stowaway

[Cross-posted at CEMP]

As a teacher approaching my 85th birthday, and with my early retirement in 2057 looming, I have decided to reflect on the most important changes that have occurred in my lifetime.

Historically, knowledge was a commodity which had been scarce and tightly controlled. Over the last millenium the control of knowledge was fought over and passed through the hands of the clericy, academia, professions such as medicine, and insititutions such as government agencies and military complexes. All of these insitutions had a vested interest in ensuring that the excluded majority continued to believe that knowledge was difficult, precious and unavailable to all but a privileged few. Just as institutions such as the church extracted a power-base from their control of knowledge, so in the 20th and early 21st centuries, entire industries (such as the industrial-commercial university system) were built on extracting value from marketplaces by controlling (or at least appearing to control) knowledge. The university system, for instance, portrayed expertise and knowledge as something difficult to obtain, and as something useful to professions, in order to continue to be able to sell their services. Neither the purchasers, nor the purveyors of these services (i.e. students and staff) had any interest in, nor gained any advantage from, dispelling these appearances, and so they helped to perpetuate the idea that qualifications such as those sold by universities were signs of expertise and ability. Other parties with vested interests in the continuation of the university system (arms-dealers who utilised the practical applications of classified scientific research, dictionary writers who sold their books and website memberships to knowledge-consumers, etc) also strived to ensure that the status quo was maintained.

In 2001 Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, with the aim of making all the knowledge in the world freely available to everyone. By 2005 it reached the milestone of 1 million articles; it reached 10 million articles just three more years later. It achieved this phenomenal expansion through a deceptively simple mechanism, which today seems entirely natural and right, but at the time was anathema and inimical to the vested interests of the elite: by allowing anyone to create and contribute to articles. Analysis showed that of Wikipedia users, 90% merely read other people's contributions; 10% made some small contributions; but a remarkable 1% of the users wrote the majority of the content. Well within its first decade, Wikipedia had no substantial areas of human endeavour that were not categorically documented and outlined in its English language articles, and translations into all the globally extant languages were underway. Most importantly, the only requirement in order for anyone to access the information held by Wikipedia was their ability also to access Internet-aware consumer electronics. Effectively within just a couple of decades, the number of people who were able to access knowledge inflated exponentially from the 2% of the earth's population who had the money to attend university to the 40% who had the money to buy an iPhone (may The Jobs be praised).

It is interesting to note - though, I admit, merely a curiosity - that at the time that Wikipedia was still in its ascendancy, there was some controversy over its merits. It may be hard for us to imagine today, though some of us are old enough to recall, that in the early decades BW (before Wikipedia), people still adhered to doctrines which would appear at best backwards to us today. The remarkable 1% of Wikipedians who contributed most were criticised as being power-mad and arbitrary, instead of being congratulated for their enormous altruism and gift to the world. Even Wikipedians themsleves were, for a while, obsessed with finding 'citations', though thankfully this rudimentary atavism to primitive practices was soon overcome. Those who we might think of as prophets who foresaw such days as ours were taken up by small numbers of revolutionaries, but were otherwise neglected; Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty (may their memories abide with The Jobs) are only the most obvious examples of those who proclaimed a message of hope, but whose message was overlooked or declaimed as 'relativism'. So-called 'correspondence theories of truth' (where, strange as it may seem, some sort of 'truthful' external reality can somehow be faithfully and accurately described using human language) still held sway - indeed such theories were absolutely crucial to those vested interests who wished to ensure that their control over knowledge was not threatened. In such a context it can be understood why barbaric practices were common in universities: students were often banned from citing Wikipedia, and those who submitted work which remained faithful to its sources were often disqualified on grounds which were, at the time, described as 'plagiarism'. Today we exalt such practices as 'no-brainers'. For those of us who have copy-and-paste embedded into our ways of working with the iPinch (may The Jobs be praised), such old prejudices must all seem entirely perplexing, and yet the strangeness of our history is no barrier to the lessons it may teach us.

The revolutionary development of Wikipedia cannot be overstated, and it is clear that it has had an enormous impact on the teaching profession and the way it conducts itself. There are the obvious and trivial things which have changed, of course: students were once expected to 'acquire' knowledge, whereas now all the information in the world is available at the squeeze of an iTouch (may The Jobs be praised); as a teacher I was once expected to 'use' knowledge where now, as we all know, a teacher's most important skill is their ability to communicate with and support learners; and of course, research was once thought to be about 'discovering truth', where now we realise that there is no such thing as 'truth' and our business is to create knowledge and shape the reality around us. These things, as I say are obvious and trivial. Far more profound are the changes which can be observed in our social realm. As soon as the majority realised that knowledge was not a commodity, and its scarcity was transformed into ubiquity, those parasitic institutions which had thrived on the control of knowledge disappeared. Universities closed within a few years, and notions of expertise and 'qualifications' became objects of derision. Arms-manufacturers and other organisations which gained from secrecy, competitive advantage and aggressive behaviour, such as govenments and nation states, all quickly collapsed.

Most gratifying of all, of course, was the new way in which society as a whole came to view its various members. People quickly realised that since truth could change at any given time, just by editing a Wikipedia page, all the old systems of using knowledge were utterly unreliable.
Instead of relying on ossified and codified information - whether that information was in outdated books, dictionaries and encyclopedias, or whether it was flashing briefly across an iBall (may The Jobs be praised) before being altered by a Wikipedia editor - society rather turned to its most experienced members for advice and wisdom. Where once society had simply turned its back on its elderly, and allowed them to decay into decrepitude, subsisting on tiny pensions and freezing in their minimally-heated seaside hovels, today we rightly look after our elderly population. After all, when you can no longer tell what is true, what is false, and what is just Wikied, where else can you go for help and guidance, but to those who have the wisdom of experience?

The world in which I retire is of course very much changed from the world in which I grew up. After all a world which relies on written words available to only an elite few is bound to be as atomised and fragmented as was that world at the end of the 20th century. Today our need to rely on each other for support, guidance, wisdom and experience has revitalised us and made us rediscover the value of community. For the privilege of being a member of such a community, I thank and praise The Jobs, and may his Apple be with you all.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, future, science-fiction, Wikipedia, knowledge, truth, relativism, community,
Comments: 0

Foucault confession on CEMP

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, foucault,
Comments: 0

Musings on Plagiarism on CEMP

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, plagiarism, wikipedia,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

In part one, I argued that a popular way of thinking about creativity stems from the Romantic era. The act of authorship is an almost magical process, in which artists – who are better at accessing the subconscious and transforming it into the stuff of creative works – demonstrate their genius and giftedness. I also noted that this also happens to be one of the ways in which industries in the creative fields justify copyright law and the ‘war’ on piracy. Copyright, they say, is a tool which ensures that those gifted artists are adequately compensated for their work.

Part 2: The History of Copyright

In this, part two of the lecture on “Ownership of Ideas”, we will examine the history of copyright law over the last 600 years, and look at some of the justifications for its development and implementation, with particular emphasis on the Enlightenment values that shaped parts of the legislative process. We will look briefly at telescopes and poetry as forms of creative work which will help to illuminate ideas. And in the tradition of ancient epic poetry, right the way through to contemporary story-telling in filmic and televisual narratives, we will begin in media res.

The Founding Fathers

As we saw in part one, the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution saw themselves as in the business of creating a nation on Enlightenment principles – reason, fairness, equality, freedom and the rejection of absolute power in the form of monarchy, religion or monomaniacal men.

It is worth taking a moment to conduct a thought experiment – to place yourselves in the mindset of those Founding Fathers, who had the opportunity to design a world to live in.

Imagine that before you are born, you are given the chance to choose the world in which you want to live. Do you want to be born into a world in which the accident of birth determines your place and chances of happiness in the world, given that you have a slim chance, statistically speaking, of being born into privilege, and a much greater chance of being born into the underclass of society, who are more numerous, living in poverty and more likely to suffer misery? Or would you choose to be born into a world where all men and women are equal, where everyone has an equal chance of happiness and prosperity?

