Citizenship is something which has been under development since at least the American Revolution. Recent movements toward a culture that has developed virtually instead of face-to-face had pushed for a greater understanding on what impact that has in “real” society. Being and existing in reality is blurred when the internet and communities that are present in that form are indeed undeniably in existence. Because of that fact the outcomes of the discourse from those built communities have an impact that must be acknowledged as culturally significant.
In the beginning there was citizenship formed around civil and economic rights. These were comprised out of the rights to trade, property rights and rights to a fair trial. Political rights were significantly developed during the 19th century and comprised of the rights to free association and the right to vote in democratically held elections.
Cultural citizenship deals with the aspects of life which create a sense of being and identity within an individual and groups of individuals. This sense of social being is what is described as social “being.” This symbolic aspect of society is very much related to citizenship and is culturally embedded. What is represented in all media forms is therefore an essential part of citizenship.Through combining all aspects of citizenship it would mean that every individual is embedded in a mutually constructed system of rights and responsibilities. As society progresses so the elements within a concept such as citizenship deepen and change.
The media is now so fundamental to creating and communicating ideas, representations and senses of communities both thick and thin and the institutions which themselves may be thick or thin. With the development of a variety of web based tools such as blogs which allow for anybody with access to a computer and the internet to publish the creation of a rich electronically based public space has now become a reality which can keep developing. This can provide us with both material and symbolic needs in which physical needs interact with and are a part ofcultural and social needs expressed through the virtual forming a sense of community never before imagined.
Through a new method of information dispersal, one that is not only supplied but also interactive, such as the internet, communication has reached a newer level of possibility. Online communities do not solely exist within the web, those communities formed upon shared interests and ideas, easily transcend into the real. The internet then serves as a foreground, a platform for locating and contacting people to begin the conversations necessary to make action. This action happens organically and shifts in ways that may not in initially be intended, but that is indeed the beauty of creating networking sites. People find methods to use websites in way that were both unintended and surpasses even what the creators of the site envisioned.
However, the policing and restricting of the internet as free space, by corporations and copyright laws, is the digresser in the movement toward fostering community. With such potential just through mass communication alone and the instantaneous feed and feedback of information through the internet, one can surely say that the internet has become inextricably bound to the way in which 21 century human beings create community. Internet society and physical society work with one another, movements are started, forums created, meet-ups are organized and as we witnessed in this years presidential campaign, elections are won. Through the use of the internet, this particular election proved a very different race. Running strategies were curtailed to reach an audience that had never before been considered. Online advertisements, Youtube videos, blog discussions, articles from ad hock websites sprouted like dandelions, and ed-opt articles of online news papers (Huffingtonpost.com) never mattered more. We saw first hand the power the internet had upon creating community, and starting action in a time when America called for change, the internet sent out that call and the voters answered in the real world not just the virtual. The use of communication tools and participatory media has created an enactment of cultural citizenship.
Across the globe, from New York to Japan to Sydney, a new cultural space is emerging— the digital commons. In it, users are creating culture and knowledge, be it by blogging, making videos, remixing songs or writing software. While it may manifest itself in different ways in different places, this movement, much like the nature of the internet itself, has become a truly global one, and is serving as a way to transcend barriers across cultures.
Many of these barriers are already breaking down— the lines between “amateur” and “professional”, “user and “Creator”, “writer and “reader” are becoming increasingly blurred. Within just the music industry alone artist’s have been able to jumpstart there careers right from their own personal computers. Musicians and new-media entrepreneurs have recognized that the web could have a profound effect on the business by giving artists the ability to circumvent the big record labels and market themselves directly to music fans. Independent artist Ingrid Michaelson was discovered on the social networking site Myspace. As a result, it was picked up by various other blogs, and tens of thousands of downloads later, it had made its way into the main stream. Her song “The Way I Am” has been sampled on an Old Navy commercial and “Breakable” and “Corner of Your Heart” were both featured in episodes of “Grey's Anatomy.” In many ways her story can be seen as a lesson in semiotic democracy and the grassroots, viral nature of the internet. She had merely published her work to MySpace and without any further effort on her part, people around the world started listening to her music. Her artistry has become a part of the Digital Cultural Revolution without even realizing it.
