Fiske's relative disinterest in technology and often, in media ownership drew sharp criticism from political economists, who felt that he underestimated the structuring power of entrenched capital. He explains in Understanding Popular Culture that his theoretical perspective is "essentially optimistic, for it finds in the vigor and vitality of the people evidence both of the possibility of social change and of the motivation to drive it.
But he also did not accept a model which saw certain media technologies as forces for cultural domination: "Information technology is highly political, but its politics are not directed by its technological features alone.
It is, for instance, a technical feature of the surveillance camera that enables it to identify a person's race more clearly than his or her class or religion, but it is a racist society that transforms that information into knowledge. The affordances of new media could be deployed towards certain ends, but ultimately, how they were used reflected their cultural context. Fiske saw the promises of a digital revolution but did not declare a premature victory over mass media:.
Technology will always be involved and, if its potential is exploited, its proliferation may make the control over knowledge less, not more, efficient. Yes, Fiske tells us, media matters, but media change does not overcome other social, cultural, political, and economic factors When I brought John Fiske to MIT shortly after Media Matters was published, I remember the disappointment and frustration some of my students felt that Fiske was "not ready" to embrace the promise of the digital, because at the epicenter of the digital revolution, we were full of hopes that the new media would lower the barriers to entry into cultural production and distribution, allowing many more voices to be heard and putting greater power political, economic, cultural in the hands of "the people.
In this context, I often had to work hard to resist technological determinist arguments and to insist, as John had taught us, that cultural and social factors shape technology far more than technology shapes culture Confronted with the assertion that the wide availability of new tools would enable greater public participation, Fiske wrote, "In premodern Europe, Fiske typically followed claims about grassroots resistance with an acknowledgment of the powerful forces which were stacked against us.
For example, Fiske was interested in the unequal status of high tech and low tech uses of communication technology, contrasting the "videohigh" of the broadcast industry with the "videolow" of citizen camcorder activism, a contrast which paves the way to a consideration of how broadcast and grassroots media competes with each other for attention and credibility. Fiske wrote "technostruggles" in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial. As Fiske notes, the original video showing the Los Angeles police beating suspect Rodney King, captured via a home movie camera by a passerby George Holliday, possessed high credibility because it displayed so little technological sophistication: "George Holliday owned a camera, but not a computer enhancer; he could produce and replay an electronic image, but could not slow it, reverse it, freeze it, or write upon it, and his videolow appeared so authentic to so many precisely because he could not.
The LAPD's defense attorneys deployed a range of technical and rhetorical tricks to reframe the King video and change how it was understood, at least by the jury, if not by the general public.
For Fiske, this struggle over the tape's meaning suggested what was to come -- an ongoing competition between those who have access to low-tech, everyday forms of cultural production and those who had access to high-tech communication systems. If new media technologies were expanding the resources available to those who have previously seemed powerless, they were also expanding the capacities of the powerful.
In Media Matters , Fiske's embrace of participatory media practices was suggested by his enthusiasm for low-bandwidth "pirate" radio stations within the African-American community. At the same time, Fiske was quick to link networked computing with institutions of government surveillance.
Fiske warned that the same practices deployed by companies to construct a "consumer profile" could be applied by governments to construct a "political profile": "The magazines we subscribe to, the causes we donate to, the university courses we register for, the books we purchase and the ones we borrow from the library are all recorded, and recorded information is always potentially available.
Fiske anticipated that increased controversy around racial conflict would be embodied through "media events" such as the Rodney King tape and the LA Riots, the battle between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and the murder trial and acquittal of O. Henry Jenkins. Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Henry Jenkins, Editor. At the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry.
Few media critics seem capable of keeping both sides of this equation in mind at the same time. Some fear that media is out of control, others that it is too controlled. Some see a world without gatekeepers, others a world where gatekeepers have unprecedented power. And they all describe some aspects of our contradictory and transitional media system.
In the s, some like McChesney could dismiss all of those resistant subcultures, textual poachers, and active audiences as figments of our over-active imaginations; today, you can find them all out in full force on the web.
The internet has made visible the invisible work of audiences. Consumers have become key participants in media culture; the debate now centers on the terms of their participation, not whether spectatorship is active or passive.
The media industry likes to talk about Napster, Bittorent and Grokster as disruptive technologies but in fact, they are disruptive cultural practices of the kind that Fiske gave us the tools to identify and analyze. By themselves, neither Fiske nor McChesney can fully explain some recent efforts to reconfigure the relations between media producers and consumers. We intend to change that with Current, giving those who crave the empowerment of the web the same opportunity for expression on television.
Surely, we need cultural studies and political economy to understand how this idea for a more participatory news network got transformed into whatever we will see when Current goes live in August. Painting with admittedly broad stokes, Fiske depicted a world where consumers and producers confronted each other from positions of unequal power with no guaranteed outcomes, other than the likelihood that both would survive to fight another day.
This seems to me a much better description of the current moment than one where corporate media totally dominates, all diversity is eradicated, and consumers are dupes. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest. The potentials of a more participatory media culture are worth fighting for.
Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this window of opportunity will have passed. McChesney is right to argue that digital media does not inevitably lead to Democracy but foolish not to recognize that all kinds of groups are working hard right now to insure that it achieves those democratic potentials — at least some of the time.
We should be fighting a multi-front battle against media concentration and for a more diverse and participatory culture yet McChesney and his allies dismiss any path forward except their own. He is uninterested in exploring what it means to live in a world where bloggers can discredit the assertions of major news organizations, countercultures can circulate alternative versions of popular culture, and anti-brand activists can rapidly organize and deploy. Whenever he raises the Internet, it is simply to dismiss any idea that such media matters — in his world, it is all or nothing.
