Core Response #4-Tiana Williams

I want to focus mostly on my observations from the Morley and Curtin texts for this week: 

    Morley’s article seemed to place a lot of focus initially on defending the placement and importance of ethnographic reception studies within television studies (which I personally felt dragged on for a bit too long, before properly integrating the naysayers analysis into his overall argument/direction of the chapter), but in any case I think that the crux of Morley’s argument which insists that focusing on micro processes, such as local or family/domestic studies, allows for a deeper understanding of globalization and localization as interconnected processes, was well taken in many ways; however I am not sure if Morley’s article made clear why the micro processes should be privileged over focus on the macro (like, is there a reason we should not consider studying both?). Morley does partially address my question in discussing a concept of “double viewing”(5), but while Morley contends that our thinking should not lie within the “one or the other” debate, it seems that Morley’s own argument is operating within this dichotomy itself at times. For instance, at one point, Morley attempts to demythologize an argument of ICTs producing “emergent placelessness,” by stating that it lacks empirical evidence and “operates at a level of over-abstraction which does not permit us to answer questions about how these media shift our everyday understandings of time and space, nor which media forms influence which people in which ways in their conceptualization of duration and distance”(9). I want to say that perhaps Morley is pointing to a question of access here, but I am not certain, as it is not totally clear what is meant by Morley’s statement/question of "which people". I suppose my own confusion with this statement is that Morley appears to totally ignore the influence of macro processes, only limiting his focus to the influence of media forms on those who are able to access the media. While Morley does bring up access in his assessment of the role of information and economic-poverty alike, asserting that its discussion needs to be reformulated into culturalists terms instead of only economic terms, it in many ways felt a bit tone deaf. In any case, I agree and mostly understand Morley’s frustration with technological determinist views of television studies, but I had slight reservations with completely taking in his entire argument (or maybe I’m not fully understanding it, so very much looking forward to discussion of it tomorrow). 

    Michael Curtin’s chapter on media capital was more well taken, as I appreciated Curtin’s assertion that media imperialism studies should shift focus of globalization from the nation to the city, and it became increasingly clear as he laid out and the three principles of media capital individually, as well as how they each worked together and were interconnected. Curtin's argument is certainly in conversation with Morley's, but I felt that Curtin did not leverage a disapproval of macro studies to formulate his overall point. I particularly enjoyed Curtin’s section on trajectories of creative migration and how it situated the pull for and of cultural labor. As I was reading this section, the Netflix’s miniseries Hollywood kept flashing in my mind, as a prime example of how tv imports specific popular cultural imaginations of the past with simplistic representations that, in the case of Hollywood, functions to assuage the tensions present within cultural production media epicenters. When creative migrants flock to said epicenter and experience what Curtin describes as industry “lock-out”,  television series often portray the protagonists as simply waiting to catch their “big break", rather than revealing the complexities of media capital at work and its impact on industry laborers.