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LISTEN TO BLACK VOICES

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Cultural Citizenship: The Agency of the Individual at the Behest of the Government

This paper was written in May of 2015 for my Media Criticism class at Queens College. The numbers in parentheses refer to specific pages in “The Media Studies Reader’ by Laurie Ouellete.

Citizenship, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is either “the fact or status of being a citizen of a place” or “the qualities that a person is expected to have as a responsible member of a community.” While the former is simply a legal definition, the latter is the embodiment of an engagement that is behest of governments, whether they be national, state, local or even private. Citizenship, in near layman’s terms is pretty much a set of cultural norms in an advanced society. The question is, who dictates this idea of ‘citizenship?’ 

Is it the corporation, in an attempt to assist in forming a general idea of what the ‘good’ citizen is? Is it the individual, whose morality dictates its own actions and beliefs? Is it the government through the media, in a pursuit of a morally united citizenship? Whatever the answer is designed to be, one thing is certain: the audience plays a major role in the participatory play being put on called “citizenship.” While this paper is referencing the idea of citizenship through media interaction and influence a “play,” one must ask themselves: “Is it really JUST a play?” Can it also be a ploy to control and influence the masses into participating in the government’s or corporation’s idea of ‘citizenship?’ What about the people? Do they have some say in this grand performance piece of “good citizenship?” Do they control the landscape, or is it a smokescreen? The object of this paper is NOT to ANSWER these questions, but to FIND the answer to the greater question that underlies everything: Has the idea of “good” citizenship ever truly been “good?”

Jeffrey Jones doesn’t address the previous question, no. “A Cultural Approach to the Study of Mediated Citizenship” looks at the interaction between the media and the audience. More specifically, it’s a look into how media shapes the citizen’s viewpoints at large. Jones addresses the fact that our various political engagements aren’t segregated activities for the “duty-bound ‘good citizen.’”(550) Where the engagement of politics in this age of new media tied to our everyday rhythms, they are also tied to our pursuits of pleasure, distraction, curiosity, community, sociability and even happenstance. (550)  The latter statement peers into the human aspect of political engagement, where personal feelings are tied to political alignment, and thus, the notion of being a ‘good’ citizen. It should be of note that Jones also plays around with the notion that what the audience consumes also dictates how they engage politically or otherwise, where “infotainment” or “soft news” actually allows for meaningful political discourse and engagement (as well as employing a variety of popular media.(551)) The discourse that Jones speaks of, while easily digested through different kinds of media, isn’t the only method of political discourse.

Pure entertainment can also be an avenue to engage the notion of citizenship, wherein Lauren Berlant looks at this method using an episode of The Simpsons,  “Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington” in “The Theory of Infantile Citizenship.” But beyond that, and before that, Berlant takes a look at the narrative dictated by the “pilgrimage-to-Washington” trope. This trope indicates “the child or innocent adult” who goes through some sort of crisis, which then causes them to abandon (or at the very least, render impractical) their naive utopian political aspirations to achieve political happiness. (565) This idea of  political happiness through infantile citizenship is explored throughout Berlant’s examination of the Simpsons episode, through Homer’s apparent cultural expansion upon receipt of Reader’s Digest, through Lisa’s metaphorical search for affection while retrieving said magazine. But the idea of “good” citizenship doesn’t come into play until the montage of the speeches that are part of the regional contests. (567) Quotes like Lisa’s, which embody what America is supposed be looked at like (the idea of something strong growing out of something fragile,) as opposed to the eventual truth, when Lisa finds out her local senator is getting paid off to destroy their national park. (568) It was only after witnessing this graft, and thusly addressing her disgust, was when her notion of ‘good’ citizenship was renewed, after action was taken against the senator, thus reaffirming her childish notion of a utopian political system that works for the ‘good’ citizen.

