Celebrities and corporations

New media theorists (like techno-enthusiasts) have accepted the idea that networked communications are characterized by distributed, peer-to-peer, personal, immediate, ubiquitous communication (the repercussion here is that the internet is not like television and not like cinema). The basic idea: people use their networked personal media devices to talk about themselves and to connect with their friends. People want to know what their friends are doing and they want to tell their friends what they are doing.

The basic debate among new media theorists has concerned the political, economic, and cultural impact of these practices. So, theorists have taken sides over whether these practices are democratic (or whether they have liberal or conservative tendencies), whether they enhance the economic prospects of most people (who can make money?), and whether the culture is more heterogeneous or homogeneous, stagnant or vital. 

Hearing comments in our class, though, I'm starting to wonder if our (new media theorists) basic assumption is wrong (or, another way to put this, I'm starting to think that my diagnosis of capture in affective networks is so right that no one even cares anymore or can even imagine that digital networks would function in any other way). Why? Because the default mode of (your? mainstream culture's? students?) thinking is in terms of corporations, celebrities, and consumption (or so it starting to seem to me based on comments in class). People seem basically to identify with the needs and desires of celebrities for celebrity and corporations for profit and consumers for consumer goods. For example, it never would have occurred to me think of Twitter as first and foremost a vehicle for the distribution and contribution of nuggets of celebrity, even as I recognize that the business of mass culture uses Twitter (and other platforms) to good effect (and even though I just saw the really great Justin Bieber where he uses Twitter to generate and connect with fans).

So, on the one hand, it seems that you assume that new media are primarily celebrity, corporate, consumer access devices. But I think there is another hand, that is, I think that you also assume that there is something vaguely democratic and free (liberatory) about networked media. If you think this, then it makes sense to worry about the effects/impact of the first hand (celebrity, corporate, consumer). But if you only think of new media in terms of the first hand, then you have to figure out what opportunities there are for critique, change, freedom, politics, etc. Differently put, if you think about new media only in terms of the first hand, you'll have to grapple with the repercussions for subjectivity. One site/cite for this is the notion of "whatever being" that I develop in chapter 3.