1 Sport as Surrogate Culture
It is very likely that never in human history have there been so many treatises, essays, theories and analyses focused on culture as there are today. This fact is even more surprising given that culture, in the meaning traditionally ascribed to the term, is now on the point of disappearing. And perhaps it has already disappeared, discreetly emptied of its content, and replaced by another content that distorts its earlier meaning.1
The full meaning of Vargas Llosa’s statement will only become apparent when we have examined not only what he calls “the death of culture” but also what has come to replace it. What is it that now substitutes for culture? What are the surrogates that now play a similar role in society to the one previously exercised by culture? We begin by looking at spectator sport as one of those simulacra of culture.
Sport holds a very important place in advanced industrial societies, one that few sociologists have noted or attempted to explain, and hardly any of them have grasped its cultural role, or better put, its role as a surrogate for culture. In assessing this role, we must focus not so much on the playing of games, but much more so on watching what others to do as spectators in vast crowds: focussing, that is, on sport as spectacle. Most of the current sociology of sport, a relatively new sub-discipline, is concerned with the players and not so much with the onlookers. But culturally considered it is the latter who are more noteworthy than the former. Children play all the sports that adults play, but they do not attract crowds on a regular basis; theirs is a pastime that can easily be left to the anthropologists and psychologists to account for. Not so with the sporting spectacles that their fathers attend and in lesser numbers their mothers as well, for that far transcends the playing of games in its ritual meaning and cultural significance. It is a curious set of rituals, into which children have to be inducted, especially if they are boys, often by being dragged to see a match whether they like it or not. In former days this was the case with
Just how curious and peculiar this is, can be gleaned if we take football as our primary example of sport-watching. Let us imagine someone from a totally different culture – if such a person still exists at present, or better still from another century, if time-travel were possible – attending a Cup Final match in a large stadium before a crowd of 100,000 spectators. What would such a person make of what is going on? Apart from being utterly bewildered, how might such a person take it and make sense of it? The most obvious explanation would be that this is some kind of weird ritual of a totally unknown religion. An Aztec remembering his own religious ball game of ollamaliztli might wonder why the losing team is not sacrificed and eaten as soon as the match is over. A Roman would be intrigued by the fact that no emperor is present to preside over these games, which he must have surely paid for, or why the crowd does not acclaim him. A Greek would suppose that this must be a funeral rite for some dead hero. A medieval knight might imagine that this was some very crucial and decisive trial by ordeal for a very noble lady or queen accused of the highest crime, adultery perhaps. A great military commander from a past heroic age might surmise that this was a combat engagement of some sort carried out by two teams of champions to settle some dispute, in order to avoid all-out war and bloodshed by the two armies of spectators. One could engage in numerous such imaginary speculations depending on how far back one delved into the past.
Obviously, all such views from the past are wrong for this is not what football is about. It is not a religious ritual for it carries no meaningful significance: the two sides represent no warring powers, no gods or demons are invoked, no mythic events are re-enacted, nobody is sacrificed, much less eaten, except purely metaphorically. It is not a political spectacle performed to serve the interest of rulers, no president is there to be acclaimed by the crowd, no liturgical largess is required because nobody pays the expenses of staging the match. It is not games enacted in celebration of anything, nobody is honoured or extolled by it. It is not a judicial process, even though there are umpires and laws to be applied, adjudicated and enforced. It is not a symbolic battle for no blood is shed, except by accident, and the winners gain nothing, no territory, no slaves, no spoils – except for prize money and increases in salary. Those in the crowd certainly get nothing out of it. All our ghostly visitors from the past have so amusingly misinterpreted football because they have likened it to the playing of games and staging of ritual contests with which they are familiar from their own societies and this has been very misleading.
These questions are in line with the one that Stephen Mennell asks at the start of his outline of Elias’ view of sport: “What kind of society must it be, for people to so much enjoy the excitement and tensions engendered by physical contests where no blood flows and contestants do no serious harm to each other?”2 But before we can even ask this question there are a number of prior ones we need to ask first in the same spirit. What kind of society must it be where so many crowds of men, for it is mostly men, are so fascinated by small teams of men chasing a ball? Why do they travel sometimes great distances to see this taking place, and do so regularly week by week, year after year, frequently over a life-time? Why do they care so much who wins and who loses and remember this ever after? What is in it for them? Why do they get so emotionally worked up during the match? Why do they jeer at and abuse the supporters of the side they oppose and sometimes come to blows over it? Why do they take out their anger on the umpire when he rules against their team? Why do they feel so elated when their team wins and depressed when it loses? Why do they identify with one team and wear its colours and insignia? Why do they talk about it and take pride in it throughout the years? Why do they watch replays of the match on television if they cannot attend in person? Why do whole nations do so in international competitions and react to wins or losses as if the national destiny depended on it?