Speaking of the ‘good’ citizen once again, the 21st century media, and its role in the creation of the citizenship idea, through the agency of the citizen itself, the good citizen is less overtly influenced by the government, but through themselves and their fabricated aspiration to maintain a healthy lifestyle, through makeover reality television. Shows like The Biggest Loser, which embraces the need for a healthy body and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, are simply part of a greater ‘civic experiment’ in “testing, refining and sharpening people’s abilities to conduct themselves in accordance with the new demands being placed on them.” (574) Governmentality, or the idea of the citizen being responsible for their own actions with a guided, hands off intervention, is the ruler of this idealism, where entertainment media, such as shows of the ilk of The Biggest Loser, both provide entertainment and information to engage, and even coax the viewer into participating in ‘suggested’ activities that allow for their sense of citizenship to be activated.

That being said, a lot of this ‘self-regulation’ is usually a product of public-private partnerships between companies and television networks to provide charity and social services, such as shows like Three Wishes, but also cultivate community service, like American Idol Gives. (576) Previously, where the government was largely involved in the welfare of its citizens, this new ‘governmentality’ utilizes the media to motivate the public into a sense of the newly commodified civic well-being, where ‘lifestyle maximization’ is tied to the nation and electoral politics, thus creating an optimal testing ground for citizenship.

To say that ‘good citizenship’ is truly good can be misleading, as the previously mentioned commodification of civic-well being in Ouellette and Hay’s piece is the driving force for the new neoliberal citizenship movement. Public spheres (527) no longer dictate the political discourse, as the exploitation of communications technologies, according to James Carey, allow for a fixing of select sensory relations in specific members of society, thus determining the worldview of said society. (557) What this says is pretty much, appeal to the intended target, empower their already embedded social activism need. However, is it truly a ‘self-regulated’ form of the welfare movement that the government is constantly trying to reform? Or is it possibly a well veiled attempt at government oversight from far away? Is what is known as ‘citizenship’ just another false construct perpetuated by the very sources of entertainment that is created for us?

Not really. As earlier mentioned, infotainment can usually provide fresher outlooks on select issues and social conditions than the news, and even public discourse, can. Sometimes it can endorse the avenues for public discourse about social, economical and political issues and subjects, allowing for a more informed electorate. There is a chance that the cultural norms that are perpetuated by the need for ‘good’ citizenship can actually be good for the societies that employ them, and the media can be just as good an avenue to perpetuate these necessary norms. It’s not that the media and the private corporations are necessarily FORCING the viewer to do what THEY dictate, and not even coaxing, to say the least. The agency is still on the viewer. Whether or not they do it, the impetus is on them to make the changes or alterations necessary for them to be a ‘good’ citizen. So while it was stated that ‘good’ citizenship is misleading, it is indeed good. It simply depends on if the citizen deems it good for themselves, even with the influences that the media perpetuates on a daily basis. It isn’t infantile, as the capability to make the choice and become informed enough to participate in debate and discourse is there. It also isn’t necessarily bad to form an opinion based on things and situations viewed through the lens of  ‘soft news.’ It isn’t good citizenship when the uninformed are taking place in discourse, and refusing to become informed. It isn’t good citizenship when the effort to inform and pass along said information is undermined. Again, the agency is on the consumer of the media, whether or not they choose to be a ‘good’ citizen or not.

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(Complete) Corporate Influence v. (Fragmented) Mass Consumption: What Favors the Culture Industries?

This paper was written in April of 2015 for my Media Criticism class at Queens College. The numbers in parentheses refer to specific pages in “The Media Studies Reader’ by Laurie Ouellete.

In a paper that I previously penned, I discussed the idea of the “main event” of popular culture, utilizing past real-life examples of the attempts to redefine what is truly the influential medium of the popular culture movement. However, one thing that drives this movement is the industry that mass produces culture through the press, film, television and other technologies (265). This culture industry, to use a term coined by critics Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, only holds up when, according to a study by the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (hereby known as UNESCO,) cultural goods are provided, reproduced, stored or distributed via industrial and commercial lines (265). This has to be done on a large scale, as well as with economic considerations in mind, discarding the concern of cultural development within the chunks of society they target. To put it in Layman’s terms, the cultural phenomena that societies are infinitely exposed to are simply corporate manufactures, geared with the intention of the target audience’s purchase and consumption of mass produced goods, such as Blu-Ray movies, mp3 downloads, clothing that matches the style put forth by the different forms of popular culture, and so on. Furthering the idea of the culture industry is the installation of permanent attractions, such as shopping malls and movie theatres (which are on a decline,) art museums, amusement parks and corporate-funded public spaces, which complement the culture industry model by providing the avenues to purchase and consume the goods related to the culture that is being peddled to the people. Nonetheless, the culture industries can be looked at from two different standpoints: full control vs. fragmentation.

