Popular Culture and New Media

The Politics of Circulation

D. Beer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137270061
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This book explores the material and everyday intersections between popular culture and new media. Using a range of interdisciplinary resources the chapters open up various hidden dimensions, including objects and infrastructures, archives, algorithms, data play and the body that force us to rethink our understanding of culture as it is today.

1

Introduction: The Intersections of Popular Culture and New Media

Some very ordinary but nonetheless very important things happen as popular culture interweaves with new media forms. It is here, in these remediations, that we find some of the defining experiences of contemporary everyday life. These are mainstream experiences that raise important questions about the organisation, relations and ordering of culture. Millions of people on a global scale are engaging with culture via these new media forms as they enchant, distract, entertain, reveal and occupy. Indeed, the intersection of popular culture and new media is at the heart of many of the big social and cultural issues that we face today. From issues of freedom of speech and the right to privacy, through to the massive revenues of the so-called digital economy, to forms of mass communication, expression and moralising, and on to questions about the nature of contemporary social connections and senses of difference.

The intersections of popular culture and new media have become central in shaping our everyday lives and in ordering our routine experiences. In many ways it has now become almost impossible to think of popular culture outside of its new media infrastructures. Similarly, when thinking of new media, we should be thinking of the popular forms of culture that are a central part of their use and incorporation into everyday practice. Yet, despite their prominence and interconnectivity, we often think of them as disconnected entities. In this book I attempt to situate popular culture, and even culture more generally, within the new media context. It is suggested that our understanding of both is improved where we think of these apparently separate spheres together. Hence, this is a book about popular culture in new media. The story is told through a focus upon the new media infrastructures that afford what I describe here as the circulations of popular culture. The book elaborates these circulations by thinking across different scales or dimensions within the assemblage of popular culture and new media, starting with the way we conceptualise these infrastructures and objects and working through to the specifics of archives, algorithms, data play and the body. The book looks at a series of questions to understand these relations and data circulations. I ask how data accumulate as a result of the changing nature of objects and infrastructures. I then use the concept of archiving to ask how these accumulating data are ordered and organised. I ask how these accumulated data are made visible or utilised by automated algorithmic systems, and how these data are appropriated into practice through various types of play. And I then ask how the body can be placed into these data circulations to understand their corporeal affects. The hope is that this focus will reveal the nature of popular culture and new media today and will illustrate the importance of thinking about them together. Also, rather than starting with any crude definitions of popular culture or new media, the book is used to describe and elaborate the forms they take as they materially enmesh in different ways across the broader social and cultural context and within the instantiations of everyday life. The book then is concerned with how popular culture and new media intersect in the context of day-to-day life and in the circulations and infrastructures that underpin it. By bringing to the fore the material dimensions of everyday life, embodied in these infrastructures and data circulations, we are able to see how culture and media combine and fold into ordinary routine life.

As this indicates, this is a book about the way in which new media are transforming popular culture. More specifically, this book focuses upon the different ways that digital data circulate through popular culture; it is here that we can locate an underlying politics of circulation. It begins by looking at the infrastructures and objects that allow digital data to be generated through routine engagements with popular culture. It then uses this as a foundation for exploring the different flows, blockages and manipulations of these data through an examination of the part that archives, algorithms, data play and the body perform in such flows. As this suggests, the book moves from the pathways of data circulation to look at how these circulations operate, shift and reshape culture itself. This then is to focus upon what Adrian Mackenzie (2005) has called the ‘performativity of circulation’ and to locate it within popular culture. It is also to evoke Lee and LiPuma’s (2002) notion of ‘cultures of circulation’. Lee and LiPuma explore how circulation is a concept that might be explored in order to understand contemporary globalised culture from an economic perspective. They suggest that:

If circulation is to serve as a useful analytical construct for cultural analysis, it must be conceived as more than simply the movement of people, ideas, and commodities from one culture to another. Instead, recent work indicates that circulation is a cultural process with its own forms of abstraction, evaluation, and constraint, which are created by the interactions between specific types of circulating forms and the interpretative communities built around them. It is in these structures that we identify cultures of circulation.