Elias’ answer to this sociological conundrum is that the phenomenon of football is a product of civilization. Elias follows Freud in considering civilization to be synonymous with repression; the more civilized people are, the more repressed they become. They must learn to control their violent emotions, particularly their aggressive ones, and acquire self-discipline. They become pacified and polite. Good manners take the place of rough and aggressive treatment of each other. But at the same time their lives en masse become hemmed in, regulated, regular, and routinized – and boring. They need something to give them some excitement, a frisson of feeling in their otherwise placid and emotionally sterile existence. As Mennell states, quoting Elias:
In these societies, there is relatively little scope for showing strong feelings or strong dislike of people, let alone ‘hot anger, wild hatred, or the urge to hit someone over the head’: ‘People strongly agitated, in the grip of feelings they cannot control, are cases for hospital or prison.’3
In the same way, at a football match, spectators savour the mimetic excitement of a battle swaying to and fro on the field, knowing that in this battle little real harm is likely to befall either the players or themselves. Torn between hopes of success and fears of defeat, they openly manifest their feelings in the company of many other people, something which is all the more enjoyable and liberating because in society at large people
are more isolated and have few opportunities for collective manifestations of feelings.4
Elias calls this a situation in which “a controlled and enjoyable decontrolling of restraints on emotion is permitted”.5 Basically, this is a safety-valve type of explanation invoking a mechanism for the release of repressed emotions when the pressures of inhibition become too great. It is vaguely reminiscent of Aristotle’s theory of purgation whereby in dramatic performances, such as tragedies, feelings of pity and terror are aroused and vented and the consequent relief felt is presumably good for the soul. Hence, Elias has no hesitation in likening football to drama and other mimetic arts and calling the emotions aroused in both cases “mimetic feelings”. According to Elias the mock battle of the game is just like the dramatic conflict in a tragedy.
There is much that is questionable in Elias’ account, beginning with his overall theory, derived from Freud, that civilization means repression and that good manners are the techniques of emotional restraint acting like brakes on emotions running out of control. This touches on his whole idea of the civilizing process as a matter of inhibitions becoming ever more severe throughout history; this is highly questionable for it is not subject to empirical proof. As we have dealt with this view of history elsewhere, we shall not discuss it any further here.6 The view that football is a mimetic activity like drama and that it can achieve the purging of excessive emotional pressures also needs to be questioned. Aristotle’s theory of purgation does not provide a very good account of why we enjoy tragedy, and neither does Elias’ safety-valve theory explain why we enjoy football. Quite apart from any other difficulties, the very idea of calling both tragedy and football mimetic has something objectionable about it. Football is a contest between two teams, but does not resemble or imitate political struggle or its culmination in battle, any more than chess does, even though the names of the pieces are drawn from political conflict. Drama is a depiction of the complex human confrontation that precedes battle, as, for example, in Lear before the final showdown. In Greek and Roman drama, the battle takes place off-scene, or obscena in Latin from which our word obscene derives. In Shakespearean drama battles are staged purely as mummery, or a few gestures of dumb-show that only small children find exciting. Football has no more to do with drama than this kind of dumb-show does.
The arena is well demarcated from the outside world. It is usually visible from far off and its situation in the city – the space which it occupies – is well known. People always feel where it is, even if they are not thinking of it. Shouts from the arena carry far and, when it is open at the top, something of the life which goes on inside communicates itself to the surrounding city.7
Every spectator has a thousand in front of him, a thousand heads. As long as he is there, all the others are there too; whatever excites him, excites them; and he sees it. They are seated some distance away from him, so that the differing details which make individuals of them are blurred; they all look alike and they all behave in a similar manner and he notices in them only the things which he himself is full of. Their visible excitement increases his own.8
There is no break in the crowd which sits like this, exhibiting itself to itself. It forms a closed ring which nothing can escape. The tiered ring of fascinated faces has something strangely homogeneous about it. It embraces everything that happens below; no-one relaxes his grip on this; no one tries to get away … the crowd is doubly closed, to the world and to itself.9
Out of these transfixed individuals a higher collectivity or social organism is formed which has its own will and purpose and strives to keep itself in being for as long as possible. It has a life of its own distinct from the individuals who constitute it.
Elias would be understandably appalled by this kind of writing coming from Canetti. He would rightly object that the people in the arena or stadium are there to watch a football match, which Canetti completely leaves out of account, not to form a crowd. For people like them or even the very same people behave and feel very differently depending on what takes place there. They might be attending an evangelical revival meeting, or Catholic mass, or a concert of brass band music, or a rock concert or a military parade, or a political party rally, or any other of the various functions for which stadiums can be utilized. In all of these, people might be seated as in a football match, but they constitute very different crowds. These collectives are not the same; each is determined by what goes on in the arena. The whole tone, feeling and mood changes from one activity to another; what goes on does, indeed, matter to determine the kind of crowd that arises.
