The Media as Cultural Industries

This chapter examines the media as institutions and processes within the capitalist mode of production and thus as instances of that systems world which it was the purpose of the Enlightenment project to make transparent and thus bring more fully under human social control. It focuses on a critique of currently dominant Information Society thinking in examining the implications for emancipation, and thus in particular for media policy, of analysing the media from the perspective of the steering system of money and with the tools of political economy.