Digital Culture – A paradigm shift

Digital Culture – A paradigm shift?

A paradoxical state -
a pivotal moment of ﬂux,
rupture, change, speed, and
decentralisation AND
consolidation, entrenchment,
centralisation and slowing
down

1

Sunday, 7 October 2012

“An artist is
someone who can
hold two opposing
viewpoints and still
remain fully
functional.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald


“There is a shadowy
ambition behind the
concept of the virtual
world -to have everyone
safely conﬁned in their
homes, hooked up to
sensory feedback devices
in an enclosing,
interactive environment
which will be far more
powerful a tool of social
control than television”

• Julian Stallabrass quoted in
New Media A Critical
Introduction pg. 287
5


Technology and Moral panics
The horror of
the TV aerial


“We can assert with some
confidence that our own period is
one of decline: that the standards of
culture are lower than they were fifty
years ago…I see no reason why the
decay of culture should not proceed
much further, and why we may not
even anticipate a period of some
duration, of which is possible to say
that it will have no culture. “

T.S.Eliot, Notes towards a Definition
of Culture, quoted in Greenberg.
‘The Plight of Culture’.


The Assault on Culture with a Capital C - The Barbarians are at the Door

“to know the best
that has been
said and thought in
the world”
Matthew Arnold


Responses - The Culture Industry

• Culture industry is a term coined by
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max
Horkheimer (1895-1973).
• The idea that the factory style production
of popular culture produces standardised
products that manipulate and seduce the
consumer (or masses) with quick,easy
gratiﬁcation that leaves the consumer
passive and ultimately unhappy.
• A central idea in Adorno and Horkheimer
critique of mass culture is that it creates
false needs - needs which are
manufactured and of course satisﬁed by
capitalism


“The effectiveness of the
culture industry depends not
on its parading of an
ideology, on disguising the
true nature of things, but on
removing the thought that
there is an alternative to the
status quo. “

Theodore Adorno
The Culture Industry


‘something is provided for
all
so that none may escape’
Adorno, T & Horkheimer,M, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Verso, 1997) p. 123


Society of Spectacle
• “spectacle was a spectacle, a
circus, a show, an exhibition,
a one way transmission of
experience. It was a form of
‘communication to which one
side, the audience, can never
reply; a culture based on the
reduction of almost everyone
to a state of abject non-
creativity, of receptivity,
passivity and isolation.’
• Christopher Gray ‘Everyone will live
in his own Cathedral”: the
Situationists 1958-1964


• “The Situationists [..] applied the
Marxist conception of alienation
to every area of everyday life and
argued that the development of
capitalism entailed the extension
of the means, the objects, and
the intensity of alienated
experiences. For the Situationists,
no area of experience is free
from the permeation of capitalist
relations of production and
consumption; the members of
capitalist societies are reduced to
the level of spectators of a world
which precludes their
participation.’

• Sadie Plant, ‘What is Situationism? A Reader’ editor
Stewart Home


SUMMARY OF MASS CULTURE CRITIQUES

• The debasement of
authentic, organic folk
culture
• The erosion of high cultural
traditions.
• The erasure of a critical
reﬂective dimension to
culture
• The indoctrination and
manipulation of the public
by market forces and
political power for proﬁt and
gain

17


• ‘there is a speciﬁc conception of
the audience of mass culture , the
mass or the public which
consumes mass produced
products . The audience is
conceived of as a mass of passive
consumers...supine before the
false pleasures of mass
consumption...The picture is of a
mass which almost without
thinking, without
reﬂecting,abandoning all critical
hope, buys into mass culture and
mass consumption. Due to the
emergence of mass society and
mass culture it lacks the
intellectual and moral resources to
do otherwise. It cannot think of, or
in terms of, alternatives.’