It is football and football alone that encourages the kind of crowd phenomena that Canetti describes. It is, as it were, part of the culture of football that the spectators should take sides and form not the one, but two opposed crowds and then engage each other in partisan barracking which can easily get out of control and degenerate to mutual abuse, jeering, missile throwing and hooligan violence. And it is true that many of the spectators enjoy this part of the game perhaps even more than the game itself. It is also true that without this
This brings us to the main thrust of our investigation which turns on this question: why is it that in advanced industrial societies, largely during the twentieth century, the culture of football and that of many other ball sports, such as rugby, gridiron or American football or Australian rules football, or in alternate seasons cricket or baseball and later basketball and many others, developed and drew so many people. In fact, so many that huge crowd containers such as stadiums had to be built in cities, ones of a size not known since the Colosseum in Rome or similar arenas in other Roman cities. For only in Rome and the Roman Empire do we find anything that historically even begins to approximate to our modern obsession with sports like football and all the other games. The Roman games were, of course, utterly different for they were gladiatorial combats, wild beast hunts, mock sea-battles, and other such violent spectacles, interspersed with the occasional executions of criminals, including (very rarely) executions of Christians martyred for their beliefs. Nor were the chariot races in the Circus Maximus like our horse races. There are, however, some evident similarities. This prompts the question of what it is that Rome and the other major metropolises of the Roman Empire have in common with cities in our modern world.
One obvious relationship, which the Marxists have made us aware of, is the existence in both of a proletariat. Of course, they are well aware that the word means one thing in the Roman context and something very different in that of modern industrial cities. In Rome and the provinces to a lesser degree it meant a class of indigent poor whose basic needs had to be supplied by the state and who were only capable, as the word suggests, of multiplying themselves. In the modern context it means a working-class employee in factories, workshops and mines or other industries, earning enough to have an excess amount to spend on leisure and pleasure. And these, in fact, constitute the major portion of men who attend matches. Until recently there were few others, for generally women kept away, unlike at the games in Rome, and the indigent were too poor to afford admission. Only later did the middle classes and even some from the upper classes join in, for these classes generally preferred cricket. In Rome the whole society was on display as the class hierarchy was there from the start, and from the start segregated according to rank by the seating arrangements. These are crucial differences in accounting for the role that the games played in Rome, as opposed to our own sports.
Sports play no such political role in our societies, at least not yet. And that prompts the crucial question: what role do sports such as football play in our advanced modern societies? To establish this, we must recall the origins of football and the other sports and trace the historical vicissitudes by which they arrived in the stadiums of our crowded cities. Football began all over Europe as a folk pastime carried on as a competitive game between villages or between apprentices and other young men in towns and cities, like that of the Italian calzio, which still survives. In England such a folk football was considered extremely common in the sense of vulgar, as when in Lear Kent refers to Oswald, whom he has tripped up, as a “base football player” – there were as yet no rules governing foul play. This was the first stage in the history of this sport, which was different from the original stage of other sports, some of which, such as tennis, had noble antecedents! The second stage occurred when these old rural or noble pastimes were taken up by the schools and colleges of England and later America. Thus, as is well known from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a novel by Thomas Hughes published in 1857, and other such popular Victorian literature, Dr Arnold the headmaster of Rugby, a so-called public school for the upper classes, introduced a ball game, later called rugby, as part of his character-building educational project – under the mistaken belief that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. On the playing fields of Eton, they played a ball game closer to what later became soccer or our present football.
The third stage took place a little later in the second half of the nineteenth century when sports such as football, played by young adult gentlemen, or so-called amateur sportsmen, became partly professionalized. This meant that they were open to all players, rules were enacted, and that competitions were set up between clubs as a regular fixture. These then began to be played for a
This poses another crucial issue: why did largely working-class men take so eagerly and rapidly to a sport that had been an upper-class pastime for boys? One obvious answer is that it was a reminder of their rural or craft origins, which their fathers or grandfathers had only recently abandoned when they were driven off the land or away from trades into the factories, mines and other industrial enterprises. But that in itself would only be a sentimental regression to a barely remembered past, which could hardly account for the shift to the culture of football or that of other sports. Something far more significant and substantial had to be at work.
We have referred to the culture of football, but this is hardly a culture in any significant or substantive sense. It is rather a peculiar habitual practice that bears little resemblance to the cultures of the ancestors of the very working people who engaged in this sport, both as players and as spectators. Starting in England where the Industrial Revolution first occurred, the working class consisted of those who had been uprooted from the land or from the trades, crafts and other occupations of the cities as a direct result of dissolution of the guilds, land enclosures and other such economic developments associated with the growth of modern capitalism. As a result, not only did they lose their traditional forms of employment, they lost their traditional cultures as well. Since they could carry very few of their original traditions into the new suburbs of old and new cities, where the industrial process had herded them and concentrated them in large numbers. Only a memory of that culture still remained, for they had become culturally dispossessed and disinherited. In this stage of cultural penury, they sought for substitutes for what they had lost. All the more so as once their wages rose to give them enough excess money to buy entertainments, and as the rigours of work lessened and afforded them leisure hours to enjoy themselves.
