This week’s reading helped me to contemplate how the television and internet convergence in the era of post-broadcasting relates to the politics of gender, race, and class. Lisa Park’s analysis on “flexible microcasting” explicates the ways in which the method of target marketing provides contents that fits each individual audience’s tastes and preferences, and how this phenomena generated new cultural space for voices from marginalized communities. Park’s emphasis on the potential for a new form of television that serves to democratize the medium parallels with Aymar Jean Christian’s focus on the way that television in the postbroadcasting era opens up new opportunities for marginalized independent creators to produce and circulate their creation to their audience. These arguments are very convincing, but at the same time, there is always this question bugging me when I think about the internet-based cultural formation and especially the issue of consumption and spectatorship.
As neoliberalism has completely changed the formation of power and knowledge on almost every level, the boundary between subjective engagement and subjugated experience has become more and more blurred. For instance, when we use internet, we all experience what the programmed algorithm constantly suggests to us, what we should watch next, and by following the suggestion, our tastes or preferences are somehow structured by the algorithms and there emerges this bizarre situation where we can no longer tell whether it is a subjective engagement or a form of subjugation. Although I am still in the process of thinking about this complicated relationship revolving around the subject and subjugation, I think the issues in relation to the politics of gender, race, and class is that it doesn’t necessarily succeed even with progressive content due to the structuring of the medium for its commercial ends.
What I would like to deepen more is how we can understand the neoliberalism as new forms of technology that are pervasive in our society. I personally think it is important to critically assess what kind of technologies, specifically their ownership, enable and form internet platforms when we try to clarify new possibilities of gender, racial, class politics that performed on/through the platform.
Wakae, I recommend the book "The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty" as one method for thinking about this question of subjectivity/subjection in the era of algorithmic capital. I am sympathetic to the pessimism/doubt that you raise; I wonder if you're concerned about the problem of surveillance or of "interactivity" and "engagement" as traps in themselves?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your recommendation. The author's conceptualization of the technological infrastructure as a form of state (community?) seems very helpful to think about the ambivalent situation of govermentality under neoliberal conditions. I am personally more concerned with the emphasis on interactivity and engagement when talking about these internet platforms as these expressions tend to work in complicit with the mechanism of neoliberal governing.
DeleteI can totally feel what you described as a blurring boundary between subjective engagement and subjugated experience, and I have been thinking about how to account for those nuances and tensions in our writing. One possible way is to understand neoliberalism not as a monolithic regime, but rather, as an assemblage of different techniques of governing. I am thinking in relation to Roger Lancaster's "Republic of fear: The rise of punitive governance in America" and how neoliberalism and discipline might be binded together like two sides of a coin.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment. I totally agree with you that more nuanced explication can be achieved through an attempt to understand neoliberal economies as an assemblage of different techniques of governing. Also, the article you mentioned reminded me of another book I found in the process of thinking about neoliberalism, Aihwa Ong's "Neoliberalism as Exception
DeleteMutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty."