Symbolic production and value in media industries

Gran Bolin

Paper presented to the 58th ICA Conference, Montreal, Canada, May 22-26, 2008.

Abstract To say that the media have become commercialized has become a standard opening for debates on the changes within the media over the past few decades, not least concerning changes in the European media landscape, or to the developments within the post-Soviet states. Indeed, the media in Europe have seen dramatic changes, some of which have to do with the increased competition between public service and commercial broadcast media, leading to the fact that more media production is aiming for producing surplus value and economic profits. (Print and music media, however, have since long, and with few exceptions, been organized commercially.) However, economic value is but one of the value forms produced within the media and cultural industries, maybe especially so in media environments marked by both strong commercial media companies and strong public service enterprises. It might therefore be worthwhile to analyse the conditions for the production of other kinds of value (political, social, cultural, etc.) in such settings. In this paper is discussed a model for analyzing the production of value within media and cultural industries, based in the field theory outlined by Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, however, did for the most part discuss the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his most known works dealt with television, one cannot say that he thoroughly enough used the possibilities inherent in his own theory to analyse this field of mass production. This paper seeks to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale, or un-restricted cultural production.

Contact details: Gran Bolin, Professor Department of Media & Communication Studies Sdertrn University College Tel: +46 8 608 4218 SE-141 89 Huddinge, Sweden E-mail: goran.bolin@sh.se URL: www.sh.se/mkv * www.technocult.se

Introduction To say that the media have become commercialized and thereby subsumed market logics has become a standard opening for debates on the changes within the media over the past few decades. This is not least so when accounting for changes in the European media landscape, or perhaps even more so when it comes to descriptions of the radical restructurings of the media in the post-Soviet states. Indeed, the media in Europe have seen dramatic changes, some of which have to do with the increased competition between public service and commercial broadcast media, leading to the fact that more areas of radio and television production is aiming for producing surplus value and economic profits. However, the discussion also encompasses print and music media, although these have since long, and with few exceptions, been organized commercially. Both when it comes to the music business and to print journalism, these are seen to having become more reliant on immediate commercial success, and it is often argued that the economical margins by which they have previously worked have narrowed, leaving little room for experimentations and daring ventures. This discussion is, however, not restricted to the public service/commercial broadcasting dichotomy of Western Europe and the economic shock therapy in Russia and Eastern Europe (for an account, see Buck-Morss 2000/2002 pp. 266ff). It is equally present in the US, where journalism is at times argued to having become overly commercial and solely yielding to economic values (e.g. Hamilton 2004). It is obviously hard to deny the increasing importance of the economy for media production, and the impact of economic logic on the production processes therein. In the midst of this, it is equally important, however, not to forget that economic value is but one of the value forms produced within the media and cultural industries, and it is important to analyse the conditions for the production of other kinds of value (political, social, cultural, etc.), not least to understand how they relate to, and sometimes contribute to, the valorisation process within the field of media production. I will therefore in this article discuss and try to further develop a model for analyzing the production of value within media and cultural industries, based in the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu, however, did for the most part discuss the production of value (or forms of capital) in relation to fields of restricted cultural production, that is, within the fine arts (e.g. art, literature). Although one of his most known works dealt with television (Bourdieu 1996/1998), one cannot say that he thoroughly enough used the possibilities inherent in his own theory to analyse this field of popular culture or mass media production, and there is therefore necessary to develop that part of the theory. Against that background the ambition with this article is to fill this space by trying to contribute to the development of a theory of value production in fields of large-scale production. I will in the course of this argument also take consideration of the fact that media commodities are becoming increasingly more symbolic in kind, perhaps also more transient, and that this fact has implications for the theory of value production. A major feature of this is the increased digitisation of media commodities, which makes

them entirely symbolic (as well as indefinitely reproducible). A second ambition in the following is to try to understand the consequences of this, and evaluate the implications of the circulation of symbolic commodities within the media productionconsumption circuit for the valorisation process. In the first section of my paper I will give some historic background to the discussion on media commodities and commercialisation. In the second section I will expand this discussion to include also other values that are produced in the production and consumption processes surrounding commercial cultural and media production. I will here introduce the field theory of Bourdieu in more detail, and try to modify this to account for the kinds of cultural production that he did not engage too fully in, namely cultural production in the subfield of undifferentiated production, that production usually labelled mass or popular culture. In the third section I will try to clarify my model with some examples. I will in my fourth and final section try to summarise this in order to contribute to the understanding of value creation in late modern economies based on sign production and semiotic labour.

