Warning Signs and Distress Signals: What an Uncertain Future for the Global Entertainment Industries Means for Businesses, Workers, and Scholars
Date: Friday 11 October
Location: QUT Kelvin Grove, Z9 Block, Level 6, Room 607
Time: 9:15am – 3:00pm
Program: See full program here
For more information, see invitation here.
For catering purposes, please register your attendance via this link.
The global film and television economy is experiencing a period of transformative disruption affecting the industry on an unimaginable scale. So much has transpired in the past decade that it’s hard to distinguish causation from correlation; yet, the financial realities of the digital era are stark. Hiring is at an all-time low as stagnant market growth, economic downturns, and the false promises of streaming profits have made Wall Street incredulous about the value of large media companies. Cinemagoing never really recovered from the damage caused by the pandemic, and Peak TV is no longer sustainable. Netflix’s spending on new production has finally outpaced its domestic commitments, while YouTube and TikTok further erode legacy media’s command over the global marketplace, especially amongst younger audiences. Added to these concerns are the threats—both material and existential— posed by artificial intelligence, the corrosive, often abusive power dynamics at play behind the scenes, and unnerving reluctance to take seriously the growing chorus of concerns about workplace health and safety for below-the-line workers.
Many of these concerns resonate most strongly in Hollywood – as the significant episodes of industrial action last year powerfully visualized – but these developments are not so easily confined to the geographic borders of Southern California. New technologies, shifting business models, footloose production, poor safety protocols, time pressures, budget constraints, and geopolitics, among others, are concerns that reverberate globally, and not always in the same way as they mix and mingle with troubles more specific to their locales.
Against this backdrop, this symposium asks contributors to think more precisely about the macro-level structural adjustments unfolding around the world to better contextualize the everyday effects and responses from industries, businesses, workers, and the organizations that represent their collective interests. Indeed, disruption today is a shared experience (with variable consequences depending on where one sits in the industry’s dynamic power hierarchies). As such, scholarship requires more multivalent perspectives that not only grapple with the shifting nature of the business in different locations and at different scales, but also facilitate more thorough and specific interrogations of what industrial change and economic instability means for different stakeholders who make their living in the entertainment industries, and for those of us who study it.
The post DMRC's Transforming Media Industries Symposium: Warning Signs and Distress Signals appeared first on QUT Digital Media Research Centre.