(Lee and LiPuma, 2002: 192)

Lee and LiPuma describe in some detail the various conceptual origins of this position. But what I try to do in this book is to explore this notion of circulation as it materialises or becomes instantiated in the mediation of popular culture. At this point the circulations take on a very specific form; here the circulations I am referring to are circulations of data. This is something I have referred to elsewhere as the ‘social life of data’ (Beer and Burrows, 2013). The book attempts to update our understandings of contemporary culture by unpicking its everyday materiality in a changing socio-technological context. It uses various resources and materials to uncover the systems and flows that are now coming to shape and constitute what popular culture is, how it is organised, how it is disseminated and how tastes are formed.

The intention of this book then is to expand the analytical scope of studies of culture by adding a more material dimension to the debates, and by beginning to reveal how changing technological infrastructures require us to rethink and rework many of the assumptions we have about the organisation and relations of popular culture. Take, for example, the issue of cultural tastes and preferences. Cultural tastes are often understood to be a product of our social position, our friendship groups or taste communities, the subculture we might associate with and so on. We have little understanding though of how software algorithms are coming to shape cultural taste as they make recommendations to us and in so doing transform our cultural encounters (see Chapter 4 in particular). This book explores a number of such examples of recombinant cultural formations and how these data flows are channelled, directed, blocked and stimulated. Underpinning these explorations is the central argument that emergent circulations of data have now come to shape what popular culture is and how it is experienced. Data in various forms, often as metrics and other types of numeric measures (Burrows, 2012), now accumulate and feed back into the production, dissemination and consumption of culture in innumerable and often unseen ways. The book begins by showing how these digital by-product data are generated, it then moves towards an understanding of how these by-product data circulate back into culture with multifarious affects. I argue that these complex data circulations have become central to the forms that popular culture now takes, I also argue that popular culture is now defined by its recursive data flows and that this requires some careful consideration in order for us to fully understand what this means for culture more generally. My central aim will be to make clear that the study of contemporary culture requires an understanding of these circulations, the folding back of data into culture and the material infrastructures that make them possible.

A note on writing a book about new media and popular culture

Before starting though, I’d like first to highlight a problem that has shaped the direction and approach that this book takes. We know that writing a book is a relatively slow process, although I’m sure, like many aspects of our social and cultural lives, it has been the site of apparent speed-up (Gane, 2006; Tomlinson, 2007). This book is an old media format that moves somewhat slower than the types of media format and infrastructures that I am attempting to write about. This is not a problem in itself, it is likely to be helpful to balance rapid responses with slower more considered accounts of the phenomena under consideration (Atkinson and Beer, 2010). However, this is something that needs to be considered in the design and formulation of a book such as this. As you will no doubt have gathered, and as I discuss in far more detail in the following chapters, this is a book that in very general terms deals with the interfacing of popular culture and emergent or new media forms. The problem concerning the speed of publishing infrastructures is exacerbated in the case of this particular topic (Beer and Burrows, 2007). Popular culture and new media, particularly when in tandem, move together quite rapidly, plus they are defined by ephemerality, fragmentation and splintering. They are in flux, they are protean and mobile, transient and changeable, chaotic and ephemeral.

So, in short, the question is simply this, how can we productively write a book about popular culture and new media? This is a problem I’ve discussed and encountered in various forms in earlier pieces (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Beer, 2009a; Gane and Beer, 2008). The problem is one of keeping-up. Once something that is so changeable is written about then we might wonder what use or value is the text. We might argue that it is a historical document of that moment. This is fine, but it is only one moment, it is non-transferable, it is locked and immobile. There will undoubtedly be some of those moments in this book, moments when I will move towards a material application of the ideas that will induce a descriptive snapshot of something that is happening whilst the book is being written but which is unlikely to still exist when you, hopefully, read it.