By posting ones work online and allowing others free access to it, it then enters a common space of cultural information that is available for the public at large to share, rework, and remix. This process, easily and readily available to anyone with a computer and the dedication to commit to it, can be seen as a method of opposing traditional copyright, which locks down and prevents such access and reworking of a particular artist (corporation, business etc.). Those who use this oppositional method of “self-publishing” their work, art, music, writing etc, then belong to a public domain and attribute a small part (or largely) to this growing pool of global information. Wikipedia is an example of this. The post-it-yourself information gathering website had become the world’s largest user-created encyclopedia. Those creators who use alternative methods of information dissemination by opting for various other licenses that is not as strict as copyright laws are adding to this knowledge space.
What the digital space recognizes is that creation is not produced out of a vacuum; we inevitably build upon the works of others, be it consciously or subconsciously. Thanks to advances in digital technology and communications networks, we are entering a new era of creative production. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the internet was viewed as having unlimited, even unrealistic potential as a medium for commerce. Now, it has increasingly become a platform for cultural communication, yet this new expansive space has produced a new battle—one that is being fought digitally between the “little guy” and big corporation.
“Anti-corporate Warriors” as they have been called, such as ® tmark, adbusters, and Negativland are all, in their own way fighting back in the name of intellectual property protection. These organizations, through various tactics, keep in balance the attacks made on small business and independent artists, attacks that restrict what information, art, or ideas they post which they have deemed “in violation of their own copyright laws”. The dissemination of intellectual property, or access to knowledge, is one of the key pillars of democracy. As information courses ever more rapidly through the internet, barriers to access are gradually reduced. This is what big business is fighting to take control over. It is this same idea of rapid information dispersal that IP Guerillas are also using it to try and keep the internet the last free space for cultural dividends.
Yet as we enter this era of democratic cultural production, the law is increasingly out of touch with reality. There's a complete lack of congruence between what is on the books and what is actually happening in the real (or digital) world. Because of this incongruence independent online users can be bullied by big business but at the same time this blurry boundary also provides for a method to fight back with. If the laws are not clear then neither are the violations. The internet resembles the “lawless Wild West”, and some have called for its regulation while others believe it to be a space for freedom in every sense of the word.
In Kalle Lasn’s book Culture Jam he identifies the element of the United States that has led to the current sense of malaise experienced by today’s youth and the nostalgia for an American Dream. Lasn believes that we as American have been unknowingly recruited into a cult of our own making and “set into roles and behavior patterns we did not choose.” We are consumers bound by the constant onslaught of advertisements that drive us to believe that we need to buy, obtain, purchase— for Lasn we have been brainwashed unknowingly and unaware.
Jackson Lears essay, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony” suggest another idea.If Lasn believes Americans are victims to corporations without any fault, the Lears suggests, based on Gramsci’s Prison Notes that perhaps the masses are more aware than we would like to admit. Gramsci suggests a notion of a divided consciousness; brainwashing the masses is not the method in which one gains Hegemony but instead a suppression of certain views of American life are replacing it by allowing “public discourse to make some forms of experience readily available to consciousness while ignoring or suppressing the others.” This is done through mass media or as Lasn puts it the player is the corporation.
Culture Jam gives a brief history of American uprising against corrupt political systems. The Boston Tea Party is the example used to show the American people beginning to understand their own strength when working together. Early American sentiment of corporate power was always held in suspicion. They were kept under close scrutiny of by the state and were very limited in how much action they can actually take; if any violation occurred they were dissolved— corporations were controlled by the people and not the other way around. The Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court decision was the pivotal moment that changed this way of corporation governing. After having gained much control and power through the disorder of the civil war, this decision, which deemed that a corporation was a “natural person” under the constitution and therefore had protection under the Bill of Rights allowed for corporations to sit on the throne of power.