Background Questions of commercialisation and the marketisation of culture has been on the research agenda at least since the 1930s, when it was taken up by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and others from the Frankfurt School. The question has since then intrigued critical media theory, political economy and other Marxist inspired research perspectives. Central to the discussion is the relation between production and consumption, a relation which has become increasingly problematised over the past few decades, not least from within certain strands of Cultural Studies, to the point where they seem sometimes to have merged into a single concept with one single meaning. Admittedly, when discussing marketisation of culture, popular culture and media production certainly have been affected by market economy for a long time, although to varying degrees and in a variety of ways depending on the traditional media forms: print, broadcast and music media. Only within the sphere of the broadcast media the production has been organised in the alternative form of public service production, which can be said to have been relatively unaffected by market pressures. 1 However, during the post-war period rationalisations within cultural production (as in general commodity production) have occurred, which has led to an increase in the commercial pressures on cultural production (faster turn-over rates, streamlining of productions, integrated promotional campaigning, etc.). The strong European public service broadcast institutions have been put to the test and met by commercial competitors, which has led to considerable changes to their content. Indeed, the print media and the
1

There are naturally alternative media productions of both broadcast, print and music media that can be said to stand outside of the market system. However, the discussion of these lie outside of the scope of this article.

press have also changed due to, among other things, changes in the advertising markets, the rise of free newspapers (e.g. Metro), and an increased emphasis on niche audiences to meet demands from advertisers. The printed media have also to an increased extent developed on-line, with continuous updates of news stories and other contents (in itself problematising the very notion of a news text, as the text becomes more of a process than a finished product [Terranova 2000:48]). The music industry has developed more refined means of distribution and marketing. Media commodities are often coordinated across media forms and genres, so that a film is released together with its soundtrack, a computer game, etc. In such ways the markets for cultural commodities have become integrated. A related tendency in late modern commercial production generally, is that commodities have symbolic or semiotic qualities that add to their economic (exchange) value. The increasing emphasis on design and brand names have complicated the way in which we can understand valorisation of commodities in media as well as other commercial production. With the beginning in the late 1950s, economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith (1958/1964: 145ff) pointed to the increased emphasis on marketing and advertising, and how it confused traditional economic theory, thoughts that were further elaborated in the 1960s by sociologists such as Jean Baudrillard (1970/1998; 1972/1981; 1973/1975), who introduced the concept of sign value as a complement to the traditional concepts of use and exchange value. The basis for this was a perceived shift in the production-consumption circuit, where the symbolic dimensions of material commodities became more important for the circulation of commodities in society. The importance of signs for the organisation of production within the culture industries has been further discussed by researchers such as Lasch & Urry (1994: 131ff), and it can be argued that most cultural commodities today are entirely made out of signs, produced through signifying practices. The development within commodity production towards increased marketisation and emphasis on sign qualities of commodities can be said to have been intensified with the technological development of digitisation, the process whereby information processing and media texts are broken down into digits, and hence reproducible without loss of quality. This puts the pressure on record and film producing companies to develop more refined tools for the restriction of markets in order to secure future profits and future reinvestments through copyright legislation the debates around file-sharing being a case in point as file-sharing does not involve tangible carriers for the textual commodities (cf. Wallis et al. 1999: 7). Copyright is, however, only applicable to works, and accordingly other techniques of market restriction have become developed for other symbolic commodities, such as television formats (format rights) or fictional characters in literature, film and popular culture in general (trademark) (cf. Gaines 1990). This means that fictional characters such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Moomin or Superman can travel between different kinds of cultural and media forms but still obey to the same principles of market control. They can then also

