alterity :: cultural studies

October 28, 2007

Susannah Stern: "Producing sites, exploring identities: Youth online authorship"

Stern, Susannah. (in press). "Producing sites, exploring identities: Youth online authorship." In (David Buckingham, Ed.) MacArthur Series on Digital Learning, Identity Volume.

Stern's article discusses how youth negotiate identity and audience as part of the process of blogging. Her article is completely in line with my findings on youth and SNS identity and audience negotiation. The article is extremely well-written with lots of good quotes.

For example, in her discussion of how blogs are announced, she points out that some teens promote while others feel that's arrogant or don't want people that they know to find them so that they have freedom. Yet, even those who promote often have people that they intentionally don't tell (p. 12). "Authors reconcile this apparent inconsistency by acknowledging their desire for their sites to be visited by others, but not at the risk of damaging their image or inviting trouble" (p. 12). Still, most see themselves as their primary audience, perhaps for self-reflection and perhaps for modesty.

Youth have strategic negotiations of audience, impression, self image, and content. (In other words, they're negotiating the same practices through their blogs that they do through embodied activity with friends and strangers.)

Quotes:

• p. 1: A curious mix of intrigue, disdain and apprehension continues to characterize many adults' sentiments about the creations young people place into the public eye on the Internet. Indeed, it is common to see journalists, educators and parents oscillate between promoting youth Internet expression and denouncing it in practically the same breath.
• p. 1: At least part of the general bewilderment about youth online expression stems from the fact that public attention is disproportionately paid to what teens disclose and produce online, such as the words, text, images and sounds that can be observed on the screen. Yet little consideration is typically given to understanding why young people express themselves in these ways or how their authorial experiences are meaningful to them.
• p. 7: A trend consultant recently quoted in the New York Times proclaimed that young people these days are "fabulous self-marketers... They see celebrities expressing their self-worth and want to join the party." Indeed, mainstream media (e.g. Entertainment Tonight, Us, People) divulge ever more detail about the lives of pop stars, and some ordinary people are elevated to the status of celebrity simply by their apparent willingness to provide such details about themselves (as seen on, for example, The Real World and Laguna Beach). Virtually all "real" and "wanna-be" stars have web pages and blogs, not to mention that many have fan sites devoted to them as well. In this context, some young people view personal sites as avenues to participate in, or respond to, a culture that valorizes publicity as an end in itself. Indeed, they feel that personal sites can serve as symbols to others and themselves that they belong to and in the public culture. This does not mean that young authors uncritically buy into the dominant messages about celebrity and pop culture that persist in mainstream media, but rather that many have recognized the cultural value of self-promotion and are motivated to publish online in consequence.
• p. 8: Despite the various reasons that motivate young people to create a personal site, it is only after having done so that many teens deliberate whether or not online expression is particularly valuable or potentially functional for them. This sequence of events appears to be different for adults, who generally reflect on the expected utility of online expression before commencing to author a personal site... In particular, nearly all of those who sustain these works for any length of time identify their utility for self-reflection, releasing pent-up feelings, and witnessing personal growth.
• p. 8: These [formal operational] skills allow individuals to "construct more abstract self-portraits, to distinguish between their real and ideal selves, and to begin the process of resolving discrepancies between multiple aspects of themselves."
• p. 10: Knowing -- and hoping -- that others will encounter their online expression is the fundamental appeal of publishing (literally "making public") personal sites for young authors... Adolescents have historically had few opportunities for public address, and, like other disenfranchised groups, they have received little encouragement toward this end. In fact, young people recognize from an early age that adults' voices are more culturally valued than their own. This uncomfortable reality is evidenced by the paucity of widely disseminated or published works authored by young people, by the adult designation of "appropriate" youth expression venues (e.g., diaries and bedrooms), and the stigmatization of many public youth expression practices (e.g., body art, graffiti).
• p. 11: Of course, many young authors today have never known a time when it was not possible to address potentially vast numbers of people online. Consequently, they rarely view their personal home pages and blogs as rebellious attempts to claim space in the way that, for example, urban graffiti artists did in the 1970s... Youth authors are distinctly aware of the relative shortage of spaces for them to publicize their thoughts and lives amidst an increasingly mediated culture. Yet simultaneously, they feel entitled to engage in public address... Youth authors' desire to address the public is not simply about actually being heard (or read) by many people, but also about feeling empowered by the mere prospect of mass reception.
• p. 11: Much has been made of the "blurring boundaries" between conceptions of public and private in the digital age. And young authors do, in fact, seem to have reconfigured these concepts in ways that pre-Internet folk find confusing. For example, people have traditionally considered their communication to be private when it is encountered exclusively by a limited and targeted individual or individuals. But some youth authors think of their communication as private when the people they know in real life do not see, hear, or read it, regardless of who else does.
• p. 11: But knowing that their personal sites are publicly accessible does not lead most young people to envision a broad audience for their online works. And, despite their recognition that virtually anyone with Internet access can pore over their sites, most adolescents, by and large, cannot imagine why "some random stranger" would be interested in doing so (unless, of course, he is a "creeper" – a stalker or paedophile – about whom most young authors tend to demonstrate awareness and dismissal in equal measure).
• p. 14: Adolescents of both sexes lament their inability to broach these kinds of issues [- homosexuality, violence, fear, and rejection -] in offline conversations with friends and family for fear of social or parental reprisals, and, given their age and relatively limited ability to travel freely, they can rarely locate many physical places where encounters with strangers regarding these topics would be possible or safe. Consequently, they are grateful that the Internet provides at least one non-private space to explore these personal issues.
• p. 15: These types of self-presentational practices might be described as "identity experimentations" in the sense that young people use their personal sites to test out different versions of their current and possible identities. Youth authors are, in fact, the first to acknowledge how they use their personal sites to broadcast aspects of themselves in order to see what kind of reception they receive.
• p. 16: One of the main reasons young people concern themselves so much with authenticity in their self-presentations on their personal sites is because, ultimately, they seek social validation from their audience.
• p. 19: We view our bodies as private space in public, just as we view our blogs. And yet, the relationship between private and public is quite blurred, particularly considering that the public square of the blogosphere is not ephemeral, but across space and time.

