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 110 Britain in 2011

Feature | MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

Online environments have become the spaces where people gather and where community is built

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   NICK STEVENS Do people actually need digital social media like Twitter or Facebook? ALEKS KROTOSKI


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News | MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT How much should the public know about terrorist activity in Britain?

Right to know 


  

  


  


 

 

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MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT | Opinion

3D cinema: the billion pound bonanza  






 

 IN 2009 CINEMA admissions increased by six per cent. This was despite the recession, despite the five per cent rise of ticket prices, despite the increasing popularity of videogames, and the availability of other distribution formats such as DVD, Blu-ray, video-on-demand and the internet. How did this happen? First, a spate of hits such as Slumdog Millionaire, The Hangover, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Star Trek and Avatar drew more people into cinemas. Second, the film exhibition industry adopted a cost-reducing innovation: digital cinema. Although they first appeared a few years ago, the number of digital screens doubled in 2009. Digital cinema lowers the cost of film copies, shortens copying time and makes switching films easier – although contractual obligations and suitcase-sized digital hard-disks driven to cinemas diminish the advantage. Third, the industry adopted a qualityenhancing innovation: 3D cinema. Originally launched in analogue form in the 1950s, it is now digitally reinvented, eliminating the analogue drawbacks such as breakdownprone projection and headache-causing asynchronous flicker. 3D was greatly helped by the boom in digital cinemas, as most can play it easily and cheaply, and the number of 3D screens increased six-fold and 3D revenue forty-fold. Today, 16 per cent of admissions are for 3D movies, up from almost nothing in 2008, and we were willing to pay more for them, suggesting we find it an enjoyable qualityincrease, and that ticket prices might have remained flat if we adjusted for quality. Fourth, cinema-going has traditionally Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassing director James Cameron’s own Titanic been recession-proof. In the 1930s it was hardly Although you might think that new On the production side, the British industry affected, and it did well in every recession distribution platforms such as postal DVD-rentals, also seemed to be made of Teflon®. Real since about 1970. This is in sharp contrast to music expenditure, which tanks in almost any video-on-demand, internet and mobile threaten expenditure increased by over 50 per cent in 2009, despite the financial crisis. Although British recession. We replace more expensive activities the viability of cinema admissions, they have actually achieved the obverse: a film release independent film-makers are finding it ever such as foreign holidays, luxury meals out, has become a big marketing more difficult to get cash, the lion’s share of live musicals, with less expensive A big wild event meant to lift sales across all British production expenditure comes from the cinema. Also, as wages moderate platforms. If it bombs, Hollywood studios, who profited from a falling and available work declines, our card is 3D. It pound and generous tax breaks. opportunity costs fall, as what we could boost the the studio loses across all platforms; if it wins, it yields far Film production is one of only a few sectors could have gained by not watching a £900 million more than box office revenue. that immediately respond to these breaks. movie declines. British postThe antique delivery system drags Expenditure rose to almost £1 billion. Similar Ever since cinema emerged along the new high-tech channels sectors include videogames development opportunity costs rises have dwarfed production in its slipstream. (£625m) and media post-production (£900m). ticket price hikes. Since 1934, sector It is not surprising therefore In little time, huge amounts of foreign resources real ticket prices have more than that the total consumer expenditure on films can shift to Britain, resulting in significant doubled, while opportunity costs (linked to in 2009, £3.7 billion, was a multiple of box services exports. While the last government the wage rate) have almost quadrupled. office revenue. That compares to £2.9 billion was sinking money into cars, incentives for Given the latter’s almost continuous lead on video games and £1.3 billion expenditure creative industries may have had a more durable on the former, cinema should become everon music. economic impact, plus a real immaterial benefit. more recession-resistant.

114 Britain in 2011

Twentieth Century Fox

We replace more expensive activities – with less expensive cinema

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News | MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT

