[iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers

Fri Nov 14 16:00:44 UTC 2008

Dear Mark,

I was editor in chief of a digital culture magazine in 96-97, at a time where in belgium, the internet was in its bare infancy, and there were no real blogs nor citizen journalism yet (only perhaps prototypes by radical minorities) ...

I can assure that all the problems you describe,  and others, where already present ...

Have they been exacerbated by the new situation of self-produced media and the erosion of interest for traditional media, sure, but it is by no means the cause of the problems, and I think Brian has it right when he points to the dialectic between the forces of capital and how they use the social dynamic to their advantage ...

Similarly I think you are fighting a straw enemy when you seem to claim that citizen journalist advocates are ignoring that mass media are in crisis and that traditional reporters are suffering ... Otherwise, names please, but none of the ones I have been reading have fallen in the easy trap of utopianising the blogosphere or citizen media ...

Formulated like you have, however understandable the feeling behind it, indeed has a great danger of creating a reactionary response ...

As Brian says, the mass media were broken long before Web 2.0,

Michel

----- Original Message ----
> From: Brian Holmes <brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr>
> To: Mark Deuze <mdeuze at indiana.edu>; iDC at mailman.thing.net
> Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 6:06:38 PM
> Subject: Re: [iDC] The People Formerly Known as the Employers
> 
> Mark Deuze wrote:
> 
> > For all the brilliance of those advocating a more democrative media  
> > system, there is generally nothing in their analyses that acknowledges  
> > this erosion of power, this wholesale redistribution of agency away  
> > from those who tend to crave only one thing: creative and editorial  
> > autonomy. No matter how excited I can get about user-generated content  
> > and the collective intelligence of cyberspace, this power shift erodes  
> > the very foundation of the way we know (and thus interact with) the  
> > world, and our ability to truly function in it autonomously, and on  
> > our own terms.
> > 
> > Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can  
> > live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely  
> > exclusively on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass  
> > solipsism and paranoia - as the only truth we can still believe in has  
> > to be strictly our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be  
> > trusted. It is the perfect storm.
> 
> The above (from quite a good essay, eminently worth reading) depicts a 
> single case of an organizational mode more broadly known as 
> neoliberalism. Since the 1970s, neoliberal management has operated 
> across all sectors of industry and enterprise by stripping businesses 
> down to the managerial core and outsourcing as much labor as possible. 
> That allows for a huge simplification of the balance-sheet: no health 
> insurance, no retirement, no sick or pregnant or aging employees to take 
> care of... As many people have pointed out over recent years (though 
> there is always a need for each person involved to discover this) there 
> is a strong parallel between the language used to justify such 
> downsizing-and-outsourcing, and the aspirations of individuals to 
> greater freedom, openness, flat hierarchies, etc. However, in the 
> crucial case of the press and the televised news, I think it is 
> important not to attribute this change to the desires of people for 
> emancipation. The message you then send out would be this: you poor 
> deluded bloggers, citizen-journalists, members of NGOs, etc., you have 
> destroyed the one thing that kept us all free and autonomous: the good 
> old (corporate) media. Hmmm, I am afraid very few people will accept 
> such a message!
> 
> Instead there needs to be an investigation into the historical pattern 
> of social change and corporate restructuring which has led to this 
> situation, not only in the media, but across the different walks of 
> professional life and in government as well. I think that the driving 
> force has been a new managerialism oriented toward short-term profit, 
> under intense pressure to perform on the stock market for all kinds of 
> reasons (because the board pushes for higher shareholder value, because 
> the corporation needs to raise more capital, because the managers 
> themselves are shareholders, because a higher stock-market value 
> produces more profit in a merger, etc). It is the combination, or 
> really, the co-evolution between this managerial model and the broad 
> aspirations of individuals to greater autonomy that has produced the 
> neoliberal society we now live in, not just in the USA but across much 
> of the world. And it is a perfect storm, quite a threatening one, I very 
> much agree with that conclusion. The clever management of peoples' 
> desires for freedom has produced a social predicament.
> 
> Now, there has been one big problem: throughout the eighties and 
> nineties, as this storm gathered, where were the professional 
> journalists to report about it? Where were the academics to elaborate 
> these themes in the universities? Where were the union organizers to 
> develop new labor strategies? Where were the politicians to make these 
> problems public? Unfortunately, in my experience there were only 
> isolated instances of breakthroughs in these different key categories. 
> Most of the work has been done by individuals (organic intellectuals, 
> free radicals or whatever you want to call them) collaborating with 
> social movements and using networked media for organizing and 
> transmission. Even if there are only a few David Harveys or Pierre 
> Bourdieus, still academia comes off comparatively well in this process. 
> The professional media has been a lot less impressive. Throughout the 
> Bush years, until 2006, you had only the comedy shows that put up any 
> resistance! Otherwise people simply had to look to the networked media. 
> Now, that may not be entirely true, and it would be interesting to hear 
> the list of shining stars as seen from the side of media professionals. 
> In my own experience, living in France, I tended to get interesting 
> professional media from the BBC (because I could download it!) and 
> sometimes from French cinema and radio. A particularly good example are 
> the films of Adam Curtis, such as "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream 
> of Freedom." The important point I am trying to make is that the blame 
> game might not be the best one to play. We are facing a social 
> predicament, it involves many complex forces, it can only be resolved by 
> finding new structures for the production and distribution of what you 
> might call politically actionable knowledge about society. And that is 
> worth working on, whatever your position in this society may be!
> 
> Personally I've been doing so for years, as one of those hapless 
> bloggers, networked protesters and citizen-journalists (or citizen 
> art-critics). Perhaps there are a certain number of us who have been 
> able to put something in their analysis that acknowledges the deliberate 
> reduction of autonomy and agency under neoliberal management. Though it 
> was written in 2001 and has been read by many many people, I am still 
> gonna give a link here to my text on The Flexible Personality, because 
> it applies in detail to the situation described in the above essay by 
> Mark Deuze:
> 
> http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en
> 
> best to all,
> 
> Brian
> 
> http://brianholmes.wordpress.com
> 
> 
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