(Original in French)

Patricia Marenghi, Marina Hernández Prieto & Ángel Badillo^[2]

Introduction

What is diversity in the audio-visual field and how to measure it are two questions which have produced much debate in the realm of social sciences for years (Farchy & Ranaivoson 2011; McDonald & Dimmick 2003; McQuail 1998; Moreau & Peltier 2004; Napoli 1997, 1999; Ranaivoson 2007; UNESCO 2011; Van Cuilenburg 2000, 2007). Since the appearance of the first digital formats of cultural products in the nineties until the popularisation of the internet in the new century, the new networks have transformed cultural production, distribution and consumption, altering the value chain of cultural industries. From an idealistic perspective, digital technologies offer extraordinary possibilities of enrichment of the diversity of cultural expressions. Not only do they offer significant advances in terms of information transmission and reproduction quality, as well as in terms of storage thanks to compression and convergence possibilities, but digital technologies also “dematerialise” cultural expressions, enabling them to travel faster, in greater quantity, reaching wider and more dispersed audiences. The transition from the physical world to the digital ecosystem is thus characterised by an increase and diversification of the offer, the empowering of the public, but also of the majors, together with a widening of the digital divide (Guèvremont 2013).

In this new ecosystem, measuring the diversity of cultural expressions presents interesting challenges. Traditional dimensions and tools do not seem as effective in this context where power asymmetries cohabit with the emergence of new dominant players (Napoli et Karppinen 2013). Although these challenges are apparent in many areas, we shall focus concretely here on those affecting the measurement of audio-visual diversity. What are the new challenges faced by the measurement of audio-visual diversity in the new digital ecosystem? Which research results can we take into account? Are there any consensual tools available to measure audio-visual diversity in the new digital environment?

From a methodological perspective, this article is based on a research project titled “Cultural and Audio-visual Diversity: Best Practices and Indicators”^[3]. One of its objectives consisted in drawing a path showing the methods used to measure audio-visual diversity, systematising the main contributions and acceptations, thus providing a general framework that would help in the selection or construction of a tool (set of indicators) aimed at evaluating the different facets of diversity within the audio-visual industry and which would also enable a case comparison. Another, more specific project, was added to this first general study: “Diversity of the Audio-visual Industry in the Digital Age”. Its objective was to offer a reflection on the existing measures applied to the digital audio-visual industry, especially on the internet, which might help define public policies and private actors’ strategies.

Our conclusions will show that there are predominantly indicators aimed at measuring content diversity on the internet, but those focus on the linguistic dimension; that there is a lack of studies reporting on the diversity of sources (i.e. producers, distributors, etc.) and that, for this reason, more research on the structure of the internet and its actors are necessary; and that in spite of a few interesting experiences of online audience measurement — more if we consider the investments made in this field by big advertising agents in the network —, scientific research on audience access does not have sufficient quantity and quality data to evaluate the internet contributions to audio-visual diversity.

This chapter is therefore organised as follows: the first part briefly explains the transformations that have occurred in the audio-visual environment as a consequence of digitisation, convergence and development of the internet, as well as their impact on diversity. Section II focuses on a few attempts at measuring audio-visual diversity on the internet, looking to identify advances as well as weaknesses in this field. Finally, the last section highlights some of the main obstacles and challenges faced by the measurement of audio-visual diversity in the new context of digital production, distribution and consumption.

I – Changes in the Audio-visual Environment: the new Digital Ecosystem

The term “convergence” has been used in the last few years to refer to the phenomenon that the distances between the telecommunications, audio-visual and IT sectors are narrowing, as a consequence of the incorporation, by the first two, of computer languages and technologies^[4]. After a stage that might be called “telematic”, when large telecommunication companies started to incorporate digitisation to optimally manage their networks and exchange data among large corporations — at a time when IT was restricted to state or big company bureaucracies, the reduction in the production cost of processors, the simplification of computer interfaces, the advent of the personal computer market and the extension of computerisation to all industry sectors, the cultural industry in particular, blurred borders between the three sectors. Whereas they were independent until the nineties, the “binarisation” of their contents gave rise to a communication and culture mega sector, circulating on new networks (satellites, micro-waves, physical networks).