In this context, it is pertinent to consider how it is possible to put together a book that might still be of potential use across temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. How can a book about popular culture and new media be of use to readers whenever or wherever it is that they encounter it? How can a book speak to the reader across the transformations that might be occurring? How can the book still be of some analytical use if the culture it encounters has the potential to change so radically? Of course it is impossible to completely resolve these questions. Yet there seems greater necessity in a book, than in a journal article, to keep these questions at the forefront of how the piece is written. In response, in this particular text, I have chosen to place the balance of the work towards a conceptual engagement with the issues. There remain some specific details and descriptions in the book: these are needed to ground the work in the materiality of the culture it attempts to engage with. These details are used though to open up a range of conceptual questions. Even where their cultural experiences may vary from those offered in these descriptions, it is hoped that the reader will find some mileage in the conceptual ideas that emerge from these moments of empirical engagement and the conceptual connections and emergences that they provoke. I hope that you will forgive any moments that seem out-of-date or culturally irrelevant at the time of reading, and I hope still further that you will find something in the conceptual ideas to disagree with or to apply to whatever it is that is happening when this text is being read. I would also add that there is a pressing need more generally for a renewed conceptual engagement with culture that updates and re-energises older concepts and that furnishes these with a creative new conceptual vocabulary (Gane and Beer, 2008).

Of course, at the heart of my concerns are the broader problems that might be associated with the endless pursuit of the ‘new’ (see Savage, 2009a) that has come to define much of the social sciences. Nowhere is this more acute, perhaps unsurprisingly, than in work on new media. Here it is expected that work aims to uncover what is happening, what are the new or fresh phenomena or how the world is changing in fundamental ways. Often this is told through the microcosm of specific web sites or new devices. I closed my previous co-authored book (Beer and Gane, 2008) by outlining some of the problems with the category of ‘new media’. First, much of the new media we discuss is often not all that new – such as the internet, mobile phones and laptops. This is not really a significant problem, continuity is important, but it just makes the prefix ‘new’ seem a bit strange, analytically awkward or even a little confusing. And, second, and closely related to this first point, is what the very concept of ‘new media’ forces the person analysing it to do. The problem is that it ties us into always looking for what is new at the expense of continuity, it forces us to ignore stable and established media, even those that have perhaps not received any critical or analytical attention, and to always be looking for the next development. This is the trap of newness that fits with the problems Savage (2009a) has outlined with regards to the drive to always be looking for the new and for change, rather than balancing this with a more considered and contextual outlook. I try to keep these in mind in this book and to think about continuity as well as change, to think about the historical development and fixity of the materialities of culture, as well as their reshaping, and to think contextually about media and culture as being a part of much broader social processes and forces. I also try to think of overarching and longer-term developments, those general trends that might be observed, rather than small changes to individual media in isolation.

With these issues in mind, the terms ‘new media’ and ‘popular culture’ become terms of convenience here that help to situate the work and to provide an indexical backdrop, but they are not limiting or defining in the directions in which the work develops – I treat these terms with some caution. So, as well as placing the balance towards a more conceptual engagement, the second solution I adopt is to find this broader social context by turning to work that provides such a vision from across the social sciences and humanities. I attempt to work here with materials that are not often used in understanding culture and media but which are of great value in revealing things about power, infrastructures, mobility, place, capitalism and the like. I turn to these to build a material and everyday vision of new media and popular culture in this wider and more situated context.

