The effects media policy has on cities and countries. Sex and the City: ‘Break-ups: bad for the heart, good for the economy’

The centre of the Modern art world shifted from Europe to the USA after the Second World War. [1]Many artists had fled the horrors of the war, and went to live and work in one specific city: New York.[2] A large number of ‘galleries, subsidized educational institutions’ were built in New York after the war, which made New York an attractive hub for creative talent.[3] Artists weren’t the only creatives living in New York at that time. New York, together with London and Hollywood, was one of the centres of ‘news, publishing, advertising’, and served as ‘headquarter to the world’s wealthiest media conglomerates’.[4]

Even though there are several cities in which media capital has grown exponentially over the past few years, New York remains the home of some of the largest media conglomerates worldwide.[5] How did the city manage to attract a creative workforce, and how was this creative migration managed? New York was a wealthy city, and money attracts labour. According to Professor Michael Curtin this money should be spend wisely if a city wants to preserve its status as a creative city, and should be spend to support already existing creative initiatives in the city.[6] In addition, Curtin writes that the ‘residual aura’ of the city might play a role as well. Storper and Chrisopherson argue that it is necessary to have ‘frequent transactions’ between different creative workers in order to support the growth of the creative sector in a city.[7] This seems very logical in this age of short-term contracts in the creative industries: people remain ‘close to the largest pool of employment opportunities’.[8]

The growth of a cultural cluster hereby strengthens itself through time. Much research has been done about the impact that human capital has on the development of cities. An example of this is the book Cities and the Creative Class by Richard Florida in which he did research on the factors that attract human capital to a city. Both lifestyle amenities and tolerance appeared to be fundamental for a city’s attractiveness for people with a high amount of human capital.[9]

One of the most well known TV-series that is set in New York is Sex and the City. This series follows the glamorous lives of New York based writer Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and her friends Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte. Carrie is a writer, and Charlotte is a curator at a gallery in New York. The series thus portrays these people with high human capital in the city of New York and the professions of these characters link the show to the concept of the creative city. The lifestyle amenities are highlighted thoroughly throughout the series. The characters frequented just opened nightclubs, cafés and restaurants and went to several museums and cinemas. The series have been very successful, and are still attracting tourists to New York today.[10] The series highlighted several lifestyle amenities, and there are special Sex and the City tours throughout the city. During these tours you can drink a cosmopolitan (the signature drink of the series), and you visit sites that were frequented by the series’ characters. These sites have, according to Professor Stijn Reijnders, now become lieux d’imagination: physical traces ‘which might serve as an entryway to another, imagined world’.[11]

Even today young, highly educated creatives enter New York City with the notion they will be diving right in to a Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle.[12] But New York is expensive and the lifestyle of writer, or any other creative, does not look like that of Carrie. Where she got money for all those cosmopolitans and that beautiful Upper East Side apartment is beyond us. New York is difficult, “once the initial excitement of living in the Big Apple dies down, it suddenly becomes clear how hard it is to purely exist, let alone thrive.”[13] It is interesting that New York still holds a high concentration of creative labour, while most of these individuals are breaking the bank to afford to live within this realm.[14] Especially those that are expected to participate in higher class circles. As long as the majority of creatives are staying in the Big Apple, the city will stay a centre of creativity.[15]

The series was not only a way to market the city of New York. The media industry in the United States is an example of a media industry that has been reviewed as a so-called market model. The series were produced by cable channel HBO, which ‘started using original programming as a way of differentiating its channel identity from other cable services’ in the 1980s.[16] The channel became known for its high quality series, and aired the Sex and the City series between 1998 and 2004. According to Johnson, these high quality series ‘provided a justification for its high subscription fees’.[17] HBO wanted to appeal to a more upmarket audience that was able to pay the high subscription fees. In this model ‘networks are really responding to advertisers, not viewers’.[18] With its upmarket audience, the Sex and the City series was incredibly appealing to many brands, and the series has become known for its ‘loose attitude towards product placement’.[19] The first the Sex and the City Movie was sponsored by at least eight ‘‘promotional partnerships’ with at least eight companies whose products appear in the film’.[20] According to professor Elayne Rapping, the series is ‘very much a female fantasy of what working women wish they had, but we all know we don't have’.[21] In the movie ‘consumption is stimulated and satisfaction becomes associated with the buying of commodities’.[22]