Because corporations were not equal to the average citizen in that they had far more money and financial support than any citizen can have alone it created a rift of social and political power that would have serious repercussions for decades to come. Today 42 percent of the worlds wealth is controlled by the top five hundred corporations. Corporations free buy each others stocks and shares. They lobby and bankroll elections. They manage and broadcast airwaves, set our industrial and economic agendas, and grow as big and as powerful as they want.Proving President Lincolns foreshadowing of “An era of corruption in high places [where] wealth is aggregated in a few hands…and the republic is destroyed.”
Mass media is a major tool in controlling America’s flow of information. Corporations control the media and therefore control what we buy, what is popular and where the flow of trends go. The 2001 film Josie and the Pussy Cats pokes fun at mass media and its control on consumer culture. In the film the record label MegaRecords, headed by the trendy and scheming Fiona (Parker Posey) pumps out pop bands and, through an arrangement with the United States government, get teens to buy their records and follow "a new trend every week" by putting subliminal messages under the music. These messages change weekly; “Orange is the new pink!” The Government's motive in the scheme is to help build a robust economy from the "wads of cash" teenagers earn from babysitting and minimum wage jobs. One particular scene features a Goth girl in a record store who goes against the pop-culture trend, doesn’t listen to the music MegaRecords produces and believes it’s all a big corporate scheme— Alan Cummings Character Wyatt Frame immediately calls in for reinforcements and has the girl kidnapped “taken care of” and the threat diminished. This hilarious and exaggerated depiction of mass media’s ability and control may not play-out in reality the same way but Lasn suggests that it comes very close.
If we use the Goth girl in the film to represent subculture and Wyatt to represent corporate power we can understand the workings of how a particular historical bloc becomes hegemonic while subcultures form in resistance. In the film because the media conglomerate MegaRecords was able to control almost every facet of consumerism their ideologies on trends prevailed. They were able to convince mass culture that their products were “cool” by constantly bombarding people with its images and messages embedded within their music and advertisements. They achieved hegemony by covering all grounds economically and developed a “worldview that appealed to a wide range of other groups within the society” their claim being that these particular products, colors, latte’s would serve in the consumers interest because it would make them trendy, cool, popular and stylish— they succeeded in making their products signify the “popular teen”. While the subordinate groups, (the Goths, rebels, emo kids) who sensed the corruption in the scheme did not have the economic power to gain the media control to promote their ideals and therefore it did not become the hegemonic trend. What the film recognized was in order to continue to keep the youth buying the products they needed they too needed to constantly change the fad, change the subliminalmessages in their music and keep the youth wanting more. The movie recognizes that hegemony is “a continuous creation” and they did not allow the counterhegemonies to remain a live option.
However if there are counter-hegemonic groups aware of the media manipulation there most be some sort of consciousness in the hegemonized groups that they too are being controlled. Gramsci describes this as a “half-conscious complicity in their own victimization”. As young teenagers with limited amounts of spending money keeping up with the trends becomes costly, however because their ideals have been “muddled by assimilation to a dominant culture”, they still behave against their own interests in order to maintain their status as “cool”.
Lasn explains the movement to end this and make more people aware that they are being duped by corporations. He describes the Culture Jamming movement as a sort of outlet of stopping, interrupting or jamming the messages media sends to its viewers and make them more conscious to take action together to fight against the pollution of information feed via advertisement. Billboard defacing, counter-commercials, and the internet all hold a power that we together can grab hold of and use to our advantage.
At a recent conference geared on Gender I attended a discussion panel on censorship. One of the attendees of the panel Christine Koh, a former Wheaton student and current founder and editor of Boston Mamas.com shared a story. Online marketing at Boston.com set up a Google Adwords campaign such that if a user types “bostonmamas.com” into the search engine, the top sponsored ad that results is for BoMoms. Meaning, theycreated a campaign to intentionally and duplicitously advertise themselves as “Bostonmamas.com. When Koh cought wind of this scheme she immediately went to the higher-ups of the Boston Globe without response. She took instead took to her blog and announced to her readers of the unjust methods of campaigning the Globe had created to attack her readership. Koh wrote a letter to the Globe and in the spirit of full transparency, this letter was also posted at BostonMamas.com. Her readers took to the web with fierceness and posted comments, tweets, and other blog posts in her defense. After bombarding the web with responses to the Globe’s actions against Koh’s site they removed the link without a word. Koh posted this response to the initiative on her blog:
“I’m incredibly grateful to everyone for their support following last week’s unfortunate dealings with Boston.com online marketing. The subsequent comments, tweets, and posts truly reflected the passion that readers and bloggers have for transparency, as well as the beauty and power of social media.”
