Communicative capitalism and the democratic deficit

 In the United States today there is a major disconnect between politics circulating as content and "official" politics. Today, the circulation of content in the dense, intensive networks of global communications relieves top-level actors (corporate, institutional and governmental) from the obligation to respond. Rather than responding to messages sent by activists and critics, they counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications, hoping that sufficient volume (whether in terms of number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) will give their contributions dominance or stickiness. Instead of engaged debates, instead of contestations employing common terms, points of reference or demarcated frontiers, we confront a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies. The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensifi cation of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite – the post-political formation of communicative capitalism.

I am not claiming that networked communications never facilitate political resistance. One of the most visible of the numerous examples to the contrary is perhaps the experience of B92 in Serbia. Radio B92 used the Internet to circumvent governmental censorship and disseminate news of massive demonstrations against the Milosevic regime (Matic and Pantic 1999). My point is that the political efficacy of networked media depends on its context. Under conditions of the intensive and extensive proliferation of media, messages are more likely to get lost as mere contributions to the circulation of content. What enhances democracy in one context becomes a new form of hegemony in another. Or, the intense circulation of content in communicative capitalism forecloses the antagonism necessary for politics. In relatively closed societies, that antagonism is not only already there but also apparent at and as the very frontier between open and closed.

WHAT IS COMMUNICATIVE CAPITALISM?

The notion of communicative capitalism conceptualizes the commonplace idea that the market, today, is the site of democratic aspirations, indeed, the mechanism by which the will of the demos manifests itself. We might think here of the circularity of claims regarding popularity. McDonald’s, Walmart and reality television are depicted as popular because they seem to offer what people want. How do we know they offer what people want? People choose them. So, they must be popular.

The obvious problem with this equation is the way it treats commercial choices, the paradigmatic form of choice per se. But the market is not a system for delivering political outcomes-despite the
fact that political campaigns are indistinguishable from advertising or marketing campaigns. Political decisions–to go to war, say, or to establish the perimeters of legitimate relationships–involve more than the mindless reiteration of faith, conviction and unsupported claims (I’m thinking here of the Bush administration’s faith-based foreign policy and the way it pushed a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda).

The concept of communicative capitalism tries to capture this strange merging of democracy and capitalism. It does so by highlighting the way networked communications bring the two together. Communicative capitalism designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies (cf. Dean 2002a; 2002b). Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion and participation come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifi cations and interconnections of global telecommunications. But instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and infl uence, instead of enabling
the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles undermines political opportunity and effi cacy for most of the world’s peoples.

Research on the impact of economic globalization makes clear how the speed, simultaneity and interconnectivity of electronic communications produce massive concentrations of wealth (Sassen 1996). Not only does the possibility of superprofits in the finance and services complex lead to hypermobility of capital and the devalorization of manufacturing but fi nancial markets themselves acquire the capacity to discipline national governments. In the US, moreover, the proliferation of media has been accompanied by a shift in political participation. Rather than actively organized in parties and unions, politics has become a domain of fi nancially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations and the means of mass communication. Indeed, with the commodification of communication, more and more domains of life seem to have
been reformatted in terms of market and spectacle. Bluntly put, the standards of a finance- and consumption-driven entertainment culture set the very terms of democratic governance today. Changing the system – organizing against and challenging communicative capitalism – seems to require strengthening the system: how else can one organize and get the message across? Doesn’t it require raising the money, buying the television time, registering the domain name, building the website and making the links?

These paragraphs are from my article, Communicative Capitalism and the Foreclosure of Politics, appearing in Cultural Politics vol 1, issue 1. Here is a rough draft of the article (there might be a few minor differences from the published version):
Download communicative_capitalism_and_politics_8.doc  

Comments

[weaverluke]

I absolutely agree with you on the importance of "the context of networked media" for its efficacy in facilitating democratic governance or resistance. Yet context exists within as well as around online networked media at least, and at many granular levels.

