Dances with Dial-Ups

The advertisement is from the January of 1983 edition of Byte magazine. Byte began in 1975 and grew alongside the personal computer’s success with readership piquing in the early 1990’s. It covered development in computer technology, offering analysis of not just MS-Dos and Mac, but the industry as a whole. The advertisement is aimed at a relatively confined but influential class of consumers, baby-booming yuppies and sentimental bourgeoisies. The target audience is people who are tech savvy and affluent, but it also latches on to the discourse of family values. Dial-up Internet becomes a tool for talking to mom or having dinner parties without dishes.

Furthermore, the advertisement depicts a happy couple sitting comfortably at home in their robes. The environment is rather decadent but not toned down enough to seem realistic. The photograph is taken from the perspective of the computer, turning the device into a part of the home environment rather than just a stale piece of business technology. At the same time the family is sitting before a book case and grandfather clock, the computer becomes a sensible tool for the upper-middle class, a piece of luxury but nonetheless serves utilitarian ends. The woman stretches out her arm holding a single empty wineglass; this object becomes an impregnated metaphor for how viewers interpret the ad. Dial-Up becomes a glass to be filled up by whatever you desire, it can be a little bit of anything. The image depicts a living room with a bookshelf, a rocking horse, a light, a clock, and family photographs, the internet contains a little of everything.

The inspirations of the advertisement are several fold; a sense of possibility and ease, ambition and relaxation, familial sentiments and time-well spent. It provokes a sense of curiosity and awe surrounding the new friendships and connections that can’t be forged by the new technology. Yet it also speaks in a way that is relaxed and rather informal for such a radically new device; “(we call it Email).” The people in the photo are wearing a guilty smirk, smiling with their mouths closed and their faces glowing, perhaps it was the wine. Or maybe it’s that the Internet seemed like such a privilege and sign of status at the time that it made one prideful in an almost indulgent way.  The image inspires its audience to buy its product, Compuserve. Buying such a product holds serious social potential. It is a tool for maintaining the most immediate relationship, the relationship between yourself and your mother and for the most superficial ones, for the people who are not worth doing dishes for. The advertisement also is meant to relax your concerns about the Internet, it is easy to use. One can simply sit back in their pajamas and “even use a scrambler, if you have a secret you don’t want to share.”

Moreover, the advertisement does appeals to stereotypes of mid-aged well to do’s, that they want to be on the cutting edge but only in order to either make life easier, augment the pleasures I already desire, or increase my social status. While, these desires may resonate almost universally, the living room the photograph is taken in, the clothing the people are wearing, and the magazine its from construct a particular identity that is self-consciously privileged. The advertisement toes the line, it both pulls you in, offering you an intoxicating glass, yet leaves it empty enough for you to fill it with your own rationalizations, dreams, or temptations. It does assume that the audience is very conscious of its consumption habits rather than conspicuous and thus weaves together the picture with its text to dispel any myths or questions that maybe in the back of your mind. The ad has to introduce an entire new concept more than its particular model or object.

Yet, the ad is also catered specifically to a good-looking couple, one that cares about family and social relations, keeping up with the joneses and appearances in general. One of its aims is in part to distinguish this type of computer owner from the glasses wearing geek, from the NASA men or the IBM Business types. It continues the drive to make the computer personal rather than a disembodied object.

