When linked to new media, democracy tags a politics, lite that anyone can get behind. Right? Theres no controversy or antagonism. Its also especially attractive to purveyors of mobile phones, notebook computers, software, and social media platforms. The injunction to get connected and participate is an injunction to buy, as well as to make oneself available for marketers to capture our data and sell it. Now, I designate this convergence of multiply-interlinked media, neo-liberalism, and democracy, communicative capitalism. Communicative capitalism is a material ideological formation. In it, the values heralded as central to democracy, take practical, material form in networked communication technologies. So, ideals of access, voice, inclusion, discussion, and participation are practically realized, through global telecommunications. Changes in information and communication networks, associated with digitalization, personalization, localization, speed, and memory and storage capacity, impact capitalism and democracy, accelerating and amplifying elements of each, as they consolidate the two into a new formation. This formation mobilizes democratic ideas and actively represses and excludes class power and economic inequality. Our setting is one of the convergence of capitalism and communication, in a formation that incites participation, only to capture it in the affective networks of personalized media. These networks have a weird, contradictory effect. On the one hand, social media networks and communicative capitalism, more generally, produce a common, a collective information and communication mesh, through which affects and ideas circulate. On the other hand, these networks presuppose and intensify individualism, such that widely shared ideas and concerns are conceived less in terms of a self-conscious collective, less in terms of class, than they are as viruses, mobs, trends, moments, and swarms. Channeled through cellular networks and fiber optic cables, onto screens and into sites, for access, storage, retrieval, and counting, communication today is captured in the capitalist circuits it produces and amplifies. This entrapment in capitalist circuits is the condition of possibility for communications transformation of production. Because contemporary capitalism is communicative, democratic rhetorics of access, transparency, voice, discussion, reflection, participation,... All of these strengthen the hold of capitalism, in networked societies. So, the problem that democratic rhetoric identifies, and the solutions it entails, channel political energies into activities that reinforce the conditions of inequality they ostensibly contest. Disruptive events, intense debates, are economic opportunities, ratings drivers, chances for pundits to opine, for opinions to be expressed and circulated, as much as they are political exercises. Communicative capitalisms realization of democracy eats up democracys use value. When communication is a primary component of the production and circulation of capital, it loses its capacity to function as a primary means for the rule of the people. Democracy is the ambient milieu, an inescapable participatory media. So, its unable to express the peoples desire and need for economic basics, like food, shelter, education, work, and health, not to mention economic equality, ecological sustainability, and the end of exploitation. youtube/watch?v=Ly_uN3zbQSU
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 22:12:08 +0000