Cyberpop

Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture

Sidney Eve Matrix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415649018
• eBook ISBN: 9781135506711
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Cyberpop is an analysis of cyberculture and its popular cultural productions. The study begins with a Foucaultian model of cyberculture as a discursive formation, and explains how some key concepts (such as 'virtuality,' 'speed,' and 'Connectivity') operate as a conceptual architecture network linking technologies to information and individual subjects. The chapters then each focus on a particular cyberfiguration, including Hollywood films (GATTACA,The Matrix), popular literature (William Gibson's Neuromancer, Scott Westerfeld's Polymorph), advertising for digital products and services (Apple Computer's '1984/McIntosh' campaign, AT&T's 'mLife' campaign), digital artworks (including virtual females such as Motorola's 'Mya' and Elite Modeling Agency's 'Webbie Tookay,' and work by visual artist Daniel Lee for Microsoft's 'Evolution' campaign), and video games (TombRaider). Each close reading illustrates the ways in which representations of digital lifestyles and identities - which typically fetishize computers and celebrate a 'high tech' aesthetic encourage participation in digital capitalism and commodity cyberculture. Matrix argues that popular representations of cyberculture often function as forms of social criticism that creatively inspire audiences to 'think different' (in the words of Mac advertising) about the consequences of the digitalization of everyday life.

1

Cyberpoetics as Methodology

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true.

—Donna Haraway¹

The visual, narrative, electronic, and multimedia cyberpop texts analyzed here can be loosely compared to what Donna Haraway calls “technofigurations”—defined as material and semiotic objects composed of complex relations of power and knowledge. Technofigurations are, according to Haraway, “instruments for enforcing meanings” around what gets to count as nature, technology, culture and community, subjectivity and embodiment.² Objects of “extraordinary density,” technofigurations are established by what Haraway calls “implosions” in the categories that structure Western thought—namely, the oppositional relationships of man to woman, organic to machinic, human to animal, and nature to culture.³ As composites of imploded binary oppositions, technofigurations combine fiction and fact, the literal and the tropic, the scientific and the artistic, as well as “technical, political, organic, and economic” elements (Haraway 1999: 50). Likewise, cyberpop texts combine fiction and fact, escapist fantasy with cautionary tales, and contain imaginative educational content that increases public technoscientific literacy. Though Haraway focuses on technofigurations from the cybernetic life sciences (i.e., the gene, the stem cell, and the fetus), her analytic method of redescription is particularly valuable for the present study because Haraway insists on appreciating the complex intertextuality and ambiguity of her objects of analysis. Like Haraway’s technofigurations, cyberpop media are densely coded texts, compatible with digital capital and implicated in dominant discourses and arrangements of power while simultaneously retaining the trace of a nostalgic cyberpunk feel, a subtle countercultural edginess.

Haraway’s method for analyzing technofigurations involves a critical reading of their intertextuality. By “teasing open” the “sticky economic, technical, political, organic, historical, mythic and textual threads” that embody technofigurative objects, Haraway is able to trace or “redescribe” the relations of power between them (1994: 68). Inevitably, Haraway suggests, technofigurations are “thicker than they first seem,” and have the uncanny ability to “swing both ways” (1985: 108).⁴ Inspired by this work, the current book analyzes and redescribes a collection of cyberfigurative popular media (or cyberpop), tracing the intertextual web or “sticky threads” of meaning therein to the rules of formation in cyberculture. We know that films, novels, and other popular cultural production media transmit conceptual frameworks (discourses, values, ideas, and knowledge) to the general public, and in the case of cyberpop, about the place of information and communication technologies in our lives. The discourses embedded in digital culture’s artwork and advertisements have material effects, initiating trends, influencing who produces and uses technology, and who recognizes themselves as a computerized subject or member of and participant in technoculture. Cyberpop advertisements and artwork operate to enculturate subjects and play a role in the development of digital literacy, as they introduce and popularize technical terms, compuslang, and marketing buzzwords into the fabric of everyday life (such as “connectivity,” “flexibility,” and “interface”).⁵ As a result, cyberpop cultural productions influence how we see and imagine technology, others, the future, and ourselves by transmitting (a limited range of) representations about how these might look in the digital age.

CYBERPOP AND PARADOX

Unfortunately, what technology gives with one hand, it often takes away with the other.

—Michael Heim⁶

Mass media productions including cyberpop can be expected to reflect the digital capitalist culture that produces them, even as they serve up imaginary futural scenarios of digital life. Films like The Matrix and I Robot and magazines like Yahoo! Internet Life and Fast Company encourage consumers to participate in digital capitalism and commodity culture. As Manuel Castells suggests, the distinctions between advertising, information, and entertainment are blurred in cybercultural productions, and the difference between criticism of and conformity to the status quo of digital capitalism is likewise undermined or blurred.⁷

The ambiguity inherent in cyberpop media is due to its paradoxical relationship to dominant configurations of power and knowledge in digital culture. Oftentimes critical of the digitizing of everyday life, the mass media of cyberculture routinely encourage their audience to think carefully about which products and services to consume, and slightly less often they encourage the public to reflect on their implication in the manufacture and maintenance of infotech culture. The target spectators for many of the examples of cyberpop analyzed in this book claim membership in discourse communities that are cutting edge, or countercultural, yet at the same time connected, involved, and implicated in the expansion and operation of the digital status quo. For this reason, cyberpop is sometimes characterized by an ironic or tongue-in-cheek tone, poking fun at social trends while at the same time promoting, romanticizing, upgrading (reinventing), and mythologizing them.

