What's This Course About, Anyway?

First of all, this isn’t a “tech” course. We aren’t’ going to be learning HTML, producing websites, or doing a lot of overtly technological exercises. Our focus is going to be on “culture.” But we are going to be looking carefully at the impact of technology on culture, at the relationship between changing technologies and changing modes of cultural production and cultural experience. The arts – and culture – have always been connected to technology (paint brushes, pencils, printing presses, typewriters are all forms of technology), so the link itself between technology and culture isn't a new thing. But the overt connection between culture and technology has accelerated dramatically over the whole course of the 20th-century, especially in the last five years when new online digital technologies have begun to redefine culture, cultural production, and the nature of cultural experience. So, while the relationship between culture and technology is an old one, we’re living in a time when that relationship has become pronounced, when computer based technology has begun to radically transform where we experience culture, how cultural forms are produced, how they circulate, and who produces them. Indeed, the formerly clear lines between production, distribution, and consumption have broken down and will continue to do so. This is dramatized in disparate ways by such forms as fan fiction, mashups (formerly audio but now, with YouTube, video as well), and user-produced news, but it can also be observed in how social networking and peer-to-peer filesharing sites (from MySpace to Flickr) allow the consumer to produce, distribute, recycle, and transform cultural objects. The consumption of culture on these sites is hard to distinguish from its production.

This is partly the result of what’s called “convergence.” We’ll read a lot more about this concept when we get to Henry Jenkins’ book, Convergence Culture. “Convergence” has to do with the extent to which formerly disparate mediums of cultural production (painting, photography, television, film, music, etc.) with their own separate platforms have converged on the web. Now a single site—your computer—can be the focal point for the convergence, and the mashing up, of old and new material produced in these various media. This is partly a situation in which cultural products converge, but it’s also a situation in which various elements of the “culture industry” (see Horkheimer and Adorno) converge to try to utilize a single platform (think record companies trying to work with online music stores like iTunes or the interest on the part of Hollywood film studios in exploiting sites like YouTube to sell their films, or the presence of mainstream news media like The New York Times or MSNBC on the web). “Convergence” has to do with the simultaneous appearance of disparate cultural forms in a single machine, but also with the linking up of various elements of the culture industry as new media companies appear and old ones try to graft onto them.

All of these changes are now BIG NEWS. Indeed, the move to prominence of what we’re calling networked public culture produced a spate of end-of-the-year articles about what happened in 2006. See, for example, the December 10 article by Jon Parles, “2006, Brought to You by You.” Parles’ point of departure is the purchase by the billionaire news magnate, Rupert Murdoch, of MySpace (talk about convergence!) and goes on to discuss how the ubiquity of “user-generated content” was the big news story of 2006. Indeed, “user-generated content” is for Parles the “the paramount cultural buzz phrase of 2006”:

"[T]his will be remembered as the year that the old-line media mogul, the online media titan and millions of individual Web users agreed: It demands attention. It’s on Web sites like YouTube, MySpace, Dailymotion, PureVolume, GarageBand and Metacafe. It’s homemade art independently distributed and inventively promoted. It’s borrowed art that has been warped, wrecked, mocked and sometimes improved. It’s blogs and open-source software and collaborative wikis and personal Web pages. It’s word of mouth that can reach the entire world."

Okay, but is the user-generated material produced on these sites art? Does it constitute culture in anything like the usual sense of the word? What happens to coherence and a sense of cultural unity in a world where cultural production verges on fragmentation and chaos? Is this anarchy, or a new form of business as usual? Will user-generated cultural products challenge the primacy of traditional literature, art, and film, or are they just a fad that will burn out without having much of an effect on “real” art and culture? This course is partly about trying to at least tentatively answer some of these questions.

Time magazine got so excited about these developments that they set aside their usual approach to naming an individual "Person of the Year” and instead decided to name “You” person of the year (whether you like it or not). Of course, we may look back and see this moment as the death of networked public culture, but like Parles, the editors at Time knew a story when they saw it.

