The rise of corporational determinism: digital media corporations and narratives of media change

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on examples of digital media corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, we argue that corporational determinism helps companies to market more effectively their products and to build stronger claims in support of their right to inform debates and decisions about the governance of digital technologies. Critical media scholarship should counteract the narratives of corporational determinism with more sophisticated approaches that underline the role of a wider range of actors in media change.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital corporations
• digital revolution
• media imaginary
• corporate identity
• narratives of media change

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Henrik Bødker, Fabio James Petani and the anonymous reviewers for providing exceedingly useful feedback upon earlier versions of this paper.

ORCID

Simone Natale http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1962-2398

Paolo Bory http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4661-3040

Gabriele Balbi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7752-277X

Notes

1 We employ the adjective “corporational” rather than the more widely used “corporate” because the adjective “corporate” (as in “corporate communication”) is usually employed to characterize narratives and messages that are produced by the corporations themselves, while the adjective “corporational” conveys more appropriately the sense of a “discourse related to corporations.”

2 It is not by chance that Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon’s initials coincide with the first four letters of the acronym GAFAM (M stands for Microsoft) used by journalists and scholars to summarize the so called “giants” of the digital industry, thus the five most valuable listed firms in the world (Smyrnaios, 2017). An exhaustive list of digital corporations is hard to be provided and could also include, beside Microsoft, non-Western actors such as the Chinese JD, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu or the Russian Yandex, Vk, Moi Mir, and Rutube.

3 In this regard, Williams would probably have been sympathetic to John Durham Peters’ recent call for acknowledging the usefulness of approaches that look specifically at the role of technology in media change, notwithstanding widespread critiques and debates about the fallacies of technological determinism (Peters, 2017).

4 Despite its popularity, this anecdote might be at least in part apocryphal. According to one of the two protagonists of the story, Wozniak, the garage played in fact a marginal role in the events leading to the creation of the first Apple computer (Audia & Rider, 2005; Morozov, 2012).