The basis for convergence lays in digitisation, that is to say the process through which different types of information — basically alphanumerical text, graphics, sounds and static and moving images — can be translated into binary code, which is most distinguished by its precision or, as Watkinson puts it (2001: 4), “that they are the most resistant to misinterpretation”. Digitisation makes it possible to manipulate all these data electronically, as far as the production as well as the transmission and consumption of cultural products are concerned. If the reduction in the cost of processors affected primarily the management of communication networks or the area of content production in cultural industries, from the second half of the nineties the drop in prices and miniaturisation of microchips led to the explosion of the mass consumption market of devices used as much for personal communication as for all types of cultural products. Since the end of the 20th century, the deregulation of internet access, the interconnection of physical and wireless networks using TCP/IP protocol and mass commercial access of the last ten years, via stationary as well as mobile devices, led to a formidable transformation of the content suppliers whose stature was already global, of the gatekeepers of the digital ecosystem (with global producers of hardware and software controlling access to cultural contents), and to consumer markets.

II – Impact of the New Digital Ecosystem on Diversity

The consequences brought about by convergence, digitisation and the rise of the internet on the sector of cultural industries are still far from being totally understood. Among the factors that need examining are the extension of audio-visual services to all global markets, with the high rate of capillarity offered by physical and wireless telematic network and the possibilities of interactivity created by the application of the new technologies, as well as the research of new communication languages and new modes of relating to the consumer.

A fair proportion of the literature dealing with the impact of the processes mentioned above is centred around two main positions. Faced with the emergence and existence of a “digital public sphere” as opposed to an “old public sphere” (Schäfer 2015), opinions have split between what we might call the “cyberoptimists” versus the “cyberpessimists” (Oates 2008), “utopians” versus “dystopians” (Papacharissi 2002) or “net-enthusiasts” versus “critics” (Dahlberg 1998). By transferring these categories to the study of diversity, the current situation may be described in the following terms.

A – Cyberoptimists

For cyberoptimists, the new reality created by digital technologies is positive due to the inclusion of more actors (diversity of sources) and a better visibility of their positions (plurality of contents). Online tools allow more people to be heard:

After all, content can be posted rather easily online, without the interference of gate-keeping journalists, and ‘connective action’ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) enables user-to-user communication which is less dependent on large-scale infrastructure and also more difficult for authorities to contain. All this might ‘empower’ those who have always wanted to engage in public debate but were previously marginalized by traditional media, e.g. individuals vis-à-vis institutions, smaller vis-à-vis larger, more powerful organizations, dissidents vis-à-vis authoritarian governments, or stakeholders from peripheral regions or developmental countries vis-à-vis ‘Western’, first-world stakeholders (Schäfer 2015: 324).

Thus, usually basing themselves on the paradigm of “mass self-communication” (Castells 2009), one of the main capabilities noted by the optimists in the new digital ecosystem is the possibility for each and every one to become a content producer and thereby an alternative source of content. The appearance of such concepts as “prosumers” or “produsers” or the characterisation of mutations — from mass communication to mass auto-communication (Castells 2009), from publics to participants and users (Silverstone 2006) — highlighted the ability of citizens to interact directly with others and thus offset dominant discourses.