The Question Concerning Convergence

Convergence Culture is the inauguration of a new era in consumption and production – like all of Capital’s epochal changes, its movement is caused by a confluence of forces, “technological, industrial, cultural and social”(3). Convergence is not just a congregation but also a collision, the contradictions between new and old, grassroots and corporate, and consumer and producer grow ever more complex. Jenkins toes the threshold between the pious followers of the Convergence cult and the unwavering dogmatism of “critical pessimists”(258). Convergence Culture is not necessarily good or evil, just potentially dangerous, Jenkins’ critical utopianism resists the view of technological determinists, “rather, convergence represents a paradigm shift – a move from medium specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, toward the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content” and increasingly “complex relations between corporate media and bottom-up participatory culture”(254).  The changes in media technologies generate new consumption habits, the postmodern economy is not limited to the old marketing strategies and essentialist identity formations but caters to niche markets. American Idol and The Matrix are examples of “affective economics” in which “the line between entertainment content and brand messages” are blurred (20).  The transformation of brands into “lovemarks” entails a shift from passive to “active, emotionally engaged, and socially networked” consumers that produce, an example of how the medium becomes the message (20).  The Matrix, Star Wars, and Harry Potter, all fantastic or fictional stories have succeeded in “transmedia storytelling”(93).  Jenkins discussion of political coverage and news media’s cyber-interfaces shows “participatory culture’s power to negate” as well as “old media’s power to marginalize”(278). Ultimately, Jenkins think that “increasing participation in popular culture is a good thing,”(259) a progressive tool that will lead to “a more ideal society”(258).  How we will get there and what technologies will be the machinery of resistance is a question for the democracy-to-come. 

Jenkins Playing Guitar Hero

In the end Jenkins accomplished the goal of his book, which was necessary but insufficient. Jenkins never claimed to possess all of the answers or that he had a specific politics embedded besides his basic normative claim that communication and popular culture are good activities. Jenkins' focus on the way culture circulates rather than is produced  lacks a theoretical framework for evaluating competing claims. The substance of Jenkins’ method of critique has become as virtual as his object of study. Granted dogmatism is a vice, but Jenkins merely seeks out the possibilities of "consumer-based politics"(260). The only discussion of the "process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution)" is posed as an offhanded question (252). Should we really expect any fundamental change in the marketplace if we are only focused on the products created rather the method by which they were given life? Does the liberatory potential of Convergence Culture, within the economic realm anyway, simply mean the expansion of marketing strategies to better assimilate the diversity of identities, social niches, idiosyncratic consumption behaviors etc..?  Jenkins vision of empowerment mystifies an ideological background of exploitation. He attacks the symptom of a process that exceeds his object of concern. Unless you criticize the fundamental structuring principles of media culture one will only end up putting a human face upon one facet of larger systemic forces of irrational violence and destitution. Jenkins is right that convergence culture cannot be dealt with through an all or nothing approach, but bracketing the discussion to how to make corporations respond better to consumer preferences is ultimately an even more disempowering and cynical way of relating to one's own role as a critic and a consumer. It fulfills our desire to conceive of capital as a rational system, that if only we have more information about the products created we can reconcile its contradictions. It feeds the fantasy that if corporations knew what we really wanted they'd make it for us. But this evades the stark reality of the culture industry; the culture industry does not just rationally respond to people's clear-cut demands, but rather produces desires and proliferates them through a leveling process. 

Coerced Connections

Spencer Ackerman writes on the ways the U.S. military could have used its technological advantages to force internet upon authoritarian regimes.

Feelin' Aristotelian: Rhetoric: Book 2 Chapters 12-26

If Aristotle is right when he claims, “When we know a thing, and have decided about it, there is no further use in speaking about it,” (II, viii, 1391b 7-9) then why is he still speaking? Perhaps it has to do with “the manner and means of investing speeches with moral character.” (II, xviii, 1391b 22-3) Aristotle’s overarching piece is to find out what moves a particular audience and cater to it. It is generally easier to play on the particular types of resonances that audience members hold and latch on to them, than to inaugurate an entire new world view. Crafting a moving speech does not entail creating new frames or associations, but modifying already held dispositions to fit the case at hand. Aristotle writes, “The orator has therefore to guess the subjects on which his hearers really hold views already, and what those views are, and then must express, as general truths, these same views on these same subjects.” (II, xxi, 1395b 10-12) Aristotle appears to have little faith in a particular rhetor’s ability to challenge an audience’s assumptions, rather they must appeal to already existing cultural values or modes of reasoning in order to gain ground.

