Upload
salvador-montanes-ramirez
View
22
Download
0
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
Cultural Theory & Popular Culture – Term 3
The dawn of cultural industries
To a new way of making things
Salvador Montañés Ramírez – 11063750
Abstract
The out-of-date situation and behavior of the so called cultural industries, in terms
of copyright abusing, high prices and market determination of the “production” of
cultural “products” –equiparated by these terms to consumer products, which we
understand are not the same thing– leaves a dark scenario for both creators and
readers/listeners/viewers.
As a solution that comes out by the steady system’s own pressure, we propose in
this work the unified spread of an alternative contestatary way of developing cultural
creation and reading/listening/viewing. Our proposal, already in growth process, is a
culture apart from the institutions and the markets and based in free creativity, free
access and free sharing as a response to an industry/market that leave those who really
enjoy every form of cultural activity unsatisfied.
Key words: culture, cultural industries, open access, cultural activity
Most of the references used in this work have been found in the internet and
downloaded for free. May this act serve as defense of the idea of free access and free
sharing of culture and information present in this work.
2
– S. Montañés
The dawn of cultural industries
Cultural industries nowadays
“Britney Spears, American Idol, Desperate Housewives … The material that
passes for popular culture has never been so vapid. Indeed, it’s almost too easy to
ridicule this stuff sold to viewers and listeners the world around. There is no
enlightenment involved in the merchandise presented to us by car companies, banks,
and other commercial failures whose primary intent is to convince us that our future
involves us spending our money on their products. Indeed, there is not even a pretense
or supposition that there should be any enlightenment in the equation. So, we spend our
time watching and listening to these entertainment products while we work out how
we’ll get that new car shown to us every ten minutes during the commercial break.”
– Rob jacobs, 2009
With the rise of the internet and the new ways of gathering and sharing
information and cultural items –making a difference from cultural products, name given
by the dominant industries and market system, which carries a concrete way of creation
(production) and spreading (distribution) and limits sharing, as well as compares a
cultural item’s life and usage to a consumer product’s– a response to the mainstream
industries is being developed.
The behavior of cultural industries, following the capitalist system way of action,
has incurred into injustices with the readers/listeners/viewers and with the creators.
Hector Fouce, profesor of the Complutense University of Madrid, collects in his
article Tecnologías y medios de comunicación en la música digital. De
la crisis del mercado discográfico a las nuevas prácticas de escucha
(2010) complaints from different groups of young spanish people
stating that they would not download music for free if the prices of
the CDs or the downloadable songs were not so high.
3
Potts, Cuningham, Hartley and Ormerod, authors of Social network markets: a
new definition of the creative industries (2008), talk about cultural industries as
operating within an market economy based on social networks. With this, they do not
necessarily mean to talk only about social media recently developed in the last years of
the internet’s life but to both buying and producing decisions being based on
interactions with others and their decisions, whose influence is usually decisive,
compared to price signals for other common industries.
We can translate this into two implicit conclusions:
In what concerns to consumer decision-making, if it is influenced by decisions
and opinions of other consumers around the decision-maker, that decision is to a large
extent subject to influence from marketing campaigns and trend-setting.
This applies to the point where a marketing campaign can be truly decisive, and
even the only factor to influence a purchase decision on a CD record or a book. You
only need good distribution and mediatic omnipresence, which present panorama of
media concentration on few owners’ hands makes quite easy to accomplish (Mander,
2004).
Ron Jacobs (2009) wonders wether “the culture we absorb influence us or do we
influence it”, and although he admits the difficulty of answering such a question, it fits
on the thinking line we have drawn in the previous paragraph. Jacobs uses as an
example TV series “24” and what he considers its predecesor, 007 films, stating that
such programs with their obvious political background contribute to shape our vision of
who the enemies of the state are but also how powerful the state can be, in order to
spread hate in the first case and fear in the latter.
In the case of producers, just as (in the end) market environment influences
consumer decision-making, market dictates as well what is to be produced, steadily
through time since three or four decades and with proper adaptation to modern changes.
