Customer Reviews

The Cultural Industries

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was a bit shocked by the previous review, which says the book is a chore to read and doesn't have any answer to the questions it raises. I think the author offers an answer - cultural industries are extremely complex, and a wide range of social, cultural, and political forces are constantly shaping the cultural industries. His strategy of analysis is to broadly outline some historical trends of cultural industries; but he also adds more complexity in analyzing these trends, warning us not to reify those trends. There is no XXX-determinism in this book. Rather, it calls for more refined analysis of the cultural industries around the world. Many scholars have praised the book, and I don't think they're lying. If one wants to hold on to simplistic approaches like some hard-core versions of the political economy approach, which tend to downplay the complexity of things, s/he should avoid reading this book. But if you believe in Gramsci and the idea that culture (production, text and reception) is always in a state of struggle, this book is for you.

David Hesmondhalgh's The Cultural Industries purports to be a guide to the changes in the popular media (TV, movies, music, books, etc.) over the last several decades, in particular how their ownership by conglomerates is affecting their quality. Yet if there is a substantial part of this book, I can't find it.
The first half of the book, nearly every page seems to reference that the important details will be dealt with in the later chapters. Once there, I was being referred back to the first half. Hesmondhalgh's entire content consists of summaries of a wide variety of existing writing on the topic, most of which is prefaced by calling it out as wrong and invalid. Yet a new counter-idea is never presented.
Even for this derivative style, The Cultural Industries manages to fail. For example, Hesmondhalgh sounds extremely out of place when writing about technology and the Internet (though this does not stop him from devoting a chapter to the subject). In a section trying to explain Web 2.0, he claims, "So the concept applies to software such as Linux, Apache and Perl and to applications such as Google, eBay and Amazon..." Linux is an operating system. Perl isn't even software - it's a programming language. And if calling websites "applications" isn't bizarre enough, you could not pick a worse example of Web 2.0 than Google: It's a white page with one (practical) item on it.
Overall, The Cultural Industries is a chore to read, and utterly devoid of information that couldn't be found in a dozen other, better written books.