The idea of political economy was a key topic of a recent lecture, and this topic gave me a personal interest as it gave me a different perspective on not only the idea of what politics actually is against what I believed politics to be, but also how I view media personally. For starters, my view on politics was shaped by the idea of a system of ideals and views which people follow and debate over, yet political economy in the media is far more focussed on the idea of power, for instance how the audience may be seen as a commodity. This clearly still has some of the aspects of what I believe ‘traditional’ politics to be (for instance this audience as a commodity viewpoint is clearly left wing due to it’s more anti-consumerist leanings, showing the idea of a political spectrum) yet has been adapted into something far more specific in relation to media, and as a result pop-culture. This idea of political economy and power within the media made me want to investigate the implications of this within pop-culture, as Patrick Burkart states that “Political economy is suited to… commodification in everyday life” (Burkart 2018) This commodification in everyday life relates heavily to pop-culture as this has become an almost constant part of day-to-day Western Society, and so I decided to have a look at the idea of audiences being a commodity as I thought that this would be the most obvious example of a political economy. This turned out to be accurate as whilst researching, I found that that consumer culture is prevalent in pop-culture. An example of this is the popular cartoon/ movie franchise ‘Transformers’, which was originally based off of toys and continues to produce merchandise to retail for financial benefit to the creators. This is a clear example of an audience being used as a commodity as it could be argued that ‘Transformers’ is essentially a glorified advertising campaign, with its target audience being children who will most likely want all of the latest toys and games presented to them. An ethical issue which may be encountered when looking into commodification in children’s adverts is the fact that children are not of legal age to give consent to participate in any studies into this. The way this can be tackled is by the organisers of a study being very careful with the content that they show in order to meet regulatory guidelines, as well as asking parental permission for safeguarding purposes.

References:

Burkart (2018) ‘Political Economy’ in The Craft of Criticism. eds. Kackman, M. and Kearney, M.C. New York: Routledge 284-312