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November 11, 2004

Christopher Hill: "Levellers and True Levellers"

Hill, Christopher. "Levellers and True Levellers", from The World Turned Upside Down in Cultural Resistance: A Reader ed. Stephen Duncombe (2002): 17-34.

In Duncombe's Introduction to the Reader, he explains the significance of this reprint for this reader. "We open with an archetype: Christopher Hill's account of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers' seizure of St George's Hill in 1649. Laid out in the Diggers' actions and Winstanley's words are nearly all the possibilities and pitfalls of cultural resistance that will be played out for centuries to come - and explored in the readings that follow" (9).

The article itself is a compelling narrative of resistance brought on by frustration and exasperation during a time of starvation and severe class battles between the poor and the elite. The resistance is pre-empted by a note to Parliament which says, "Necessity dissolves all laws and government, and hunger will break through stone walls" (18). In short, desperate and hungry, a group of people choose to make common property what was privatized so that they could grow food. As it turns out, their efforts are futile since the land is barren, but "the symbolism of taking back as common land what had been enclosed (i.e. privatized) overshadows the negligible material value of planing corn in barren soil" (17).

Functionally, the article serves to introduce the reader to a political and socio-cultural situation in which resistance emerged. While the narrative is quite compelling, it is not necessarily the contents of it that are of value for my purposes, so much as the mindset.

In prefacing the article, Duncombe reminds us that the struggle exposed in this article is "archetypal, exhibiting many of the characteristics - pre-figurative symbolic protests, ideological appropriation of a master text, lack of strategy and organizational structure, spread of idea and ideal - that mark cultural resistance today" (17).

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November 1, 2004

Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies: two paradigms"

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: two paradigms" in Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72.

Synopsis:

Hall opens with a reminder that Cultural Studies emerged as a response to a particular state of affairs in Britain in the 50s, referencing early New Left agenda that positioned "'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies from the beginning" (58).

He then draws out two different notions of 'culture' that underscore Raymond Williams' Long Revolution:

• Def 1: Culture is "the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (59). This definition allows us to talk about democratization of culture.
• Def 2: Coming from an anthropological perspective, culture "refers to social practices" and "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (60). In other words, threaded through all social practices is culture which is the "sum of their inter-relationships" (60).

Hall then moves to discuss culture in Williams' text before broadly speaking of the historical situation around Cultural Studies that permitted this, referencing a structuralist and culturalist schism and moving to the likes of Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss to complicate the concept of culture from the schism. Hall suggests that culturalism "would correct for the hyper-structrualism ... by restoring the unified subject" while "discourse theory" (?poststructuralism?) "restores the decentered subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated" (70).

For Hall, Cultural Studies "thinks forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises" (72). Individually, neither will do but between them, they address the core issues of Cultural Studies.

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Posted by zephoria at 4:54 PM