be connected to other kinds of commercial commodities (cups, T-shirts, jackets, etc.), hence bringing sign value to these. The need for such legal techniques has also increased as digitisation admits the same basic narratives to be distributed via several different platforms, to use industry jargon. We can read the news in a printed paper, on the net, get the information via television, our mobile phone, and we can watch a feature film on television, cinema, on video or DVD or again in our mobile phone. The connection between fictional characters in films and computer games is of high relevance here, and this has farreaching consequences for how we can think of cultural artefacts (songs, films, television programs, computer games, etc.), and may indeed alter the ways in which future generations will regard cultural phenomena. We may, indeed, think of this as a shift on par with the one noticed by Walter Benjamin (1936/1991) in his essay on the fate of art in the age of its mechanical reproduction, and see digitisation as another radicalisation to this process, and one that have qualitative consequences for the cultural object at the centre of it. Indeed, both marketisation and digitisation have led to important shifts in the ways in which commercial value is generated. Over this process has not only arisen the need for the industry to regulate, but there has also arisen an increased need for more refined means of consumption in order for the audiences/readers/users to be able to take part of the digitised texts: when commercial commodities circulate in digitised form (as binary digits), we need complex software and hardware to decode the digits into accessible, consumable form. In order to download a film we need a computer, access to high-speed Internet, and software of appropriate kind to be able to take part of, or consume it, and thereby realising its value (Bolin 2005a). The concept means of consumption is also used by US cultural sociologist George Ritzer (1999) for describing theme parks, shopping malls and related spaces of consumption. I would, however, rather reserve the term for the technical gadgets needed by media consumers to be able to take part of texts television sets, computers, MP3s, portable DVDs, etc. The difference between Ritzers and my use is then between the means needed for the purchasing of (material) consumer goods and the means needed for consuming (immaterial symbolic) texts. These are then means that appear at different moments of the production-consumption circuit (production, distribution, purchase, use/consumption).2 There are several studies that have tried to understand the effects of digitisation and new means of consumption for the possibilities of generating economic (surplus) value for media producers (e.g. Oberholzer & Koleman 2004). There are also quite a few studies on the media use of digital commodities and object, especially downloading (e.g. Blomqvist et al. 2005). The general results, however, are inconclusive, not least because of the difficulties to make estimations on economic
2

I use the concept of immaterial texts and commodities metaphorically, as also digits have a material base in being physical energy flowing through fibre optic cables. As concepts such as immaterial property, etc., have gained ground, this seems to have become silently understood and common parlance in these debates. 5

gains or losses (Lucas 1999). There are, however, few studies on the effects of the general processes of production, and how they relate to the production of other kinds of values than the mere economic, and how these other values contribute to the economy (but see e.g. Ross 2000, Kenney 1997). In relation to television production, I have tried to lay bare how the value of being public service can be struggled over, and how the political and cultural connotations of that concept have been used as a competitive field strategy by TV4 in Sweden (Bolin 2002, 2004). Public service production complicates these things further, as it on the one hand compete with commercial production, and on the other does not strive for maximum profits. Very few, if any, have related the consequences of the contemporary commercial production context for the actual textual expressions.

