Differences & Repetitions

Fred Vogelstein over at Wired has been turning out some great material about Facebook over the last couple of weeks. His first piece, “Great Wall of Facebook,” and his follow-up interview with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg are compelling in what they portend for the company’s future.

The gist of the matter is this: Facebook began as a social networking site, and indeed it very much remains that. However, it’s also in the process of re-imagining itself as a new type of search engine, one that prioritizes human social connections over abstract computer algorithms. And it’s a move expressly designed to pit Facebook against its archrival, search engine giant Google:

Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn’t just going strong, it has evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet—its structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google’s algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg’s vision, users will query this “social graph” to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

Two things are intriguing to me about Facebook’s foray into search. First, I’m fascinated by Zuckerberg’s rhetoric. He describes Google as a tool of the “surveillance society” — as if Facebook had no interest whatsoever in paying attention to what its users are doing. He also describes Google’s approach to search as “top-down,” suggesting not-so-implicitly that Facebook’s approach is more bottom-up. Why is it that every technology company is the authentic champion of grassroots democracy until the next new hotshot comes along? It’s getting old…really, really old. Didn’t Apple beat that one to death with Microsoft?

More compelling to me is Vogelstein’s discussion of Facebook and Google’s respective philosophies of search. Prior to reading his article and interview, it hadn’t dawned on me that there could be such radically different search architectures — much less that there would be a struggle over them. And that make these times we’re currently living in all the more interesting.

There’s a lovely moment near the beginning of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, in which the late philosopher shows how living creatures used to be classified prior to the advent of the modern kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species system. There was a radically different order of things, as it were, and reshuffling that order involved a tremendous redistribution of power throughout society.

Perhaps it’s overblown to pitch the impending Facebook-Google showdown in such world-historical terms. All the same, the struggle over how best to bring order to knowledge and information isn’t just about one company’s desire to triumph over another — it’s about how, where, and among whom power will be dispersed in society.

…Lawrence Lessig, responding to Kevin Kelly, explaining why “free culture” is liberal-capitalist, and not socialistic:

http://www.lessig.org/blog/

The comments are especially interesting and fruitfully extend the debate. For my part, I’m not convinced that socialism is “coercive” as much as it is “compulsive,” but really that’s a side matter….

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P.S. The debate continues. Here’s the link to the latest update from Lessig on free culture, liberalism, and socialism.

One of the defining attributes of the late age of print is the erosion of old publishing certainties. Among them is the notion that the free circulation of book content leads inevitably to lost sales. Another is the belief that strong, proprietary systems are the best way for publishers and authors to secure value in their intellectual properties. Maybe it’s too soon to let go of these notions completely. It’s fast becoming clear, however, that they cannot be taken for granted any longer.

There are two ways of responding to the erosion of old certainties like these. One way is to dig in your heels, hoping to keep familiar ground from shifting under your feet. The other is to allow the erosion to expose opportunities that may have been buried underfoot all along. With the latter you risk coming up empty, but with the former you risk something worse — inertia.

I’m pleased to report that my publisher, Columbia University Press, isn’t one of those digging in its heels. It’s taken the bold step of releasing The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book. You can download the e-edition by clicking here. The file is a “zipped” .pdf of the complete contents of Late Age, minus one image, for which I was (ironically) unable to secure electronic publishing rights.

I thank Columbia University Press for releasing my book electronically under a Creative Commons license. In doing so, it’s embraced the extraordinary spirit of openness that is beginning to flourish in the late age of print. Mine is the first book the Press has decided to release in this way. Here’s hoping that many more will follow.

1944 was the year in which the world we inhabit today was born.¹

I arrived at this hypothesis in the course of the conversations I’ve had with the bright group of graduate students enrolled in the seminar I’m teaching this term, “The Social Matrix of Mass Culture.” The class is about many things, but lately its focus has been the “countercultural” response to mass culture in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. (For more on this theme, check out this post from a few months back.)

