Rob Stones, Why Current Affairs Needs Social Theory?

Abstract

creativity of artists but as a professional and creative discipline. In other words, we should go beyond the creativity versus marketing dualism. Such a move is in line with three ‘destabilising’ strands of academic debate about media industries. The first is the importance of paratexts. We no longer merely have a newspaper article, for example, but a tweet linking to an article. Jonathan Gray’s discussion of the increasing importance of ‘paratexts’ across platforms, such as trailers, that he argues affect how audiences interpret the text has shaped the authors’ thinking here. In addition, we have witnessed the rise of short form video content in its own right consumed on the move in a mobile media world. The second is the infiltration of promotional culture into cultural, political and everyday life collapsing boundaries of promotion and content in interesting and sometimes disturbing ways. The third is production studies, which has gone through something of a rebirth as an object of study in recent years. Again what we see here is a blurring of boundaries between producers, promoters and consumers as a consequence of economic, technological and cultural change. These three destabilising trends are viewed through the data provided by interviewing senior promotional industry executives, through fieldwork observation of production spaces and professional gatherings (such as award ceremonies), through analysis of promotional forms and through institutional analysis of company documents and public documents such as white papers. Following Boddy’s characterisation of contemporary media as ubiquitous, mobile and interactive, this provides a fascinating and sophisticated account of promotional transformations in screen industries.