Behind these sad facts lie the origins of so much of later Victorian popular culture, such as music hall and circuses, and also such non-cultural diversions as drink and football. Just like the music hall and the pub, the stadium and the football club became venues to which working men resorted for light relief from the heavy burden of work. At this point we will not discuss the music hall, which is certainly an artistic and cultural venue, featuring a huge variety of
The sociological importance of football is that it is perhaps the earliest of the substitutes for culture. It took the place of the culture that was missing. In other words, it was a surrogate for an absent culture, one of the many surrogates that arose and which we shall study in what follows. In particular, there were two kinds of cultural activities that had largely disappeared or been severely attenuated in industrial societies and had somehow to be compensated for, especially so in the lives of working men, those who would form the bulk of the football spectators. The first is religion and involved a yearly round of rituals and ceremonies and the cultural life associated with the church, unvaryingly repeating itself from year to year over the course of a life-time and from generation to generation with hardly any change. The second, equally unchanging, is the communal ethos with its yearly cycle of cooperative activities surrounding agriculture in the countryside or the trades and crafts and services in the towns, with their role differentials of landlord and tenant, master and servant or master and apprentice, involving oppositions and rivalries and ritualized forms of strife.
Industrialization and concentration of the working class in cities destroyed most of this traditional ethos. Men were no longer obliged to attend church services on Sundays or the yearly festive holidays, though in Victorian England many still did so. Nor did they any longer engage in the communal activities associated with the traditional ways of life. Their identities and sense of Self were no longer firmly anchored in a station of life with its duties, responsibilities and loyalties to others, both those of equal status as well as those above and below their level in the social hierarchy. As working-class labourers, packed closely together in city suburbs, their lives had lost much of its rhythm and rhyme and for some its very reason or raison d’être. So as not to become totally alienated and subject to utter anomie, they looked for substitutes for the culture that they had lost. As we shall see, many such surrogates arose, to which they eagerly took. We have already referred to the music hall, the circus and the pub and we shall go on to consider many others.
Football was one such for it offered what had been discontinued in the round of life. The regular weekly or fortnightly attendance at the match and the league fixtures throughout the sporting season leading up to the climax of the Cup Final carried distant echoes of the old religious observances. A partial sense of identity was restored through belonging to a football club and identifying oneself with it, in opposition to all those in the other clubs. It brought
The whole experience of attending matches over long periods established something like a football “culture”, though this was not a culture in any traditional sense. Arraying oneself in the garb, colours and insignia of the club; travelling to the stadium, sometimes for long distances as on a pilgrimage; the starting ceremony prior to the game itself at the stadium with the arrival of players and umpires; the marching bands and cheer leaders in America; the standing to attention for the national anthem – all this resonated with the participants. Then the play itself in which each barracker felt part of the faction (the word comes from the Latin factions associated with the chariot races) at war with the opposite faction, a battle of words and gestures and mock hatred that could easily get out of hand and degenerate to blows and real hatred (just as with the Roman factions). The word fan, short for fanatic was another synonym used that indicates the kinds of feeling that could be aroused and openly vented. The obligatory abuse hurled at the umpire also had a role in the incitement and diffusion of feeling, especially as the umpire stood in for the law and order, which could not otherwise be flouted. Then at the end of the match other kinds of emotion came into effect, with one side overjoyed, celebrating victory and feeling highly elated, and the losing side depressed, mourning defeat and feeling deflated. This might be followed by some spectators, especially the younger cohort, going on to drink and celebrate further, and perhaps a little hooliganism if the opportunity warranted it, and others taking out their frustration and rage on passers-by.
But this is not the end of the matter, for the effects of the experience continue throughout the week till the next match. Much time is spent reading about it in the sporting press with endless discussion, post mortem play analysis, recollection of glorious and shameful incidents, and so on. Television
Our discussion of football introduces us to a key sociological concept, that of synthetic surrogates for culture or sham cultures, which play an increasingly important role in contemporary life. It was perhaps the first of these, appearing at the start of the twentieth century, after which as the century progressed many more would be concocted by the new electronic media, by advertising and what has come to be called the Culture Industry. For the more the old traditional cultures were evacuated from ordinary life the more synthetic cultures had to be devised to fill the void. Not only nature, but culture, too, abhors a vacuum. But these sham “cultures” are no more like real culture than what the Germans call Ersatz Kaffee is or tastes like the real coffee for which it was a war-time substitute. Thus, we shall coin the term Ersatz Kultur for sham “culture”.