Leaving aside for a moment that your choice here might determine whether your natural political inclination might be liberal and right-leaning if you choose the former, and socialist and left-leaning if you choose the latter, we might briefly note that a Marxist point of view would probably attempt to design a system which made perfect, reasonable sense in an ideal world of good-natured human beings. However, George Orwell in 1945 illustrated extremely well in his novel Animal Farm, that perfectly reasonable and rational approaches to designing social systems cannot account for the vagaries of what human beings will do.

A Constitution based on Enlightenment principles

In this light, we might concede that the American Constitution is possibly the best attempt that any group of people have ever produced that strove to shape a society that would reward merit, protect freedoms and limit the power of the state. There is much evidence that Franklin, Jefferson and the other Framers of the Constitution considered the real-politik of human behaviour, economics and idealism and strove to write a document that outlined a way for people to live freely, but as part of a society working to the benefit of all.

The Constitution separated the church from the state, limited the power of the president, and gave men the right to speak freely, and bear arms as a defence against state-armed militias. This measure, while it may have given rise to what is called the gun-culture in the USA, was intended as a mechanism to ensure that free men could defend themselves against an oppressive state – an obvious and pressing need in the view of those who had just fought for their independence form Great Britain in the American Revolution.

Jefferson on Intellectual Property

So in this climate of reason and social engineering, what was the attitude to copyright and intellectual property? Jefferson is very clear on the point in a letter to Isaac McPherson, written in 1813. He states:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

And here, crucially, Jefferson makes his assertion:

“Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”

Here then quite clearly we see that the view of the law-makers at the start of the 19th century saw the granting of intellectual property rights as a specifically ‘social law’ (as opposed to a self-evident ‘natural law’), which a society chose to do purely on the basis that the ability to gain financial benefit was an incentive to intellectual production; and that intellectual production was of value to the ‘moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition’. In short, intellectual property is a gift of the state, an incentive for people to share their ideas for the benefit of society, rather than a natural right of the author.

In this same letter, Jefferson refers to the situation in England (whose imperial rule America had just successfully fought):

“It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs […] generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.”

England, then had a longer history of copyright and intellectual property law, so it’s worth examining that history and the subsequent development of the body of law that covers intellectual property.

A History of Copyright Law: 1557 – 1862

1557: UK: London Stationer’s Company

In 1557, the ‘Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers’ (now a conference venue) were granted a royal charter. The printing press had emerged as a powerful mechanism for the printing and dissemination of ideas. The royal charter granted the Stationer’s Company the exclusive right to print and publish books, pamphlets and papers – the ‘right to copy’. Such a monopoly ensured that there was only one legal route to printing and spreading ideas, and the Company also had the right and responsibility to seize any materials which did not conform to the requirements of Church and State. It is worth noting that this charter recognised and empowered only the publisher – the bottle-neck through which all material passed, rather than the author of a work.

Clearly, the first establishment of copyright, then, was an attempt to control the flow of information, in response to the rise of a new technology.

1709: UK: The Statute of Anne

The monopoly previously given only to publishers is in 1709 transferred to the authors themselves, for a period of 14 years. Where under the Stationer’s Company’s charter, the publisher had a monopoly ‘in perpetuity’, the author is now given the monopoly for 14 years, and thereafter, the work may be reproduced by anyone else.

This is the first evidence that copyright law seeks to reward authors, and that the monopoly is granted only for a short term, after which the materials may be used and reproduced by others – the germs of Jefferson’s idealistic vision of ‘pursuing ideas which may produce utility’.

1734: UK: Engraving Copyright Act

Copyright law is extended to cover engravings – the first legislative protection given to ‘artistic’ works.

1787: UK: Fabric designs are included in new statutes.

It’s worth noting that the industrialisation of textile production occurs in the last half of the 18th century.

1790: US: 1st US Copyright Act

3 years after the signing of the American Constitution, America, as in England, recognises the copyright only of works produced by its citizens.

1798: UK: Sculptures included

Might this provision coincide with the rise of the middles classes to municipal power, and their expression of this power though the built environment – and hence for the first time, sculptors are working for profit in the service of the nouveau riche in their show-towns? Did it coincide with the new ability to mechanically reproduce and therefore industrialise sculpture? Did the ‘craft’ of the stone-mason-worker transmutate into an ‘art’ practised by the gifted?

I leave you to decide… mostly because I haven’t had the time to do the research to assert any of these hypotheses :) In any case it is worth noting that scuplture is one of the oldest known practises in artistic expression, only recognised as copyrightable work at the turn in the 19th century.

1852: UK: Lithography and other mechanical processes included

Note, once again, the response of the law to technological progress.

1862: UK: Paintings, drawing and photographs – term extended to author’s life plus 7 years

The first example of copyright laws being extended to beyond the author’s death.

Social and Natural Law

We’ll pause in the middle of the 19th century to assess what has occurred so far, and examine two important events: a court-case in London in the mid-18th century, and a debate in the British Parliament in the mid-19th century.

Clearly, Jefferson’s criticism of English copyright law has some basis: its trajectory begins as a mechanism of censorship and control over emerging technologies and means of information production and dissemination. Over the course of the 18th century, though, we might argue that copyright law begins to recognise the author rather than the publisher, and widens its scope to include art forms. There is a very noticeable trend, however (which will continue throughout the 20th century) for copyright law to react and respond to technical developments – fabric printing, lithography, photography, etc. This is often seen as a feature of ‘social’ law, as opposed to ‘natural’ law – social laws cannot account for future developments precisely because they are constructed in response to social trends. So-called ‘natural’ laws, however, such as the criminalisation of murder, are arguably self-evident, and unlikely to need amendment. Indeed the exception to the outlawing of murder – war and capital punishment – requires ‘social’ law to legalise state-sponsored slaughter.

And if we cast our minds back to Jefferson’s letter, he states, of property in general:

“no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.”

This is rather at odds, then, with the sudden introduction in 1862, of an extension of the copyright term to 7 years after the author’s death, exploitable by the author’s family and estate.

The Achromatic Telescope Doublet

Earlier in 2007, Lewis Hyde gave a talk at the 5th Media in Transition conference at MIT. In it he described a court case in London which illuminates the instrumental purpose of copyright and patent law.

In 1733, Chester Moore Hall invented the achromatic telescope doublet – a device which helped to eliminate lensing effects. This invention was a trade secret – optical manufacturers knew of Hall’s design, and with him, they enjoyed the effective monopoly of the design they were able to exploit, as no-one else knew how to make such a device. 25 years later, John Dolland ‘reinvented’ the same device, reverse-engineering it, and then filed a patent for the design. Being granted the patent allowed Dolland to demand royalties from those manufacturers who had already been selling these lenses. Obviously outraged by this cynical manoeuvre, they pursued Dolland in the court, basing their rejection of his demand for license fees on the fact that they had already been making this device for some time.

The court upheld Dolland’s patent, and according to Hyde, their judgement was that “the commercial advantage that you get for having a patent is a reward not for having made the invention, but for having disclosed it to the public, so that when the limited period of the patent has expired, the public has the free access of this idea in perpetuity…” Indeed, quoting from the court ruling, Hyde says:

“It was not the person who locked up his invention in his writing desk that ought to profit from such an invention, but he who brought it forth for the benefit of mankind.”

There is a clear sense, here, that intellectual property law is an incentive or reward for the sharing of knowledge, and this of course is in-keeping with the framing of intellectual property that we’ve seen from Jefferson.

A Necessary Evil

In 1841, Mr Serjeant Talfourd, a member of the British Parliament and as it happens, an author, supported by the lobbying and petitioning of some of those very Romantic poets we met in part one – Wordsworth, Southey and Carlisle – put forward a bill which would extend copyright terms to 60 years beyond the author’s death. Thomas Babington Macaulay made two famous speeches in response to the bill, in which he characterised copyright as a monopoly – a necessary evil – and argued instead for a fixed term of the author’s life or 42 years, whichever expired first. The basis for Macaulay’s support of the 42-year extension was simply that authors might be recompensed for the continued consumption of their work while they lived. The bill was rejected at least partly on the strength of Macaulay’s argument.