Koh’s resistance to Google and the corporate owned Boston Globe proved successful. Her website will remain easily accessible. This example of the “little guy” v. the Big Dog and how together through the channels we do have readily available to us we can help put big business back in its place.
Mark Dery describes Lasn’s Culture Jamming effort and its move to the internet. “Jammers are heartened by the electronic frontiers promise of a new media paradigm— interactive rather than passive, nomadic and atomized rather than resident and centralized, egalitarian rather than elitist.” Compared to the one way flow of received information from the televisions in our living rooms, the internet provides for two-way communication. One is able to respond to the media on a large scale and disseminate thoughts and ideas but also comment on them rebut them argue them.
“This medium gives us possibility that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The roles of the reader, writer and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation.”
Even so as experienced by Christine Koh and the attack on Bostonmamas.com, big business will always try and monopolize the spread of information however the internet provides the tools to fight back.
Thinking in regards to the Bubble I can see this website becoming a tool to start the dialogue needed at WheatonCollege. On our campus there is currently only one source of information dispersal to the student community, that being the Wheaton Wire. Because this newspaper has a complete monopoly on information and its print form does not allow for an organic flow of conversation it is difficult to refute it or have discussions on its effectiveness and/or its content. How would be able to confront the Wire if the only way to do so is through the Wire? The Bubble strives to break this cycle. By adding the online component to our journalistic efforts it can become a method of activism that defeats the static one-sidedness of the information monopoly.
The current saturation of relatively inexpensive multimedia communication tools hold tremendous potential for destroying the monopoly of ides we have lived in for so long…A personal computer can be configured to act as a publishing house, a broadcast quality TV studio, a professional recording studio, or node in an international bulletin system.
The future of the Bubble is yet to be seen however with the right components and situation on campus it can become a necessary almost inextricable tool for campus information and communication among students. The ability for the Web to create communities is where we hope to bring the Bubble magazine— a “Universe of Technological Communication- patrolled by groups of communication guerillas” can exist and will possibly change the way Wheaton perceives consumerism, media and journalism, the possibilities are perhaps boundless.
I must have read the Jackson Lears piece about three times now and each time I’m not quite sure if I grasp the concepts he extracts from Antonio Gramsci. So I looked up some other reading on Cultural Hegemony to gain a better understanding of Lears and Gramsci himself. After doing this I came across a few interesting authors on the subject of Hegemony and included in this blog some of the ideologies they received from Gramsci as well.
Hegemony is the dominance of one nation or culture over the other. This dominance creates norms, socially, politically and otherwise. For Gramsci hegemony takes on a specifically Marxist character. Of Gramsci’s era, the dominant class of a Western Europe nation was the bourgeoisie, while the crucial subordinate class was the proletariat. He refers to the leadership of the proletariat over the other exploited classes. The proletariat for Gramsci must be the leader of the struggle of a whole people for a fully democratic revolution, in the struggle for all the working and exploited people against oppressors and exploiters (Anderson 17).
Gramsci defines hegemony as a form of control exercised by a dominant class, in the Marxist sense of a group controlling the means of production. Gramsci's "hegemony" refers to a process of moral and intellectual leadership through which dominated or subordinate classes of post-1870 industrial Western European nations consent to their own domination by ruling classes, as opposed to being simply forced or coerced into accepting inferior positions. (Lears 568)
Gramsci uses the classical base-superstructure model of Marxism. The economic base included only the material necessary for production. The superstructure was arranged in two halves.
"Social hegemony" which includes the "'spontaneous' consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group [i.e. the ruling class – in Gramsci's Western Europe, the bourgeoisie]; this consent is 'historically' caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.