Economic and other values Value, it is said, is indefinable (Magendanz 2003, pp. 443f). Although indefinable, there are connecting terms such as belief that can be used for explaining the meaning of the word. Most of us also have everyday conceptions of value, and one such everyday conception is that value is the worth of a thing an agreed or assumed standard, criterion or measure (p. 443). Value is also both a verb and a noun, that is, it is both a concept referring to an activity, and a concept referring to a thing or a phenomenon. Both these are naturally connected: a thing is given a value, and hence it also becomes the value that it has been given or valued. Value is thus produced socially, in that we by interpretations of objects, actions and phenomena around us give them meaning in a socially defined space. Standards, measures, and criteria are agreed on, that is, they are the outcome of communicative action in the Habermasian sense (Habermas 1981/1992). Furthermore, agreement of the standards or criteria for judgement does not imply that everyone arrives at the same evaluative conclusion. But when there is agreement on the principles of judgement, a discursive space is opened for struggles about which interpretation or evaluation of the thing, person or action is the most valid. As has been pointed to by John Guillory (1993), the concept of value has its origin in the eighteenth-century discourse of political economy, where it was introduced in the struggle to distinguish art from the commodity, and fundamental for the distinction between use and exchange value as theorised by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and later picked up by Karl Marx (p. xiii). The connection between the economic and the cultural is therefore at the heart of processes of evaluation and value judgements. Marx dealt with few exceptions with the production of material commodities and goods/objects. He could not really foresee the development that industrial society would eventually take: the rise of the mass media and the spread of popular culture markets with their increased emphasis on the production of symbolic commodities and services: sign commodities. As a consequence, both use and exchange value in Marxist

thinking is the result of raw material, means of production and labour. Exchange value, is the value that becomes realised when the commodity is circulated on a market, and sold for a price that can be turned into surplus value, later to be reinvested in the production and ideally turned into new surplus values. However, as sign value has become of increasing importance for the generating of exchange value, this value has also become more difficult to estimate. The absence of raw material in commodity production, and its extreme dependence on labour, makes the production processes more reliable on other bases than the raw material that is tooled into artefacts. When products are composed of digits, labour becomes relatively more important for the value generation of the commodities. The production of symbolic commodities also becomes more dependent on the belief in their value by customers, since there is no material base for the value, and hence the belief systems surrounding the design components in the production process are of crucial importance. So, when we look at production of symbolic commodities, such as media texts, it soon becomes apparent that there are other values circulating in the production than mere economic values, and that these other values also have an impact on the economic values. If we take television production, for example, as a special and very transient form of symbolic commodity production (that is, the commodity is gone as soon as it is consumed if not laid down and stored on a DVD, video cassette, etc.), this is a kind of production that is surrounded by a number of intersecting interests and objectives on part of the agents involved, which all have a bearing on each other and influence each others value generating efforts in various ways. Being technologically and administratively a quite complicated operation, television production is reliant on a range of individuals and organisations from several spheres of society to come into being (Bolin 2002). That television production can be divided into two kinds complicates this even further public service production not aimed at producing surplus value, and commercial production, which has this kind of production as its final goal. In fact, television production lends itself quite well to exemplify the complex web of values that are drawn into late modern cultural production. With the borrowing of the model of cultural production from Pierre Bourdieu (1992/1996), we can try to analyse the relations between these as several fields of power, as it is the relations between these that are determining for the value produced. However, I will discuss and slightly adjust Bourdieus model of the relation between the field of cultural production and the power field(s) of society, since I find it somewhat contradictory in its construction at least as seen from the perspective of large-scale production. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu (1992/1996) discusses the field of cultural production as a specific subfield of the larger field of power, in turn a part of the (national) social space (see fig. 1).

Figure 1. The field of cultural production in the field of power and in social space.

Source: Bourdieu (1992/1996: 124).