Corporations who control the means of production, distribution and exhibition (such as Comcast, who not only owns several television networks, both broadcast and cable, but also the Philadelphia Flyers of the National Hockey League, the Wells Fargo Center where the Flyers and 76ers play, and Universal Studios (both the film studio and the parks.)) create a concentration of private cultural power. According to Herbert Schiller in his piece “The Corporation and the Production of Culture,” this concentration means that “only the richest groups…can afford to own media-informational companies.” (270) This then means the tiniest spectrum of the masses (or the interests that control them) hold the means to create the messages that constitute news, entertainment and general cultural product. UNESCO further elaborates on this saying: “It is open to question, in order to obtain an accurate portrayal of the system of forces at work in the cultural industries, the assumed symmetry of classical communications theories should not be replaced by a firmly asymmetrical view, reflecting the predominant influence of the industrial producers of the messages...who in the end dictates the choice of channel, content and even the consumer’s choice, in the interests of economic or ideological control.” (270 - 271) Needless to say, Schiller immediately points out that this same view has been generally rejected by communication and media theorists, where it is noted that the sheer acceptance of the widely prevalent control of the media and allied cultural fields is something that is accepted by most Americans, despite the large scale anti-monopolistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Where the corporate “voice” is the national symbolic environment, Schiller contends that it isn’t that “one or another corporate giant utilizes the cultural industries to make it’s preferences known to the public…” but that the far more significant detail is the organic growth of the corporate voice and its generalization across cultural expression. (273)

However, around the 1970s, these same corporations had to begin a reorganization, as they began to realize that they were garnering less control of the subterranean circulation of products, as well as they were unable to “dependably construct mass audiences through control of technology, government regulations or market economics.” (279) Curtin, in “Culture Industries in the Neo-Network Era” contends that because of the expansion of content made available to the masses, they went from choosing the least offensive of a small concentration, to being “hailed by a plenitude of choices in a variety of formats.” As the national (or industrial) infrastructure (that formerly played a very important role in fostering the high network era of television) becomes less influential than before, future audiences begin to be formed by the forms of culture themselves, through a clustering of audiences around a product that fits their tastes. Curtin argues the previous assessment as the reason why media conglomerates are developing flexible strategies that reflect the incoming dialectic of fragmentation/globalization. Looking into this dialectic, David Harvey maintains that the flexibility that corporations have shown in maintaining the control of these fragmented markets has little to do with decentralization, as it does with using decentralizing tactics to maintain highly centralized control, where marketing campaigns can no longer be focused on a single audience. (278) 

Whereas being able to broadcast in television prime time used to net you broad national exposure, which most conglomerates favor, the new shift in technologies and distribution do not allow for this to be possible, as audiences become more fragmented than before, with different tastes. Schiller tries to maintain that the corporation is still largely influential, in a mass sense, however, that isn’t the case, according to Curtin. Real life examples, such as Comcast, do support both Curtin and Schiller’s views, whereas a company completely controls every piece of media needed to control the cultural industry as a whole, but has enough parts where fragmentation can be utilized to focus in on a specific demographic to maximize their message’s reach, such the idea of “independent” labels owned by a major label signing artists matching the carved niche they set. However, where Curtin and Schiller diverge is a different argument in itself.

Remember when it was mentioned that Schiller maintains the idea that at least ONE conglomerate controls the complete message, despite the audience? This is where Curtin pumps the brakes and reverses away, or at least into another lane. In Curtin’s argument, he argues that the previously unapproachable now becomes “attractive to media conglomerates with deep pockets.” (284) Safety is thrown to the wayside, as more companies start to gain a voracious appetite for innovation, using these previously outer-mainstream groups as new testing/recruiting grounds for new cultural forms, as well as taking niche acts and leveraging them into mainstream acts once a growing interest is shown. 