One example for that might be how sex and provocation turned out to be a very
effective way of selling records for music producers and creators in the industry (we can
say) back in the 80’s and still keeps up today; but, at the same time, being a single
phenomenon taking place through so many years, we have been able to see how it has
4
become more and more explicit as years passed. It would also be the case for violence
and sex as well in commercial film-making. Always there and always pushing harder.
Morbidity has always sold, but there has never existed more than nowadays.
Copyright issue is a debate that not long ago fulfilled news media around the
world, with events like the shut down of Megaupload by the FBI that followed the law
proposals SOPA, ACTA and PIPA in the USA.
For creators already inside the music industry (if not created directly by it) the
defense of copyright supposes a kind of auratization –following Walter Benjamin’s
(1936) concept– of their work, a feeling of superiority from where they cannot (or do
not want to) see the injustices of their work’s consumption by the public. We could
easily state this within the market economics to which marketing strategies serve.
Actually in the whole economical panorama, everything from smallest to biggest
consumer products are covered with an aura that goes beyond the use of any of them.
In the case of the so called cultural products, and concretely musical products, the
work is first deauratized when it is turned into another consumer product, but then it is
auratized again in that role of consumer product, surrounded by a marketing campaign
in charge of that. In the end, that is what advertising does: associating intangible
qualities to material products.
But in any case this would be nothing but a mask behind which economical
interests lie, specially those of distributors and record labels, who squeeze revenues
from sells taking the biggest part; only that in the case of millions-seller, the part that is
left for the creators is substancialy greater that in the case of less-known works.
Just like Benjamin said that the nazis intended to “aestheticize politics” and
“politicize art” (Romero, 2004) to develop the regime’s values to the people, culture
derived from cultural industries/markets suposes a reflection of political values as well
as economic interests from governments, which directly lead to those of big
corporations, an important part in global power’s ownership. In the end another
reflection of the opression on the people and the will to keep them entertained (few
5
“cultural products” go beyond that) while those who rule us keep on doing whatever
they want with total freedom.
* * *
By now we can state that culture produced from institutionally supported (and that
includes the markets, closely related to governments every organisms and entitites is
unavoidly susceptible of political domination.
The solution is a culture born apart from the institutions and markets.
The internet, social media and web 2.0 allows culture sharing in a way that never
took place before, but the internet itself (and the access to it) is ruled by the
governments, that can apply political restrictions to it if needed; and by the market,
since internet access is controlled by telephon companies and all the industries that
make the technology possible.
We must not forget as well the influence of music companies and organisations
(from producing labels to writers and performers themselves), which could eventually
act like a strong lobby, if they saw their business model threatened, even if its because
of a perfectly legal way of creating and sharing that has nothing to do with music
industry except for its rejection.
Anyway, we are not talking of burning buildings or assaulting the congress. What
we want to propose here is a paralel “culture” which uses the tools available –inevitably
from the system: there is no alternative internet– and develops in a broad way cultural
items’ open access and creation apart from market dictates, promoting sharing and
creation without economic interests, finding the true motivation of “making” culture:
culture itself.
To a new way of making things
What should this new way of “making culture” be like? Now we are going to try
and state some main points that we could see as recquirements for the development of
6
paralel cultural activity.
No economical interest: the motivation issue
Economical interests are what mostly pervert any activity within a capitalist
market-based system. From this work we strongly state that no work of culture
should pursue economic benefit as the main purpose. Cultural work cannot be
treated as current job –actually no current work should– since it is meant to
achieve an objective in another terms totally apart from the economical.
Cultural works are meant to inform people, to make them wonder, to
express an idea and share it, or to support social and political iniciatives (as some
examples) but we understand that the pursuit of benefits as an objective and not a
way, leads to a corporate-like kind of activity and as we have already seen that
supposes nothing but harm to culture and its conversion to a money-making
machine like any other consumer industry.
