Scholarly and popular critics alike often refer to “new media” in a way that is both objectively vague yet critically sanguine. In other words, it appears to have become acceptable to group an incredibly diverse set of technological and mediated phenomena under the monolith of “new media” while maintaining a kind of stubborn conviction that they all work in the same way. It’s reminiscent of a kind of Associate Justice Potter Stewart logic: we know it when we see it.
Author: Lev Manovich
Publisher: MIT Press
Publication date: 2002-03
Length: 394 pages
Format: Paperback
Price: $28.95
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/l/languagenewmedia-cover.jpgDespite both the various productive efforts to actually historicize the concept of new media (for instance, Lev Manovich’s 2001 book The Language of New Media) and the contrasting reductive tendencies of more off-the-cuff negative reactions to “new media” (I’m thinking of anything from Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur to dinner table conversations with my Boomer dad), the often shrilly polarized discussion about the so-called effects of new media points to at least one underlying assumption about our contemporary media environment: “new media” refers as much to an accompanying ethos or mode of practice as it does to actual technology.
I’ll admit right off the bat to possessing a probably sub par understanding of the ongoing seismic shift in the global technological landscape. The promises or perils of the technology itself are not really the predicates of my inquiry into “new media” here. Rather, I’m entering the fray with an interest in the social and cultural investments in these “new” platforms for communication. How do they intersect with preexisting preoccupations about the distinction between public and private space, the construction of identity, the negotiation of work vs. leisure, and the ideological underpinnings of larger concepts such as surveillance and interactivity?
Author: Andrew Keen
Publisher: Broadway
Publication date: 2008-08
Length: 240 pages
Format: Paperback
Price: $14.00
Image: http://images.popmatters.com/misc_art/c/cultofamateur-cover.jpg Many such efforts to confront the socio-cultural corollaries of new media concentrate on the underlying modality of the therapeutic. Whether discussing televised talk shows or web 2.0 social platforms, the contemporary media environment is increasingly identified by its therapeutic function in at least two registers. Not only is there the more standard idea of “therapy” as interaction between social actors that produces some kind of resolution to personal problems, there is the notion of the public disclosure of private feelings as therapeutic in itself. As a professor of mine once opined, it is the shift from Rockwell’s paranoid “I always feel like somebody’s watching me” to the insistence that someone need be watching to validate private feelings.
As media scholar Mimi White has discussed in her 1992 book Tele-Advising, “the therapeutic ethos proposes itself as a response to the loss of logic, coherence, stability, and order.” In conversation with this perspective, Keith Beattie has correspondingly posited that in contemporary media culture, “private reflections, gossip, and confession replace public and ‘official’ knowledge as credible and authoritative interpretations of reality.”
The thrust of these arguments, therefore, is that the therapeutic discourse which saturates the new media environment is defensive, a (paradoxically) publicly enacted guarantor of private feelings that circumvents the family dinner table or the clinic and proceeds in the realm of unregulated mediated exchange. It is only a short conceptual jump from this ethos to the larger privatization of public life and valorization of free-market exchange that are the hallmarks of neoliberal ideology.
Still, though, therapy is a term that I for one am most likely to associate with problems. It may be therapeutic in this manner to participate vicariously in Oprah Winfrey’s public exorcisms of someone’s private emotional deadlock, sure, but what about all of the personally generated new media content that documents stuff that is ostensibly fun? Further, what about the content that may even seem affectively neutral, like taking a photograph of yourself every day for a year and displaying it on the web?
There are obviously many different types of blogs, but one variety seems particularly illuminative to me regarding these ostensible cracks in the new mediated enactment of commonsense notions of therapeutic discourse: those in which the blogger documents some ordinarily enjoyable leisure activity by reformulating it as a challenge. We can turn to a closer examination of what I see as two case examples of this strain of user-generated web content in order to probe the significance of this otherwise perhaps unassuming formulation of new media therapeutics.
Displaced Personal Improvement
Displaced Personal Improvement
The passages from the two scholars above indicated that the therapeutic imperative was in some ways fundamentally defensive. The issue, then, is not only identifying (or in more appropriate terms for this kind of piece, suggesting) the implicit root of this defensive posture, but also in unpacking why and how this particular nexus of technological and social practice may appear as a privileged site of negotiating whatever identity issues are put on display. The two developed blogs which seem like fertile entry points,
100 Bands in 100 Days and Art Every Day, both locate their recuperative therapeutic work in issues of fun and leisure-time enjoyment.
