Justin O’Connor’s Culture is Not an Industry arrives at a critical moment. In a period marked by profound institutional fatigue, eroded trust in public and private institutions, and the hollowing out of democratic life, this book offers a necessary and timely corrective. Its core message is clear: if we are to take culture seriously as a component of a good and liveable society, we must move beyond the reductive logic that has for too long treated culture as merely an economic sector—an industry to be managed, measured, and commodified.
Instead, O’Connor argues for a reframing of culture as part of the Foundational Economy—those everyday systems and institutions that ensure our collective wellbeing. From health and education to public infrastructure and care, these are the domains of life that shape our ability to flourish in common.
Crucially, O’Connor includes media—particularly local and community media—within this foundational space. This is one of the first clear acknowledgements of local media not just as a communications utility, but as a set of embedded social and cultural institutions with care, meaning, and shared understanding at their heart.
At Decentered Media, we welcome this book as an essential map—one that charts the shifting terrain of cultural value, and helps us orientate our advocacy for media as a civic practice rather than a commercial transaction. The challenge now is to turn these general insights into grounded practices.
That means establishing a base of case studies, stories, and examples that can show how community media operates as a foundational good—and why it deserves parity with other cultural and social institutions like the arts, theatre, libraries, or cinema.
Culture and the Everyday
O’Connor’s core contention is that culture is not a luxury to be enjoyed once basic needs are met—it is itself a basic need. A meaningful life cannot be reduced to material survival alone. Culture, he reminds us, is what allows us to imagine futures, share memories, form identities, and express collective belonging. It is not incidental to democratic life; it is constitutive of it.
Community media exemplifies this principle. Whether it’s a neighbourhood radio station offering space for local voices, a grassroots podcast platform hosting intergenerational stories, or an independent publication offering a critical lens on urban redevelopment, these media spaces do more than communicate—they hold communities together. They are places where judgement, critique, memory, humour, dissent, and imagination circulate freely.
This is what makes them foundational. Not because they sell advertising or scale up start-ups, but because they help to build trust, foster belonging, and sustain community life through difficult times.
Community Media as Cultural Infrastructure
If we accept O’Connor’s view that culture should sit alongside health, education and welfare as part of the social foundation, then it follows that community media—in all its diversity—must also be recognised as cultural infrastructure. This means advocating for its inclusion in funding frameworks, policy agendas, and civic development plans not as an add-on or “nice to have,” but as essential.
Too often, community media has been treated as either an outreach tool for institutional agendas, or as a stepping stone to commercial career paths. We need to move beyond this narrow instrumentalism.
Community media is not valuable because it might one day become an SME or because it delivers on pre-set health or education targets. It is valuable in itself, because it forms part of the public realm where people express who they are, listen to others, and make sense of shared life.
In this sense, community media is a social anchor—a local site where care, recognition, and democratic participation are practiced in everyday terms. This makes it not just cultural but civic, not just expressive but constitutive of a democratic society.
From Market Citizenship to Civic Responsibility
O’Connor’s critique of “market citizenship”—the idea that we express value through consumption and productivity—finds strong echoes in our media landscape. Platforms reward engagement as quantified interaction; algorithms filter culture through monetisable attention. In this model, media is not for dialogue but for data extraction. This has fuelled polarisation, undermined trust, and accelerated civic disengagement.
What’s needed now is a reassertion of responsible, engaged, and grounded media practice—a shift from extractive communication systems to regenerative, embedded media infrastructures that operate at the scale of communities. This is not about returning to some nostalgic golden age, nor is it a utopian blueprint. Rather, it is a call for sensible, pragmatic, social democratic thinking—what some might call a return to “one-nation” principles—that place the common good above abstract growth metrics.
It is about building durable institutions from the ground up. Institutions that take seriously the specificity of place, the knowledge of lived experience, and the role of media in holding space for plural, negotiated identities.
What Decentered Media is Doing
At Decentered Media, we are taking these ideas forward. We believe that local and community media must be supported not only as communications channels, but as social and cultural institutions that underpin democracy, care, and everyday participation. That means advocating for new funding models, regulatory frameworks, and public policies that reflect media’s foundational role in society.
We are working to identify and support examples of community media that:
- Anchor communities through storytelling, dialogue, and collective memory;
- Contribute to local civic life, enabling democratic participation and accountability;
- Build social and emotional resilience by sustaining communication in times of disruption;
- Provide accessible pathways for cultural expression and creative practice;
- Operate within local economies and contribute to public value, not just private profit.
These examples will form the evidence base for a renewed cultural policy agenda—one that treats media as foundational to a good life and a democratic society.
Towards a Collective Future
As O’Connor makes clear, culture is not an industry. Nor is media simply a sector. Both are dimensions of how we live, remember, imagine, and act together. If we are to navigate the uncertainties ahead—from climate breakdown and economic precarity to democratic erosion and technological upheaval—we need institutions that can hold open spaces of shared meaning, care, and deliberation.
Community media is one such institution. It may not be glossy, or scalable, or profitable in conventional terms. But it is vital. It is how people stay connected when everything else fragments. It is how new possibilities emerge in overlooked places. It is how the future is co-created.
In the months ahead, Decentered Media will continue to build alliances, foster dialogue, and support those working to restore alternative, independent and community media to its rightful place: not as an industrial asset, but as a civic necessity.