In other words, the activity could be the aim itself, or it could pursue social
revenues (from a political way as we said to a purely entertaining purpose).
Money as the main (and at all costs) aim can lead people or even events
from the popular culture panorama to act under and for companies’ images which
in pursuit as well of the greatest benefits possible guide themselves following
audience demand and trends in the market.
Quality creation with shoestring resources
Staying aside of the main industries and its business model (and the
restrictions it carries) involves a clear disadvantage: not having the budget a big
record label or its mother entertainment company or any sponsor would give to
you in exchange of your freedom for some years.
But once again, modern times are here to save us: now it is easier than ever
to produce and publish from home.
7
Maybe the most difficult fields to carry this on were visual arts (sculpture,
paint) and music. In the first case it is hard to find materials, space and transport
resources if you have planned a great thirty metters high sculpture; but it has
become ridicously easy to make music at home, and music industries, for the
popularity and wideness of this field of arts is probably the most representative of
the cultural industry problematic.
We still need access to a computer and the internet, but after that the amount
of music-making software available is increasing, as well as the ways of
uploading and sharing it. Still far better than having to record luckily in a four-
track tape recorder or a single voice recorder.
No creativity premises
What we are talking about in this part of the work is not the cration of an –
ism, in the way that used to happen with the late 19th century and the 20th’s
vanguardist movements, but a shift of mind, far from the institutional and market
influence, a network of creation with no starting point but a personal motivation
from the creators. A kind of underground movement able to hold the system off
and questionate validity and effectiveness of the cultural industries.
Comparable value to a market “cultural product”
A common argument from the side of the cultural industries against music
downloading is that when you download an album, although you get the music,
you miss all the artwork that usually goes inside CD cases. That is why we should
consider important (when it is considered proper, according to author’s intentions)
to go beyond the limits of purely making music or writing or whatever activity
creators do by integrating it in a multidisciplinar way of working, enhancing the
result.
This is more a suggestion than a true premise, but we see as necessary that
works produced in this new way should be able to compare themselves (and
overcome) to any industrial cultural product. This means merging musical work
8
with graphic artwork, with the intention of giving people an added value to every
work in the way of a network: every creator would be a network of multiple
disciplines or work within a network of workers from different disciplens in order
to complement their work with each others’.
Open Content, Open Access, free sharing
Since we present this paralel way of culture as a response to abuses from the
market and the cultural industries and in the vital context of the social media and
web 2.0, free, easy access to cultural items turns out to be essential to make it
work with the desired richness.
“ Open Content is about different work categories than software like
literature, music, photographs and further more that were created to be freely
available and used by all people in a broad way. The minimum requirement would
be that the work can be freely consumed and non-commercially copied and
distributed. Optional work uses would for example be the modification and the
commerical usage.”
“ According to an official definition of Peter Suber, Open Access means:
‘Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most
copyright
and licensing restrictions’ “
– Heuffel, 2007
Freely available, editable, non-commercial, online, free of restrictions.
Looks like an ideal, but it is already true, and it has to be even more spreaded in
the future.
There are some different open content licenses, like GNU Free
Documentation License, the Digital Peer Publishing License, or the Open Content
License (Heuffel, 2007); but the most famous, easy and practical to the moment
can be considered the Creative Commons license.
9
Nowadays it is hard to meet someone who has not heard about Creative
Commons licenses. Here, a very good definition of what they are is given by
Foong (2008):
“CC licences are a set of six free standardised, “open content” copyright
licences that grant permission to the public to share and use copyright works, in
accordance with the licence terms. For example, a basic term common to all six
licences is that whenever a work is copied or redistributed under the licence,
credit must always be given to the creator/licensor. This is a “some rights
reserved” copyright licensing model that provides creators with flexible options
in governing how their work is shared and used by others. As it starts from the
premise that copyright will be exercised to permit reproduction and distribution
of the copyright material by others (subject to certain conditions of use), it is
particularly relevant to material that can be distributed online in digital form.”