In fact, the substitution of sham “culture” for real culture is part of an ongoing process of replacing the natural by the artificial, as in utilizing plastics instead of natural materials and eating synthetic foods rather than natural foods. Obviously, this can occur to varying degrees, just as with foods. Few foods, as yet, are wholly synthetically derived from chemical ingredients; most are made from natural ingredients which are processed in many ways. The worst of these are the highly processed fast foods produced in vast quantities and sold at low prices generally to the poor and the young. The results are apparent from medical statistics of rising obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, coronary failure, etc. Consuming synthetic culture at a regular rate is as good for the soul and sensibility as eating fast foods is for the body. Unfortunately, this is what takes place as evermore traditional cultural practices and institutions are replaced by newly contrived ones coming out of the media factories of the entertainment businesses. Similar effects are also achieved by the introduction of new technological ways of apparently doing better what was previously done more simply and naturally, but resulting in something very different and far less beneficial.
2
Sport functions in society not only as a cultural substitute, an Ersatz Kultur, but also as a model for other more genuine cultural activities. These become imbued with a sporting spirit, that is, ‘sportified’, and pursued as if they were sports. This is particularly true of cultural spheres where crowds form on such a large scale that they are seen as examples of mass culture in a contemporary context. For what makes something more like sport is not that it is a game, but that it attracts crowds that are like the spectators of popular sports. In both cases it is not so much the nature of the activity itself that matters, as the crowds it attracts and their behaviour. In order to see clearly how these crowd phenomena operate, we need to introduce the concept of virtual crowds, which is an extension of the concept of real crowds.
In sport generally, as in football, for example, the real crowd is composed of the people who attend the match at the stadium. This constitutes a ‘double-crowd’, as Canetti terms it, of supporters on the two opposing sides who sit facing each other in the stadium; together they constitute a closed crowd, limited in size by the capacity of the stadium. However, apart from this real crowd, there is also a virtual crowd made up of all those watching the match on tv, usually sitting in isolation in their living rooms, or in small groups in bars clustering around the tv screen, or on their iPhones, or wherever else people watch the game. This virtual crowd is in some ways like the real crowd; in other ways it is different. People in the virtual crowd can still barrack for their own teams and get as emotional about the game as those in the real crowd, but usually they cannot interact with supporters from the other side; they cannot banter, tease, jeer, exchange insults or blows, as is the case with real crowds. Their experience as sporting spectators is somewhat attenuated but nevertheless genuine.
One important difference, however, is the potential size of the virtual crowd: it is far larger than the real crowd, and therefore as Canetti says: it is ‘open’ not ‘closed’. In fact, its growth is unlimited; all those willing to tune into the match can join the crowd; their numbers can extend to millions, tens or even hundreds of millions, as in the case of the World Cup. Unlike a real crowd, furthermore, a virtual crowd can continue to exist after the match is over when the real crowd breaks up and all the spectators go home. The virtual crowd watching on tv lives on in replays of the game, which can be repeated for weeks, or in comment and analysis and press reports. In a more attenuated sense, the virtual crowd continues in existence whenever supporters get together to discuss the match.
It is rather odd that the great theorist of crowds, Canetti, never considered virtual crowds. He dealt only with real ones, such as those in football stadiums, ignoring crowds of fans or club members. Apart from such real crowds, the only other ones he discusses are those he calls invisible or unreal crowds, such as the crowd of the dead, that is, ghosts, or illusory crowds of demons and angels or other unreal beings.11 By implication, he does consider virtual crowds when he discusses the crowd symbols of whole nations, but this is not theoretically developed. Perhaps the phenomenon of virtual crowds was not as salient in Canetti’s time, the 1930s, when the media were not as culturally significant as now, prior to the invention of television, computers and the internet. As we shall see, the electronic media in particular are a potent means for creating virtual crowds. All the communication media that establish networks of connected people can of course promote crowd behaviour, but the mass behaviour fostered by the electronic media, above all, television and the Internet is the most extensive.
All types and forms of crowd behaviour can also be found in the cultural domain at present, and in this lies its similarity to sport. We shall take rock music as our primary example. The crowd at a rock concert has many features in common with the crowd at a football match, with the vital difference that it is a single unified crowd, rather than a double crowd of supporters of opposing teams. The concert crowd is extremely unified, in fact, for it is brought together by the rhythmic beat of drums and electronic guitars as it pulsates through
It is necessary to go beyond both these theorists and treat virtual crowds as a more important phenomenon than real crowds today. Rock music provides an even richer case for analysis than football, because fans can be extensively groomed and commercially exploited long before they become spectators of live performances and fuse with each other in real crowd experiences. The availability of recordings and media broadcasts and televised interviews with stars enables fans to identify with bands they may never hear perform live, and to construct life-style self-images by purchasing items associated with the star performers. As with rivalry between football clubs, which keeps their virtual crowds in being and gives a sense of illusory identity to their members, so too does rivalry between bands serve a similar purpose in the cultural sphere. Being a Beatles fan, for example, involves a different range of life-style and fashion choices than being a fan of the Rolling Stones: clothing, hair styles, bearing differ.