In the model, Bourdieu theorises the field of cultural production as part of the wider field of power in society. The structuring principle for the field of cultural production is the opposition between, on the one hand, the degrees of acquired cultural and economic capital, and on the other between the consecrated top positions of the field versus the not yet consecrated positions of newcomers, challengers, and other agents who have not, at least not yet, acquired dominant positions within it. Thus Bourdieu makes a distinction between the two sub-fields of small-scale and large-scale production, where the sub-field of small-scale production consists of production for other producers, and thus restricted in its kind. This part of the field is marked by its high degree of autonomy, which indicates that value judgements here are made solely on aesthetical grounds, and production, in this case art, is produced for its own sake, unaffected by outer demand and influences from other areas of social space. To the right in the figure, we have the sub-field of large-scale production, where production is directed towards an unrestricted market of undifferentiated consumers, and where success is measured in wide-spread popularity and counted in economical terms. This part of the field is low in autonomy, and has, according to Bourdieu, to obey to the forces of the economic markets. Now, Bourdieus way of representing the field of power and the field of cultural production is not without problems. At least three such problems are of importance for the present discussion. Quite obviously they have their ground in the fact that Bourdieu is more interested in analysing the sub-field of restricted production, where autonomy is high, and the values produced are more pure than those produced within the sub-field of unrestricted production the production directed to an undifferentiated group of consumers. The first problem is connected to the strong emphasis that Bourdieu places on the polarisation between economic and cultural capital. This opposition is certainly of great importance, but the emphasis on the dichotomous character of the structure obscures the fact that other values can be involved in the power struggles within the field. For example, television production of non-commercial, public service kind, cannot be explained by this model, since stakes are not made on economic grounds, and success is not measured in economic value. Public service television is instead more reliant on the production of political, and maybe also educational values in order to gain legitimacy for its activities and to secure broadcasting licence agreements (cf. Bolin 2004). The second problem with the model concern the question if there is only one field of power in society, as Bourdieu suggests both in The Rules of Art (1992/1996) and in his analysis of the French elite schools in The State Nobility (Bourdieu 1996). If political values are produced within the field of political power, would it not be more productive to regard that as a separate field of power, than to include it in a general power field? Furthermore, if there was one, comprehensive field of power, that field would certainly not only be structured by high and low assets of economic and cultural capital. The field of politics, for example, have political power as its value. And of

course a party with strong economy would have a better position than one with low economic assets. But that would not be the only structuring principle. The third problem, as I see it, concern the question of scale. Bourdieu most often labels the less autonomous part of the field of cultural production the sub-field of large-scale production. However, there are quite a few commodities in this part of the field that do not fit that description. A common misapprehension is, for example, that television broadcasters strive to reach as large an audience as possible. This model might have been the guiding light for broadcasters previously, but since at least one decade large audiences is rather considered a problem, since advertisers do not want to pay fore audiences that they do not want to address. In the eyes of the advertiser that wants to reach young girls in the age range of 17 to 25 years old, all other viewers are considered waste, and are in that sense literally worthless. According to one production executive at Swedish TV4, the company has ceased to charge advertisers for audiences over the age of 55, and has started to give them away for free (cf. Bolin 2004: 283). The problem with the Bourdieuan terminology is then that the concept of largescale production privileges an emphasis on the scale of production, rather than the aim of it, or for which group of consumers it is intended. Many media sociologist, most notably those engaged in the analysis of the music industry, have pointed to the fact that most records produced never earn their investments (Hesmondhalgh 2006: 225). Out of ten records, the popular story goes, nine fail. These nine artists, then, or records seem to destroy rather than produce economic value. Furthermore, many of the most acknowledged artists of their time actually are economic successes (e.g. Dylan, The Beatles, etc.). So, how can we understand this? Is this at all possible to fit into the field theory? I do think it is. The solution is, I believe, to be found in Bourdieus theory of the production of belief (Bourdieu 1977/1993). The question of consecration and legitimisation is not so much coupled with how many records (or books, paintings, etc.) you actually sell, but the way in which you relate to your production. So, if Dylan sells an infinite number of records or not is beside the point. His legitimacy depends on the fact that he does not seem to care if he sells or not, that is, he is not aiming at making economic success. At least he convincingly appears to act beyond or above economic goals in his cultural production. So, if one can convince others that the motifs for production are not economic, but artistic, and if one thereby can produce an authentic aura as an artist (rather than a profit-maker), one can get away with being economically successful. And if one, as Neil Young, gets sued by ones own record company, one has really succeeded in producing a strong image of autonomy and distance from the forces of the economy. Against the argument in the previous paragraph, it might then be better to speak of sub-fields of restricted and un-restricted or heteronomous production, and altogether avoid concepts of scale. However, despite this slight modification two problems with Bourdieus model remain; concerning the possibility of there being several fields of power in society, and