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Ever since 2005, when the WTO (World Trade Organisation) made cultural industries an exception, countries have waged tax wars to lure them to their territories. One of the stalwarts is Quebec. The Canadian province offers a layer cake of different tax breaks, leading to an influx of videogame makers and other creatives. Three different tax incentives also rescued Hollywood from the doldrums between the early-1970s and mid-1980s. So what does the future hold? The previous government set up the UK Film Council (UKFC), an industry body distributing subsidies and administering tax incentives, and promised a videogame tax break. The current government has axed the latter as well as the Council itself, but kept the film tax incentive. Uncertainties lie ahead, depending on what will replace the UKFC, whether the pound goes up or down, and what tax breaks other countries have up their sleeves. A big wild card is 3D. It could further boost the burgeoning £900 million British postproduction sector, and will undoubtedly further increase admissions. However, the industry is still holding its breath to see whether 3D remains a fad. Two billion-dollar questions are whether cinemas can offer non-film live events in high-quality 3D, and whether anyone succeeds in developing technology that converts old 2D films into a top-of-the-range 3D quality, drawing us into cinemas again and enticing us to buy DVD versions for our new 3D televisions. The latter is the ultimate wild card: it could lead to an almost unimaginable boom in cinema-going and a renaissance of the industry surpassing the CD boom in the music industry. One need only think of re-releasing Harry Potter parts one to eight, or all of the James Bond films in 3D, to see the enormity of it. Several venture-capital backed postproduction companies are gambling on it, GERBEN BAKKERdollars at costs ranging from 50 to 100,000 $%""


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 DR JOAN HARAN at the ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics has been researching media representations of embryo science in Britain since 2004. Central to both embryonic stem cell research and infertility treatment, embryology has been consistently newsworthy over the last decade. In March 2010, a London-based fertility clinic was the subject of Radio 4’s live debating programme Moral Maze when it offered a

118 Britain in 2011

donated human egg and a free cycle of IVF as a raffle prize. The controversial contest was open to potential clients who attended a promotional seminar for a prominent US genetic profiling and fertility clinic; this international collaboration appears to have been a way to circumvent the regulation to which infertility treatment is subject in Britain under the terms of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (HFEA) 2008.

The existence of such collaborations, the media storm they create and an alleged surge in fertility tourism are used to justify calls for an increase in compensation for the provision of donor eggs in Britain by those who believe this is the way to tackle their scarcity. Despite its planned demise, the HFEA is to conduct a public consultation on its policies relating to donation of eggs, embryos and sperm in early 2011. In spite of a press statement which claims that ‘the Authority has not made any decisions about which options to undertake consultation on’, the policy review is understood to be considering whether to increase the ‘compensation’ paid to egg donors. Indeed an unnamed spokesman for the HFEA was quoted in the Daily Mail

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as speculating about whether it might be appropriate to increase monetary compensation to the level of benefits in kind – said to be worth several thousand pounds – received by women who ‘share’ their eggs in exchange for free or discounted fertility treatment. One of the key arguments raised in support of such an increase is the risk to the health – and potential knock-on costs to the NHS – of British women who travel abroad for fertility treatment to countries where it is easier to obtain donor eggs. By increasing the compensation to British donors, the argument goes, these health risks will be minimised. Less consideration is extended to the overseas egg donors who may be risking

Today, young people do not need recording studios full of equipment to create. They can do it with their home computer or mobile device

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their health to donate eggs for more affluent women. Important issues which need to be addressed include whether positioning the limited supply of eggs for infertility treatment as a question of consumer – and indeed producer – choice limits serious debate about the commodification of reproduction and the potential harms to donors and their offspring. Further, will a focus on the ‘choice’ of women to donate eggs, for the benefit of infertile women or couples, obscure the professional and financial interests of the infertility clinics – the key beneficiaries of this donation or trade?

