The IT sector’s power in the realms of media and communication

New media and communication technologies are constantly being developed and produced — and then quickly rendered obsolete. This is a striking and significant but surprisingly under-analysed feature of contemporary capitalism. Prof Hesmondhalgh will delineate the main forces driving these constant shifts in the prevalent technological means by which culture is experienced. He will do so via a historical case study of the music industry and related sectors, which have tended to be at the forefront of such changes. Over the last twenty years, information technology (IT) has replaced consumer electronics (CE) as the most powerful sectoral force shaping how culture is mediated and experienced, a fact insufficiently recognised and/or fore-fronted in research on media and communication. However, change cannot be understood entirely, or even predominantly, in terms of technologies imposed by businesses. Instead, Prof Hesmondhalgh offers a multi-causal understanding of change in cultural industries, showing that the shift from CE to IT draws upon, and in turn quickens, a move from domestic consumption to personalised, mobile and connected consumption as the “cutting edge” of capitalism. The disruption in prevailing forms of musical consumption in modern societies brought about by digitalisation is consistent with longer-term patterns of turbulence (which are easy to misinterpret in retrospect as stability). The last twenty years have seen particularly high levels of disruption, even chaos, and the IT industries are now the primary sector determining change.

David Hesmondhalgh is Professor of Media, Music and Culture at the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds. He is the author of several books examining media and cultural production and policy, including Why Music Matters (2013) and The Cultural Industries (3rd edition, 2012).