Here are some of Macaulay’s key points. We should not rely on men of means to supply society with good literature, only “from persons who make literature the business of their lives.”

“It is then on men whose profession is literature, and whose private means are not ample, that you must rely for a supply of valuable books. Such men must be remunerated for their literary labour. And there are only two ways in which they can be remunerated. One of those ways is patronage; the other is copyright.”

Macaulay dispenses with patronage as an adequate reward for pursuing literature, as he could conceive of “no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles”. Instead, it must be copyright; but of copyright he says:

“It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.”

The Apotheosis of Enlightenment Ideals

In part one, we examined the tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and it should be clear now that that tension is also clearly expressed in the contest over copyright law: The Romantic emphasis on the author is put in the service of lobbying for copyright extension, while the benefit of society is seen as a priority by lawmakers from the mid-18th to mid-19th century.

We might reasonably say, then, that the Enlightenment-driven approach to permitting intellectual property law to flourish merely to benefit society, reaches its zenith, or indeed, apotheosis (or entrance into heavenly gates, and hence-forward its inevitable decline) in the 100 years surrounding the start of the 19th century.

The eventual success of the Romantic lobbyists is exemplified by the extension beyond the author’s death from 1862 onwards. And as we continue our history of copyright, we’ll see that the benefit of society is a declining priority.

A History of Copyright Law: 1886 to 1998

1886: The Berne Convention

The Berne Convention was the first international treaty recognising the copyrights originating in other countries. In 1886, this was an agreement between a few European countries. The Berne convention was the first to recognise (after the French tradition – and not the English tradition) the author’s ‘moral rights’ to be recognised as the owner of the fruits of their intellectual labour. America refused to join the Berne convention, because (they argued) they did not recognise the ‘moral rights’ of the author, merely the incentive for intellectual production for the benefit of society.

1911: UK Copyright Act

Sound recordings added to the provision. Term extended to author’s life plus 50 years.

1956: Cinematic works added

As you can see by the date, this was again a reaction to technological developments, so the law was altered to provide for new cinematic works.

1974: WIPO moved under the auspices of the UN

The World Intellectual Property Organisation, formed in 1967 as the offspring of the Berne Convention, is incorporated into the UN. WIPO is explicitly set up to ‘promote intellectual property protection’.

1988: The UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

The UK recognises the authors’ ‘moral rights’ legally. Unpublished works protected for life plus 50 years. America signs the Berne convention – 102 years later.

1993: European harmonisation

Term extended to life plus 70 years.

1998: DMCA

The American government enacts the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which (among other provisions) allows copyright holders to demand that potentially copyright infringing material be removed from the Internet.

There are subsequent acts, provisions and statutes, as well as others I’ve missed from this history. The selected events in this history, though, represent the general thrust of the development of the law. However, IANAL :)

Today, the copyright terms have been extended to:

• Broadcasts: 50 years from the making of the broadcast
• Sound recordings: 50 years after the recording is made
• Films: 50 years, but determinable by the principle director
• Computer-generated artistic works: 50 years from creation
• Literary, dramatic, artistic and musical works: life of the authors + 70 years
• Unknown copyright holder: 70 years after publication

I’m sure you’ll be reassured to know that if no-one knows you created something, they still won’t be able to steal your income for 70 years, even though, since no-one knows it is your work, you cannot claim any revenue anyway.

You’ll also see the heirarchy of value in the different forms here, since of course, you have less right to exploit your copyright after your death if you’re a CGI artist, than, say an oil-painting artist.

The Contemporary Justifications of Copyright Law

In this history we should be able to see the logic behind the 3 main defenses of copyright that have emerged:

• The Moral Rights of the Author
• The Economic Incentive
• The Benefit of Society

However, we can note that the moral right of the author, as the Romantics may have argued, has only been widely legally recognised in the last few decades. The Enlightenment ideal of the benefit of society may have had an early emphasis, but this has arguably declined. And we have yet to see in the context of this lecture whether the economic incentive is a good reason for people to engage in intellectual production.

A Victory for Romanticism?

It can be tempting to see this history – the late recognition in 1988 of the author’s moral rights, the extension of the copyright terms to benefit the estate and heirs – as a victory for the Romantic idea of the author and their unique creativity, at the expense of the Enlightenment ideal of intellectual production for the improvement of society.

However, in the third and last part of this lecture, we’ll try to examine whether copyright law does, as its defenders claim, incentivise and protect the author’s interests – and whether the law-makers still see intellectual property law as operating in the interest of society at large.

The Commons

Some hippy folky trotsky stuff:

This history of intellectual property law is sometimes called the ‘Second Enclosure Movement’ – after the first movement (obviously) which saw the appropriation of common land into the hands of property owners. The common land was available to all for the grazing of livestock. A land-grab occurred in the late 18th and early 19th century where much common land was taken into private ownership by established land-owners. An anonymous poem from the time offers a pithy condemnation of the double standards at work in the movement:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, copyright, lecture, ownership, history,
Comments: 0

Emancipatory Power of Online Spaces on CEMP

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, identity, performance, liberation,
Comments: 0

Cross-posted at CEMP

Context: BA Interactive Media Production – Level I Authorship Unit; following on from some introductory ideas about Collaborative Authorship, we asked you to contribute to an online social space: http://impserver.bournemouth.ac.uk/bournemouthsoundseeing/

Join in

Anyone reading this who wants to join in the collaborative audio – please do!

Bournemouth Soundseeing

The Bournemouth Soundseeing project is an example of a space which provides scope for user participation. Here we have an example of the kind of thing you might consider for your own project to make an online social space, and this mini-project was designed to give you something concrete to examine as you consider problems like:

• finding a balance between providing users with some freedom to participate, and the imposition of your own design constraints
• every design constraint you impose is a barrier to participation
• how even a simple practice project can throw up a lot of production issues
• the biggest problem: what is this stuff for?

We consider some issues regarding design, production, and feasibility; and then speculate as to how we’ll form the next $188b start-up (Google’s current market capitalisation).

Architectures of Participation

In this project, there is a set of ‘designed-in constraints’: contributions must be short audio files, in mp3 format, and somehow tied to a location. Besides that, the user is free to do anything they like. At first glance you might think that this allows for little freedom. However, you can over-anticipate what your users will do.

When we built this page we conceived of it as a way of painting an audio portrait of Bournemouth, where the portrait is built up by ‘people in Bournemouth’. It soon became clear, though, that users don’t do what you might expect them to do: if you zoom out, you’ll see that some users have added audio in Scotland, Guernsey and Sussex. Indeed, the functionality of the page allows you to add audio to the North Pole if you want to.

Also, not all contributions were ‘audio portraits’ of Bournemouth, even if they are located in Bournemouth; some examples play along with the ‘authorial intention’ of the site, such as the recording of the singing hobo, or the sounds of the sea; others, however, were tenuous at best: The Frosties rap is delightful, but a perfect example of how your users will do things you didn’t anticipate. I love this kind of unpredictability, but of course, designers (and advertisers) don’t, so much… :)

Some of you also decided to be deeply reflexive and contribute debates about Collaborative Authorship. Theory points go to you.

Barriers to Entry

So some things we can talk about include the fact that how the ‘architecture of participation’ is designed will impact on whether people will take part and join in. To join in this project, you have to get some device that records, find something to record, get it onto a computer, turn it into an mp3, and upload it to the site. It’s worth noting that if you can motivate your user to make the first step, there’s still – as you found – hurdles to leap (such as figuring out how to turn your mobiles phone’s .amr file into an mp3). So we might wonder why anyone would be motivated to add anything to this page? And for each hurdle that they must overcome to join in, what is their pay-off?