As a final note, and to further situate the text that follows, there has been much written over the last few years about the problems and opportunities that are presented to the social sciences and humanities by the profusion of vast amounts of digital data – or what is sometimes rather optimistically called ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford, 2012). There has been a good deal of prevaricating about what this means for social and cultural research. The focus has tended to be upon the scale of new forms of social data that are now out there, and how we might use such data to tell new types of stories about the social world. The worry has been over how we might access and cope with such a deluge of data, and even with how we might compete or demarcate our own analytical value in such a context of data, data play and predictive analytics (Abbott, 2000; Savage and Burrows, 2007). This is all fine and necessary, but I think we are missing something in these debates. We lack a developed understanding of what these new ‘digital’ social data are, how they form, how they accumulate, how they are organised, how they circulate and how they feed back into culture. In short, we know little about the data themselves or about the politics, infrastructures and agendas that underpin them. By focusing upon popular culture, as the site in which much of these data are generated and incorporated, we can begin to reflect upon these questions and in turn build a clearer picture of what these data are and how they are manifested. This is not a book about data and social research methods, but let me begin by suggesting that it can be read as a book that is intended to speak to some of these debates. It is here, in answering such a set of questions, that we might be able to make a distinctive contribution, a contribution that competes with the social and cultural analysis that is going on all around us (Beer and Burrows, 2010b). At the same time, this will also allow us to make more informed judgements when we come to respond to, critically analyse or work with such data. Let me put these debates to one side and focus now upon the substantive exploration of the book’s core themes.

The structure and content of the book

Following this brief introductory chapter, the book moves through a series of different areas or analytical dimensions that are located at the intersections of popular culture and new media. The book starts out from broad accounts of the infrastructures in which popular culture and new media come to intersect in everyday life, and then moves from this broad scale towards increasingly more localised forms of analysis. To give an opening impression of the different scales of analysis at stake, let me briefly now provide an overview of the content of the book and foreground some of its key arguments.

As mentioned, Chapter 2 begins by developing a broad conceptual account of the context in which the book is set. It takes objects and infrastructures as its focus and offers a foundational account of the key points of reference that open up the possibility for a more material engagement with culture. This chapter looks at the type of conceptual and analytical resources that might be used to analyse the everyday infrastructures within which popular culture and new media converge. It focuses upon the objects and infrastructures that facilitate the capture of these new forms of data (and in turn also then make their circulation possible). In order to do this, it draws upon a range of sources to work through from objects, to infrastructures and then to assemblages. The specific properties of contemporary objects and infrastructures are outlined here. The chapter turns to the work on urban infrastructures, and suggests that this work might be used in various ways to contextualise cultural analysis. Alongside this, the chapter also explores Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) assemblage theory and suggests that we might be able to use such analyses to understand the complex material assemblages of popular culture. The chapter explores how the infrastructures that form the backdrop to everyday life draw out new forms of data. It calls upon Dodge and Kitchin’s (2009) concept of ‘logjects’ as a mechanism for understanding how these mobilities are captured, sorted and relayed by the devices that we routinely deploy across the spaces of everyday life (we return to the combination of data, devices and bodies in Chapter 6). The notion of logjects is used to understand how data can be extracted from moments of cultural engagement. This chapter is used to argue for an appreciation of the material underpinnings that facilitate and constitute contemporary popular culture. It argues that in order to fully understand contemporary culture we need to develop a greater understanding of the systems and flows that shape what it is. The argument of Chapter 2 is that we need now to write these objects and infrastructures into cultural analysis. The chapter closes by reflecting upon the notion of cultural assemblages and how this notion might be used in developing cultural analysis. These observations provide the foundation and conceptual backdrop for the following chapters.

Sticking with this infrastructural and broad focus, Chapter 3 looks at the archive and archiving. It uses the concept of the archive for thinking through the organisation and ordering of culture. It is concerned with how new media archives are the site of everyday forms of cultural engagement. Once data has been generated and extracted, it is often categorised and archived. This chapter looks at the processes of archiving in popular culture, and suggests that this can be used to reveal the organisatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: The Intersections of Popular Culture and New Media
• 2. Objects and Infrastructures: Opening the Pathways of Cultural Circulation
• 3. Archiving: Organising the Circulations of Popular Culture
• 4. Algorithms: Shaping Tastes and Manipulating the Circulations of Popular Culture
• 5. Data Play: Circulating for Fun
• 6. Bodies and Interfaces: The Corporeal Circulations of Popular Culture
• 7. Conclusion: The Centrality of Circulations in Popular Culture
• References
• Index