www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/cesagen

Britain in 2011 119

MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT | Opinion

Containing a crisis MEMORIES OF ‘STATIC KILL’, ‘top kill’, ‘junk shot’ and ‘top hat’ attempts to stem the oil-flow into the Gulf of Mexico may be receding, but the Deepwater Horizon oil spill raises several key challenges for risk regulation and management, not least as other jurisdictions embark on even more complex deep water offshore drilling exercises. The consequences of the three monthlong attempt to contain the oil spill, apart from the tragic loss of life and the economic and ecological impact, will be felt for a long time. Yet the implications of Deepwater Horizon go far beyond the oil industry and the world’s dependency on oil itself; they point to the manner in which events can give rise to contagion effects which cut across regulatory systems – something which was also evident in the recent global financial crisis. Conventional wisdom suggests that successful responses to such crises are marked by three key elements. However the Deepwater Horizon incident points to the Media coverage of the oil spill highlighted the difficulty of crisis communication inherent limitations of these orthodoxies. emphasis on learning systems and on enhanced, to disaster: better communication, more First, the widely held view that risk de-centralised resources to cope more quickly communication is key in successfully redundancy and better risk management. The with the implications of a major accident. dealing with such emergencies is challenged accident also points to further key conundrums by the Deepwater Horizon experience. Studies Promises have been made to provide more affecting risk regulation in contemporary autonomous units within the industry to offer of accidents in highly complex industries that economic and political life. enhanced long-term planning and capacity to deal with considerable uncertainty highlight One is the contagion effect of major develop alternative plans for action. the problems that emerge when errors are accidents and events in complex industries. Yet although redundancy has been a longtolerated and deviations from agreed norms As the political temperature in the US rose, established recipe to provide for resilience, it become accepted and amplified. History markets reacted and BP holdings in the comes at a considerable cost. At a time when provides many instances where warning pension funds of millions of people became signals were ignored or overridden, and where governments, regulators and shareholders are devalued, creating an unexpected kind of demanding greater cost-efficiency, debates arise solidarity with the fishermen of Louisiana. Or, professional judgement and communication about how much redundancy is necessary and was biased towards the view that things in the case of the banking crisis, the solvency through which mechanisms. cannot fail. of individual banks became a problem for The third widely held view that risk Deepwater Horizon points to the the solvency of nations and subsequently regulation matters has also unravelled. One inability of even the most well-trained a problem of personal solvency for citizens. of the first responses to Deepwater Horizon in corporate reputation management machine Indeed, many societies experienced a form of the US was the renaming of the to successfully respond to political shock at the realisation that large institutions In a hostile disgraced Minerals Management and media attacks. When things go like banks are not autonomous entities, but Service as the ‘Bureau of Ocean wrong, industry – especially when are deeply embedded in society (as economic political Energy Management, Regulation it involves a chain of fragmented sociologists have always maintained). environment and Enforcement’. Along with contractors and sub-contractors as in These examples call for greater attention other organisational reforms, the case of Deepwater Horizon – will risk to the inherently complex connections in not unite and share expertise, but contemporary market societies in which failure communication this sought to deal with, at least temporarily, the often-diagnosed is likely to distance itself, hoping to and regulatory responses in one industry have turns into an problem of ‘regulatory capture’ via repercussions for the economic and social avoid any blame and liability. Indeed, impossible job revolving doors, cosy relationships, well-being of citizens in other countries and in a hostile political environment gift-giving and the completion that demands certainty and quick economic sectors. Such interdependencies of safety-critical documentation by industry responses, risk communication turns into an between sectors – and dependency on the workers rather than inspectors. However, the impossible job. As we all saw, when a highly well-being of key industrial sectors – point to wider unresolved question is how to combine complex technology goes wrong, it is not the inherent limitations of any single regulator demands for strict and error-intolerant oversight or regulatory strategy, and to the need for easy to fix. with continuous pressures for ‘light touch’ and The second widely held view, namely regulatory networks to somehow mirror the ‘industry-friendly’ regulatory interaction. that redundancy matters, has also been interconnectivities of the regulated domains. Deepwater Horizon has therefore shown challenged. Unsurprisingly, the immediate Deepwater Horizon raises a wider industry response has been to place a greater the limitations of the three standard responses conundrum. As society remains structurally

120 Britain in 2011

Rex

 




 
 
 
 
 


 


  

dependent on cheap oil, it necessarily relies on increasingly risky drilling activities. Yet at the same time, many elements of society are both sceptical about the interests of major industries and also intolerant and precautionary regarding potential major disaster. So the debate about future energy portfolios must confront the problem of communicating trade-offs to a risk-intolerant media and political system, and must make clear the choices between the cheap availability of highly risky energy sources and the potential unpalatable consequences any particular choice might incur. Finally, one of the key debates in risk management has been the extent to which it is possible to create and maintain ‘high reliability organisations’. These are organisations that sustain an error-intolerant organisational culture that, against the odds, succeeds in avoiding major accidents. The standard recipe for achieving high reliability is an organisational pre-occupation with, and institutionalised curiosity about, failure. This involves the constant challenging of information, an organisational commitment to resilience, and the empowerment of professional judgement. Emphasising these methods is said to mitigate the likelihood of a ‘normal accident’ having major disastrous consequences. However, whether such strategies are actually capable of avoiding major disasters in international and fragmented industries remains a major question. Indeed, it also raises a further question about whether regulators have the ability to impose such systems in an age of financial austerity and likely industry mobility to ‘light touch’ jurisdictions. The wider implication of Deepwater Horizon is therefore not to raise the politically undesirable question as to which kind of complex technologies society wishes to tolerate. It raises the even more troubling question as to whether there are some highly risky and complex industries upon which modern society has become over-dependent, therefore having to live with ever growing risks of failure and disaster.
www.lse.ac.uk/collections/carr

MARTIN LODGE (top) MIKE POWER 

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