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if there are more forms of value than the economic and the cultural. I would, as a consequence of my objections described above, like to propose another model for analysing field relations in order to explain how several kinds of values are produced, especially those values that gets produced in the sub-field of undifferentiated media production. One of the crucial factors that can explain for the production of multiple values is the questions of autonomy, and the relative dependence between fields. In figure 1, autonomy is higher in the sub-field of restricted production, and lower in the sub-field of unrestricted production. This means that the values produced in the latter sub-field are more sensitive to influences from forces outside of the field of cultural production. Bourdieu holds forth the economic as an explanation, and argues that the sub-field of weak autonomy is low on cultural and high on economic assets. However, I suggest that although the forces of the economy are hard to neglect in late modern cultural production, there are at times other values that are influential on the value generation within the field of cultural production. In figure 2 I have tried to illustrate this.
Fig 2. Outline of the relations between four fields of power.

In figure 2 above, I propose that the economic power field is but one of the fields of power that is influential on the part of the field of cultural production with low autonomy. Indeed, for commercial media production, the audience statistics, and the lifestyle analysis of the audience is of utmost importance. However, for public service television it is obvious that it is not primarily the commercial field that is of importance, but the political, and maybe even the educational or academic field of power (that field that governs knowledge values). It is within the power of agents in the political field to decide on licence rights and concessions charters for broadcasters such as Swedish SVT, TV4 and British ITV. It is not primarily the commercial market that is of importance, but the field of political power. This is also why it is important also for public service broadcasters as well as hybrid channels dependent on broadcast licenses to engage in audience measurement, since this is the tool that can produce arguments for the companys fulfilling of certain public service goals, for example to reach most parts of the citizens, to not avoid elderly viewers, to provide for minority programming, etc. It is not the market that wants to compartmentalise the audience in segments, but the sphere of politics. So, we can conclude that production within sub-fields of weak autonomy need to produce sign values to add to the economic values (e.g. political, economic, educational, etc.), in order to strengthen the symbolic values at the centre of their own field. We can exemplify this discussion with two kinds of commodities produced in
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media industries, and see which kinds of values get produced in relation to their production.

Two kinds of symbolic commodities

It might be reasonable to exemplify this by giving an account of two of the basic commodities circulating in the culture and media industries texts and the audiences to these.3 Although these two are certainly interconnected, they are commodities of different kinds, and can hence be attributed different kinds of values. Texts are, on the one hand commodities in themselves. After they have been produced and laid down on a tangible carrier or made available via ether or cable in analogue or digital form, they can be sold to media users, to broadcasters or to other distributors. In order to be of economic value, there need to be regulatory frameworks surrounding them, as texts open for all to access cannot have exchange value (but, of course, can have use value). Textual commodities with narrative closure and that are easily definable in sign economies that is, works are consequently heavily dependent on copyrights. The need to restrict markets in order to secure commercial exchange value could be said to have become at the top of the agenda since the ability of users to file-share music, films, computer programs, etc. However, copyrights are but one of the commodity forms circulating within the media industries. Another and possibly more complicated commodity form that has appeared on the increasingly globalised television market is the format (Moran 1998). However, formats are in all their vagueness more problematic to control than are copyrights. Copyright law only makes sense if you have individual works that can be identified and distinguished, for example a song, a film or literary work. A format is weaker than that. Basically it is an idea for the main components in a television series (for example, Big Brother), and the commodity that you sell is this basic idea, that can then be modified or nationally adapted to suit regional contexts (Bolin 2005b). In order for this idea to become a commodity, it has to become documented in the form of a bible, preferably as detailed as possible in order to be considered judicially valid in the capacity of intellectual property. The change in emphasis from copyright to format production obviously has consequences for the media texts. Not least because with format production we enter into the realm of transmedia storytelling, as Henry Jenkins (2006: 93ff) has termed the phenomenon where texts are constructed across platforms. Especially for reality formats (cf. Hill 2005), the construction of the television text is combined with web services and mobile content, and most reality formats are also heavily dependent on the tabloid press and the weeklies. Jenkins also argue that the specific form of collective intelligence (Jenkins 2006: 50ff) that
3

