Convergence Culture Digital Media and Cultural Circulation

1. Convergence CultureDigital Media and Cultural Circulation André Jansson MKAD01 Fall 2009

2. Structure • Part I:Classical theories of cultural production and consumption - The Frankfurt School and the culture industry - Habermas and the public sphere - Cultural taste and social reproduction: Bourdieu - Culture and resistance: British Cultural Studies • Part II:Cultural circulation in the digital era - The concept of circulation - Convergence, co-production and participatory cultures - Cultural creativity versus exploitation - New forms of media literacy – new hierarchies? - Social empowerment versus social surveillance

3. The Culture Industry • Horkheimer & Adorno (1944) The Dialectic of Enlightenment. • The paradox of modern society; rationality as religion • Marxist perspective: Structural determinism • Industrial means of cultural production: obliterating the authenticity of culture • From folk culture and artistic culture to mass culture

4. Adorno in Minima moralia (1951/1974), p 238: Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

5. Enlightenment as mass deception • The culture industry produces sameness in the name of ”newness” according to uniform standards. • Audiences learn to demand what they are already being given. • Audiences are indoctrinated by the capitalist ideology of consumerism.

6. Connection between the culture industry and the cultural imperialism thesis?

7. Habermas and the Public Sphere • Public culture of 18th-19th century Europe • Bourgeois public sphere • Communicative rationality binding lifeworld with system • The colonization of the lifeworld by system • The ”consuming public” – passivity of the mass audience

8. Bourdieu and cultural taste • ”The classifyer classifies the classified.” • Habitus as a reproductive system of socio-cultural predispositions. • Social positions and lifetyles are organized in a three-dimensional space

9. Bourdieu in Distinction, 1979/1984: p. 174-5: The system of matching properties, which includes people – one speaks of a ”well-matched couple”, and friends like to say they have the same tastes – is organized by taste, a system of classificatory schemes which may only very partially become conscious although, as one rises in the social hierarchy, life-style is increasingly a matter of what Weber calls the “stylization of life”. [ …] Taste is the practical operator of the transmutation of things into distinct and distinctive signs, of continuous distributions into discontinuous oppositions; it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions.

10. Pierre Bourdieu’s social space 1979

12. British Cultural Studies From Raymond Williams (1958) Culture and Society: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing other people as masses.”

13. The Birmingham School and British Cultural Studies • The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart) • Turn to working class culture and subcultures (Hebdige) • Turn to everyday life • Ethnographic methods • Contextual interpretation and the production of meaning: polysemy • Class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality • Media use as ritual and resistance • Media scholars: David Morley, Dorothy Hobson, Charlotte Brunsdon, et al…

14. Towards convergence culture • From Fordism to Post-fordism (from 1970s) - culturalization - segmented consumer culture - mediatization - flexibility and co-production • Reflexive accumulation (Lash & Urry, 1994)

15. WHY ’CIRCULATION’? 1. The concept captures how contemporary mediatization nurtures a culture of convergence (cf Henry Jenkins): A. production and consumption B. culture and economy 2. The concept points to the space-biased ideology of contemporary media society (cf Harold Innis). • However, circulation must always be understood in relation to its opposite: sedimentation and time-biased ideologies.

16. The case of television • Increasing resources spent on audience analysis; pilot testing, focus groups, etc… (”affective economics”) + • Technological opportunities for audience interaction (inter-mediality)

17. American Idol (Jenkins, p 61) To understand American Idol’s success, we need to better understand the changed context within which American broadcasting is operating and the changed model of consumer behavior shaping programming and marketing strategies. We need to know more about what I am calling ”affective economics”. By affective economics, I mean a new configuration of marketing theory […] which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions. In many ways, affective economics represents an attempt to catch up with work in cultural studies over the last several decades.

18. Convergence as liberation…? • Audience participation (contest, voting, commenting, etc) • Audience creativity (alternative production, parody and play) • Audience communities (viewing community, fan-community, brand community, etc) • Time- and space liberation • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzf-sIEtnYk&feature=related

19. Or an escalating exploitation? • Accentuated standardization of culture (genres) • Global homogenization (format) • Commercial exploitation • Technological dependence • Surveillance • Degraded moral standards • Undermining of civic culture and the public sphere

20. Jenkins, p 62-3 Here’s the paradox: to be desired by the networks is to have your tastes commodified. On the one hand, to be commodified expands a group’s cultural visibility. Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored. That said, commodification is also a form of exploitation. Those groups that are commodified find themselves targetaed more aggresively by marketers and often feel they have lost control over their own culture, since it is mass produced and mass marketed. One cannot help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go unrepresented – but one doesn’t want to be exploited either.

21. New forms of media literacy • Knowledge communities (”Spoiling Survivor”) • Transmedia storytelling (Matrix): ”The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium.” --- Jenkins, p 97 • Popularity through polysemy (Matrix): ”The deeper you drill down, the more secrets emerge, all of which can seem at any moment to be the key to the film.” --- Jenkins, p 101

22. Reflection Is Bourdieu’s notion of cultural distinctions through taste still viable?

23. Cultural and social empowerment? • Co-creation (of e g game worlds): ”In co-creation, the companies collaborate from the beginning to create content they know plays well in each of their sectors, allowing each medium to generate new experiences for the consumer and expand points of entry into the franchise.” --- Jenkins, p 107 • Grassroot creativity and amateur productions – collisions between conglomerates and audiences/fans. (Ch 4) • Social movements and activism: culture jamming, web-parodies, social campaigns, etc. (Ch 6)

24. Jenkins, Ch 6: ”Photoshop for Democracy” How to make a culture jam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00yXM74CHFg Just Do It: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=His_Xqibzug