We might note that all of you who added content knew that your peers were likely to find it and listen, as they were hoping you might do the same? Did the fact that your clip might be played in the lecture influence your decision to contribute? How much of online participation is about performativity, knowing an audience somewhere will get an insight into your carefully controlled online identity? How much of that performativity can you capture and harness? We’ll come back to this later in the unit…

Production Issues

The technology used in this project includes:

• Javascript-based use of Google Maps API (Application Programming Interface)
• XHTML / CSS for serving documents
• FLASH audio player
• PHP4 to build a dynamic page / process data upload
• MySQL to store captured data

As mentioned in the lecture, those who contributed to this project were effectively beta-testing it. When this was built, it was tested by the person who built it. That person will never do all the things with it that your users will do with it. This is a very good illustration of some of the things you will need to do when you build your projects: testing it yourself will not do! You need to get other people to use it and see what happens. All sort of unexpected things will happen.

Some of the issues that have been found so far (don’t worry if you don’t understand the jargon here for now):

• incomplete uploads of mp3 files result in balloons without audio; some kind of file integrity test would be nice.
• on IE6 / PC / Windows XP: closing a bubble without pressing the ‘stop’ button fires the audio player again: a IE6 specific piece of Javascript code to fix this would be nice.
• the Google Maps bubbles render nastily on IE6 / PC / Windows XP: outside our control?
• Safari has caching issues, and a slightly different Document Object Model (javascript issues): complicated code to force reloads would be nice
• Firefox / Mac / OS X runs Google Maps like a dog: worth investigation (‘running like a dog’ is technical jargon for ‘performance issues :)

When you make your projects, we won’t expect you to have solved every one of these types of problem with your site; we would, however, expect you to identify them, by leaving some time for people to use and test your site!

Also, the focus of this project is PHP and MySQL, so you’ll almost certainly find that learning to use a third party API (especially if it is Javascript!) will be too much to conquer within the next 4 weeks… don’t feel you have to crack everything in your first iteration. Concentrate on the idea, the feasibility, and in technical terms, the practicalities of capturing, storing and retrieving data.

What is this stuff for?

And really, this is the hardest part of developing projects like this. In the lecture we discussed where we might go with an idea like ‘Bournemouth Soundseeing’. We considered the idea of targeting Bournemouth’s tourism industry as a way of making some money; you collaboratively suggested some problems and solutions in taking this approach.

The proposition

A set of information about Bournemouth might be useful to tourists visiting Bournemouth. Allowing people (and businesses) to add their own content might be a inexpensive way to populate the site with useful information. A popular site might attract paying advertisers.

Limited media types

Audio files are somewhat limited. We might expand the functionality by allowing the addition of images, videos, or just plain old text. Database complexity increases.

Vandalism

What if people add porn soundtracks? Irrelevant fluff? Solution: moderation. Except it isn’t really a solution, of course. We could add an RSS feed, and some poor bored person would monitor it, and ensure that vandalism is removed. The BBC spend more than £1m per year on moderation. Can you cover that with advertising revenue?

Copyright Infringement

This works both ways: copyright infringing material may get added: the moderator will have to remove it. But also, will people know whether they can use the material that is on the site? Someone might hear the sounds of the sea and use it themselves, having been inspired to be creative.

Flickr allows you to specify the ‘copyrights’ you wish to retain over your image, and we could do the same. Contributors specify whether people can reuse the audio.

We might even use Flickr’s API to allow people to upload images from there, instead of reproducing the fuctionality here.

Overabundance of information

The map could be overrun with information, and become bewildering. So we might add a tag cloud, or search facility. Contributers use keywords to describe their content, and users can filter out stuff they don’t want to see, or specify information that they do want to see.

Inappropriate use-context

While we might have thought our target audience were people planning to come to Bournemouth, advertisers might want to access them when they’re here. You don’t look two weeks ahead for a KFC when you’re going on holiday. Unless you’re a KFC freak.

One idea we had was to use the ‘iStations’ so people can access it in the street. However, what we really want is for them to have the info in their pockets.

We have one nice clean dataset, moderated by our tea-boy. Data is added via an ordinary browser, but we build a platform for a mobile phone. People searching for info stumble upon a nice French restaurant round the corner and take a detour.

Advertisers don’t like UGC

This is a constantly evolving problem. Before Google bought YouTube, there was (to my knowledge, and I’ve been using YouTube for at least 18 years) no advertising on there. The nut to crack was the fact that advertisers want to control what media their brand gets associated with. No brand wants to be associated with potentially offensive material…

Google have introduced advertising to YouTube, using their keywords / pay-per-click system. Perhaps a chink is opening here. But we’re still talking Pot Noodles, rather than banking.

Wold dominion

So we’ve figured out (at least in our idle daydreams) how to make the site a going concern. We have a clean, functional dataset, and we tick over some revenue.

Our plans for world-dominion now turn to mobile phone manufacturers, who will build better mobile phone services than we can. We started out as a service using a mashsup of APIs. We start providing an API to our own data, with geo-data, meta-data in the form of keywords, and license this data to third parties who want to charge people to access the data through their whizzy iPhone interface.

As the slashdotters often say:

• Get data
• Serve data
• …
• Profit!

Remix Culture

Next week we’ll go back to a slightly more theoretical context and investigate the ‘Remix Culture’ that pie-in-the-sky ideas like this are a part of.

Finally

I would like to thank the following people who collaborated in the authorship of this post: the students of BAIMP2; Annie Hunt; CEMP; the CEMP website team; Mike Molesworth; James Jordan; Hugh Chignell and MARP 06-07; Google; IT services and their maintenance of the impserver; Bournemouth University; the open source community responsible for developing Textpattern, phpBB, PHP and MySQL; the developers at Macromedia and Adobe for providing Flash; the developers of the mp3 audio format; the developers of the JPG image format; Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C for building and developing HTML; the CSS working group; Microsoft, Apple and the Linux community for developing www browsers; Marc Anderssen and the Netscape browser developers; the Unix community; the inventors of TCP/IP; the American military types who worked on the ARPANET; Charles Babbage; and Aristotle. Apologies to all those who contributed, who I haven’t mentioned. You know who you are!

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, lecture, collaborative, authorship, audio, mashup, google, map,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

So many of the ideas about the media that theoreticians talk about, revolve around Marxism. Marxism revolves around Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism. ‘Capitalism’ is a flavour of Political Economy. See Key Concepts: Ideologies for some context.

Political Economy

At the heart of Marx’s political economy lies the idea of value.

• Marx believed that the base determined the superstructure – i.e. the way we operate ecomonically determines the values that are propagated in our society, in the interest of those economic operations.

Marx initially distinguishes between two types of value: use-value and exchange-value

Use-value:

• the utility of a commodity – that is how it fulfills human needs:
• a pen has use-value because we write with it;

Marx’s examples are linen and coats:

• linen has use-value because it can be made into clothing;
• a coat has use-value because it can be worn to fend off cold and allow us to present ourselves in public with decorum.

Exchange-value:

• can at first glance be thought of in terms of price,
• although Marx has a few things to say about exchange-value before it becomes equated with price.

Exchange-value is the relationship of value:

• 20 yards of linen has the same exchange-value as 1 or 2 coats, rather than 5 or 10 coats.
• Not just because of the amount of linen required to tailor a coat, but the fact that labour is expended in manufacturing linen and tailoring coats.
• Similarly, 1 tonne of gold has a greater exchange value than 1 tonne of iron – because more labour must be expended in mining gold than iron because of gold’s relative scarcity.

Exchange-value, then, is created by the expenditure of labour.

• In theory there should be no clear reason under these circumstances for one person to acquire more power in exchange-value (ie acquire more commodities, have greater wealth) than any other person, except for the amount of labour they expend.
• In theory, those who work most, become the most wealthy.

Surplus-value

Of course, in practice, Marx noted that the reverse was true, and it is the translation of labour to money – the transition from labour-value to monetary value – that creates the inequalities.

• If a man sells a commodity for a price and generates a profit – where has this profit come from?
• This profit, or surplus-value is at the heart of the capitalist economy, and it essentially boils down to middle-men taking a slice. [This is why brokers are rich.] Middle-men can only take a slice because they own the ‘means of production’ (the factories, the land), and they can only own things because capitalist systems are based on the primacy of private ownership and property. As Joseph Proudhon said, “Property is Theft“.

If the exchange-value of a commodity is generated by the labour in its production, but the monetary value realised is greater than the labour-value, then there is a natural imperative which arises to ensure that more and more commodities are made for less and less cost.

