«Educational products and services: the lessons for research into the CMI ?»

Yolande Combès
University Paris 13, MSH Paris Nord, France

Why do technological industrialisation and valorisation modes observed in educational fields benefit understanding of mutations taking place in Cultural industries and Information and Communication Industry sectors?
Observing virtual universities platforms, campuses and e-learning processes leads to alternatives questioning, diverging from usual propositions such as  the notion of radical change (machine replacing teachers) or classical approaches (class room focused). These two propositions have been proven sterile since they do not prove themselves in enough usages or tend to discard pertinent technical potentialities or research for efficiency.

The nature of educational processes (learner centered processes, heterogeneous applications and audiences which make the mass effect uncertain, non for profit applications, Applications that cannot be reduced to industrial product production and the multi-dimension of educational processes and systems) forces actors who invest in educational technology to face numerous problems that some ICIC industry managers face today. These innovators are looking for new configurations that combine two originally distinct industrial models: the cultural industries’ publishing and the services industries’ mediation model. Their aim is to issue a new model taking the two others into account.

Although sometimes hardly emerging, four new tendencies can be described:

- Customized learning ideally based upon the learner autonomy granted by the use of ICTs. This choice encompasses the entire work chain: degree of openness of resource, degree of decision making available to students, type of remediation offered, system allowing ‘customized mass mediation’.
- New reflexivity forms deriving from mediation engineering. They open the way to new possibilities as much at the conception level then at the learning practices level. These reflexivity forms are based upon the integration of conception process based on experience and upon the experimentation of collaborative learning relations.
- Mutualisation: this community based approach to production-distribution of pedagogic resources has been founded by teachers (i.e.:Sesamath). It moves away from the educational publishing world towards the introduction of “Creative Commons”. Founded on an open source approach to learning, it is inscribing itself in a solidarity economy perspective.
- Generalized service assistance: the merging of cultural industries and of services industries model entails a rethinking of valorisation modes. The pay per use process (broker model) has been detected in the educational field and may suit a long term strategy towards assistance.

« Changes in the film industry in France »

Julien Duval
CNRS, Centre of European Sociology, France

This paper is based on an analysis of French cinema at the beginning of the 2000s. French cinema is a diversified space. It can be described as a continuum between a commercial pole and a more autonomous pole. At the commercial pole, the films can achieve broad and immediate success. At the more autonomous pole, the films are aimed at a limited audience (at least in the short term) but they can be well-received by critics or prestigious festivals. But French cinema is also a cultural industry that is characterized by a structural dependence on American cinema and on mass medias. Therefore, since the 1970s and the 1980s, it has been affected by the transformations of Hollywood and by the rise of commercial channels in France. These transformations have had repercussions on the structures of French cinema. They have reinforced commercial logics and they have been harmful to the most autonomous productions.

«The new dominant definition of international news coverage.
The example of the French general-interest television channels »

Dominique Marchetti
CNRS, Centre of European Sociology, France

The relative decline of “foreign policy” in the news bulletins of the three major French television channels (TF1, France 2 et France 3) reveals the transformations that have occurred since the second half of the 1980s in the way international news are treated and in the place they are given in the national general-interest media. The objective of this research is to describe and explain the shrinking coverage of foreign policies or diplomatic activities (international summits, Europeans elections, public policies, etc.). To analyse this phenomenon, one must take into account the increasing weight of economic and professional logics in the production of international news to the detriment of traditional political logics, the reorganization of labour within the French channels, as well as external factors linked to the political and social spaces.

« Structure of the enterprise and the evolution of content: the example of Le Seuil publications »

Hervé Serry
CNRS, Culture and Urban Society, France

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« Reality Television at the heart of changes in Television system. The North-American case »

Gaëtan Tremblay
GRICIS, UQAM, Canada
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The current television system is for sure quite different from the one that existed at the end of the 70’s. Ever since then, it had and still have to face major challenges, such as the expansion of transmission capacities and the resulting growth in the providing of products and services, the invention of computer devices for the large public, the re-regulation of the industrial environment, the marginalization of the public service, the amazing development of the internet, the increasing competition for advertizing revenues. Nevertheless, television viewing remains the dominant activity among all cultural practices for the large majority of people.

The popularity of reality television over the last few years, through its diverse formulas, makes it an interesting case to analyze both the problems that television businesses have to face and the strategies that they develop to overcome them. In this respect, reality television reveals the main transformations occuring in the north american television systems.

One should not conclude that the whole strategy designed by the television channels could be reduced to reality shows. It is certainly of one of its major pieces but it is not the only one. To draw a complete image, one should also take into account, for example, the policy of information, of products buying and of home made production. We will try to show here how a multifaceted standard like reality shows provide a good example of the answers television channels are giving to the big challenges they have to cope with.