Class started with Dan Schultz’s return from Germany, with Mozart balls in tow. While at Mozilla’s Drumbeat hackfest, he helped start the MetaMeta project (GitHub, Google Group) and witnessed the birth of William Uricchio, a Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and author of one of our readings, Displacing Culture.

We discussed attempts to bridge the divide between the political economists and cultural theorists and how cultural theory and political economy can merge in different ways: transcultural political economy.

William Uricchio says:

He grew up with this debate and saw it unfold. In academy, they read all of the old schoolers: Marx, Gramsci, Althusser.
Grown with the debate, and tried to outgrow the debate. There was (is?) a longstanding fierce standoff between cultural studies and critical political economy.

The debate’s location within the academy was an important indicator. Political economy work happened in communications schools (social science) advising governments and companies. A Marxist stance was respectable to take in the academy before the end of the Cold War.
Cultural Studies, meanwhile, emerged in Britain in sociology and was embraced by the humanities. It was framed among literary studies in terms of discovering the reader: reception theory bridged the media sector (TV and film research) and could talk to people who did literary research. It consisted of methods of understanding what makes the cultural industries tick, meeting methods of understanding texts, meeting understandings of what audiences do with texts.

Normative judgements of culture, with “better” vs. “worse” readings based on pedigree (“the erudite professor”).

“The Reception turn” was a shift to empowering every day readers and thinking that how people receive media, what people do with culture matters.

The basic clash becomes one between this view and a deterministic structural model from political economists using old-school notions of ideology. The Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer) are the straw-men of this approach: they hate on popular culture with no mercy. For example, cynical of popular music for being formulaic and manufactured, it keeps people wanting more with superficial satisfaction, etc., versus classical music (Wagner, et al), which they say is “real liberating, intellectually satisfying art”. From the cultural studies perspective 40 years later, you can paint that view as class warfare, damning popular taste for being popular.

John Fiske, Henry Jenkins say, hold on a minute. What you DO matters. Appropriations, textual poaching.
The extreme side of “this is what you do with the text” – each person’s use can be different and valuable regardless of the intent of producers, or whether profit is made on the cultural piece.

“And then comes late capitalism,” which screws things up. We get situations like where it costs more to promote and circulate a can of Coke than it takes to make a can of Coke, so traditional Marxian economics don’t fit. It becomes less about surplus value on production (traditional Marx) and more about surplus value on circulation (Coca Cola, Inc.).

The General Intellect is used by autonomous Marxists who reject that a political party would represent the communist values well and will distribute products of science across the entire world. In the West, where everyone’s paranoid about communism, it’s easy to conflate the success or failure of the Soviet Union with Marxism as an ideology. The embodiment of political ideas changes them-
the ideas themselves are interesting, but the carrier kills them (Stalin kills everything).

There are debates among American, European theorists, who are then attacked by academics in the developing world, arguing against each other in respect to their stances on national, local, and global cultural production. A new generation of scholars is now trying to tie things together in a less confrontational manner.

Two quick anecdotes from Bill:
1) The intellectual boxes / traps we put ourselves in in cultural moments.
He did research in the 80’s on Nazi television, which ran from March 1935 until a week before Soviet occupation of Berlin. So almost 10 years of daily public broadcasting, not much was ever written about it. So he went and looked in the archives of East Germany and West Germany, because they’re divided. Propaganda archives in the west; post archives in the east. Propaganda was responsible for programming, Post did infrastructure (satellites, transmission, equipment).

From a western perspective:
“Bad apples” + bad circumstances (economics) leads to a Nazi fascist take over
versus the Soviet perspective:
Facism is nothing less than capitalism gone crazy, super-streamlined. It’s almost an economic cancer.
The two sides never talked about this — the West ended up with the propaganda file, physical proof that it was brainwashing. The East had all of the infrastructure, proof that it was the outcome of capitalism.

There was also proof that Westinghouse, RCA, ITT, GE, other big firms from the ‘West’ engaged in daily commerce with the 3rd Reich, including large gifts of crude oil to acquire assets in Argentina (during World War II). This was dismissed as ‘communist propaganda’ by intellectuals in the West, despite the archival proof.

The world is about building boxes, and you often see them a generation later, and think “That’s crazy! how did we ever let that happen?”

An expanded notion of understanding production and consumption. Henry Jenkins: ‘pop cosmopolitanism’
Western consumption of Pokemon, manga, anime (odorless –> can easily cross borders vs. fragrant –> confined to specific fan niches, otherwise not as general appeal products).

How do we encounter these cultural practices, how do we embrace them? How do we begin dialogue?

Now we get a chance to move outside the long-standing battle between the capitalist media, representing only the interests of the ruling class, and the state-controlled media, representing only the interests of the ruling group.

Participatory production is being centered instead – the theories of the active audience school of thought are coming to fruition.
We can move beyond critical readings and what audiences do to what audiences make.

Sasha: As makers and scholars, it’s exciting that DIY culture represents the moment. It has moved from the margins to the center of discussions about the media ecology. Participatory culture was relegated to the margins of what people paid attention to, and what scholars theorized. And now it’s at the center.