• This imperative gives rise to separate classes – the bourgoisie and the proletariat, the employers and the employed.
• The employers seek greater surplusses and exploit the employed who labour more and more for less and less of the pie.

The Economy Gives Rise to Ideology

The Marxist discourse, and ideas about political economy, then, stem from Marx’s analysis of how the exploitation of working classes arises. Of course, there are many other aspects to Marx’s ideas of political economy, but we don’t need to go into all of them to see the centrality of these concepts of value.

By extension we can also see why the ‘values’ of a society might be very useful to vested interests:

• values such as:
  • competitiveness,
  • value for money,
  • having a work-ethic,
  • productivity,
  • a flexible workforce (a euphemism for a ‘sackable workforce’)
  • get on yer bike and get a job.

The Division of Labour and Alienation

Marx’s emphasis is on the worker, the proletarian.

• We said that the more productive labour becomes, the less value it has – Marx calls this a moral inversion

In his essay, Estranged Labour, he describes this as alienation, isolation, and estrangement. He argues that the consequence of this is that:

“man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions – eating, drinking procreating, or at most in his dwelling and dressing-up, etc; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.”

(McLellan, 1977)

In the same essay, Marx argues that the worker becomes the ‘object’ – he is objectified, in fact, turned into a commodity, become sub-human.

From his “Communist Manifesto”,

“These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”

(McLellan, 1977)

• The capitalist system objectifies a whole class of society and turns their existence into a commodity to be bought and sold.
• This is a kind of slavery, whence the famous phrase, “the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”.

We might like at this point to reflect that what enables barbarous acts to be committed in a society is the objectification of human beings, whether they be Jews in Nazi Germany or Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.

Marxism != Communism

We should not take Marxism and Communism to mean the same thing.

• Marx’s idea of communism sprang from the idea that a society could operate through shared ownership: instead of some individuals accruing capital through surplus-value, all individuals share in the products of the labour of society as a whole.
• Of course, everyone would still need to expend labour in order for the needs of the society to be met, but the labour would be equitable, and the products shared:

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

You have to go a long way from these ideas to explain the nature of totalitarian regimes such as that that arose in Communist Russia under ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin.

Readings:

McLellan, D. (ed.), 1977. Karl Marx: Selected Writings Oxford: Oxford University Press

Marx, K., 1954. Capital, London: Lawrence & Wishart

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004. The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin

This post was brought to you by Joe – reading Marx, so you don’t have to. :)

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, lecture, system:lectures, marxism, political economy, ideology,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

This lecture started to develop ideas about the relationship between media and society. A key concept in understanding theories about the media, and the influence of media on society, is that of ‘ideology’. This lecture looked very broadly, and therefore very selectively, at the history of our ideas about ‘ideology’ over the last 150 years.

We looked at the Berlin Wall and its fall in 1989 to illustrate some of the ideas; we explored ‘Marxism’, because Marxist ideas have been an incredibly important part of the foundations of our ideas about media and ideology; and so therefore we saw a long procession of dead white men.

 

PART ONE:

In part one of this lecture, we looked back at important Marxist ideas about ideology and society.

 

The Berlin Wall is a joke.

Holy Moly have a website and weekly email which take an ‘irreverent’ and foul-mouthed take on celebrity gossip. A couple of weeks ago, on 28 Sep 2007, they listed the following item in their email:

Nasal Herr

Welsh acting scarecrow Rhys Ifans, the man who is in no way sleeping with Sienna Miller, was once asked to house-sit for friends and enthusiastically agreed, having recently been evicted from his latest hedge.

On their return, the homeowners were greeted by an extremely apologetic Ifans who confessed immediately that he’d been a naughty boy. Returning from a drunken night out while they were away, he’d noticed a small box on the mantelpiece with a lump of cocaine inside. Rhys being Rhys, he promptly crushed and hoofed the lot.

Ifans did wonder aloud why it was grittier than most coke he’d had before, and immediately offered to replace the stash.

“Better fuck off to Germany then,” said the homeowners. “That was a piece of the Berlin Wall that we got in 1989.”

In the lecture this got a little titter, and it has a mixture of absurdity and horror about it. Why have a piece of the Berlin Wall as a souvenir? Crushing and snorting it seems almost a sacriligeous act – reducing the icon of 20th century conflict to celebrity decadence. [It’s worth pointing out at this point that we have no evidence that any of this is true :) – we merely quote Holy Moly for the interestingness of their email]

We asked what does the Berlin Wall mean to us? Some suggestions were: “Freedom”; “reunification”; “the end of communism”. These ideas all help us to think about ideology.

 

The Berlin Wall on YouTube

Here’s a clip of some of the history of the Berlin Wall that some random person has put on Youtube:

So the key point is that the wall represented the divide between two different ideological and economic systems: capitalism in the West, and communism in the East. The contest between capitalism and communism is a good way to approach ideas about ideology.

So let’s go back to the source – communism as an economic and social system evolved from Marxism; Marxism is what we call that set of ideas (ideology?) derived from Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism.

 

Karl Marx 1818 – 1883

So here’s the beardy guy who has influenced so much of every aspect of human life today.

 

Karl Marx – key facts

• Marx was a champion of ‘socialism’
• He was author of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (with Friedrich Engels, 1848)
• He wrote a critique of ‘capitalism’ in ‘Capital’ (1867)

In a capitalist society, we have to go to work and earn money, in order to buy the stuff we need. It is based around property, ownership and money. Marx argued that this will always lead to exploitation and inequality. He proposed that ‘socialist’ societies would be fairer. Instead of property and private ownership, everyone has shared ownership of the products of their labour, and so everyone works, not for money, but for the good of society and for satisfaction, brotherhood and comradeship. Marx was nothing if not compassionate.

 

Base and superstructure

Let’s look at Marx’s analysis of society. Marx split ‘society’ into two parts: the base and the superstructure.

 

So the ‘base’ refers to the ‘political economy’ – that is, whatever economic system a society is based on – such as capitalism, or socialism, or feudalism, etc. This defines how economic relationships work; so in capitalism, you have private ownership, commerce and currency, employment with employers and employees, people who own corporations, and people who work for them.

The ‘superstructure’ refers to the social institutions in a society which play a part in spreading cultural values: the family, religions, the educational system, and, crucially for us, the media. Of course, the media was a very different thing when Marx was writing in the 19th century – no TV or cinema existed. The place of the media in the superstructure has grown to prominence over the last 150 years.

 

The base determines the superstructure

To say that the ‘base’ determines the ‘superstructure’ is to say that our economic systems are the main driver for the cultural values we have. Here’s how Marx and Engels put it The Communist Manifesto:

“What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class”.

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, p30

Our ‘intellectual production’ – that is, the cultural ideas and values of society – change as ‘material production’ changes. In a capitalist society, the ‘material production’ is based on working to earn a living, in order to participate in the ownership of private property. Hence, the cultural values in a captialist society reflect the needs of that economic system: having a work ethic; valuing private property; aspiring to acquire more money; etc.

Here’s a diagram to illustrate:

 

A Communistic Revolution

Marx analysed capitalism, and argued that it inevitably created inequality, resulting in the exploitation of the workers. Working classes, whom he refered to as ‘proletarians’, give their labour for wages, but the fruits of their labour are enjoyed by the owners (employers) of the factories and workhouses.

See Marxism 101 for more detail on how the capitalist system drives inequality, and ideological values.

Here are Marx and Engels again:

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Engels, F. & Marx, K., 2004, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, p52

Marx’s project was to encourage the working classes, or ‘proletarians’ to overthrow their masters, the ‘bourgeoisie’ in a revolution. Nothing short of revolution would do.

 

Who are the bourgeoisie?

So, these bourgoisie, why do we call them this ugly French word? Broadly speaking, we might refer to the ‘middle classes’ as the bourgeoisie. Here’s a clip of Stephen Fry on Room 101. The second item, in which he chooses souvenir plates as a candidate for Room 101, is worth watching – look out for how he describes the Daily Mail…

 

Fry has infinitely fascinating things to say about aesthetics and beauty, but we’re interested in his description of the Daily Mail as a symbol of all that is ‘bourgeois, defensive and aggressive’.

