‘What does online democracy mean?’
By Editor on April 28, 2008 7:18 pm
Mark Nunes is Associate Professor of English at Southern Polytechnic State University and Chair of the Communication and Digital Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association. He is the author of Cyberspaces of Everyday Life. Professor Nunes spoke with Rohit Chopra at the 2008 Popular Culture Association - American Culture Association conference held recently in San Francisco. In the interview — which inaugurates a series of features on new media and culture on Interjunction – he discusses the relationship between digital culture and popular culture, new notions of media production and consumption, and expectations of Web 2.0.
Professor Nunes, in your view, how does digital culture relate to the broader realm of popular culture? How has digital culture transformed our sense of what constitutes popular culture?
I think in part I was trying to address that with the area theme for Communication and Digital Culture this year. I don’t know if I can say when the change occurred — if we are even talking about a line that divided the two realms — but certainly aspects of digital culture are increasingly integrated with what we traditionally think of as mass culture or popular culture. The idea of television shows with web tie-ins or alternate reality game tie-ins, for instance, has become increasingly commonplace. There is now much more interpenetration of digital culture and popular culture.
Part of what we have been trying to address in some of our panels in the Communication and Digital Culture area is how does one define ‘mainstream’. Does it make sense to talk about ‘mainstream’ as distinct from the digital? Can we define what might be a ‘digital mainstream,’ and how we might view that? Is it about content or is it a set of practices mirroring how one interacts with media, reflecting the expectations of consumers across paradigms of convergence culture? Our panel discussions brought a lot of this, with its problematic implications, to the foreground: the idea of the changing world of what it means to be a media consumer.
Numerous panels at this conference reflect the centrality of media to culture. I’d be interested in your reflections on the extent to which theoretically and substantively media seems inseparable from culture and the ways in which we might conceptualize that relationship.
I am not a historian of popular culture, or of this organization for that matter, but I think one of the points to be foregrounded about popular culture as it is addressed within the academy is the extent to which it is tied up with the study of mass culture, and the degree to which mass media provides a grounding for mass culture in the 20th century.
Long before the rise of any kind of “new media studies” presence within the framework of popular culture studies, you certainly have numerous works on dime store novels and television and movies and comic books. There’s a well-established precedent for this overlap in the study of popular culture and the study of mass media and mass produced objects. That highly disputed division between high art and low art, between high culture and low culture, marks a nexus of sorts between media studies and cultural studies.
My interest in digital culture lies very much in that connection between these two realms, an attempt to take media studies and cultural studies and look at the ways in which they overlap. We are at this schizophrenic moment of increasing consolidation of media companies at the same time that the idea of media production is increasingly moving from a small group of individuals who have access to the production apparatus to a large group of people who may be only marginally involved in media production but who are actively engaged in consumer-producer involvements with mass media ,such as with alternate reality game tie-ins with television shows. So I think it is a very interesting moment for media studies and cultural studies. In particular, we need to be thinking media as an expression of multiple cultures, and which cultures are reflected in these expressions.
Aside from the fact that the media is the object of scholarly inquiry, how, in your view, can the worlds of professional media and academia productively engage with each other? Should the two be separate, as some might argue?
There was a presentation yesterday by Ted Gournelos as part of the first panel in the Communication and Digital Culture area, which was looking at issues of convergence culture. A number of presenters on the panel were taking a stance that was a bit oppositional to Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture. Gournelos was making the point that in contrast to the Habermasian model of consensus culture that Jenkins seems to imply in his use of the term, “convergence” must also take into account conflicts of culture and conflicting investments in the production of conflicting public spheres.
I think we are once again at a moment where there is a sort of euphoric celebration of the way in which the role of media producer and media consumer continue to blur and how that blurring might give rise to a productive and liberatory social space. And this kind of rhetoric does work its way into the academy. There is oftentimes a rather naïve celebration of the proliferation of these idealized communities — as in its older form in the mid- 1990s, as theorists “waxed utopic” over the social and cultural impact of the internet. The popular uptake of these new media interactions is depicted as a kind of mediated populism — a proliferation of democracy online. I think we are in stage 2 of that same kind of euphoric uptake that we saw a little over a decade ago. You hear it all the time in these celebrations of what it means to be involved in Web 2.0.
Some academics have valorized this as a revolutionary moment without taking into consideration things like the free labor provided by individuals who have been putting content online, and the way in which this may play into certain corporate structures. I think there is always going to be a bit of a friction between an academic approach to media and culture and the way in which media corporations are making use of media and culture. There is a degree to which the academy should provide that critical lens, that critical reflection, that calls attention to what euphoria often elides or overlooks.
That does not mean that there cannot be opportunities for interesting academic work that steps outside the ivory tower, so to speak, and has its eye toward media production. I guess I am just a little suspect of what happens when production gets melded into certain corporate ideologies or corporate strategic planning.
How might we think of the internet as a cultural and political space? The everyday perception of the internet is that it is a neutral space, which itself is an outcome of a certain kind of thinking.
Some of my earlier thinking about the internet — and I was as guilty of this as a number of other first-generation internet culture writers — reflected a willingness to look at the internet as public sphere without fully taking into consideration what it means when the public sphere is entirely subsumed within corporate or state structures.
I think right now what’s going on in China with the Tibet protests is very telling. Just the other day I heard a report on NPR: the degree to which some rather clever computer engineers in China have successfully managed to shut down external communication and internal communication in China, the degree to which the state government can filter Google and Yahoo and can completely shut down access to YouTube or other international sites that it finds questionable — this really makes the case that any strong argument for the internet as public sphere that does not take into consideration corporate structures or state structures that can override or predetermine communication is, I think, a little naïve.
Again, I don’t want to come across as saying that it is impossible to have democratic communication by way of the internet but you always need to be aware of the ways in which these political structures and informatic structures delimit what it means to have democracy online.
Image: Sunil Krishnan
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