So why 1944? It was the year in which two path-breaking books were published–one from the left, the other (ostensibly) from the right. The first was Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The second was Friedrick von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Though operating at different ends of the ideological spectrum, and though arriving at rather different conclusions, both share a surprising amount of common ground. Of particular concern for this odd group of authors are the social, economic, and political problems stemming from centralized mass production. It’s no surprise that the horrors of Nazi Germany loom large in both works.

What’s fascinating about Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Road to Serfdom is that they are also touchstone works in the “revolt” against mass culture. Put differently, in rejecting centralized mass production, Horkheimer/Adorno and Hayek collectively helped set the stage for the highly individuated mass culture that has emerged today–a culture supposedly populated no longer by estranged “cultural dopes” but by “active” and “empowered” consuming subjects.

Clearly there’s much more to say about the consonance of Dialectic and Road. More to come anon as I continue gathering my thoughts.

¹ Clearly it’s hyperbole to say “the world”; really I mean, the United States.

Over the last year or so I’ve been thinking a great deal about countercultures, or more specifically, the countercultural legacies of the 1960s. What first prompted me to do so was Fred Turner’s outstanding book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which I blogged about here back in January 2008.

Since then I’ve had the good fortune of reading a number of books, all of which explore the persistence of countercultural practices and sensibilities from the 1960s. These include: Preston Shires’ Hippies of the Religious Right: From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell (Baylor U.P., 2007), a wonderful book that I just finished, about the meteoric rise of evangelical Christianity in the late-20th century and its roots in the 1960s counterculture; and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Collins Business, 2004), a provocative look into how an anti-establishment, “rebel” ethos has come to pervade what used to be called mass culture.

Most recently I broached Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997). I’d been putting it off for some time, mostly because I know Frank looks unfavorably on cultural studies (my primary intellectual identification). Rightly or not, he claims that cultural studies, in its concern for “resistant” readings and uses of mass cultural artifacts, mis-recognizes the politics of culture. Since the late 1950s, Frank shows, advertisers have been touting not only their own anti-establishment sensibilities but infusing them into their advertising campaigns. Advertising, he argues, is a principal–and unusually effective–site where the critique of mass culture has been waged. Of course, this critique exists not for the sake of tearing down “the system,” as it were, but rather for encouraging ever more consumption vis-à-vis product and consumer differentiation.

Frank may caricature cultural studies, but the larger point he makes is a compelling one. The so-called “creative class” about whom Richard Florida has written so much in recent years has its origins in the late-1950s and early-1960s, when (in the case of Frank’s book) upstart ad men and women lashed out against the stultifying organizational and scientific structures within which they worked.

But what’s also intriguing to me is how it wasn’t simply advertising per se that led the way. Indeed, there was something of a countercultural, “creative revolution” happening in any number of other industries at the same time. Last summer I blogged about Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry, Men of Tomorrow. I didn’t realize it then, but Jones tells a story similar to that of Thomas Frank. Before the 1960s or 70s, most comic book companies employed writers and artists whom they treated like hacks. A good deal of the material was formulaic and dictated from on high, and the “creatives” were meant merely to execute that vision. And though I’m less familiar with the music industry, I gather that there’s a similar story to be told there as well. If Tom Hanks’ silly little movie That Thing You Do! (1996) is any indication, record producers of the 1950s pretty much ran the show, subordinating talent to what they knew–or thought they knew–they could package and sell. Is it any surprise that, at the end of the film, the character Jimmy (Jonathan Schaech) breaks from Mr. White’s (Tom Hanks) Playtone record label to pursue a successful solo career making serious rock ‘n roll? He’s the film’s embodiment of the creative revolution that was about to happen in music.