Today, the middle class is a slightly different animal than in the 19th century. Today the middle class is huge – most of us in this university get to call ourselves middle class. We don’t have to engage in hard labour. We still have a working class – we often call them ‘chavs’ – and when we do we’re effectively expressing our contempt for another class. The idea, much touted, that we live in a classless society today is sadly untrue.

In the 18th century, the middle class was a slightly different thing. In ‘Capital’ Marx charted the change from a feudal society to a capitalist society. According to Marx:

• In a feudal society (as in the middle ages), an aristocracy owns the land, on which the peasant, working class must live and work, subservient to the aristocratic rulers.

• In a capitalist society, a new ‘middle class’ emerges who are wealthy, own the economic powerhouses of factories and land. This ‘middle class’ or bourgeoisie, though still relatively small, become effective rulers, by virtue of their ownership of the ‘means of production’.

• Who are the ruling classes today? This is a rather muddy question, which we leave open for now…
  

   

Bourgeois and proletarian ideologies

Marx argues that these two different classes have different ideologies – or sets of values. The proletarians must be subservient, while the bourgeoisie believe themselves to be superior. The proles must have a work ethic, while the borgeoisie are entitled to a life of luxury by accident of birth. The proles are commoners with no rights, no votes, no say, while the bourgeoisie are ‘genteel’, better, and in charge. These things appear to be natural and true – the way of the world.

So when we say that the base determines the superstructure, we mean that these different sets of values come about because of the underlying economic system. These values help to reinforce the status quo – which is exactly, of course, what the borgeoisie would like to see continue. After all, why would they willingly give up their privileged position in society?

 

False Consciousness

So, if Marx wanted to foment a revolution, in which the workers took control of the ‘means of production’, he believed it was necessary to inform the proletariat of their condition. He thought that once they realised how they outnumbered the borgeoisie, and how they were being mercilessly exploited, they would throw off the shackles and revolt.

This begs the question – why didn’t they realise it already? What stops the working class from realising they are being unfairly exploited?

Marx’s answer was ‘false consciousness’ – the idea that the workers are decieved about their own powerlessness. The ideological values that operated in society kept the workers from understanding their potential. Once they were informed, and told of their unfair exploitation, the scales would fall from their eyes.

We might speculate whether, if Marx were alive today, might he see the all-pervasive media in our society, as part of the way that this ‘false consciousness’ is perpetuated?

 

The failure of Marx’s project?

No matter how much we may be persuaded by Marx’s arguments, some facts are rather awkward as we look back on history:

• The West almost entirely resisted socialism.
• Except in some small pockets, the workers did not revolt.
• Perhaps ‘false consciousness’ is a little too simplistic?

Although the 20th century saw more carnage, butchery and murder than at any other time in human history, and some of the participants were communists, the fact is that the two world wars were largely a fight between capitalism and fascism. The communists indeed, were fighting on the same side as the ‘allies’ of the West.

So what went wrong? Is something more complex going on?

 

The Frankfurt School

We leap to the 1930s and 1940s. Marx’s ideas have been very influential. Bastardised versions of his ‘socialism’ have been implemented in Russia and elsewhere. Fascism rises in Europe. A group of intellectuals based in Germany are convinced that Marx’s ideas were too important to reject, and set about re-examining his arguments, and trying to account for the world they found themselves in.

The stakes were extremely high. These intellectuals were based in Frankfurt, and they were mostly German Jews. They had everything to lose, and as we know, being a Jew in Germany in the 1940s was usually fatal. Among their number were Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and others. They witnessed the rise of totalitarianism and fascism in Germany – which had hitherto been a capitalist democracy.

A key idea they proposed was that fascism was the logical consequence of capitalism: capitalism run wild leads to monopolies; when the state takes control of the monopoly, you have totalitarianism. They saw the ‘political economy’ changing before their eyes, and yet still the workers did not take control, and bring about a glorious socialist revolution.

So they re-examined the base and the superstucture, and switched the causal relationship about: they argued that the superstructure determines the base:

 

The superstructure determines the base

To say that the ‘superstructure’ determines the ‘base’ is to say that the cultural life and values that operate in society are what permit and perpetuate the economic means of production.

This effectively places ideology right at the centre of all social relations: social, political, economic, technological, etc. It is because the culture we live in reinforces certain sets of values that the economic relationships we have continue.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote an important essay in 1944 called ‘The Culture Industry’. By this time the cinema was established, and they were deeply critical of the films that were shown. The film industry was just another part of the capitalist means of production, churning out mass entertainment, which the workers watched willingly. After expending their hard labour in the day, they relaxed by watching movies which were characterised by escapism and romantic shlock. The masses, they argued, were stupified and pacified by these films. Their imaginations were numbed, and any thoughts of the discomfort of their lives, or chances to revolt, were stamped out by this entertaining drivel. They really were quite disparaging. Poor old Hollywood.

 

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Let’s look at another clip about the Berlin Wall. This is a news item produced by ABC.

 

The fall of the Berlin Wall is an important moment when peoples in several countries that had been under communist regimes really did revolt. We might think of the rise of the media in the latter half of the 20th century, especially Television, as playing a part in ensuring that the populations were exposed to the values of the consumer society, just over the wall. Why should these people, having seen the glorious bounty of the West and its capitalist mode of production, put up with their masters, whose political leadership had led them to live in comparative poverty?

This clip shows some of the Graffiti from the Wall. You can see at one point, trees on the western side of the wall, with lovely, juicy consumer goods hanging from their branches…

 

It is a rather cruel irony, that the best illustration of how exposure to alternative ‘values’ and ‘ideologies’ might be a factor in leading to revolution – the Marxists’ best hope – is actually a moment when it is communism that is overthrown, rather than vice-versa.

The Frankfurt School were onto something when they stressed the importance of the superstructure. But where communism did take hold, it slid into totalitarianism, and nearly everywhere, it has collapsed. Cuba and China are amongst the few places where communist regimes still hold on.

 

The Ideological State Apparatus

The Marxist project to diagnose and fight capitalism continued, even as capitalism entrenched itself ever further into the fabric of the West. Louis Althüsser (1918 – 1990) a French Marxist, published a paper in 1970: ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses‘.

The Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) is Althüsser’s attempt to account for how members of a society are inculcated with the values necessary for the status quo to be reinforced.

A rather caricatured view of the ISA can be seen in this clip from Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a film directed by Alan Parker (1982).

 

Note how the boy dreams of revolt, and burning the school and the teacher – but of course it is just a dream, which will never be realised – the ISA sees to that.

The educational system is characterised in this film as a machine for producing the drones necessary for the continuation of the capitalist system. Stamp out creativity and individuality, and ‘socialise’ people into functional members of society.

 

Interpellation

Althüsser’s ISAs work through ‘interpellation’ – the idea that the ISAs are there to determine us as individuals. The idea is similar to what sociologists call ‘socialisation’, or even ‘structuration’ when they want to sound scientific. As we are born into the world, we are exposed to ISAs such as family, religion, education, and of course the media, all of which determine what we think of as normal.

We might think of this as the most extreme manifestation of a desperate Marxism… and it really highlights one of the key weaknesses in the ideas we’ve seen so far.

 

Stupid passive masses

Many of the ideas we’ve encountered share a problem: they try to deal with human behaviour at a macro-social level, from the rarified air of intellectual mastery, and in so doing, they treat the rest of us human beings as stupid, passive masses. Interpellation is a ‘passive’ device – you are interpellated, or determined, by your environment. You have no choice, freedom or agency of your own. The Frankfurt School, too, assume that the masses watching those Hollywood films, are being made stupid, and are somehow entirely passive – they absorb the ideological values of their society as though they are sponges. And the very idea of false consciousness requires that people are, frankly, stupid.

Indeed, it is another cruel irony that the hectoring of the Frankfurt School and other Marxists scarcely sounds any different to that symbol of all that is ‘borgeois, defensive and aggressive’ – the Daily Mail – yelling from the sidelines about how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and the poor stupid masses can’t be bothered or are too stupid to do anything about it.

