From what I can gather, he's talking about 'convergence culture' (converging meaning to join or merge) discourse as being a system about the naturalisation and manufacture of merging structuralism and post-structuralism as being a liberating thing. I think he's suggesting that in the current media dominated society, the notion of post (after) Modernism is a discourse to seduce the public into believing that they can exercise their agency by turning their backs on 'tradition'. Within this process media conglomerates are convincing the public of options only available within media dominated areas and systems. The actual 'social system' is being reduced from a 'twin' system to a 'singular' system. Over time, the public has been locked into this single media dominated system and other avenues of 'agency' have become invisible, just as media power has also become invisible (Deuze 2007, pp245-250). I think digc202 is trying to expand this system again and 'release' us from this media-dominated area. Deuze states that the idea of liberation through 'merging' systems of structure and agency (in a single-system sense) is nothing more than post-modern/media dominated discourse. That true agency lies in a 'separation' of the two systems along with an 'expansion' of the system to reveal the second system which has become 'hidden' (Deuze 2007, pp245-250). The 'whole' system seems to be in need of a split or fissure and a re-grouping of culture/power/ecology (Snapper 1999, pp128-135).
Deuze discussed the conflation of 'creativity' and 'agency' in post-modern culture. The two are very different, but media culture seeks to placate us with the notion that creativity is agency. Creativity is 'innovation' whereby in a closed system culture settles to the 'bottom', creativity is recombinating already existing entities and bringing 'forgotten' ideas again to the fore and in new combinations (Deuze 2007, p250). Zigmunt Bauman (Bauman 1999, ppv-xvi) discusses this idea in terms of patterns as does Pierre Bourdeau (Van Krieken et al. 2006, pp144-145) in terms of habit/habitus, a similar concept can be evidenced with the Google page rank system (Google 2009), I always like to bomb the 999,999th entry on any search. But agency is at the level 'above'/'below' this where we ask what is it that drives us to recombinate these patterns and entities? This is the question that media seeks to hide and extinct. This kind of follows on from last week's discussion on how copyright eats and extincts not only our ability but also our desire to recombinate, it's like a downward spiraling generally of the public's awareness and internal 'desire' over time (Lessig 2004). The discourse is a reduction in mass and elite dualism, but exactly the opposite is happening. Those who are pulling the strings are becoming more powerful, the knowledge gap is widening and we have become blind to this process. Very tricky!
I wonder then how Sociology, as a discipline, deals with all of this? Sociology has been developed only in the last 120 years, post industrial revolution and amidst social media hegemony. Is Sociology unwittingly complicit in this entire process? Is this what Gabriel Tarde was referring to (Matei Candea 2011) Has Sociology in fact enabled or reproduced a culture ripe for media hegemony, or even just reproduced the discourse itself at an ontological/ecological level throughout the 20th century? As a tool, how then can we use Sociology to our advantage, if at all? Or in doing so, are we only reproducing media power?
References
Bauman, Z 1999, Culture as Praxis, SAGE Publications Ltd, London
Deuze, M 2007, 'Convergence culture in the creative industries', International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, Iss. 2, pp243-263
Lessig, L 2004, Free Culture, accessed 15/8/2011, http://authorama.com/free-culture-4.html
Matei Candea, 2011, Gabriel Tarde, the road not taken, accessed 27/8/2011, http://www.candea.net/Gabriel_Tarde.html
Snapper, J W 1999, 'On the Web, plagiarism matters more than copyright piracy', Ethics and Information Technology, Vol. 1, pp127-136
Van Krieken, R Habibis, D Smith, P Hutchins, B Haralambos, M Hoborn, M 2006, Sociology Themes and Perspectives, 3rd Edition, Pearson Education Australia, Frenchs Forest
Good post jo. When you write you sound like some of the authors we read in class. That was a compliment too haha. I also like to search something broad and bomb down the the 1 millionth entry. Its interesting what you can find.
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