Unfortunately, however the diverse social web applications that mediate online networked media each impose their own ontologies of identity onto their users and the media they create. The contexts within online networked media tend to be
shaped as much by the ad hoc and fragmented patterning of disparate applications' ontologies as by the human relationships and communities these applications seek to facilitate.

This ontological fragmentation of the social web's fabric tends to act to inhibit the formation of strong, network-pervasive and persistent social groupings—people's energy is taken up in processing the vast quantities of information in the network, ploughing laboriously through endless newsfeed items and emails, rather than the information serving them according to the individual and communal identities they express within that network.

This is the background to one of the main current focii of social web developers and thinkers—the evolution of a digital identity meta-network that will put people (and their ontologies) back at the centre of their own digital life.

[Jodi]

Thanks for your comment--really interesting. Let me see if I understand. I think part of the difficulty for me is getting a sense of how you are using the terms ontology and identity. In the last paragraph you use ontologies in the plural--do you have in mind something like people's different ways of being in and experiencing the world? And is your point that social web developers are thinking and working on ways for people's digital experiences to stem more from their own ways of experiencing the world rather than coming from the software?

I don't know what you mean by the idea of a digital identity meta network. Does it have something to do with a larger symbolic frame that enables particular ways of being to be recognized in a certain way? Could you expand a bit?

When you say that social web applications impose their own 'ontologies of identity' on users, what does that mean? Does it have something to do with underlying expectations of what a user is or does? How to guide, push, channel users through the environment?
(I'm not trying to be a pedant here; it's actually an effort in translation--to reference a previous exchange.)

What does it mean to say that an application has an ontology?

I'll stop with these questions for now.

[weaverluke]

Pretty much everything you hazard in your reply to my comment is spot on. But here's a provisional answer to your questions about ontologies (incidentally, don't read too much into my choice of singular or plural, as I tend to be a bit sloppy in that regard. : )

When I talk of a social web application's ontology of identity, I mean the way in which that application structures and represents (1) data about a user (personal info, contact lists) and (2) her digital creations (writing, pictures etc. etc.). In fact, these two categories can effectively be subsumed into "everything attributable to the user within the application".

I wrote about this topic with regard to the way in which blog tools "hardwire" blog content as either "posts" or "comments", and so effectively lock that content into the blog tool providers' data-silos:

http://www.i-together.net/weaverluke/2004/12/blog-evolution.html

http://www.i-together.net/weaverluke/2005/01/blog-evolution-2.html

The kind of exchange you and I are attempting here bears witness to the clunkiness of distributed conversations using comments!

Incidentally, I'm exploring all this stuff in more depth over at my blog in a (draft of a) paper on "Exploring apparent polarities in the digital identity space". See particularly the "Fluid vs. structured community?" section:

http://www.i-together.net/weaverluke/2004/12/exploring-apparent-polarities-in.html

Constructive criticism is very welcome.

Finally, Microsoft's Kim Cameron's blog is a good source of ideas and info on the digital identity meta-network:

http://www.identityblog.com/2004/12/30.html#a77

Hope all that helps!

[Jodi]

I'm going to look through the links you sent. Thanks!

[George W.]

Jodi,

Although I am tempted to write more, I'm just going to make one comment, and I hope that you will take it in the spirit that it is given.

You argue that
“Instead of engaged debates, instead of contestations employing common terms, points of reference or demarcated frontiers, we confront a multiplication of resistances and assertions so extensive that it hinders the formation of strong counterhegemonies.”

I agree with the above, but then what does that mean for your own efforts as a blogger, that is an active part of this process? I don’t mean to rile you, and I know that you are new at this, and perhaps just positing for fun, but you post an average of 1.3 new threads a day, and many of them go unanswered, or lack an effective back and forth. To someone new it may be a bit overwhelming to keep up, as new posts just keep overshadowing the old ones. Does this mean that perhaps starting fewer threads, and those that attract readers of diverse spectrums, and thus allow for longer facilitated discussions, would be more in tune with the earlier logic and make you a better blogger?

(And I'm nessesarily opposing posting a lot and seeing what gets a bite, as that may be more fun, and more in tune with a "snowday" blog.)