Perhaps this is where the Marxist project to understand ideology failed to bring about the dream of equality that characterised its inception?

 

PART TWO:

In part two of this lecture, we looked briefly at (possibly?) more helpful ways of thinking about ideology in contemporary society.

 

Determinism is too simplistic

The idea that ideology is something that happens to us, either because of the economic system, or because of the superstructural elements like education and the media, or even because of the great clunking hammers of ISAs, is too simplistic, because it forgets that human beings are imaginative, choice-making creatures with almost unbounded ingenuity.

We need something a little more complex to help us. Enter Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937).

 

Hegemony

Gramsci was not just a Marxist intellectual – he was also a revolutionary, who led the Italian Communist Party and fought against Mussolini’s fascists.

He’s one of those very few people we could pick out, like George Orwell, who not only wrote and intellectualised about the injustices of life, but also put their money where their mouth was and tried to do something about it. Orwell didn’t just write newspaper articles and books, he got a gun and went to Spain and fought the fascists. Gramsci spent the last 11 years of his life imprisoned by Mussolini.

His intellectual contribution was the idea of hegemony. So far we’ve seen that perhaps there might be two ideologies (one proletarian, one bourgeois), or just one big ideology, encompassing our entire society like a wet blanket. Neither of these ideas explains how ideology changes or evolves – which of course it must, since our cultural values and our political systems do change and evolve.

Hegemony is the name Gramsci gives to the notion that cultural values are constantly being fought, contested, and won, and in the process, they change. A ‘spontaneous consensus’ emerges as this process goes on. So whenever there is ‘unrest’ amongst the workers, the ruling classes must somehow meet that ‘unrest’, not just through brutal repression (because that didn’t work for the Communists when the Berlin Wall fell), but also by persuasion, giving an inch here, taking an inch there.

The useful thing about the idea of ‘hegemony’ is that it acknowledges the place of dissent, negotiation, and contest. This forces us to think a little harder about how these contests occur. A useful way to think about this is to drop the whole ‘ideology’ business and think about ‘discourses’ instead.

 

Discourse

Our world is filled with discourse – the ability to say things. Media-makers get to make a lot of discourse and reach large numbers of people with it. I get to make a lot of discourse by being a lecturer standing in front of 150 people and telling them stuff. We all get to make discourse every time we say things to each other. Graffiti artists make discourse on train stations and Berlin Walls.

We might think of hegemony, then, as the resultant – and ever-changing – outcome of the product of all of these discourses. Some of us have more influence on it than others, but none of us are ever out of the loop.

Indeed, it makes a lot of sense to place our emphasis on ‘discourses’ instead of ‘ideologies’. We might even go so far as to say that our contemporary, media-saturated society is dominated by discourse.

 

Simulation

Another key idea, another Marxist. Jean Baudrillard (1929 – 2007) contributed a key, complex, controversial idea to the debate about ideology, discourse, and the values that operate in a society.

You may be familiar with Baudrillard’s work from the following shot from the Matrix:

 

Baudrillard’s suggestion in Simulacra and Simulation, which he developed in other essays such as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place is deliberately provocative and controversial: there is no real world out there any more… there is only a simulation.

It would be wrong to think that Baudrillard means that the world is really like The Matrix film. Rather, we might think that what he’s getting at is that our experience of the world is now totally mediated, or simulated – it consists only of discourse.

Our knowledge and understanding of wars, for example, at least for those of us who don’t have to die in them, is indistinguishable from video-games. We can switch off the war, and forget about it, just by switching from the news to Who Want to Be A Dancing Celebrity Not Me Get Me Out of This X Factor, or logging onto www.facemybebospacebook.com

More than that – we consume discourses too. We consume media commodities, just like we consume clothes and cars and music and sex and food.

 

The Consumer Society

Here’s an old clip, again featuring the Berlin Wall:

 

Perhaps it is indicative of the cosumer society in which we live that a corporation can quite happily co-opt the events of the collapse of communism, the ‘liberation’ of East Germany, and the conflict of the Cold War, and just add their logo to it in order to add value to their brand, and sell us some telecommunications.

 

The End of History

That the huge significant events of the 20th century can be condensed to a 60-second ad, and that we can countenance the idea that our lives are mere simulations constructed out of discourse, is perhaps what has led to the ability to think that we have reached the ‘End of History’.

Francis Fukuyama (1952 – ) is a political economist and has been influential in the development of Republican politics in America. In 1992, he suggested in his book The End of History and the Last Man that it will no longer be possible for alternative systems to capitalist liberal democracy to ever arise again:

‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

Fukuyama, F., 1993. The End of History and the Last Man, London: Harper

This is an extraordinary idea, and it presents us with some problems.

 

Post-ideology?

We’ve seen that ‘ideology’ as an idea has been almost used up – it seems to have meant anything from ‘common sense’ to ‘the way of the world’ to ‘any political system’ to ‘a shared set of values’… indeed we live in an age which is often called ‘post-modernity’ in which no ideologies bring us together any longer. Religion has declined; the family has broken up. Perhaps the only things which truly bring us together any more are the soap episodes we discuss around the watercooler, the meaning of ‘Lady Di’s last smile’.

And since ‘ideologies’ have lost their notional grip on our shared cultural lives, perhaps it is possible that we forget to worry about the rise of fascism or totalitarianism. When we vote, if we vote, we choose between the leaders of political parties, with no ideological or ‘policy’ difference: we vote on whether we like them; whether their PR works for us; whether, as consumers, we feel happy ‘buying into’ them. If we can be bothered.

 

The Wall

And finally, perhaps Baudrillard and Fukuyama give us salutary warnings by proclaiming the end of history, the triumph of the mediated world: perhaps we should not be complacent about the triumph of the liberal capitalism of consumer society:

The wall, built in the last few years, separating Israel from Palestine. Banksy – graffiti artist at large – turns yet another manifest barrier between opposing ideas and peoples into a site for discourse.

Go Home

As reported by The Guardian

Banksy also records on his website how an old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’

Readings and Further Resources

You can flesh out some of the simplifications in this lecture by reading:

Strinati, D., 1995. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London: Routledge, chapters 1 to 4.

Bignell, J., 1997. Media Semiotics: An Introduction, Manchester: Manchester University
Press

Gripsrud, J., 2002. Understanding Media Culture, London: Arnold, chapter 2.

See also: UK Media Culture and the Media Timeline

Finally, at the start of the lecture, I asked you to write down a few key words that summed up your ideas about ‘ideology’. What I forgot to do was ask you to do the same at the end! If you had, would those key words and ideas have been different, the second time around? If so, perhaps you’ve just witnessed the power of discourse – my power to influence the way you think about ideas – or my part in the ISA that is the machine of education…. Power will be one of the themes to which we’ll return in this lecture series.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, system:lectures, ideology, marxism, media, discourse, hegemony, ISA, Berlin Wall, Marx, base, supstructure, communism, bourgeoisie, Frankfurt School, false consciousness, Althusser, interpellation, Baudrillard, simulation, consumerism, Fukuyama,
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Encyclomedia
 
A social site for CEMP which allows users to bookmark media training websites and resources - supported by Channel 4, BBC, and Skillset.

Author: joe
Categories: web:dev, CEMP, learning-resource, pedagogy, media training, system:learningresource,
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Cross-posted at CEMP

 
Three things recently caught my attention and hit the fan at the back of my mind; this post is a representation of some of the pollackesque splatterings that resulted.