Aristotle doesn’t make a claim about the origin of language or its nature overall, i.e. that language exists allegorically, or is structured fundamentally by metaphors or tropes. But he does elaborate the ways in which these devices serve pragmatic purposes. Aristotle further makes no distinction here between writing and speech, or do justice to the performative aspects of speaking. Yet he does apply the general framework of philosophy to language, he writes

In discussing deliberative oratory we have spoken about the relative greatness of various goods, and about the greater and lesser in general. Since therefore in each type of oratory the object under discussion is some kind of good – whether it is utility, nobleness, or justice – it is clear that every orator must obtain the materials of amplification through these channels (II, xix, 1393a 11-15).

What are these “materials of amplification” (II, xix, 1393a 11-15)? Is there an overlap between Aristotle’s metaphysics and his theorization of linguistic laws? For example, are the materials with greatest amplifying power the most moderate or virtuous ones? He outlines an entire spectrum of modes of argumentation, in what way can we assign different weights to the different methods? He claims that exaggeration and invention are sometimes necessary, couldn’t that also imply it is always-already happening?

Aristotle however would prefer not to dive too deep into these waters; “To go further than this, and try to establish abstract laws of greatness and superiority, is to argue without an object; in practical life, particular kinds count more than generalizations” (II, xix, 1393a, 15-18).

On the other hand, when he speaks to the types of uses of ‘Example’ he does differentiate between “the mention of actual past facts” and “the invention of facts by the speaker” (II, xx, 1393a 27-8). He reproaches Socrates for having deployed the latter form, through the use of ‘illustrative parallel.’ He also indicates that fables are more useful when speaking to popular assemblies. The reasoning behind this claim is two fold; 1) The Rhapsode, the poet, and drama were the primary modes of education for the majority of ancient Greeks, learning through narratives or story is thus what these people would be disposed towards and 2) given a larger group of people it would be more practical to deploy a fictional example if not everyone is familiar with the facts. Furthermore, perhaps the use of fables has the power to create a distance between our preconceived notions and the argument at hand. The way that they become abstracted, Aristotle gives an example of a story with animals for characters, forces disconnection. One has to see the whole story in order to see the moral arise and then apply it to the example at hand. A rhetor would pick a relatively narrow fable in which the moral of the story can only be applied to the case in a way that appeals to their larger argument.

If it is a narrative that possesses more cultural import it can be more amplifying to an argument, i.e. the way the left appeals to the ‘nation of immigrants’ narrative to pass visa policy reform. Grand claims about the historical origin of the U.S. can force people to think outside of the confines of the present position they’re in. In the U.S. this can be a very powerful tool, since the story of the founding of the nation can evoke waves of pride and nostalgia. I think that this example problematizes Aristotle’s division of speech types and their correlative appeal type, “that concerned with Amplification is…most appropriate to ceremonial speeches; that concerned with the Past, to forensic speeches;…that concerned with Possibility and the Future, to political speeches” (II, xviii, 1392a 4-7). Perhaps also the line between actual and invented facts should be exposed as arbitrary in many cases. While there may be a real distinction between what we know is a fact and what is not, there is no actual difference when it comes to the way we relate different facts to one another in a speech. The way historical facts are weaved together within narratives shifts the value that facts possess based on context et al. 

Movements.org

Movements.org is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists to build their capacity and make a greater impact on the world. Through the use of new technologies, grassroots activists have more capacity than ever to make change in their communities. Yet wired social movements continue to grapple with the challenges of scaling and sustaining themselves over time.

How do we do this? We support technology driven grassroots activism campaigns by striving to acheive three main goals:

Identify and promote digital activists and developments in digital activism through our website, blog, social media presence and annual conference;

Connect digital activists to each other and to technology experts by facilitating year-round online collaboration and conversation, a mentorship program between fledgling activists and more experienced activists, an annual conference;

Support digital activists through in-person trainings, online tutorials, case studies and best practice guides, and leveraging Movements.org relationships with technology leadership to generate direct support, including resource sharing, for activists’ activities and capacity building.

'Critical Utopian': Contradiction or Compromise?