The question is, however, is there a need for a homogenized culture? Can the culture industries maintain a unified front in terms of the creation of popular culture? The current climate says otherwise, especially with the ever evolving technologies that are present, where the audiences that are present have the ability to pick and choose what they consume, as opposed to a couple decades ago, where the consumption of media was constricted to what the corporations made available. Seeing both of these in action at one point or another leads back to the initial question asked: Which favors the Culture Industries? It all depends on the makeup of the audience that the industries are looking to influence, honestly.

[clintonnavigatorbowman]

What is the Main Event of the Popular Culture Show?

This paper was written in March of 2015 for my Media Criticism class at Queens College. The numbers in parentheses refer to specific passages and lines in “The Media Studies Reader’ by Laurie Ouellete. 

Popular Culture is a weird little phenomenon in itself. Whether discussing the merits of popular culture’s positive influence on the human condition or its negative, there isn’t much of a debate of how influential popular culture has become. However, quoting the late Keith ‘Guru’ Elam of the hip-hop group Gang Starr, “The question remains: What is the true influence in the world of popular culture? 

Some would argue that the culture itself is the true influence, or the “main event,” of the popular culture movement, while others look at the devices and technology as the vehicles as the true vehicles of influence in popular culture. There is no telling which one truly drives popular culture, however this essay aims to evaluate two such arguments about what is really the main event of the pop culture movement, “Popular Culture, This Ain’t No Sideshow” by George Lipsitz, and “From Screen to Site” by Anna McCarthy.

In “Popular Culture, This Ain’t No Sideshow,” Lipsitz tries to show that what is commonly shown as a “sideshow” can sometimes be the show itself, dependent on the audience, of course. Using late jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk as an example in the beginning of this piece, he claims that, while Kirk’s art contained “multilayered and heavily coded covert messages about the past,” a large part of the audience that partakes in his music simply views it as a simple sideshow and a diversion that keeps them entertained (45). Lipsitz states that this problem is still existent now, even going as far as to say that the apparati of commercial mass communication dominates public discourse in the modern world, supplying us with a diversion and distraction that direct our minds towards messages geared towards advertisements (46). These messages thusly create a niche in the most intimate and personal parts of our lives, taking advantage of our flaws to augment our need for commercial goods. As a result, we purchase these goods without questioning the origins or attempting to disseminate the meaning behind what we are innately being pressured to consume. This can be attributed to the claim that “history and commercialized leisure appear to be polar opposites.” On the one hand, history is focused on the unification of the totality of human experience, encompassing what Lipsitz describes as high culture later in the article, and, on the other hand, commercialized leisure is about immediate gratification, forming the crux of popular culture (46).

Anna McCarthy, however, argues that the television set destroys the traditional sense of space, creating a false sense of spatial awareness. As “site-specific” as the television medium is, it creates a disconnect from our natural sense of space. According to McCarthy, television, as described by Samuel Weber, simply “takes place” (149). Weber claims that since television can “take place in three places at once” the ontological aspect of place achieves an upheaval of sorts (149). Furthermore, since the idea of place is tied to its sense of stability and containment, television and its ability to take a space, and place it in another that is not its own, upsets that balance, so to speak. McCarthy takes issue with this, citing Weber’s presentation of the place of the screen as “an essential kind of unity...a metaphysical phenomenon that is bounded and stable...until the moment that technics enters the picture in order to ‘re-place’ it” (149). This is exemplified in her example of the Rio Videowall in Atlanta’s Rio mall. McCarthy explains that the videowall stripped the sense of space through a sophisticated system which superimposes mall patrons that walk into the mall as human outlines onto a landscape that is predetermined (151). Television’s ability to abolish the idea of the remote and its mysticality raises, or better yet, instills the theoretic idea of commodity fetishism, where the almost superstitious treatment of the television in the everyday practices of life is in itself a testimony to “the richness of the occult as a resource for thinking about television’s omnipresence in consumer culture” (153).