"Political government" which includes "apparatus of state coercive power which 'legally' enforces discipline on those groups who do not 'consent' either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed"
Through a societies superstructure hegemony becomes a form of control. Superstructure is used in three particular ways: Institutions which are the legal and political forms of the existing real relations of production; Forms of consciousness that express a particular class view of the world; political and cultural practices which covers a range of activities when men become conscious of a fundamental economic conflict and fight it out.
The two superstructures do not function solely on their own but come together to create the integral state. Gramsci uses the idea of the “state” to signify the “governmental-coercive apparatus”. This includes the functions of social hegemony and political government. The state is dictatorship plus hegemony. Political society plus civil society equal the state, in other words hegemony is protected by coercion. “Ruling groups do not maintain their hegemony merely by giving their domination an aura of moral authority through the creation of perpetuation of legitimating symbols; they must also seek to win consent of subordinate groups to the existing social order.” (Lears 569)
When a group develops its own particular world view, what Gramsci refers to as a “historical bloc” it may or may not become hegemonic. This depends on how the group establishes itself within the framework of other groups and classes. Hegemony can only be achieved when a historical bloc develops a world view that is appealing to multiple groups within a wide range of society and they must be able to claim that their view is for the benefit of society as a whole (Lears 571). Thus the system of hegemonization is constant, it is a life cycle that consistently meets protest and must be legitimized repeatedly. Power is then fluid it belongs to many and culture is shaped by many, though the hegemony can serve the interests of some groups better than others. Subordinate groups may participate in legitimizing their own domination half-consciously. Lears speaks of a hegemonic continuum which can be closed or open. In the closed continuum the subordinate groups “lack the language necessary even to conceive concerted resistance” and in the open continuum “the capability for resistance flourishes and may lead to the creation of a counterhegemonic culture”. The idea of “contradictory consciousness” allows for one to understand that domination and subordination is fluid as well, it is not built in all defining categories, which according to Lears has opened possibilities for more complex ideas of popular culture.
In an attempt to apply this to a more tangible ideology I present to you Google. Google, used by millions as a search engine but also with the company’s vast methods of organizing your online life (i.e. Google chrome, Google Calendar, Google Docs) it has quickly become a favorite among internet users. If we consider Google the dominant group, which has successfully validated its ideologies, values and uses to the public domain, we can see the contradictory consciousness Gramsci speaks of. Currently Google is now recording the types of websites you visit in order to gather a behavioral profile of your interests purportedly so that they can send you targeted advertising. This policy is in addition to their current policy of keeping a record of every single web search you have ever made along with as much other personally identifying information as they can gather. They claim that they are doing this in order to personalize and simplify the online experience per user making it more efficient and enjoyable. The information gathered can be readily handed over to authorities upon request. They can receive detailed web histories and behavioral profiles in a flash. In doing this they are violating the online privacy of millions. One can safely say that many users will willingly allow for this to happen in order to gain the “perks” Google offers. This is an act done puposly. It is easy for an internet user not to use Google, but instead an alternative web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, but subordinate groups may continue in maintaining the Google universe even if it means it will legitimize their own subordination.
Aside from Lears I stumbled across this interesting reading by Raymond Williams on Hegemony:
Hegemony constitutes lived experience, "a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives" (100).
Hegemony exceeds ideology "in its refusal to equate consciousness with the articulate formal system which can be and ordinarily abstracted as 'ideology'" (109)
Lived hegemony is a process, not a system or structure (though it can be schematized as such for the purposes of analysis)
Hegemony is dynamic - "It does not just passively exist as a form of dominance. It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own."
Hegemony attempts to neutralize opposition - "the decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate [alternatives and opposition]" (113).
One can argue persuasively that "the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture."
Hegemony is not necessarily total – "It is misleading, as a general method, to reduce all political and cultural initiatives and contributions to the terms of the hegemony."
"Authentic breaks within and beyond it . . . have often in fact occurred."
Works Cited
Anderson, Perry. "The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci." New Left Review 100 (1976): 5-78.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised Edition. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