Jenkins' original claim that he is representing rather than critiquing Convergence Culture loses its effect in the concluding chapter. Jenkins identifies the most controversial claim of the book as resting upon "my operating assumption that increasing participation in popular culture is a good thing" (p. 259). He further states that "having a sense of what a more ideal society looks like gives one a yardstick for determining what we must do to achieve our goals" (p. 258). It becomes clear at the end of the work that he is very explicitly making a normative claim about the nature of the way we ought to relate to the phenomena of Convergence Culture. Granted he employs a critique that toes the threshold rather than casting an all encompassing epistemological net.

As an alternative to the method of 'critical pessimists' (p.258), Jenkins seeks out the possibilities of "consumer-based politics" (p. 260). The changes in the ways people consume and produce culture call for new tools of resistance on the part of consumers; "A politics of confrontation must give way to one focused on tactical collaboration…The new model is that we are collectively changing the nature of the marketplace, and in so doing we are pressuring companies to change the products they are creating and the ways they relate to their consumers" (p. 260-1). The only discussion of the "process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution" is posed as an offhanded question (p. 252). Jenkins ultimately isolates "cultural diversity" and "participation" as the prime social goods of a reformed convergence culture (p. 268 & 269). Should we really expect any fundamental change in the marketplace if we are only focused on the products created rather the method by which they were given life? Does Jenkins give us any normative criteria by which to establish more 'ethical' consumption habits? The Sequential Tarts are used as an exemplary practice of consumer advocacy groups, in which comic book producers were persuaded to create comic catering to women's interests. Does the liberatory potential of Convergence Culture, within the economic realm anyway, simply mean the expansion of marketing strategies to better assimilate the diversity of identities, social niches, idiosyncratic consumption behaviors etc..?

I think Jenkins makes a good point when juxtaposing his mode of engaging Convergence Culture versus the pessimists when he writes, "the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception" (p. 258). The problem with Jenkins however is that what he sees as empowerment is an illusory fiction meant to veil an ideological background of exploitation. Jenkins' political conclusions sound like a Ralph Nader campaign ad, a defense of consumer protectionism and populist reformism. He attacks the symptom of a process that exceeds his object of concern. He indicts "the old politics of culture jamming" in which "resistance becomes an end in and of itself rather than a tool to ensure cultural diversity and corporate responsibility" (p. 259). Beyond those that argue for abandoning media altogether, there is a valid point to be made that unless you criticize the fundamental structuring principles of media culture one will only end up putting a human face upon one facet of larger systemic forces of irrational violence and destitution. Jenkins is right that convergence culture cannot be dealt with through an all or nothing approach. Yet our questions and criticisms cannot end with the stance of the true pessimist who claims that all forms of resistance which go beyond the limited realm of consumption choices are unrealistic or doomed to failure. Jenkins' scope of direct moral concern becomes extremely limited for claiming to be a utopian. While the role that certain cultural formations play within the reproduction of society should not be underestimated, can we really afford to let our discussions be limited to how to make corporations respond better to consumer preferences? Is this not ultimately an even more disempowering and cynical way of relating to one's own role as a critic and a consumer? This approach fulfills our desire to conceive of capital as a rational system, that if only we have more information about the products created we can reconcile its contradictions. It feeds the fantasy that if corporations knew what we really wanted they'd make it for us. But this evades a very stark point about the nature of the culture industry; the culture industry does not just rationally respond to people's clear-cut demands, but rather produces desires and proliferates them through a leveling process.

I'd like to compare Jenkins' book to one of the most pessimistic pieces of academic work ever written about the culture industry. In 1944 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote the essay "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" which went on to become a chapter of their larger work The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Adorno and Horkheimer proceed dialectically, harnessing the spirit of the negative with clarity and rigor. The work reminds us that, “Culture is a paradoxical commodity.” The industrialization and mechanization of the production of culture is part of a larger historical process of capitalism. The new possibilities unleashed by changes in technology and culture and their correlative transformations in consumption and production make the superstructure mushroom. The culture industry is caught between two competing forces. It has to appear as offering a huge diversity in its appeal to consumers while it simultaneously “impresses the same stamp on everything.”