Specifically, “100 Bands in 100 Days” documents a New York City man’s self-imposed challenge to get back in touch with his love of live music through the apparently herculean undertaking of seeing 100 consecutive days’ worth, while the more collaborative “Art Every Day” (and its offshoot “Creative Every Day”) challenges participants to make and display (the definition of which is personally discretionary) something they consider “art” every day of the week. Both, then, rest on what Max Weber would have called the “rationalization” of something ordinarily spontaneous or otherwise located outside the realm of personal regulation; the stuff people do to kick back when they aren’t supposed to be doing anything.
The revealing aspect of this iteration of user-generated media comes into sharper focus with a little bit of help from Slavoj Zizek. Throughout his body of work, Zizek has formulated a distinction between two registers of “the law”. With Lacanian psychoanalysis as the obvious starting point, Zizek posits that there is the symbolic external law — the dictum that outwardly prohibits certain behaviors as a member of society — and the internal law of the superego. The primary superego imperative, according to Zizek’s reading of Lacan, is that of jouissance — or what he calls the “injunction to enjoy” (How to Read Lacan). In this sense, “enjoyment” is closer to the literal French meaning of the word jouissance, a kind of painful and incomplete pleasure. In other words, it is anxiety provoking: as he puts it, “to enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted duty.” (see Zizek’s lecture, The Superego and the Act posted here on The European Graduate School website, and From Western Capitalism to Western Buddhism posted here on Cabinet magazine.)
What’s so interesting about these aforementioned blog strains, therefore, is that they formulate their ostensible goal as a kind of alleviation of the injunction to enjoy. In this way, they are essentially therapy for the internal demand that one have a good time when he/she is supposed to. Consider first the description of the idea on “100 Bands in 100 Days”: the project is designed as “a self-induced binge gigging marathon” that the proprietor, Nick Sonderup, has initiated because (among other reasons) “[he] wants to see if [he] can do it.” The goal is not simply the completion of the project, however– it goes further: ancillary goals include “to become more assertive” and “to work out a better work/life balance”.
Some of the reception from the “Art Every Day” blog echoes the kind of displaced personal improvement that comes from regimenting one’s otherwise spontaneous creative activity. Two posts in particular help to underscore this notion: one reads, “Your blog keeps my focus on being creative even on the days when I’m not ‘producing’ anything. That’s keeping my brain fertile and watered for the days when the sun breaks through. Another goes further, stating that “Some days I don’t think I am being very creative — until I stop and think — planting the strawberry plants today was a creative process — creating that coconut cream pie from scratch was a creative act — playing cards with my daughter and boyfriend was a creative act … I want to thank you for opening my heart and mind to being more aware and thereby being more creative and more satisfied with things when I don’t think I am doing enough.”
Instead of simply writing up their concert experiences or telling their friends about some cool new art projects, these writers appear to locate the satisfaction of having participated in such ordinarily pleasurable endeavors in precisely the degree to which they circumvent enjoyment in their execution altogether. They articulate the achievement of a new kind of “meaning” in their appreciation of certain leisure activities — or even lifestyle regulation itself — through the publicly displayed documentation of the struggle to stick with a routine of self-ordained, compulsory enjoyment.
They are thus therapeutic in the sense that they transform the material of leisure into a form of work, and thus (according to the logic) recuperate a kind of ownership of such activities and feelings. Since the importance of the mode of communication is our fundamental concern here, I think we can go one step further: in its invitation to routinized self-disclosure, the blog format itself seems to create a kind of template for this alleviation of the pressure to spontaneously have a really good time; it gives their pursuits a form.
Zizek is fond of pointing out a kind of “perverse core” of militarism that lies at the heart of the westernized Zen of new age spiritualism. I think that the kind of self-articulation that is at work in the aforementioned blog format could very well just appear par for the course concerning the “Western Buddhism” that a writer like Zizek adamantly (albeit eccentrically and sometimes incoherently) argues is the underlying ideology of Western consumer society.
The point, however, is not to indict such social- technological practices as bad or glorify them as good; it is simply to suggest that there appears to be a strong link between the architecture of the public platform and the kind of private affective participation that it affords. More specifically, it seems that the pressure or imperative to conceptualize one’s enjoyment through exhibitable or reproducible terms in a way produces its own backlash: the terror of the injunction to have a really great time is alleviated through the public display of how your “fun” is actually a form or struggle — or better, of work and productivity.