In the same work, Foong also express a “concern that CC promotes a “gift
culture” which devalues creative works both in society at large and in the minds
of creators themselves.” This is a false discourse which intends to suggest that
cultural industries fairly value creator’s work, when the reality is that a really
low percentage of revenues from published works of any kind (except for the
visual arts-gallery-collectors world maybe) goes to the creators, with the
exception of those selling huge amounts (millions of copies), who are favoured
by the system.
These firsts words about this “new way of doing things” in a cultural sense should
be seen as an initial proposal, for sure open to changes, doubts, responses, or rejects, as
there exists a huge gap in the author’s knowledge and experience, but it could be
considered as a first try of a student to think about a beginning to what he nowadays
thinks should be an independent and enriching practise.
* * *
I have based the second part of this work on thoughts and ideas that I had slightly
10
forged as I watched the panorama of music industry and its abuses and out-of-date
methods. Of course the idea about that panorama and my original sketch-of-an-idea
have been fed by the research (never deep enough) developed for this work.
As an auto-critic, the whole statement in this work should be questioned by an
idea: since the idea of the second part wants to be a response to the institutionalised
culture born from cultural industry/market, it is really easy to think that, the way it has
been presented in this work suposes an institutionalisation of that alternative idea (even
“alternative” is already a institutionalised label).
Even if I have not presented the idea for this new culture with a catchy title or an
–ism behind, there is a little fear that I may have fallen into the dynamic I was fighting
against by talking about new-born ways of carrying cultural activities and creation as a
unique phenomenon or by trying to state points of action for it.
In that case, perhaps this work is now ready to be thrown to the bin (or failed).
But my purpose, and the purpose of that original sketch already in my mind, was
that this way of creating and sharing became a main way of doing things, just like we
try not to buy products that abuse of labor conditions or land massive exploitation. In
the end, that “way” of doing things in cultural activity is a response to the main power,
barely stated in the first part of this work –more than ever not only in the content but
also in the way of acting–, a protest, and hopefully part of a system switch in many
other aspects that, now for sure, go beyond my knowledge.
11
References:
– Benjamin, W. (1936) The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Retrieved from http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDUQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F
%2Fitp.nyu.edu%2F~mp51%2Fcommlab%2Fwalterbenjamin.pdf&ei=6px0T4-
cOdCgOv-DgU0&usg=AFQjCNF30AcPFB66Ssfb6juTk4m6gXS1tg
– Cavanagh, J.; Mander, J.; International Forum on Globalization. Alternative
Task Force. (2004) Alternatives to economic globalization: a better world is possible.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
– Fouce, H. (2010) Tecnologías y medios de comunicación en la
música digital. De la crisis del mercado discográfico a las nuevas
prácticas de escucha. Comunicar (34) 65-72. Retrieved from
http://www.revistacomunicar.com/verpdf.php?
numero=34&articulo=34-2010-08
– Heuffel, S. (2007) Creative Commons Licenses. Vienna University of
Economics and Business Administrations. Retrieved from
http://wi.wu-wien.ac.at/rgf/diplomarbeiten/Seminararbeiten/2007/200706_Heuffel/
CreativeCommonLicenses_Heuffel_se.pdf
– Jacobs, R. (2009) Into the Vapid. Consuming cultural products. Counterpunch.
Retrieved from
http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/02/consuming-the-cultural-product/
– Potts, J.; Cuningham, S.; Hartley, J.; Ormerod, P. (2008) Social network
12
markets: a new definition of the creative industries. Journal of Cultural Economics.
Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/content/h673836r0183w64q/fulltext.pdf
– Romero, A. (2004) Benjamin: Estética y nazismo. Retrieved from
http://anibalromero.net/Walter.Benjamin.estetica.pdf
– Romero González, M. (n.d.) El concepto de la industria cultural de Theodor
Adorno. Interiorgráfico (11) Retrieved from
http://www.interiorgrafico.com/articulos/32-segunda-edicion-interiorgrafico-/37-el-
concepto-de-la-industria-cultural-de-theodor-adorno
13