• Dominic Strinati 1995, ‘Mass Culture and popular
culture and The Frankfurt School and the Culture Industry’ 18


–“the concept of the
spectacle flattens
distinctions with polemic
intent.’
• Jorg Heiser, ‘Things that matter in contemporary art’


Critique of mass culture critique

• Agency: How
contemporary
consumers in a digital
culture use, interact,
respond to and with, the
products of our
consumerist society,
are, as research has
shown far more
complex, contradictory
and varied than the
spectacle critique allows
for.


• Agency vs Determinism


Agency vs Determinism


Bruno Latour
• Critiques the notion of themodern concept)
nature and society (a very
separation of

• Latour attempts to (arguing they exist in
and natural worlds
reconnect the social

what he refers to as a a parliament of
things).

• Latour view is that humans and non humans
form hybrid entities by virtue of the networks
their share

• Nothing is no longer purely human, not
because humans have changed but
because the environment they inhabit has.

• We live in a biotechnological world where
we are networked with other things.


The Shufﬂing, stumbling Zombie


The feverish, running Zombie


“most human


sufferings nowadays
tend to grow from a
surfeit of possibilities ,
rather than a
profusion of
prohibitions (as they
used to be in the
past)”
Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Passions, pg. 94


•


'the essence of the blasé attitude
consists in the blurring of
discrimination. This does not mean
that the objects are not perceived, as
is the case with the half wit, but
rather that the meaning and differing
values of things, and thereby the
things themselves, are experienced
as insubstantial. They appear to the
blasé person in an evenly flat and
grey tone; no one object deserves
preference over any other. All things
float with equal specific gravity in the
constantly moving stream of money'.

• George Simmel quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming LIfe


‘sense the infinity of connections, but be hooked up to nothin”g’.



•icase study - ipod


•interestedisin how
Reynolds

technology like the
ipod has changed the
economics and
business of music.

•from the perspective
He examines this

of the consumers
acquisition of music
and their listening
habits.


•technology of the
Reynolds sees the

ipod as replicating
and reinforcing
central core ideas
within neoliberalism -
the cult of the
narcissitic self , of the
privatised, atomised
individual and of
creating an
increasingly nostalgic,
slowly ossifying ‘dead’
culture


I Me Mine - No Surprises – Flat Culture

• ‘but itipod maymemory maker:box
the
is not a
be a memory
it
is hard to imagine the device
playing the same kind of role as
the radio did in the past , in
terms of entwining music with
everyday life, especially as it
often involves the use of music
to screen out the outside world
and avoid unwelcome social
interactions’
• Simon Reynolds, pg 117


• “the commodiﬁcation of music
meant that investing one’s
cash and investing one’s
emotion became totally
wedded. When music came
clad in a cherishable husk of
packaging and the recording
medium itself had a material
heft, it asserted itself as a
tangible presence in your life.
It was easier to form an
attachment to music when it
was a thing”
• Simon Reynolds, Retromania, pg. 126


For Reynolds, it is the shift for a culture of scarcity
to one of plentitude that has resulted in a radical
transformation of our relationship with music.

He contrasts the change from an either / or
mentality (you could afford one record instead of
another) and the tribal, partisan attitude that came
with this, to one of ‘plus/and’.

“Plus/and means that you don’t have to choose,
because you can choose both; you don’t have to
take sides, because everything has its point and its
positives” Reynolds, pg. 126


•remains subject (or theitrulefact ‘either/or’. Lifelife
“Unfortunately
to
is in
of
fortunately?)
itself
is a scarcity economy: you only have so much time
and energy. What’s missing from all the techno-
utopian scenarios of access and choice is the reality
of limits -on resources, on an individuals time, on
our brains ability to process information beyond a
certain speed. To the extent that plus/and is
becoming the dominant principle of culture (so
many options, so much information, so much
entertainment), it could be that it is actually killing
music, because its ultimate tendency is towards a
kind of indifference” Reynolds, pg. 127


Criticisms of:

Old fogeyism

Self serving, selective
historical blindness

Underplays the return
to the ‘live event’

Eurocentrism


Digital Culture – A paradigm shift

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