The End of The Industrial Schooling System

The first was the news that Knowsley Council in Merseyside is closing all 11 of its secondary schools, and replacing them with 7 ‘state-of-the-art, round-the-clock’ learning centres. In these new centres, pupils won’t attend formal classes or adhere to a timetable – instead, they will be assigned projects in the mornings and disperse into the learning centres’ facilities to work on them in groups. On the surface this possibly appears to be a drastic measure, described by one ‘edu-blogger’ as ‘The End of The Industrial Schooling System’. One motivating factor for this reinvention of secondary schooling is “lack of progress, catastrophically high levels of pupil absenteeism, stubbornly high levels of youth unemployment”. The Independent’s article is sketchy on details, but a PDF document produced by Knowsley Council outlines considerably more. Some interesting aspects of the document:

Democratised spaces: these include self-sufficient ‘pods’ as ‘home bases’ which facilitate year and ‘vertical’ (I assume this means ‘cross-year’) groups; learning spaces which will ‘not be owned by subject specialists’; and learning ‘streets’ which encourage ‘a busy learning and social space in which activity and interaction is a feature’, where performing or visual arts play an ‘integral role’. (p42)

New curriculum models: “Creating a curriculum experience that will offer the opportunity for students to develop personal, learning and thinking skills by learning through projects, understanding how they learn, reflecting upon their progress and being able to contribute their own opinions and ideas. This development is considered to be key to transforming educational practice since the explicit teaching of thinking necessitates a significant shift in pedagogy which will itself significantly transform the learning.” (p50)

The self-analysis of society

The second was the paper on the Consumption and Marketing Portal, Having, Being and Higher Education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer. While the paper aims high in terms of locating the conflicted interests of students, academics and universities in a society which is more preoccupied with ‘having’ and consuming than in ‘being’ and reflecting, it goes to the heart of the problem of vocational education: when motives are driven by markets, interests which are at odds with bottom lines are pushed out. Realists everywhere cry out, ‘but we live in a market-based society, and HE is there to help graduates function in the market-place’; blind optimists (known sometimes as Marxists, troublemakers and, even worse, ‘philosophers’) insist that, even if nowhere else, universities are the place in which a critique of the market must happen. A good learner must reflect on themselves and their own learning. Surely a good society should reflect critically on itself, and if the HE sector has one determining characteristic, it is that it should perform the self-analysis of society that corporations, atomised individuals and branded politicians substantially cannot.

Acting With Technology

The third piece of fan-hitting stuff came from Kaptelinin and Nardi’s book, Acting With Technology – Activity Theory and Interaction Design (MIT: 2006). The authors note that some of the key aspects of activity theory are its emphasis of human intention, of people over things, of the evolving nature of human interaction with the world around them, and the cultural dynamics that arise. It is an obvious but surprisingly little-considered notion that human beings tend do things for a purpose and are not often willingly determined by the function of the technologies around them.

As part of their argument for framing one’s view with a ‘historical, developmental perspective’ in order to consider the wider impacts of technological design, they hint at the interrelatedness of disciplines which are all too often kept rigidly separate:

“…the batteries and components of wireless devices contain arsenic, antimony, beryllium, cadmium, copper, zinc, nickel, lead, and brominated flame retardants – all toxic. Wireless devices, including cell phones, pagers, PDAs, pocket PCs, portable email readers, and mp3 music players, are being manufactured by the billions. Yet we have not designed or implemented adequate means of handling the wastes they release. Toxins leach into groundwater when wireless devices are discarded in landfills, and dioxins are created when they are incinerated. Used cell phones (and computers) are often donated to Third World countries, so the waste reaches its final resting place in the air and water of the poorest countries […] As designers, how do we respond to these realities?” (p13)

A flippant answer to that question might be that designers won’t or can’t respond. A more common answer might be that the market will respond as the economics evolve, or that politicians need to take a lead, or EUs and UNs and the like ought to co-ordinate their efforts and pass resolutions.

Splat

It occurs to me that one of the characteristics of the HE system, whether at the vocationally disposed end, or at the research-led antipode of the spectrum, is that there are highly specialised areas which carve out their own niches. Spaces, whether physical, intellectual or institutional, are ‘owned by subject specialists’. It is equally clear that the kinds of problems articulated by Kaptelinin and Nardi require intense collaboration between different domains of specialism.

It also seems to me that locating the domains of various activities in a much broader context would be an extremely effective way to expose consequences, and highlight otherwise hidden outcomes and impacts. If we were to try to define a more critical way of thinking, it would surely involve the ability to see beyond the local motives and imperatives of one’s discipline, corporate balance-sheet, market-place, or indeed, capitalist mode of production.

Furthermore, if one broadly accepts the constructivist approach to pedagogy, in which learning takes place most effectively in problem-based activities where theoretical underpinnings are synthesised in the solution of real challenges through concrete collaborative activity, then it seems like a no-brainer to suggest that the cross-domain problem outlined by Kaptelinin and Nardi be investigated and acted upon by groups of people who each want to learn about the various domains of knowledge which deal with those issues.

Hence I imagine undergraduates collaborating in all sorts of ways: leisure industry entrepreneurs commission product designers to work on devices, using materials suggested by chemists and conservation scientists, informed by health workers’ recommendations, backed up by gymnastic legal advice, with interfaces created by interaction specialists, whose lickable finish is ruthlessly marketed, while journalists investigate the vested corporate interests blocking new initiatives through recourse to IP law-suits, and political communicators and lawyers examine the necessary tactics to broker international agreements. I think it’d be a pretty cool first-year project.

Learning from learners who are releasing their potential

Now of course, the proposal from Knowsley Council looks very appealing on paper, but it would be interesting to know how those people on the ground, the teachers, pupils and parents, feel about the overhaul of their schooling system. It has not escaped our notice, to coin a phrase, that systematic changes and corporate plans can look great on paper, while the shop-floor workers are ignored, disenfranchised and demoralised. Learning from learners sounds excellent in principle, but can in practice mean a university manned by researchers more interested in their Experian RAE score than the tedious business of drawing the attention of beginners to their own ignorance.

However, learning from learners could mean something other than the traditional research culture which encourages its practitioners to secret their investigations away from spying eyes until the triumphant scoop in a high-impact journal. It could mean the entire spectrum of academics from freshers to post-docs working ‘vertically’ on the kinds of real problems that require the finest minds to collaborate at the fore-front of their fields away from the commercial and electoral imperatives which so restrict many social institutions. Stephen Downes argues that a good teacher teaches by demonstration and modeling. Don’t ask me what the information you need is; instead, let’s find the answer together, and hopefully I can share with you my experience of finding things out, just as you bring your new way of thinking to my entrenched old habits.

Of course, it all sounds very hard, co-ordinating such large-scale integration of disciplines, activities and objectives; that’s exactly why it should happen in universities while they still have a margin of space within the institution’s financial dependence on public funding. It would be so time-consuming! Yes, but so much more interesting than the equally time-consuming and endless repackaging of courses into credit frameworks, or renaming of the positions in the hierarchical management structures, or the most insidious and soul-destroying of time-wasting pursuits, re-applying for your own job. It could even have the long-term benefit of encouraging generations of people going out into profit-driven market-places, short-sighted corporations and self-serving political systems, who might even find the current strictures of self-interested and myopic businesses and governments quite absurd. It looks very like the difference between delivering vocational courses which speak to and perpetuate the status quo, and an education which could actually be transformational.

I was recently told that Interactive Media Production students write the most utopian dissertations. It wasn’t intended, I think, as an unsullied compliment. But I’m extremely pleased that they are, and very infectious too, thankfully.

Author: joe
Categories: CEMP, pedagogy, learning,
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D&AD recognise BU Interactive Media Production students with New Blood awards.

News on BAIMP at CEMP. Don't you love acronyms?

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News at CEMP

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news at CEMP

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CEMP News

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Biblipedia
 
A social web tool, allowing users to annotate books, create literature reviews, share notes, and find readings and notes by other users. A social scholarly bibliographical annotation tool. Funded by CEMP, Bournemouth University's Media School Centre of Excellence in Learning and Teaching Media Practice.

Author: joe
Categories: web:dev, CEMP, books, bibliography, learning-resource, pedagogy, literature, reading, scholarly, system:learningresource,
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My contribution to world peace (and the Interactive Media Portal at CEMP) today concerned Mark Thompson, the bell end big cheese at the BBC, making a speech to his own staff about how they need to create the BBC Web 2.0. Cue hype-fatigue, and jaded cynicism as good ideas get hijacked by PR speak. :(

Author: joe
Categories: BBC, CEMP, audience, participation,
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