While this may look like the well-known and relatively harmless aspect of adolescent behaviour, known as peer group conformism, which enables young people to form their identities through membership in a range of real social groups, it can, in combination with other social pressures, create an addiction to membership in a diffuse and unreal virtual crowd, and expose them to ongoing, unlimited manipulation of their self-image. For the self-image sold to fans is transient, evanescent and superficial, unlike the self-image people traditionally construct through membership in real communal groups and institutions, such as clubs, churches and political parties. This is not to say that rock music culture which now has a seventy-year long history, necessarily creates such an addiction, only that it may and indeed has done so for many fans – witness the Elvis clubs that persist to this day. It is rather a matter of identifying the commercial pressures within that culture that lead fans to adopt whatever fashion
If we wish to understand the exponential growth of virtual crowds in contemporary society, and their importance in the global market of cultural products at every level, we need to grasp that the cultural content – whether it be a sporting activity or a musical style that is being used for mass entertainment – is actually less important than the means used to produce it, namely the entrepreneurial skills, the financial resources, mainly provided by advertisers, and the technologies available for disseminating these products. The role of Brian Epstein in moulding the raw talent – that the four Beatles undoubtedly possessed – into an image of youthful insouciance that would appeal to millions of fans is well documented. He decided on dress, manners, staging, photos, tv appearances: in short, the details that created their public personas, in much the same way that pr managers groom politicians before elections. The ultimate aim is different, success at the ballot box leading to real political power, rather than commercial success, bringing fame and wealth – the former provided for the politician by voters, the latter provided for the performers by the adoring buyers of concert tickets, recordings, and allied paraphernalia. However, sheer numbers are the sine qua non for both, and to achieve these the managers know that virtual crowds are indispensable.
The story of how the virtual crowd became indispensable to securing mass followings in the domains of sport, politics and art is a familiar one. The role of film and television as they competed for audiences in the second half of last century is an important part of that story, with Hollywood devising film content to suit star performers who were guaranteed to sell films regardless of their quality on the one hand, while on the other hand television companies pursued ratings by romanticising the mundane realities of viewer’s everyday lives. In either case, personalities had to be cultivated with whom audiences could identify, whose personal lives were more interesting to them than the characters they portrayed, so audiences demanded to see the stars in the flesh occasionally. This created the interesting situation in which celebrities created by the media, who had a vast virtual following had to agree to be interviewed, go on tours and show themselves to admirers from time to time. On such occasions the virtual crowd would resolve itself into multiple real crowds,
In considering the consequences of this change, it is essential to keep the main features of crowd psychology in mind. As crowds form, they put pressure on individuals to join and to conform to the expectations of those already involved. Crowd behaviour thus resembles the flocking of birds or the herding of animals in the non-human world. The psychological gains are obvious; escape from the uncomfortable sensation of being different from others, and the accompanying isolation, accession to the sensation of power as part of a mass of like-minded people and the enhanced sense of personal identity that identification with this crowd of others confers. Consumer culture relies on this flocking behaviour, as people can only feel they are birds of a feather if they like the same things, enjoy the same entertainments, purchase the same products. Adolescents are particularly prone to flocking, due to their unstable identities and they are also particularly vulnerable consumers, with money to spend but unformed tastes and malleable needs. Advertisers strive to elicit such flocking behaviour in order to create both real and virtual crowds of consumers.
As we shall see, film and television taught the producers of internet-based entertainment and social media platforms three important lessons about how to create virtual crowds: first, develop a star system, so users can flock around celebrities; second, secure high ratings by focussing on real events like sporting competitions, quiz shows and news stories, creating blends of these often classified as ‘infotainment’; third, invest heavily in youth, the most easily manipulated consumers. In the final two sections of this chapter, we will look more closely at how these lessons were absorbed over time by Hollywood and then by the producers of internet-based entertainment. Here we are intent on describing the growing importance of virtual crowds to the global reach and the commercial success of the electronic media – and the impact of this process on the arts.
By the 1970s, film producers were adept at manufacturing stars and had moved on to creating virtual crowds that young audiences considered exclusively their own, consolidating the escape from the family circle effected in the youth movements of the 1960s. They achieved this by basing films on the heroes of children’s stories, such as comic book heroes, like Batman. Or they adapted high phantasy, adventure or science fiction into films with chid heroes, such as “et”. Kevin Feige of Marvel Studios, for example, made twenty-five films starring comic book heroes, netting $22 billion. Or, alternatively, they adapted best-seller children’s fiction, such as the Harry Potter series, by J. K. Rowling, as well as versions of earlier children’s classics, by C.S. Lewis and J.R.