Where Lipsitz and McCarthy are loosely in agreement is the idea of commodity fetishism, albeit with significantly contrasting views. McCarthy pushes the theory that TV’s space-binding and scale-shifting effects, as well as the abolition of the remote creates the aforementioned fetishism. Lipsitz examines popular culture’s ability to attack the psyche and its flaws, augmenting our appetites for consumer goods, thus making culture a commodity, and something to fawn over in an almost fetishing fashion. However, there is a tighter agreement between the two articles, where identity comes into play. Both popular culture and television as a media augment identity (of both people and objects) in nearly transformative ways. However, with that agreement in mentality, comes a larger disagreement.

McCarthy believes that television, as the main event in popular culture, transforms identity, and hollows it out. McCarthy points out the example of the Rio Videowall, which we referred to earlier, as an example of this hollowing out. While the wanted intention of the cameras that fed the human images into the wall of videos as silhouettes was apparent, the cameras simply “emptied out identity and installed a standardized, abstracted subjectivity in its place…” (152). To place into layman’s terms: the cameras made everyone similar and indistinguishable, revealing the world as mundane and lacking personality. She also breaks down this same argument through Jonathan Crary’s argument,where Crary claims that television has become “so fully integrated into social and subjective life that certain kinds of statements about television...are in a sense unspeakable (147).” This claim reflects the history of attitudes of behavior modification “via perception into an act of witnessing,” as well as the idea that viewers are a “suggestive mass,” even going as far as citing the long standing Hollywood formula of taking the alleged paranoia and giving it insidious forms, such as The Truman Show (1988). Lipsitz, however, removes the idea of television as the apparatus which controls popular culture, instead taking the position that popular culture is a near endless medium that  takes root in our most intimate and personal parts of our psyches, exploiting all flaws to alter our desire for consumer goods. He even cites theatre as the biggest catalyst for the changing social mores in the Victorian era. Popular culture allowed the Victorians to roleplay—giving them the ability to hide and change their identity, which was cited as a threat to the sense of authentic self-knowledge. Here, Lipsitz says that it create the “psychic preconditions for the needy narcissism of consumer desire” (47).

Determining the main event of the popular culture movement isn’t a task that is easily performed. Both the manufactured culture and the apparatus that allows for the consumption of mass culture both contribute to the “main event,” like two fighters contending for the richest prize in the sport. One might even say both aspects are dueling each other for supremacy. However, to determine this, one must figure out an effective way to evaluate mass media through the lens of popular culture. Dissecting what makes culture popular, and thusly readily available for mass consumption might be one way to evaluate and critique mass media. We can also try to critique the methods in which popular culture norms and conditions are fabricated. However, the phenomenon of popular culture is still an enigma that has yet to be truly figured out in a complete sense. Which leaves me with one question: What truly is the main event of popular culture?

[clintonnavigatorbowman]

The Warmest of Welcomes

How do you welcome someone to a blog that will be potentially offensive and abrasive? A trigger warning might be appropriate. Consider this a caring thought to those individuals. For those that wish to continue, I warmly welcome you all. My name is Clinton Bowman. I was born, raised and still live in Brooklyn New York. I am a Class of 2020 graduate of CUNY Queens College with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Media Studies. Currently seeking his Master’s of Arts in Teaching in Elementary Education, I decided to start this blog because I wish to share some of my thoughts, both new and old. On this blog, I will be sharing some old content related to the media and our consumption and criticisms of them. The crux of this blog, however, is to address my many thoughts on as many topics. Education, gaming, inequality, my life as a black man, whatever I find appropriate. Some topics may not be the easiest to digest, but that’s the goal. To create discourse and solutions for the greater good.

Most blog posts that I create won’t be very long. The goal is to get straight to the point and express myself in a manner that provokes and coerces thoughtful insight on said topics.

Enough with the introductions, though. I hope you enjoy, and have fun ‘Navigating my Thoughts’.