There was debate over the Open Broadcasting Authority – what would be the best system for an open, sustainable network of small-scale producers?
YouTube’s “rising stars” program, where YouTube promotes its top producers to help them become more popular with the intent of increasing their own ad sales (and with the intent of promoting great producers! Both).

You can’t win – one of the critiques.

Autonomist Marxists do a lot of media production, aren’t interested in a totalizing view of cultural industries, like to look at the pushback within the system – Sasha: “A perpetual dance between the wonderfully liberatory possibilities of humans making media and sharing with each other and how that all gets translated into trans-national capital flows.”

The Political Economists were very serious– it’s heavy, it’s not fun. The cultural studies people were fun and sexy (and younger)(!).
Participatory culture was dominant until the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the 19th century with the rotary press, cinema, radio, industrialization starts to set in.

Cinema, radio, television all had an incredible amount of top-down control of these expressive communications technologies.
Trans-media production has been around – look at the Catholic Church – the cruciform, stained glass windows, services in performance, singing, sermons, incense thingies – asking the audience to take part, within certain set of constraints. Trans-media is not a new corporate discovery.

We know we have new affordances, increasing by the minute, and new tools together with a participatory dynamic is potentially empowering – which of these existing entities is going to let go of control?

It’s interesting to think about copyright at a moment like this, with the current levels of transmission possible.

People have always been productive, but without platforms to get there stuff out there (to others).

Cultural production is more than just the production of material goods –
There’s copyright (which just produces more piracy the more it’s enforced), the box office (screwed by the transition to home consumption of cultural products). There was the creation of global cable firms with pipes into people’s homes.
There’s built-in obsolensce through the manipulation of time – maybe not a result of capitalism, maybe just part of definition of “news” itself. first contact >>> second contact

How many models are there to distribute media? Beyond existing advertising, patron, government subsidy models?

In the “Freemium” model, the core content / service / information is given away for free, but you can pay for an augmented experience. Virtual goods, paying for small things, upgrades. This means the producer don’t care about copyright because what people pay for is the enhanced experience, not the content. LinkedIn. League of Legends defined freemium in the game industry, and it is taking it by storm (they have essentially solved the unsolvable problem of piracy and DRM). Overview of the game and why what they did is working.
Crowdfunding: open patronage to mass participation, the awesome foundation http://awesomefoundation.org/, Kickstarter – selling experiences/identity in addition to goods, http://spot.us
‘The platform’ as business model – Facebook – different than TV networks?
Is advertising dying — it’s the only model that kind of works, so people continue to beat a dead horse?

But ads in print media can drive TV, social media coverage. <-- Sasha
Even though print ad metrics are crap (vs. online advertising) <-- Matt

States are still arguably actors in this stuff.

GOOGLE CLOSING GOOGLE LABS! (Google n-grams viewer is actually a really useful tool.)

Screen quotas mandated by state (sometimes unsuccessful, sometimes successful, e.g. Korea (1/2 of films had to be Korean produced, the foreign ones were taxed, with that revenue going to Korean Film Board)).

General Agreement on Trade & Tariffs (GATTs) of WTO – really contentious debate over “audiovisual goods”
People freaking out that Hollywood will override national cultures, identities
Transnational media firms vs. national media firms, but the people who get screwed are the tiny artisans.

What does the transition to participatory culture mean for protecting national cultural industries?

A new category, information services, was created to allow digital cultural content to flourish even as traditional film remains regulated. The film industry screamed and screeched about it like stocked pigs.
Framing is key: It is information or culture?

Netherlands had a film tax as well. The Hollywood model became the vernacular notion of film in Europe following WWI, to the detriment of other types. At the mainstream cinema in Europe, you expect Hollywood cinema.

Bill: “Cinema’s something where you’re asking people to pay before they walk into a dark room – people want predictability” – Narrative form, stars, franchises, etc.

The boards that disburse the artistic subsidies and funds have clear opinions about what deserves to be funded, and mass popular film doesn’t cut it – it’s too ‘Hollywood.’

Hollywood intentionally develops forms of film that play across cultures and languages (romance, horror, action). The size of the US domestic market helped Hollywood dominate.

Any time European films penetrate the US market, it’s on an intellectual level, works if the film is anti-Hollywood in production values, plots, clearly intended as artsy, all that poor lighting, unknown stars, weird plot stuff that helps you define / assert that the film as artsy and intellectual and stuff.

Europe was democratized after WWI, where aristocrats lost power, but old elites held onto culture (they were the patrons).
The funding boards represented old, elite tastes, and this hurt their cultural exports commercially. It was the BBC model of giving people what’s good for them.

How does this translate to the web? l33t culture?
For one thing, if your language isn’t well represented on the web you’ll be limited building a service.

The traditional kind of logic doesn’t drive things today – the economic action and control has shifted elsewhere, to who owns the pipes.
Nate: universities mediate a lot of power in culture – the elites all went there, go on to write the news.
In the US, journalism is more of a professional industry with its own graduate programs.
Europe is the language of blood, US of wealth.
It’s bad in Europe to be perceived as striving too hard — to be labeled a climber. Dutch might be more extreme, but “transformation” seems almost negative.

India’s media has liberalized to allow more foreign ownership of media (26% in 2002, from zero in 1950’s)
But 100% of advertisement can be foreign-owned (backdoor)