Focusing now on the audio-visual field, convergence, digitisation and, fundamentally, the development of the internet produced significant transformations in the last few years regarding the interaction between IT and the cultural industries, when computers were included in processes of content management and production. These effects were felt as early as the eighties, with the introduction of non-linear production systems on digital platforms — already very common and cheap in the nineties — and led to a transformation of the productive fabric accessible by increasingly more actors. For instance, compared with the mid-20th, when its costs were very high, audio-visual production in the eighties and nineties — with the application of electronics and IT reducing the price of equipment — saw the emergence of a growing number of actors willing to offer their services^[5]. During the last few years, the explosion of the internet as a commercial platform, after decades of it being an experimental network of academic research, witnessed the crystallisation of an incalculable number of initiatives centred around the new technological possibilities of digital media, with the attraction of its global reach (enabling the globalization of events and contents), as well as the ability to share (and commercialise) audio-visual contents without intermediaries.

Thus, for cyberoptimists, internet allows, thanks to its decentralised architecture, low production costs and its “end-to-end design”, an increase in the diversity of sources and, thereby, an actual ability to contribute to democratisation.

To this rise in the number of voices, other researchers (Benkley 2006) add that the internet can contribute to generating a new form of communication and construction of collaborative knowledge (through wikis for example). This new perspective implies a decentralised and networked production of contents, closer to the original idea of the World Wide Web as imagined by its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, a production which manages in many cases, due to its non-commercial objectives, to overcome the barriers imposed by the commercial logic of traditional communication means.

As far as contents are concerned, net-enthusiasts consider that the decentralised structure of the internet functions as a neutral, equitable and transparent platform, promoting a wider variety of contents. As a direct consequence of the increase in production sources and of the linear equation according to which an increase in the number of actors leads directly to an increase in the quantity and types of contents, the conclusion is that the digital revolution increased the level of diversity.

Meanwhile, audiences have become more powerful. Interactivity enables users to increase the control they have on the cultural product (Marsden & Verlhust 1999), for example, when they consume or modify it to personalise it based on individual preferences. Thus, as a consequence of the abundance of producers and contents and the extended abilities by citizens to format the cultural products they consume, the new digital environment appears to be an ideal of diversity.

B – Cyberpessimists

At the opposite end of these technoptimistic discourses, critics consider that past logics were replicated while the number of sources increased, and that they were even accentuated in some cases. Robert W. McChesney (2013) argues that, more than an increase in the diversity of media contents, the advent of digital technologies increase concentration and the tendency to oligopolies. The concentration of the cultural industries was already one of the most notable characteristics of all traditional media systems in the context of progressive commercialisation and deregulation of the last few years (see, for example, Bagdikian 2004). In an economic perspective, company mergers reduce the number of actors and, consequently, eliminate the effective market competition. Moreover, the economic size of these actors is unseen, historically speaking. In 2012, Apple became the most listed company on the stock exchange since the beginning of the registry, at $620 billions (Forbes 2012) and three years later, it became the first company in the world to exceed $700 billions (Wakabayashi 2015). Nevertheless, in the field of cultural industries, the main problem is not only of an economic nature, but also, and especially, socio-political. The reduction in the number of actors implies a reduction in the number of voices and therefore, concentration has repercussions on the living conditions of public opinion. The problem affects the individual not as a consumer, but as a citizen participating to the cultural flows of the public sphere.

Within the current context of the internet, much more propitious to the transnational extension of corporations, the issue of emergence of new dominant actors (such as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.), perpetuated by present power asymmetries on the network, refers directly to the question of diversity of sources. As Hamelink already foresaw (2000: 12), “The technical convergence leads to institutional convergence and to the consolidation of national and international provision of information (and culture) into the hands of a few mega providers”.

Multinationals are consolidated vertically, horizontally or in multimedia^[6], with transnational interests and headquarters in various countries, their ownership being increasingly vague — due to the fragmentation of ownership made possible by stock exchange markets and the control help upon them by financial entities or investment funds. Their growing presence creates a new structure in this digital ecosystem, in which other content producers have a hard time competing. Napoli and Karppinen (2013) clearly summarized it when they quoted Eli Noam: “when it comes to media pluralism, the Internet is not the solution, but it is actually becoming the problem, due to the fundamental economic characteristics of the Internet (such as scale economies, capital intensity, etc.)”.