In order to be intelligible to their audience, cybercultural media productions negotiate between “revolutionary” ideas and existing (and established) cultural conventions. For example, as Sherry Turkle explains in Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1997), the most compelling popular cybercultural productions convey theories composed of “ideas that capture the imagination of the culture at large, [which] tend to be those with which people can become actively involved.”⁸ Thus, in order to be successful, films such as X-Men or Minority Report must tap into discourses about technology and humanity that appeal to and are familiar to a mass public audience while at the same time delivering messages about the importance of diversity, uniqueness, individuality, and innovation. This negotiation of the “popular” and the “personalized,” and the delicate coding of the “new” and the “familiar” is configured in such a way as to encourage the active participation of subjects in the construction of digital lifestyles. Cyberpop cites the regulatory norms of digital culture as they are manifested in its key concepts (for example, speed, intangibility, and connectivity). These citational practices, as Judith Butler explains, are complicit with the dominant cultural order but (perhaps paradoxically) also attempt to innovate, recreate, upgrade, or revise existing relations of power that constitute the status quo (Bodies 15).

Katherine Hayles describes this process in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) as part of the “irresolvable ambiguity of cyberculture,” wherein “for every solution it offers, it raises a new problem; for every threat that erupts, new potentialities also arise.”⁹ Hayles concludes that the point is not to resolve ambiguities, but, instead, to take pleasure in the “new moves” and “fields of play” they make possible (Seductions 307). Cyberpop media utilize postmodern strategies and aesthetic techniques such as irony or pastiche, seeking to defamiliarize the spectator, inspire critical reflection and analysis, or invite public debate about the increasing computerization of everyday life. At the same time, cyberpop’s key concepts and their underlying discourses encourage the expansion of computer networks, digitization, and global capitalism. This is accomplished by creatively illustrating how the latest technologies can be incorporated into existing cultural processes and individual lifestyles to upgrade them for the digital age. In order to accomplish this, cyberpop references existing social arrangements while concurrently projecting revised and often innovative representations of culture, subjectivity, knowledge, and power—which may or may not be “new and improved.”

At the heart of cyberpop, then, is a paradox begging to be redescribed, tracing the intertextual mix of the “old” and the “new,” the “insider” and “outsider,” and the “complicit” and “resistant” discourses therein in order to discern the ideologies and politics of the sticky network of codes transmitted by these digital cultural productions. As Zillah Eisenstein has commented, new media have the ability to “complexly rewire” preexisting racial, sexual, and gendered inequities.¹⁰ Oftentimes, however, these recycled discourses reinscribe conventional binary logics (which privilege the masculine over the feminine, the natural over the artificial, the real over the simulated, and the human over the machine) while, at the same time, they encourage and even facilitate the implosion or shifting of these dualisms into high-tech hybrid forms. Haraway’s method of redescription is designed to “make it impossible for the bottom line [of meaning] to be one single statement” (1985: 105). Multiple bottom lines require an analytic of at least “double vision,” Haraway suggests, in order to grasp how the networks of power, knowledge, and subjects operate together to maintain, structure, and produce a technoscientific culture (1999: 38).

ANALYZING PARADOX IN CYBERCULTURE

As these technologies emerge in social space the great political question will be what forms of cultural articulation they promote and discourage.

—Mark Poster¹¹

The importance of cyberpop media lies not only in the representations they transmit and popularize, but also in the “new modes of relation and perception they impose, which change traditional [social] structures” and relationships.¹² As Felix Guattari has suggested, “today’s information and communication machines do not merely convey representational contexts, but also contribute to the fabrication of new assemblages of enunciation, individual and collective.”¹³ In order to consider the social and political effects of cyberpop on cultural formations and subjectivities, it is necessary to trace their encodings (the ways in which these visual and textual forms reflect and support, criticize and upgrade existing and dominant cultural values, relations of power, and the rules of formation in cyberculture), but also to consider the processes by which they are decoded (consumed by their audience). In much of the existing literature on digital capital and its political economy, the active role of the consumer as a user and producer of cyberculture is undertheorized, in part because of the use of “repurposed” analytical models that were not designed with digital and new media in mind. I will consider briefly two of the more popular versions of this repurposed or borrowed analytic before further explaining my own approach to cyberpop cultural productions.

