the digitisation and commercialisation of media channels, and subsequent threat to PSB, from a shared belief that media meanings can shape the social. To be sure, both traditions have discarded a cybernetic approach with its technical denunciation of the centrality of meaning. Political Economy rejects cybernetics for its ‘tendency to operationalize the (social) system in mechanistic terms’ (see Schiller, D in Mosco and Wasko (eds), 1998 p. 29) and exclude the ‘issue of meaning’ from the debate (Webster, 1995 p. 27). Cultural Studies considers information and meaning to be the same thing. However, this paper argues that Shannon’s 1948 model of communication is key to the future development of a cultural consensus in modern communication systems.

As Terranova (2003) argues, the ‘informational battlefield’ positions a shared common sense of meaning and value as a residual factor. Indeed, Terranova concludes that ‘information is not simply the content of a message’, but the central element of the massless flows ‘within which contemporary culture unfolds.’ This paper interrogates meaningful cultural consensus with a need to understand effective message transmission in a crowded communications market. Furthermore, an analysis of the effectual transference of form between the sender and receiver is strategic to developing an understanding of the new media and PSB’s role in it.

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