Cyberpessimists do not criticise the lack of variety of content producers (in fact, they admit that the variety is wider), but the fact that said abundance did not modify existing power relations between groups and actors. Instead, it reproduces the same old logics, today with different participants, and leads to some voices being more audible than others. It is not the quantity of voices, but the power distribution of said voices that is denounced in the new digital environment.

As far as contents are concerned, critical positions emphasise the risks of increasing recycling and repetition practices, alongside quality loss (Doyle 2010; Fenton 2010; Freedman and Scholsberg 2011). Reuse has become a common practice. As Champion observes: “digital technology made content recycling easier and contributed to the rise of ‘churnalism’^[7], second-hand stories, reusing existing content, as well as recycling and remixing content for multiple platforms” (Champion 2015: 40).

The reproduction and repetition of existing ideas and the amplification of dominant discourses were exacerbated by the arrival of new intermediaries, search engines, contents aggregators, etc. which have further stifled access options to diverse contents. One notable reason for this is that, for structural reasons inherent to the internet, “the best search engines, in the best of cases, only cover a fifth of the total number of websites” (Picard 2000: 186). The “de-intermediarisation” of communicative processes is nothing more than a change of gatekeepers, where selection and hierarchisation are not made by traditional media actors but by the algorithms of the new companies. Thus, as Karppinen concluded (2009: 166),

it is increasingly clear that limitless number of options is not a value in itself. As the logic of exclusivity is shifting from the production to the filtering of information, it can be argued that the real issue for contemporary media policy is not lack of information but access to new and challenging content, exposure to different ideas, and particularly to new and innovative ideas and opinions of various alternative or minority groups, as opposed to satisfying pre-existing needs.

This is directly linked to the issue of audiences. Saturation on the one hand and segmentation and personalisation on the other are the two issues that harm diversity. Even though web 2.0 shows the advantages of universalising production and democratise access to contents, citizens suffer from the supersaturation of the media flood (Gitlin 2002). There are so many voices that it becomes difficult to be heard; Picard’s comparison is very revealing, when he suggests when describing the current situation “it is as if one is speaking in one’s seat in a premier league football match and hoping other spectators can hear what you have to say” (2000: 186).

Digital technologies have increased fragmentation, through audience segmentation and content personalisation for individuals. “In order to survive in the highly competitive environment of fragmented audiences, media managers in broadcasting, cable, and publishing […] tend to engage in audience segmentation” (Picard 2000: 184). In doing so, they have undermined consumption diversity (Baker 2002; Champion 2015; Helberger 2011, Napoli 2011b).

III – A Few Experiences in Measuring Audio-visual Diversity on the Internet

In the new digital ecosystem, measuring diversity presents interesting challenges. Conventional tools and dimensions do not seem adequate for the task anymore (Napoli & Karppinen 2013). Although these challenges exist in many areas, we shall refer here to a few experiences that focused on measuring audio visual diversity.

The rare empirical studies looking at the measure of audio-visual diversity on the internet particularly analyse contents. For instance, Champion, Doyle and Schlesinger (2012) have researched how the growth of digital and multiplatform distribution have affected content and the economy of communication means. The question they posed was to what extent the evolution of media companies towards multiplatform production and distribution has amplified or reduced diversity and the plurality of contents. In order to test these changes, they suggested carrying out content analyses. Compaine and Smith (2001) and Carpenter (2010) had already performed an analysis of the diversity of media contents, though restricted to a unique sector — the former studied the case of internet radio and the latter focused on citizen journalism and online news articles —. Compaine and Smith’s study (2001) was based on the premise that internet radio added diversity to the traditional structure of radio diffusion and measured the level of diversity created in terms of formats, property, the localisation of the target market and language. Lin and Jeffries (2001) had previously compared television channels as well as radios and newspapers contents, but they had done so in the context of only one platform, based on the analysis of 422 websites.