Either you are the most powerful force in the room or what you do has no real consequences. The contemporary media landscape is fragmented, to be sure, these are no longer the highest rated shows, they are as always ideologically impure, but college educated progressives represent a niche which is being well served at the moment. McChesney consistently depicts media companies as well-oiled corporate machines that always recognize and pursue their own interests, but the closer to the ground you get the more media conglomerates look like dysfunctional families whose various divisions scarcely speak to each other.
We can not afford to ignore the agency of cultural workers who work within the cracks of the system to produce meaningful content any more than we can ignore the degree to which contemporary media companies seem genuinely spooked by the muscles being flexed by their consumers. In both cases, Fiske offers a more dynamic vision of cultural production and a more compelling account of social change than McChesney.
Fiske taught us that constructing cultural hierarchies often masks other exercises of power. Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of our relations to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture.
None of this means we should walk away from the challenges of media reform. Fiske saw writing as an extension of his role as a teacher, so you can find in his books many traces of the intense exchanges we used to have in his seminar room. Media literacy education develops informed, reflexive, and engaged participants for a democratic society.
Linda Herrera , for example, interviewed young Egyptian activists to map the trajectory of their involvement with digital media prior to becoming revolutionaries. For many, their point of entry was through recreational use, downloading popular music, trading Hollywood movies, gaming, or sharing ideas through online discussion forums and social-networking sites.
Such practices involved forms of transgression against government and religious authorities, and these shared experiences led them to understand themselves in collective terms—as a generation that has had developed distinctive cultural and political identities through their engagement with each other through an ever-evolving array of digital platforms. My current research explores these forms of participatory politics as they are taking shape among American youth. For example, the Harry Potter Alliance is a large-scale network of fan activists committed to fighting for human rights and social justice around the world as an extension of the shared love for the world depicted in J.
They have, for example, campaigned to get Warner Brothers, the studio that produces the Harry Potter movies, to shift its chocolate contracts to companies that follow fair trade standards banning exploitative child labor.
These groups and networks, along with many others, deploy metaphors drawn from popular culture, practices drawn from fan communities, and a range of media technologies to get their messages out and mobilize their supporters, with each representing spectacular examples of critical media literacies in practice. His primary example was the use of pirate radio as an alternative communication system within the African American community.
Skills at reading and creating media, thus, becomes core to political struggles, which, Fiske hopes, may make America a more equal and more diverse culture as it undergoes profound demographic shifts in the first decades of the twenty-first century.
Greater access to technologies, Fiske suggests, will not achieve the desired results if people do not acquire the skills to use them in the service of their own interests. Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture Fiske had difficulty documenting the tactics for audience resistance and transgression that he theorized in his work and had trouble showing the routes that might lead a young Madonna fan into participation in a public demonstration for, say, equal pay for equal work.
Today, we do not have to look far to see the explosion of grassroots creative production that constitutes the dominant content of YouTube, that forms the basis of exchanges through social media, that generates millions of Wikipedia entries, or that yields the stories housed in the top fan-fiction archives.
At the same time, we are discovering the many diverse forms that participatory culture may take, and we are seeing what happens when diverse communities are brought together through shared media platforms and, in the process, learn from each other. The Pew Center of Internet and American Life had found that more than half of American teens—and 57 percent of teens online—had produced some form of media content, and roughly a third had circulated that content beyond friends and family.
Yet my colleagues and I knew that technological access alone would not be sufficient to ensure that everyone would be able to meaningfully participate in the practices and processes that were shaping contemporary culture.
We did not directly reference Fiske anywhere in this white paper, and yet his spirit, his influence on my intellectual development, can be felt on every page. For example, you can see the legacy of the cultural-studies tradition in our insistence that literacies be understood as social skills and cultural competences rather than as individual capacities and that the end goal of literacy is to empower the public to meaningfully participate in the core institutions and practices of our culture.
Many accounts of twenty-first-century skills stress those required for the workplace. While we certainly want to broaden economic opportunities for all, our white paper, again inspired by work in cultural studies, stresses the value of such skills in expanding the civic and expressive capacities of grassroots communities, thereby presenting the new media literacies as a means for fostering social change rather than simply integrating students into existing social structures.
There is a wealth of cultural-studies writing behind the argument that while some young people may acquire these new media literacies outside of formal education, those skills that are most greatly valued inside the culture are those that conform to the language of the classroom.
Fiske and Williams had both argued for the importance of being attentive to the forces within the culture that worked to value some forms of culture over others and stressed that opportunities for participation should be available to all.
Six years—and much research—later, we now have a much deeper sense of how many different forms of cultural divides exist that work against our efforts to ensure that all people have the opportunity to meaningfully participate in their cultures. These concerns with inequalities of access and participation have extended into subsequent documents in the digital media and learning movement.
Many of the authors, like myself, come from a cultural- or critical-studies background. At the same time, the report resists an assimilationist agenda in favor of one that still values diverse forms of knowledge and cultural expression.
Williams would have insisted that what young people learn in these other contexts needs to be respected within schools as a source of distinctive knowledge that carries deep personal and collective values. References Arnold, M. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Fiske, J. Television Culture. London: Methuen. Reading the Popular. New York: Routledge. Understanding Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. Reading Television. Goody, J. Giglioli, — Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Hall, S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, and P. Willis, —
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