I’m not sure where all this reading is going, honestly. Nevertheless, all of the books I’ve mentioned suggest that we now live, as it were, in the long shadow cast by the 1960s. That makes me wonder: what, if anything, will be the unique contribution of this moment in which we’re now living? How does one create, let alone “rebel,” when the dominant ethos is already “anti-establishment” and throw-out-the-rules “creative?”

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Perhaps the only thing more daunting than squaring off in front of the United States Supreme Court is having to go head-to-head with Stephen Colbert on his television talk show. Lawrence Lessig handles things beautifully in discussing his latest book, Remix: Making Art & Culture Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008). Bravo, Professor Lessig.

Be sure to check out Lessig’s Blog for some creative remixes of the segment.

P.S. Happy 2009, y’all!

My friend Dustin Howes alerted me to this recent Q&A with author Seth Godin, who talks about the future of the book biz. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: What’s the most important lesson the book publishing industry can learn from the music industry?

A: The market doesn’t care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there’s even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, “if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don’t pirate stuff cause it’s convenient and cheap…” I’m a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music. How are you betting?

I’m so pleased to hear someone else saying to the book industry, “lower your prices to generate interest and increase sales.” This was my basic argument when I blogged last June about the Amazon e-reader, Kindle, and the possibilities it opened up for the book biz to rethink its pricing strategies.

The rest of Godin’s Q&A is definitely worth checking out. He has lots of interesting material there on “content” versus “book” publishing (the latter he refers to as “the life and death of trees”), as well as on the importance of publishers servicing, rather than simply making money from, their markets.

Here’s hoping his thoughts don’t fall on deaf ears.

Last May I posted a short snippet of a paper I was working on to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. It was called “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing.” The title summarizes the principal focus of the piece. Essentially I wanted to ask: why hasn’t the field of cultural studies given its instruments of scholarly communication–journals especially–more critical scrutiny?

I was encouraged by the many comments and questions I received in response to the two pairs of paragraphs and tables that I had posted online. I kept plugging away at “Acknowledged Goods” into the summer and finished a draft sometime in late June. I’ve been meaning to post the completed piece to D&R^W, but unfortunately other responsibilities have gotten in the way.

Until now, that is. I’ve finally managed to get “Acknowledged Goods” properly formatted for the wiki, so at long last you can read the whole essay by clicking here. Since this is a longer and much more nuanced version of the work I posted back in May, I’m still very interested in hearing your feedback. Indeed, “Acknowledged Goods” remains a work in progress, so your comments, questions, and concerns will only help as I keep tweaking the piece.

I hope that you enjoy “Acknowledged Goods” and, more important, that it spurs you to action. Academic journal publishing is at a critical crossroads right now, and cultural studies ought to weigh in on its present and future directions.

From yesterday’s Wired Magazine Blog:

[Digital services provider] Comcast came clean with the Federal Communications Commission late Friday, detailing how it throttled and targeted peer-to-peer traffic — maneuvers it has repeatedly denied….

By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast monitored the content of its customers’ internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections in violation of network neutrality rules. The selective blocking of file sharing traffic interfered with users’ rights to access the internet and to use applications of their choice, the commission said.

Beyond Comcast’s aggressive anti-net neutrality shenanigans, the straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the company’s unilateral decision to remove Soap Net from my cable lineup. (Yes, I follow General Hospital….) One day it was there, the next, it was gone. Oh–and have I mentioned what I pay for cable and internet services in Indiana?

You can read the full story from Wired here.

From Monday’s BBC Entertainment News:

Warner sues over Puttar movie
Warner Bros says it wants to protect intellectual property rights.

Harry Potter maker Warner Bros is suing an Indian film company over the title of upcoming film Hari Puttar – A Comedy Of Terrors, according to reports.

Warner Bros feels the name is too similar to that of its world famous young wizard, according to trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.

With thanks to Simon Frost at the University of Southern Denmark for passing on the story to me, the complete version of which you can read here. I’m in the midst of finishing up a project right now, but some commentary on the suit should follow from me soon, hopefully.