Are we just a bunch of Digital Conformists? A brief look into what would Marx and Hall think of Social Technologies

Digital technologies have evolved into a state of omnipresence and invisibility that has had a great impact on culture. The concept of culture of Stuart Hall and the British cultural studies differs from what was thought by Karl Marx. The views of both authors on culture are antagonic in both model and uses as a social participant.

Karl Marx argued that the economy is the base and the foundation factor in society and that it is supported by the superstructure (that includes cultural production such as film, literature and music), which plays the secondary role of support to the establishment in place. According to Marx, the superstructure is determined by the economy and culture in society reflect the value of its base, therefore, the values of the dominant culture.

Hall rejected Marx’s reductive notion of culture as a passive, secondary, reflection in order to stress its active, primary, constructive role in society. Where Marxists would argue that economics determines cultural production, Hall argues that cultural production also determines the social and, thus, the economic climate. Cultural production has real political and ideological effects in the sense that it erodes traditional class alliances, resulting in ‘a sense of classlessness’. More importantly, if popular culture is not fixed, or guaranteed in advance by the economic base then its meaning and function can be negotiated and reconfigured through cultural intervention.

The incorporation of cultural dimensions into the popular media conceived that people were no longer empty and victimized receivers but were creative participants and culturally inserted individuals. Through studies of youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute distinct forms of identity and group membership and appraised the oppositional potential of various youth subcultures. Cultural studies came to focus on how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities.

Individuals who conform to dominant dress and fashion codes, behaviour, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within mainstream groups, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class conservative Americans). Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standardised models.

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By disrupting with the Marxist concept of culture, Hall took a step forward into studying the popular culture and its participation in modern society, what can serve to analyse the upcoming of the Digital Culture.

Today’s society, through all the developments made over the past 20 years, revolutionised the way people live, by immersing them in digital technology. Digital technology’s omnipresence and its increasing invisibility had the effect of making it “natural”. A whole generation of “digital natives” take digital technology for granted and have the sense that it has evolved into its present form naturally, in a sort of digital nature state.

This naturalization has transformed the way in which people interact with popular culture. Receivers, with total access to it, naturally replicating, sharing and interacting with it, became even more active than perhaps Hall could have imagined. In many ways, that confirmed his theories of a culturally active involvement of the receiver in the media process.

A super active receiver, with a lot of choice and all the sharing tools necessary, is better equipped than ever to establish their own counter culture and style. In a question of days, maybe hours, a group in London can identify with one in New York and a web of people with the same interests was formed. The 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s was a powerful demonstration of how urban popular culture raised up to the mainstream like never before and how these movements had almost immediate replications in different part of the globe.

By the mid 2000s however, the popularisation of social digital technology produced a much deeper and revolutionary change to the reception’s nature of popular culture forever.

If digital technology produced super active receivers, social technology has turned every receiver also into a potential source of content. Popular culture is no longer necessarily edited by the media and is happening alongside of it, which gives incredible potential for people to resist to the dominant culture and produce their own. Henry Jenkins called that phenomenon, Participatory Culture: “We’re seeing the emergence of a new form of participatory culture (a contemporary version of folk culture) as consumers take media in their own hands, reworking its content to serve their personal and collective interests.” (Jenkins, 2006)

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But here is where Marx’s definition of culture may start to gain value again. When Hall’s views of popular resistance by culture were finally put in an environment where it could exercise all of its potential, when technologies finally empowered people with cultural creative subversive means, all that can be seen is the reproducing or, at the most – as Jenkins put it – the mere reworking of the content produced by the established media.

Back in 1991, W. Russel Neuman pointed out how the power of media conglomerates had affected society’s critical thinking. For him, mass audience has a semi-attentive, entertainment-oriented mindset shaped by the decades of mass media influence. This laziness can now easily be observed on Youtube where its audience is highly concentrated, either on user-generated content that mimic or parodies traditional media content, on traditional media content shaped for the internet or on viral videos produced by large enterprises to promote their products.

Canadian media scholar, Pierre Lévy, however, in his book “Collective Intelligence” has a much more optimistic view on the participatory culture. In his book “Cyberculture” he predicted that the power emerged from networking technologies would serve as a strong corrective to those traditional sources of power. Jenkis added to that in 2006, by saying that people are still just learning how to exercise that power – individually and collectively. He still believes that once they do, they might finally start using that power the way Stuart Hall would have imagined.

So far, however, pretty much all that can be seen in terms of culture in social media is a replication of mainstream media. New technologies revolutionised the way popular culture is distributed but not its content. Fan culture, TV shows and mainstream pop music still dominates popular culture, maybe even more so than ten years ago. Information about the war on Iraq is still as superficial and partial as it was in Vietnam times and user-generated content is hardly connected with any pursuit of subversive change and generally of very bad taste.