It would take the invention of the internet to take the creation of virtual crowds to a new level, in which consumers of ‘infotainment’ co-operate unwittingly with advertisers in serving their commercial interests. The most original move was made by inventors of social media. They realized that the star system invented by Hollywood and the celebrity culture fostered by television could be adapted, so that fans and followers could themselves become stars, and command a virtual crowd of their own. They were able, furthermore, to make the flocking process almost automatic. Facebook, for example, with nearly three billion subscribers extending across the globe, has created search engines that prompt people to make “friends” of strangers continually, with no more effort than the click of a mouse, thus constructing innumerable virtual crowds who feel they belong together and have no need for the reality check to which real stars were occasionally subjected. There is a key difference from the other communication media, however. The groups that form around individual users, the self-styled stars of social media, create so-called ‘bubbles’, which are hermetically sealed off from other groups of users and so are prone to rumour-mongering and fake news reports, leading to erosion of the distinction between truth and lies, with far-reaching social and political consequences. Neither the people with whom one may interact on social media or the content of the information they disseminate need be ‘real’. We will pursue this insidious development in the final section of this chapter.
Meanwhile, another development with serious consequences was happening in the creative arts industries. Arts entrepreneurs and publishers soon learnt the lesson of how to use celebrity appeal to build crowd followings for artists and writers. Much of the popular literature at present is geared to the mentality and tastes of children and youth, even though it is also read by adults. Thus, literature has fallen into the same state as film and pop music, most of which have ceased being made with a mature audience in mind. This does not mean that literature, films or music for adults no longer exist, but rather that these have now become niche products and are not the main line of business. And to be successful even these have to follow certain well-established marketing strategies. Thus, for example, best-seller books for adults tend to deal with so-called “hot” topics, such as hard-core pornography or soft-core pornographic romance, or abstruse conspiracy theories generally touching on religious topics, or biographies of famous people or current celebrities. Most
This does not mean that good books are no longer being written, merely that serious writers can no longer hope to become best-sellers as they could in former times, as they are forced to compete for an ever-decreasing number of serious readers. This competition has been institutionalized. Serious writers increasingly seek recognition through prizes and awards, and are sucked into a culture in which the relation between talent and success is inverted: one must first be a winner if one wishes to be credited with talent, even though for every winner there are losers whose talent will not be recognized. In this respect, literary competition now resembles sporting competition. This whole phenomenon might be considered the ‘sportification’ of art and is to be encountered not only in literature but in all the so-called “classical” or high-brow arts. It is particularly prominent among classical music performers where it is almost impossible to succeed without winning one or another of the renowned international competitions for instrumentalists and vocalists. There are similar competitions for architects where prizes are awarded for plans or complete buildings, as in the much-watched Kevin McCloud program “Grand Designs” on the bbc, where the contest is for the best house of the year. There are numerous other architectural awards and so-called ‘starchitects’ like Frank Gehring can win more than one hundred of these.
The sportification of art ensues not merely from the competitive spirit, which was never absent, but from the fact that artists must face off against each other in a specially staged contest, where a jury of judges or experts compares the one work with the other against certain standards or criteria, which they are presumed to have in common. This is much like what happens in sports where there are no objective targets or measures of who does best or who is the winner, but rather where qualitative features have to be determined by members of a judging panel who crown the winner according to the highest score on some points system, enumerating what counts as desirable or undesirable. This takes place in sports such as diving, figure skating, ballroom dancing and many others. It is much the same in artistic competition, as, for example, in the awarding of the Booker Prize or the Prix Goncourt. These have become so
It is important to note that a seemingly similar competitive spirit began to pervade Western societies around about the time that the Olympic Games were revived in 1896 and when the first international football competition was established. This was also when the first and most important prize for literature, the Nobel Prize in 1901, was awarded and when the Venice Biennale of the arts was established in 1895. Its founder Riccardo Selvatico was inspired by the internationalization of football, according to James English: “In conceiving of the basic aims and contours of his new festival, it was the rise of international football he turned to.”12 English is the author of a book comprehensively examining the role of prizes and awards in what he calls the “economy of prestige”. He notes how such a system of competitive contests has grown in the course of the twentieth century in parallel with the growth of sporting competitions. Now in nearly all oecd countries and many others, there are multiple prize-giving festivals and award ceremonies in which winners are crowned. At the time of writing in 2005 English recorded over 6000 that offered annual awards, and these were increasing at a great rate year by year. One reason for the increase was the fact that countries were competing in staging new awards and offering ever larger prizes to increase their prestige. The most famous awards, such as the Nobel Prize, the Booker, the Prix Goncourt, the Oscars and so on now have competitors in other countries. Some of these are being set up for no other reason but to confer value on certain kinds of marketable commodities. This seems to be the case in Britain with the Turner Prize for painting and installations, etc., which was set up by the advertising firm Saatchi and Saatchi.
