Introduction

In 1946, Hortense Powdermaker, an anthropologist whose previous fieldwork had been among the headhunting tribes in New Guinea, found herself researching Hollywood. She considered Hollywood as a particular kind of social system, with its own habitat, taboos, gods, and even magic. She saw Hollywood as part of a key tension: that of the mass production of dreams. Or, as a critic put it, ‘an industry churning out mass-produced dreams with all the cold efficiency of a Detroit auto plant’ (James, 1989). Powdermaker herself wrote:

What happens when storytelling, at once individual and social, creative, imaginative, and emotive, becomes part of a factory-style production process? While this question is primarily oriented to the macro-sociological level of the media industry, our examination here is more closely focused on a crucial aspect: media workers themselves and their labour.

As with the industry as a whole, media labour operates on a similar premise: workers’ knowledge, creativity, and their emotional world, in short, their whole subjectivity, is mobilized as an economic resource. Unlike, for example, workers in a factory who sell their time and manual skills and then go home and forget about it, media workers (and in general cognitive, non-manual workers) engage their whole self in their work, and part of their job is to use emotions in order to produce emotions in others. But what are the implications of this for the workers and for the media themselves?