Adorno and Horkheimer make a similar claim as Jenkins about the way cultural commodities are valued. Jenkins writes that “Fans…embrace an understanding of intellectual property as “shareware,” something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in various ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a proliferation of different meanings” (p. 267). A specific good does not have a static or limited value but rather accumulates value based on the way it circulates and the connections it creates. Adorno and Horkheimer write, “So completely is it subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates with advertising. The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes. The motives are markedly economic.” Today, the forces of monopolization have been eroded in certain respects, but advertising functions differently. Now that consumers can actively interact with commodities, the content they produce does the work of advertising for the corporation.

Yet Jenkins is not over idealistic, he writes of the limits as well as the possibilities of Convergence Culture;

Despite the rhetoric about “democratizing television,” this shift is being driven by economic calculations and not by some broad mission to empower the public. Media industries are embracing convergence for a number of reasons: because convergence-based strategies exploit the advantages of media conglomeration; because convergence creates multiple ways of selling content to consumers; because convergence cements consumer loyalty at a time when the fragmentation of the marketplace and the rise of file sharing threaten old ways of doing business. (p. 254).

Jenkins sees the threat however solely within the terms of economics and marketing. The missing link is two fold; first an analysis of what most of the cultural products of capitalism are for, are they merely for whimsical enjoyment or an ideological strategy and secondly, an analysis of the ways changes in convergence culture materially affect those that sustain the system as a whole. Neither of these turning points of analysis should necessitate dogmatic responses; one can see the benefits of becoming conscious of activity outside of the confined notion of the economic sphere or the ways that increased information sharing has made people more globally aware of international living standards etc.

Adorno and Horkheimer were limited in their critique by the horizon of the present. They are not to blame for not envisioning the ways new relationships to media technology would emerge. Take this passage for example;

This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness. The step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. The former still allowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. The latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same. No machinery of rejoinder has been devised, and private broadcasters are denied any freedom. They are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur,” and also have to accept organisation from above.

While the new advances in technology were limited to the more passive type and subject to political and ideological forces, the emergence of autonomous knowledge cultures and zones of collaboration challenge the original hierarchies that emerged. Youtube and Vimeo, Internet Radio and Wikipedia are potentially the “machinery of rejoinder.” These advances change the rules of the game because the divide between amateurs and professionals etc is no longer such an obsession. Rather the rise in organic forms of organizing and communicate seem to hold revolutionary potential. Jenkins reading of Benjamin makes this point as well. Yet the question of how relate to the culture industry cannot be limited to just forming rules ethical consumption or social contracts. Convergence Culture often acts as an opiate or mask. The question is not one of being resistant to pragmatic reforms and compromises, but ensuring that the frame by which we approach the problem as a whole does not drop out. Adorno and Horkheimer write;

All are free to dance and enjoy themselves, just as they have been free, since the historical neutralisation of religion, to join any of the innumerable sects. But freedom to choose an ideology – since ideology always reflects economic coercion – everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same. The way in which a girl accepts and keeps the obligatory date, the inflection on the telephone or in the most intimate situation, the choice of words in conversation, and the whole inner life as classified by the now somewhat devalued depth psychology, bear witness to man’s attempt to make himself a proficient apparatus, similar (even in emotions) to the model served up by the culture industry.

While we should not let the process of demystification blind us from the potentials in the present, it remains necessary to expose the ways that the culture industry exists is the medium through which the masses “insist on the very ideology which enslaves them.” The divide between life experienced for work and for pleasurable/cultural activities is a falsity that is sustained by commodified forms of pleasure. Convergence Culture however increasingly blurs the lines, as well as the distinction between the personal and the political. Jenkins occupies a delicate position between Adorno and Levy, yet in a brilliantly reflexive fashion. The question is for all the abstract theorizing about the nature of Convergence Culture the real question becomes how to deploy that knowledge from within to alter the structures above and about.