Champion (2015) performed a detailed content analysis. He chose to focus on newspaper and magazine headlines and television signals^[8] and analysed them over three time periods (spring 2013, 2014 and 2015). His working hypotheses were: 1) that multiplatform innovations increased the volume of available contents and 2) that they influenced its diversity. To operationalize concepts, the “volume” is calculated by taking into account the duration of the various programmes and the number and length of the articles, and “diversity” is measured in terms of repetition as well as concentration.

The study seems to suggest that the linguistic diversity of online contents has been the most debated and promoted dimension in the internet environment lately. While they do not focus directly on the audio-visual sector, the concern behind all these studies stems from the idea that:

For many Internet users, the potential benefits of the tremendous variety of content options available online from a vast array of sources essentially run aground against the fact that much of this information may not be available in their native language. As was noted in the IGF 2010 panel on linguistic diversity, there are more than 6,000 languages in the world, though only about 350 of them are represented online […]. And, not surprisingly, there has been an overwhelming proportion of English–language content online, relative to English speakers’ representation in the global population and the online population (Napoli & Karppinen 2013).

UNESCO (2005), in concert with the World Summit on the Information Society, promoted the measurement of linguistic diversity on the internet using three evaluation methodologies: 1) measuring the user profiles of the online population; 2) analysing the languages used in the online environment by users; and 3) analysing the languages used by websites (web presence). Gerrand (2007) classifies and systematises the measuring attempts that have applied these methodologies (figure 1) and offers a taxonomy.

Figure 1. Taxonomy of methodologies used to estimate linguistic diversity on the internet

Source: Gerrand (2007: 1301)

 

Based on the review of these studies, Napoli and Karppinen (2013) adopt an analytical approach to measure the principle of diversity online (though they do not develop it). Reformulating the proposition of Napoli’s classical studies (1997, 1999), the following diagram includes: 1) the diversity of sources (measured by analysing user profiles), 2) the diversity of contents (measured through a linguistic analysis of websites and user communities), and 3) the diversity of exposition (measured by analysing the access to sites) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The principle of online diversity: analytical approaches

Source: Napoli & Karppinen (2013).

Because of the small number of indicators that can be used to shed light on diversity in the digital context and, consequently, the low number of empirical researches, studies that have been conducted in the last few years are calling for a “reconnection” between the principle of diversity and public policies. Communication polices regarding what we now call “traditional media” were set up in a context which is now disappearing, or is at least in transition. The debates on the rarity of the radioelectric spectrum, the distribution of licences and the configuration of different barriers, to name just a few, which have historically characterised discussions on the regulation mass media of communication, are currently “non-issues” (Napoli and Karppinen 2013) in the internet environment. However, as Napoli points it out (2011a), the new context created new concerns.

On this point, Napoli and Karppinen (2013) criticise the degree of disconnection between the principle of diversity in traditional communication policies, and the context of governance of the internet^[9]. They denounce the fact, for instance, that during the sessions of the main forum of discussion on the governance of the internet, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the concept of diversity was limited to one discussion on multilingualism. Only on the margin of the main discussions was the concept connected at all to the themes of pluralism and freedom of expression. As these authors indicate correctly, the forum did not include any debates regarding the relationship between diversity of sources and diversity of contents, which characterise the principle of diversity in the discussions on the regulation of traditional media.

IV – Conclusions, Challenges and Propositions Regarding the Measurement of Diversity

The rare attempts made to measure diversity in the digital environment and more specifically on the internet were based on various problems, some of them current and others still unsolved, inherited from the past. The first is the lack of conceptual precision regarding what diversity actually is and, inasmuch, how and on what basis it should be measured. The inexistence of consensual categories applicable to cultural goods and services^[10] is particularly obvious here. The difficulties of actor classification should also be noted, with the added problem that it is indeed almost impossible to place in one category alone the traditional actors of the value chain – producers, distributors, operators -, and new intermediaries, such as the contents aggregators or search engines, to name just a few, which are hard to catalogue.