Naturally, there are a range of other commodities circulating within broadcast television production, at various levels and of various importance: journalists and hosts, the knowledge of technical staff, and other commodities that are drawn into the consumptive production of television programmes, to again use theoretical concepts from Marx. 12

viewers produce and engage in, which also includes web activities in fan communities, or knowledge communities as he terms these, show how entertainment companies are reappraising the economic value of fan participation (p. 58). I will in the next few paragraphs discuss this value production process in terms of labour. A main component in the production/consumption circuit is labour, which, according to Marx, is the key to the understanding of how surplus value is generated. However, in late modern sign commodity production it is increasingly hard to define what labour actually consists of, and who is the labourer. Amateur media production and interactivity on part of the media user is complicating this further, as, for example, the texts on a certain web community are produced by the users themselves. There are also those who argue that the television audience actually work in service of the television networks while watching (Jhally & Livant 1986 ; cf. Smythe 1977). There are calculations made to show that GDP per capita in synthetic worlds is far higher than in the real worlds poorer economies, such as those of India and China (Castronova 2005: 13). Others have pointed to the increase in new functions or occupations within cultural production, such as cultural intermediaries: those occupations involving presentation and representation (sales, marketing, advertising, public relations, fashion, decoration and so forth) and in all the institutions providing symbolic goods and services (Bourdieu 1979/1989: 359; for a critique of the further uses of the concept of cultural intermediaries by Bourdieus followers, see Hesmondhalgh 2006: 226f). So, the question to these studies is: who is the labourer, and what is the source of value generation? All the studies referred to in the above paragraph point to the role of audiences (and cultural intermediaries could be said to be a very specific kind of audience). Audiences or media users are to an increasing extent also drawn into the processes of generating economic value, for example by working for the networks as Jhally & Livant claim. However, it is probably more fruitful to regard audience activity not as labour in this process, but as the raw material that is tooled into a commodity by the media and culture industries and sold as a commodity to advertisers (Meehan 2000). This is also why a concept like user generated content really is an ideological concept, obscuring the fact that this specific kind of production is not compensated for by the industry (although it naturally can have personal value outside of the market for the individual produser or prosumer). We can also see that this perspective is not new, but part of an ongoing debate since at least the 1940s: The customer is not the king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its object, writes Adorno (1967/1975: 12) in a follow-up essay to his and Horkheimers famous culture industry essay. Seen in this way, the text commodity is a means to reaching the ultimate end with (commercial) media production, to construct audiences to sell to advertisers (or, in the public service setting, to construct political legitimacy). These audiences are constructed from aggregated audience statistics and lifestyle segmentation techniques. Audiences are measured and accounted for, and prices are set according to demand from advertisers on a competitive market. However, all media researchers know that

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the audience is a very slippery category (cf. Ang 1991). Audiences statistics are of course only representations, based on statistical calculation and probability theory. Audiences, as commodities, have in fact very little to do with the social subjects that watch, read, listen to media texts. However, this knowledge is, of course, not confined to media researchers. This is naturally also common knowledge among media analysts and marketing executives. Nonetheless all these people negotiate prices, and come to terms on these, irrespective of the large uncertainties surrounding audience statistics. You could say that they act as if this was not the case. In these negotiations numbers become real, and are the basis for real prices set. This is what I would say is the belief in the system that is activated. And this is also because all involved know that there are no other ways of coming to agreement on prices. So when people at Swedish TV4 say that they give certain older audiences away for free, this is only based on the common agreement among those involved that these specific segments are worthless. And when everybody agrees so, this is also how it will be.

Conclusion
I have in the above tried to argue for a more refined analysis of how value is created in media and culture industries. In the course of this argument I have presented what I consider a modified model of Bourdieus analytical tools, in order to have them fit better to production in an area where most commodities are entirely symbolic, which, as I argue, make the signifying practices in form of e.g. audience measurement and market analysis techniques increasingly more important for the construction of economic value. Following from this concentration of symbolic production, economic value has to be generated with the help of other values (political, cultural, educational). In this process is also constructed or produced other symbolic commodities beside the textual commodities.

References
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