Lister and Kellner

I'd like to apologize for the strange formatting of the summaries. For some reason, Blogspot decided to erase all my formatting when I published this post, so I tried to fix it as best I could, but to me it looks a bit distracting.

Kellner:

- Culture wars: conservatism vs. "political correctness"
- new technologies: possibility for isolation, social control
- production for profit and articulation of conflicting social positions to appeal to diff. demographics
- media culture is the dominant culture
- "new modes of experience and subjectivity"
- work declining in importance as pleasure is derived from consumption, not labor
- dominant conservative (Reagan) discourse
- "Culture has never been more important and never before have we had such a need for serious scrutiny of contemporary culture"
- 1950s on: various forms of post-structuralist theory
- postmodern nihilism vs. postmodernism of resistance
- critical social theory, practice-oriented social theory, dialectics
- cultural studies: text and context, transdisciplinary approaches
- Frankfurt School and culture industries

• - shortcomings: no analysis of political economy of culture, high/low culture binary, mass culture = pacification of audience (dulling down, brainwashing)

- British cultural studies: Gramsci - hegemony/counterhegemony (displays of raw power vs. induced consent)

• - materialist
• - subverts high/low culture distinction (but tends to erase high culture)

- Terminology: mass culture (elitist) , popular culture (ignores fact that most popular culture is created by corporations, not the people), media culture
- US cultural studies often omits political economy and social context, focusing exclusively on text-audience relationship
-Problematics: unproblematized celebration of oppositional readings/resistance and fetishism of struggle, resistance, audience pleasure

• - need for critical analysis of what kinds of opposition, struggle, pleasure are occurring

-Stuart Hall: cycle of production - distribution - consumption - production
- making visible the processes by which culture becomes dominant
- not letting cultural studies become "celebratory" and "uncritical"
- postmodern as a buzzword, undetheorized: the "postmodern sandwich" and other throwaway uses of the term
- Hebdige and neo-Gramscian theories: non-teological, no "grand plan of emancipation," but hopeful for emergence of new solidarities and radical change

Lister, pp. 219-279

New Media in Everyday Life
- not cyberspace vs. everyday life; new media permeates everyday life
- "for some observers, new media offer new creativities and possibilities; for others they reinforce and extend exisitng social constraints and power relationships"
- Emphasizing everyday life in the study of media technologies and their uses foregrounds the following key issues:

• Media are the products of already existing social and economic structures and forces (Williams)
• Meanings and uses of new media are negotiated by various social agents, not fixed
• New media technologies have to find their place within more stable and established social structures often characterized by existing media
• Practices of consumption are integral to the commercial success and methods of use of new media

- possibility of the Internet not being a cyberspace: email and other communication "concrete and mundane enactments of belonging"
- "smart homes," ubiquitous technology, and consumerism: the home is still the privileged site of consumption
- black box theory and convergence
Theories of new media's relationship to everyday life
- Cyberculture: newness and emancipatory possibilities of consumption of digital media
- "Business as Usual": new media reinforce and extend existing power hierarchies; repressive potential of new media technologies
- Populists and postmodernists: consumer culture = only culture; no sense of technologies as "material or instrumental"
- Cultural and media studies: new media not "fundamentally distinct" from old media; not privileging consumption or production
- media technologies are not deterministic, but do invite or facilitate certain uses
- Ethnography of home computers (Mackay)

• the significance of consumption of ICTs for domestic lives and relationships
• how ICTs are implicated in shifting individual and family identities
• the relationship between household members' public and private worlds
• how technology (as well as the household) is transformed in processes of domestication and incorporation

-Screen Play research project: placement of computers in homes, gendered placement and usage, sharing and negotiating usage time, parental anxieties about cost and possible danger of Internet (but, Internet often purchased in response to perceived increased danger of physical environment)
- Edutainment: clashes of "low culture" and educational materials; tension between those who argue that entertainment value "dumbs down" educational aspects and those who believe adding entertainment more effectively engages learners
- "Knowledge stock" vs. capital and intellectual property: ideas taking primacy over money and the commodification of knowledge
- Instrumental progressivism: new philosophy/methods of education and training that acknowledge "broader relations of power" in relation to technology usage
- Global networks: subjects are not autonomous, but "embroiled in networks, in intimate relationships with machines and media"