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

The Time piece tends to unabashedly celebrate what’s come to be called Web 2.0, and it’s a little embarrassing to read for people who want to take the developments they chart seriously, and to think about it critically. But the article does mark a cultural moment of obvious import, one that’s been taken very, very seriously by academics from California (the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) to Boston (The Center for Comparative Media Studies at MIT). In the readings I’ve drawn from people working in these two programs (and others) we’ll get a good idea about how networked public culture is being theorized by cultural studies and media studies academics, and how their work itself represents a convergence of media studies, popular culture studies, cultural theory, and a kind of Foucauldian attention to institutions. Indeed, some of the critics we’ll be reading (like Henry Jenkins) spend part of their time doing cultural criticism and part of their time consulting with large multinational conglomerates on how to utilize the new technologies of networked culture to sell their products, which puts a whole new spin on the concept of the public intellectual.

But what do all of these developments have to do with literary studies? To the extent literary studies have both spawned and incorporated cultural studies, the emergence of networked public culture, social networking, peer-to-peer file sharing, and user-generated cultural content is simply new grist for the mill for academic cultural studies, especially as it has paid particular attention to media studies and popular culture. If in cultural studies we’re serious about thinking theoretically and historically about how culture is conceptualized and shaped, and if we’re also serious about studying the relationship between high culture and popular culture (and serious about taking popular culture seriously) than we can’t avoid the study of networked public culture.

Beyond this, however, is the more important fact that literary and academic culture are about to be dramatically transformed by the same technologies that have begun to reshape the culture at large. Take a look at the online materials we’ll be reading in late March that have to do with Digital Textuality (March 20th) and Academic Publishing and the Future of the Book (March 27th). Peer-to-peer file sharing, user generated content, and even social networking technologies are beginning to have an impact on the production and distribution of literary work, textual knowledge, and scholarship, and this trend is bound to continue in ways we are going to want to try to envision in this course. Wikipedia, for better or worse, has transformed our students's approach to research, and it represents a technological platform that is hugely exploitable for rigorous, peer-reviewed knowledge sharing. If Wikipedia is both useful and gives you the willies, don’t worry, for the people there are at work creating an academic, peer-reviewed version called “Citizendium,” and that’s just one of a number of efforts to bring the “wiki” technology to scholarship and research. And of course the people at Google are busy trying to scan every single text they can get their hands on and put it into a virtual hyperlinked format that will transform our experience of textuality and the book. And you may never consult an OED in print form again, for the folks there are at work on a “living,” fluid online version of the venerable dictionary.

While these fledgling developments are taking place on the research end of what we scholars do, other critics are pondering the future of the book (literary and otherwise) and the nature of academic publishing. What IS the future of the book in a world in which everyone is online all the time social networking and peer-to-peer file sharing? The Time magazine article asks:

"Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion? The answer is, you do."

Our discipline depends upon people who read literature, but where will literature fit in 15, 20, or 50 years from now when the convergence model has really kicked in and digital technology rules? Will the only literature be historical? If not, what form will it take? How will literature as a vehicle for narrative hold its own not just against television and film, but against all the various technologies that entertain teenagers and young adults today? For some musings on these questions, see the essays we’ll be reading on the future of the book at Forbes.com (yes, that Forbes). And what about academic publishing? How much longer do you think academic journals will appear bound in printed pages on university library shelves, and why should they? The technology is already in place for putting standard versions of academic journals online (think Project Muse), but social network and peer-to-peer file sharing platforms represent a much more exciting model for rethinking the creation and distribution of academic scholarship. We’ll read some of the Forbes articles about the future of the book, and we’ll also read some articles like Kathleen Fitzgerald’s “On the Future of Academic Publishing” in order to think in concrete terms about the “material” culture of academic research and writing over the course of the semester.

So, there’s an overview of sorts. One challenge for us will be to figure out how the study of networked public culture relates to the larger field of cultural studies as presented by Simon During in the first book we’ll read, Cultural Studies: A Critical Introduction. By the end of the semester we should have a decent grasp of what networked public culture is all about -- and have made a few educated guesses about where it’s headed generally and what its impact will be on our profession. And we should have a bit of fun along the way.

Some beginning definitions:

Network

Public

Culture