The second obstacle inherited from the past is the insufficient data available on the operation of numerous cultural sectors, and the diversity of study methodologies when those data are available. While it was already difficult to obtain information, statistical information for the most part, allowing to measure diversity within the environment of the traditional cultural industries, their expansion to the internet worsened the situation even further. It is therefore necessary to encourage scientific and public research on the economy of digital culture, and to promote projects which strengthen the creation of common methodologies to study the sector.

The third problem lies in the lack of consensual indicators to measure diversity or pluralism, as noted by Napoli and Karppinen:

(…) it is now commonly acknowledged that the problems of market dominance and concentration of media power have not disappeared in the Internet environment. But as was noted in the 2010 workshop on how to measure communication and media in the digital converged era, the degree of concentration is increasingly difficult to measure in the online environment when there are no commonly accepted means to define relevant markets or assign market shares to different types of sources (Napoli & Karppinen 2013).

The same thing may be observed in reference to the indicators used to evaluate the development of contents in different languages:

(…) with the birth of the Web and the growth of the commercial part of the Internet, the academic sector has partly given up the creation of Internet demographic data to the private sector, and perhaps more controversially to the marketing sector. This has created privately held, rather than publicly available, data. This has often led to the lack of transparency of research methodologies (Pimienta, Prado & Blanco 2009: 7-8).

As far as production, distribution and dissemination/exhibition are concerned, the new audio-visual environment has seen the emergence of new actors and, at the same time, generated transformations of great magnitude for those already existing. Global contents suppliers — some originating directly from the hardware and software industries — just as internet providers and the new intermediaries which can no longer be classified in the old categories based on the value chain of traditional cultural industries, make up a complex scenario, built on logics that are still vague and exist in tension, that must be taken into account in order to measure diversity. The main obstacle, in this sense, comes down to knowing how to measure the degree of diversity while it is still difficult to establish the limits of the markets in which the agents are acting, and consequently, generate segmentation criteria of the internet’s infinite universe for its evaluation. In addition to this, another difficulty consists in measuring the size and geographical origin of said agents in an environment which is characterised not only by the opacity of information, but also by deterritorialization, with flows and interactions increasingly less conceivable in spatial terms.

As to the diversity of contents, the majority of studies so far have approached it in its linguistic dimension. Although it is an important one, it is necessary to go beyond those frontiers and to integrate other dimensions in the analysis of diversity. The question of whether the evolution towards a new ecosystem created not only more contents, but also more content diversity, can only be answered by studying other substantial categories — among others, the classical categories proposed by McQuail (1998) which are political, geographical and sociocultural —. At the same time, it would be just as interesting to measure it in relationship to content recycling, by confronting their originality levels and reutilisation.

From the perspective of measuring consumed diversity, digitisation makes it necessary to develop new measurement instruments that would make it possible to shed light on direct and differed viewing, mobile content visualisation, consumption via computers, smartphones, tablets, etc., and the effects of the multi-screen. In other words, instruments that go beyond the measurement of the offline audience, which was used until now to measure consumption. Different organisations and companies conduct measurements of the digital media, varying in their degree of complexity and according to their instruments. The resulting inconsistency and lack of homogeneity constituted a major obstacle in advancing the measurement of the diversity of the contents produced, but even more fundamentally so of the contents consumed.

In order to measure the level of consumed diversity, it would be necessary to include mechanisms able to differentiate between the digital media that allow repeated viewing, reproductions or interactions (online video games, for example), from those which do not — an episode of an online TV series, for instance — (DMMF Report 2013). The new technical possibilities of downloading or streaming, involving linear or on demand offer, present new challenges for the measurement of consumed diversity. Additional obstacles exist, such as the analysis of consumption occurring through illegal or unauthorised platforms, or consuming or downloading though peer to peer technologies. In this sense, every attempt at monitoring must be based on substance and not on the platform; that is to say that it must, ultimately, be technologically neutral.

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