1. Cyberpop As Tools of Mass Deception: Repurposing the Frankfurt Schools’ Culture Industry Model

In their work Times of the Technoculture, Kevin Robins and Frank Webster view popular SF/sci-fi films and e-commerce management literature as commodities of the culture industry, which (as Adorno and Horkheimer argued in 1944) serve to enforce conformity and encourage passivity rather than promote the development of critical consciousness and active participation.¹⁴ From this perspective, cybercultural productions support a form of mass deception and impede the development of autonomous, independent individuals. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis (repurposed by Robins and Webster), technoscientific and computer technologies and associated popcultural media “parade as progress […] as the incessantly new,” but are instead “a disguise for an eternal sameness” (Adorno). The discourses of technoculture, according to Robins and Webster, encourage subjects to be satisfied with the status quo and to consume entertainment that is tantamount to what Adorno called “prescribed fun” and a source of fleeting satisfaction.

Nowhere in Robins and Webster’s analysis of the social and political effects of the information and communication technology revolution (they prefer the term “evolution”) do the authors consider modes of reception or consumption that allow for criticism or creativity vis-à-vis dominant cultural values, nor is there a distinction made between media (such as television vs. the Internet). Moreover, in their exclusive focus on computer technologies as tools of mass deception, Robins and Webster forgo an inquiry into the complex process whereby the narratives attached to computer technologies are decoded. As a consequence, this work ignores the ambiguous, paradoxical, or contradictory relationship of cyberpop media to digital capital. It also disallows for the possibility of a critical or resistant, media and computer-savvy audience, while at the same time disregarding the role of the consumer in the production of the values and narratives associated with computer and communication technologies. Instead, Times of the Technoculture documents the role that information and communication technologies play in the “intensification and reconfiguration” of existing relations of production and consumption.¹⁵ It appears that Robins and Webster see nothing new in “new media.”

However, to observe that cyberculture and its communications and information technologies are compatible with the operation of an existing capitalist economy is, according to Hakim Bey, painfully obvious and predictable, even a truism. “Isn’t it a cliché,” Bey asks rhetorically, “to point out that any communication medium is analogous or mirror like in relation to the dominant social paradigm that coevolves with it? How could there exist a communications medium outside the totality it represents?”¹⁶ Moreover, as R. L. Rutsky observes, although it is “pointless to deny that techno-culture and multinational capitalism are deeply imbricated in one another,” it is an exercise in reductionist thinking to assume that digital cultural productions are simply reflections or celebrations of “capitalist instrumentality.”¹⁷ The current book suggests that what is new and important about cyberpop is the way that it remediates, repurposes, and redelivers “old” ideas in innovative forms, upgraded versions, and new remixes—and close attention is paid throughout to the complicated and media-savvy portrait of the self-consciously implicated and critical, skeptical audience/consumer that is assumed and promoted by these texts.

2. Seduction of the Interface: Repurposing Debord’s Spectacles and Baudrillard’s Simulacra

Another popular repurposing maneuver effected by theorists and critics of cyberculture involves borrowing the concepts of Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard concerning spectacles and simulations, in order to suggest that there is nothing new about new media forms. For example, when in an interview Baudrillard is asked, “What potential do the new technologies offer?” he responds:

I don’t know much about this subject. I haven’t gone beyond the fax and the automatic answering machine. I have a very hard time getting down to work on the screen because all I see there is a text in the form of an image which I have a hard time entering. With my typewriter, the text is at a distance; it is visible and I can work with it. With the screen, it’s different; one has to be inside; it is possible to play with it but only if one is on the other side, and immerses oneself in it. That scares me a little, and Cyberspace is not of great use to me personally.¹⁸

Despite the fact that Baudrillard readily admits he is not technoliterate, he is regarded as perhaps the central postmodern theorist of technoculture and new media. His early writing on simulation and the theory of simulacra is regularly repurposed by Baudrillard himself and his followers to analyze the cultural and political effects of computerized telecommunications media. Having not ventured “beyond the fax,” Baudrillard remains confident that his media and popculture analyses are applicable to the study of the cultural impact of virtual reality technologies and computer-mediated communication.

In Baudrillard’s version, when the user is before the screen, “no contemplation is possible.”¹⁹ The user is configured within computerized screen culture; in order to “enter” and “play” with the realm of virtuality, the spectator must become immersed in it, engaged in a dynamic of interactivity—but the cost of that experience is their critical vision. Since Baudrillard admittedly has “a hard time entering” into the activities of computer culture—when he looks at the screen, all he sees is “text in the form of an image”—he opts to turn this techn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cyberpoetics as Methodology
• Chapter 2: Cyber-Commerce and Computerized Subjectivity
• Chapter 3: Technomasculinity and GenderBLUR in The Matrix
• Chapter 4: GATTACA, Gender and Genoism
• Chapter 5: Cyberfemininity: Pixel Vixens
• Chapter 6: Technoeroticism and Interactivity: The Lara Croft Phenomenon
• Chapter 7: Dangerous Mixtures and Uncanny Flexibility: The Shape-Shifter
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index