Television is a cultural commodity. It works within an economically determined capitalist economy, but when we have said that about it we have said both much and remarkably little. There is a financial economy within which wealth circulates, and a cultural economy within which meanings and pleasures circulate. and the relationship between them is not as deterministic as some theorists have proposed. In the financial economy, television symbolises programmes and advertisements, not textuality. A programme is a commodity produced and then sold to distributors. In distribution. its role changes and it becomes not a commodity, but a producer, and what it produces is a new commodity, the audience which is then. in its turn, sold as a commodity to advertisers. The ramifications of this financial economy are fascinating. Here the role shift undergone by the programme in the financial economy-that from commodity to producer-is now undergone by the audience. who are left as a commodity sold to the advertiser. But in the cultural economy the audience rejects its role as a commodity and becomes a Producer, a Producer of meanings and pleasures, and at this moment stops being ‘an audience’ and becomes different materialisations of the process that we call “viewing television”. While the metaphor of a cultural economy is a productive one. we must not let it blind us to differences between it and the financial. Meanings and pleasures do not circulate in the cultural economy in the same way that wealth does in the financial. In the first place there is no exchange of money at the point of sale or consumption. Television appears to be free. however. it may be actually paid for. Payment has no direct relationship to consumption-people can consume as much as they wish and what they wish with no thought of what they are able to afford.
When we consider television as a product . then it operates in a/an
