Communication and Economic Life. Liz Moor

These include the way people talk about economic matters to family, friends and partners, the way they use computers or phones to research goods or make financial plans, what they learn about money from reading books and magazines, or from watching plays, the way they present themselves at work, the way they choose a hairdresser or how they decide when to make a meal from scratch rather than buy it from a supermarket or restaurant. It also ignores a good deal of the communicative activity that goes on inside businesses and firms, such as meeting, reviewing, complaining or gossiping. As we have seen above, leaving such practices out of our accounts of economic communication may also mean replicating dominant definitions of ‘the economy’, rather than understanding that these definitions are contested, or the outcome of a process. It also means ignoring the wider sociological and anthropological traditions that explore the symbolic dimensions of economic life and its subjective meaningfulness for those who participate in it.

Another reason to avoid a sole focus on mass media texts such as news is that it leaves the field open to the charge of media-centrism. As Nick Couldry notes, this is a real problem for media and communications scholars because, by assuming the importance of media, we bypass the question of ‘how central media actually are to the explanation of contemporary change’ (Couldry 2006: 12, emphasis added), and ignore the possibility that ‘sometimes, perhaps more often than … we suspect, media are less consequential in the social world than other forces’. What Couldry has in mind here are broader social and economic forces, including shifts in income, changing patterns of employment or ownership, and so on. But his point remains true even within the field of media and communications. There is a tendency to assume that (mass) mediated communications are the most consequential forms of communication, and then to focus on them. Yet the fact of being ‘media’ or ‘mediated’ may often be less important than the fact of taking narrative form, or of being a work of science fiction. Of course, the communicative aspects of economic life may ultimately be less important than its other parts too – the extent to which communication constitutes economic life is clearly an empirical question – but ‘communication’ offers a much broader starting point than ‘media’ (particularly when ‘media’ is really code for mass media texts), and, for scholars interested in these questions, it makes sense to start with them before assessing the extent to which mediation matters.

      In practice, focusing on ‘economic communication’ or ‘communication in economic life’ means drawing multiple traditions of work into the same orbit. Work on the way that, for example, financial crises or industrial disputes are represented in ‘the media’ (whether that is news and current affairs, or Hollywood films) must sit alongside work considering how ordinary people discuss debt and savings on internet discussion boards, or how they use savings apps on their phones, but also how their views of capitalism might be formed through reading particular kinds of novels or playing particular kinds of computer games. These are all forms of economic communication, and one is not more ‘authentically’ economic because it deals with inflation or central bank lending. Within such a framing, mediation would be posed as both a question and a spectrum. It has to be a question, rather than something we assume, because not all forms of economic communication are mediated, and certainly not through ‘mass’ media. As we shall see in chapter 6, the ordinary face-to-face discussions people have about the economy are vital for understanding how people make their own process of provisioning subjectively meaningful, and one of the advantages of attending to them is that they often show how far ordinary understandings of ‘the economy’ converge with or diverge from accounts offered by either governments or news media. On the other hand, mediation is also a spectrum because as we see in chapters 5 and 6, the ‘mediated’ versions of these conversations (for example as they take place on internet discussion forums) may share a good deal of the substance of their face-to-face counterparts. Where they differ is that mediated discourse extends the availability of these discussions in time and space, and offers a wider range of interlocutors (and perhaps of viewpoints) than are typically available in everyday life. Studying them alongside each other thus allows us to draw certain conclusions about how much difference mediation makes.

The approach to mediation in the chapters that follow draws on two traditions. The first is the expanded sense of media as including materials, technologies and systems. In this view, communicative forms such as novels, paintings and graffiti might be considered as mediators, because they play a role in shaping how we think about things (they ‘get in between’ us and some more direct view of a topic or event). But they are also mediated in the sense that their communication occurs via materials that place certain limits on them. In fact, all kinds of phenomena can perform a ‘mediating’ function: trains, radio signals and cloud storage can link people together, and have the potential to enable (but also place limits on) actions that are communicative (Innis 1950; Peters 2015). German sociologists Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann both include ‘money’ and ‘power’ in their definitions of communications media, and Luhmann even includes ‘scientific knowledge, art, love, [and] morals’ (Fuchs 2011: 90). These are beyond my scope here, but I do take this view of media as materials and systems seriously, particularly in chapter 2, where I look at the symbolic dimensions of money and payments media, and in chapter 3, where I explore the significance of ‘delinguistified’ and ambient forms of promotion.

The second tradition I draw upon is work in European media studies about ‘mediation’ or ‘mediatization’. This work explores the way that mediated communication creates ‘new forms of action and interaction in the social world, new kinds of social relationship and new ways of relating to others and to oneself’ (Thompson 1995: 4), and, as an unavoidable part of this, new ways of exercising power. This approach is developed by scholars who argue that the traditional focus of media and communications research – ‘mass’ communication, separated into the study of production, texts and reception – risks ignoring the significance of a more overarching set of historical developments in which media and processes of mediation have entered into many more aspects of daily life (see, e.g., Livingstone 2009; Couldry and Hepp 2013). In a post-internet age – but discernible before then – it has become much harder to speak about the media, as though that referred to a fixed set of forms and genres. Instead, we must begin by acknowledging the mediation, or potential mediation, of many elements of our experience, from taking out a loan or buying a book to going on holiday or seeking advice. From here, we can ask what difference this makes to social interaction and organization, to the distribution of resources, and so on. As various authors have noted, the concept of mediatization is therefore less a grand theoretical framework than a historical claim, a ‘sensitizing concept’ (Couldry and Hepp 2013) alerting us to what we must now consider when we explore the relationship between media and the social. The concepts of mediation and mediatization are valuable to the study of economic communication because they take seriously the fact that mediation, and mediated messages, can now be found in all kinds of places beyond what we think of as ‘the’ media, without determining in advance which are likely to be most consequential.

      What does all this mean for the study of economic communication and the construction of economic life? I take economic communication to refer to a large, but still circumscribed, set of actions, interactions, encounters and forms of expression, which may be mediated or unmediated (or involve a complex interplay between the two), and which have to do, very broadly, with ways of understanding and providing for our material wants and needs. As I have suggested, a major theme of the rest of the book concerns the role played by both communication, broadly understood, as well as specific media technologies in defining the content, scope and limits of ‘the economic’, both as an object out there in the world (as, for example, in the case of the construction of the economy on television news) and as a lived set of experiences of provisioning.

Value plurality in economic life

      A final concept