Although the series has been very successful, it has also been criticized. Media brand VICE criticized  the series because of its ‘shocking lack of diversity and its awkward insistence on gender tropes, among other offenses’.[23] According to David Croteau & William Hoynes the media have the ‘potential to promote social integration’.[24] Since the series mostly has an all-white cast, the Sex and the City series has not been a good example of showing society’s diversity and enhancing tolerance. This shows the major flaw of the market model in the media industries: it often does not ‘sustain a diversity of voices in a global era’.[25] As Hesmondalgh stated: ‘The most difficult question of all is whether or not texts promote the interests of businesses and dominant social groups by encouraging political and economic stability and discouraging progressive social change’.[26] Thus confirming the status and wealth of already existing media conglomerates. Sex and the City clearly confirms New York’s status as a creative city, but denies New York’s racial diversity.

Bibliography

Croteau, D., and Hoynes, W., (2006), ‘Media, markets and the public sphere’, in: The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, pp. 15-40.

Curtin, M., (2011)’Global Media Capital and Local Media Policy’, in: J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa (eds), The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 541-557.

Davies, R. & Sigthorsson, G., (2013). Introducing the creative industries: from theory to practice. SAGE Publications Limited., p. 183.

Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the creative class. Routledge.

Johnson, C. (2012) Branding Television. Abingdon: Routledge. An in-depth stud of branding strategies in UK and US television.

Reijnders, S. (2010), ’Places of the imagination: an ethnography of the TV detective tour’, in: Cultural Geographies 17 (1), pp. 37-52.

Storper, M., & Christopherson, S. (1987). Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomerations: the case of the US motion picture industry. Annals of the association of American geographers, 77(1), 104-117.

Other

Website of the Guardian < http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2014/jul/23/the-top-30-brands-mentioned-in-sex-and-the-city >.

Website of the New York Post < http://nypost.com/2012/03/11/a-warning-to-a-new-generation-of-women-dont-let-sex-and-the-city-ruin-your-life/  >.

Website of PBS. < http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/newyork-postwar/>.

Website of Reuters < http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/05/15/uk-sexandthecity-idUKN1530121420080515  >.

Website of VICE < http://www.vice.com/read/who-still-goes-on-a-sex-and-the-city-tour-in-2015  >.

---

[1] Website of PBS. < http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/newyork-postwar/ > (4 October 2015).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Michael Curtin (2011)’Global Media Capital and Local Media Policy’, in: J. Wasko, G. Murdock and H. Sousa (eds), The Handbook of Political Economy of Communications. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 546-547.

[4] Ibid., p 541.

[5] Ibid., pp. 546-547.

[6] Ibid., p.552.

[7] Ibid., p. 547.

[8] M. Storper and S. Christopherson, (1987) Flexible specialization and regional industrial agglomerations: The case of the U.S. motion picture industry. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 77 (1), p. Sorper and Christopherson 1987, p. 110.

[9]  R. Florida, (2005). Cities and the creative class. Routledge, pp. 90-91.

[10] Stijn Reijnders (2010), ’Places of the imagination: an ethnography of the TV detective tour’, in: Cultural Geographies 17 (1), p. 48.

[11] Website of the New York Post. < http://nypost.com/2012/03/11/a-warning-to-a-new-generation-of-women-dont-let-sex-and-the-city-ruin-your-life/  > (4 October 2015).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Curtin, p. 545.

[14] Ibid., p. 548.

[15]  R. Davies, & G. Sigthorsson, (2013). Introducing the creative industries: from theory to practice. SAGE Publications Limited., p. 183.

[16] Johnson, C. (2012) Branding Television. Abingdon: Routledge. An in-depth stud of branding strategies in UK and US television, p. 30.

[17] D. Croteau & W. Hoynes (2006), ‘Media, markets and the public sphere’, in: The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, p. 29.

[18] M. Ferrier < http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2014/jul/23/the-top-30-brands-mentioned-in-sex-and-the-city > (23 July 2014).

[19]  Website of reuters < http://uk.reuters.com/article/2008/05/15/uk-sexandthecity-idUKN1530121420080515  > (4 October 2015).

[20] Ibid.

[21] Hesmondhalgh, D. (2007). The cultural industries. p. 90.

[22]  A. Conti, ‘ I went on a ‘Sex and the City’ Tour of a Bizarro Version of New York City’, < http://www.vice.com/read/who-still-goes-on-a-sex-and-the-city-tour-in-2015  > (4 October 2015).

[23] Croteau & Hoynes, p. 30.

[24] Curtin, p. 555.

[25] Ibid

[26] Hesmondalgh, p. 90.