• - consumption choices and identity formation
• - communication: many to many, vs. one to one (telephone) or one to many (broadcast media)
• - Personal webpages: identity construction, bricolage
• - New media is fundamentally changing identity: we are being "Borged" (so entangled with technology that we are becoming cyborgs)
• - different theories indicate various degrees of new media influence on individual and group identity
• - theory of the "virtual age": everyday life, corporeality in opposition to identity as constructed through virtual means (declining significance of the physical body as center of identity)
• - postmodernist cyberculture theory: McLuhan-influenced; "overthrow of passive consumption by interactive communication and creativity" -- technological progress as positive
• - postmodernist politics of identity theory: media as one site of constructing and contesting identity (Stuart Hall)
• - postmodernity as crisis: hyperreality and erasing of the physical, "real" world; we lose direct access to the "real world"
• - subjective change in relation to history and specific trends and eras
• - Mediated experience and or vs. lived experience
• - Case studies: cyborgs and cyberfeminism -- "Woman is a virtual reality"
• - MUDs and explorations of "ambiguity and androgyny" (but whiteness, youth, and attractiveness are still normative); performed identities not free-floating, but consciously constructed

-Commercial popular culture: the role of consumerism in theorizing and constructing identity
- The impact of video games

• - "othering" of video games: anxities about impact of violence on youth; video games as encouraging antisocial behavior
• - video games presented as a problem to be solved, contrasted with educational potential of Internet, CD-ROMs
• - Instrumental vs. exploratory play and hacking as consumption
• - Huizinga: Play integral to everyday life; play = "stepping out of 'real' life into a temporary sphere of activitiy with a disposition all its own"
• - Caillois' fundamental types of play: competitive play, play involving chance, role-play, play involving shock and disorientation
• - underlying axis of adherence to strict rules vs. creative play
• - playing with video games as interactive consumption; simulations rather than representations
• - pleasure derived from intervening in/controlling the game's action
• - learning: decoding the game's controls and conventions
• - identification: identifying with the computer itself in games like SimCity, awareness of one's subjectivity as the player of a game

- Complex interactions between the physical world ("real life") and new media technologies; meanings of the consumption of new media cannot be separated from "fantasies and dramas woven around it"

Both the Kellner and Lister readings were full of so many theories and ideas that I found it hard to keep track of everything they were discussing, so I used brief bullet point notes out of necessity; trying to summarize all their main points in sentence form seemed a rather daunting task. Despite its density, I appreciated that the Kellner article provided a historical context for the development of cultural studies, and emphasized cultural studies as a critical discipline; I've seen it too often dismissed as a flight of fancy or the pet project of a small group of intellectuals rather than an essential field for understanding societal development. I was unaware of the various strains of cultural and communications studies that have evolved into the discipline used today, which seems like a loose version of British cultural studies. My personal experience with cultural studies has been something like the neo-Gramscian model Kellner describes himself as belonging to; to me, it's very important to maintain possibilities for social change while at the same time rejecting the teleological, often deterministic view of history that I see as one of the biggest problems with Marx.

The aspect of the Lister reading that I found most interesting was the application of theories of identity formation and consumption to video games. My parents subscribed (and still subscribe) to the idea that video games are fundamentally non-educational, vapid entertainment, and never allowed me to own a game console when I was younger. As a force of habit, I still don't own one, nor do I frequently play video games. I instead channeled my desire to intervene in and control virtual situations (which Lister situates as one of the main pleasures of video games) into participating in online fan communities, a major component of which is taking characters and situations from existing "old-media" productions such as comic books and television shows (which you cannot change the content of once it has been produced) and rewriting them in a manner that satisfies the viewer (which may be an individual or the collective fan community). I'm also wondering whether this desire for control-centered play and identification with a kind of omniscient/omnipotent position stems from new media developments which enable individuals to do so, or whether it is something more instinctual. Did we want so much control over media products before we knew we could have it? Is that desire a product of increased consumerism and valuation of individual consumptive power, or is it more related to the desire to transgress the boundaries of one's own social situation and identity? This question in particular reminds me why it's so important to, as Kellner suggests, maintain a critical lens on audience participation and not simply valorize every kind of popular usage of new media technologies.