Reading 4

Castelells Manuel, “Communication, Power and Counter power in the Network Society”, International Journal of Communication 1 (2007), pp238-266.

Manuel Castelells is a sociologist especially associated with information society and communications research.

I am interested in the premise of interplays between communications and power relationships that Manuel Castelells explores in this piece. He argues that the media has become the social space where power is decided. Is this still the case in 2010? Or has this power been fragmented or further expanded?

I need to own up here to having a political interest; I work in a voluntary capacity on the Marketing Committee for the Green Party with a specific overview on brand and design.
The Green Party, like all parties are continuously researching means to establish the best ways to communicate with both members and potential voters.

The Obama campaign which occurred after this piece was written, is often mentioned as a turning point in election campaigns as it exemplified how best to harness social networks and digital communications to political gain. This is a change from Castelells noting TV as the number one political communication channel (p240). One of clever parts of the Obama campaign was how the Scott Thomas as design director clearly understood the divergent abilities inherent in the many new channels, identifying four main areas of image approach as 1. Campaign 2. Instant / Vintage 3. Timeless 4. Supporters. Using these as different storytelling motifs of the brand. This u-tube clip explains: http://the99percent.com/videos/5821/scott-thomas-designing-the-obama-campaign

This does confirm Castelells surmation that the value of the media is image based ‘The language of the media has its rules. It is largely built around images, not necessarily visual, but images’ (p242). The Obama campaign pitched the image in many ways reinforced with a visual component.

So we have got cleverer at selling a particular political brand to many audiences, in the way that audience wants to perceive it. This does confirm an active fragmentation or multiple ways of selling the same message over a broader type of media, which may now also deliberately include the low-tech (e.g oversize supporters buttons) and much as twitter feeds and digital sign-up mediums.

The English 2010 election, also strongly media driven, with a televised political debate being seen as the unexpected driver to change voter behaviour. The debate after much media discussion had 321,000 u-tube views.

The media also used the election to reinforce their own brands. The Independent newspaper produced a u-tube clip, which said in their own words: ‘Too much news is not news – it is spin and PR. Under an unapologetic, liberal banner, we will bring you the facts that many would rather you simply did not read’. This covered proportional representation, financial contributions and media involvement in the election. See the clip at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/the-independent-truth-matters-1949116.html

I would suggest that media power has been fragmented by the use of public zones such as u-tube, which for the moment at least are outside direct media control, even if they are being used by the media in increasingly clever ways.