What then is the meaning of this sportification of art and what has brought this competitive ethos about, with its contests, prizes and awards? Why was it almost never necessary before, except for rare instances, such as in ancient Athens? Previously questions of quality in the arts were decided by those who
Now we are living in a completely different cultural environment where literature hardly matters to the affairs of society. Poetry and drama have almost ceased to exist except for small groups of self-enclosed afficionados, like philatelists or other hobbyists. Novels are still read widely, but mostly these are best-sellers read for distraction or entertainment or to fill an idle moment, like all the airport literature which is discarded as soon as the flight is over, as it has fulfilled its purpose. Nevertheless, there is still a small minority of readers who long for something better than best-seller pulp literature. But how, from among the tens of thousands of titles that publishers keep issuing annually, can they find the few that are worth reading because they have something to offer? For serious readers, this is another version of the old problem of finding the needle in the haystack.
Such a reader can no longer rely on honest reviewing and responsible criticism, as he or she could until about half a century ago. Reviewing and cultural journalism is vanishing from most newspapers, which are themselves rapidly disappearing due to the inroads of news on cable-tv and the internet social media. There are only a handful of major newspapers that still carry reviews and cultural criticism, and their readership is continually declining. Magazines and journals have also ceased addressing themselves to contemporary literature as it appears. Academic journals have never done so, and academics themselves are less inclined to do so now since current reviews do not count for much on their cvs and do not enhance their career prospects. Besides, literary academics are also disappearing in the face of the huge growth of special studies courses in which students now enrol, instead of the literature and modern language subjects they used to take in the past. In any case, the study of literary theory, such as Deconstruction, has taken over from criticism and the study
This is where the system of prizes and awards and the sportification of the higher forms of literature steps in – it fills the void left by the erosion of criticism and reviewing. But in doing so, it helps further this erosion too. For serious readers now turn to the outcome of competitive contests to help them decided what to read and what not to read. Hence the annual winners of such prizes are assured a large readership, those who are short listed get smaller readership, and those who the jury does not mention get hardly any readers at all. As usual, in our competitive society, it is a case of winner takes all, or nearly all, as the case may be. The winner of the Booker Prize is almost guaranteed sales in excess of 100,000.
But who decides winners? Usually, it is juries of a half dozen or so “experts”, that is, those who have a career in literature or some other cognate academic activity at best, at worst they are renowned personalities who might include tv presenters of literature shows. Since both aspiring and established authors generally desire to win, since on that hangs their future, it is understandable they will do everything in their power to influence the members of such juries to return verdicts in their favour and against their rivals. These tactics can range from writing works of the kind that are approved by the known or predicted jurors to the illegal resort to blackmail. Little is known of these manoeuvres in literary politics, except for the occasional scandals when the truth of what goes on in these secret conclaves is revealed, and it is usually not a pretty picture.
It is frequently hard to divine why one work should have been declared the winner in such a process of committee bickering and another, perhaps much worthier, should have lost out. To have made an enemy of one powerful member on such a panel is often enough to forfeit one the prize. This has happened to famous and outstanding writers in vying for the Nobel Prize, many of whom have never won it, one need only think of Lawrence, Joyce and other great writers or somewhat lesser ones, such as Graham Green. Something similar takes place at all levels.
Art and sport are coming to be thought of as related or analogous practices in which the same interests were at play and the same stakes were at issue. Expositions and festivals of the fine arts became simultaneously more international and more explicitly competitive … artists from different countries were in effect competing with one another for cash prizes and medals, often delivering speeches from a winner’s podium.13
Nevertheless, without the operation of such a system of competitive awards, it is doubtful whether any quality literature could survive at present. It serves multiple functions, apart from being a surrogate and replacement for criticism. But in the very process of substituting for criticism, it serves an extremely important marketing function since without it, it is doubtful that sales of quality new books would be anywhere near the figures they still command for the winners of the important awards – and this is one good reason that many publishers keep on bringing out quality literature. As prizes and awards usually receive considerable publicity in the press and electronic media, publishers can count on reasonable profits. The Nobel Prize and a few others as well receive international news coverage. This constitutes the main form of recognition that societies give to great writers.
Lesser writers, especially up and coming ones, also benefit from the recognition afforded by winning awards and prizes. This can lead to invitations to appear on television in interviews, talk shows, and the rare book shows that are still broadcast. No writer is ever invited to appear on these unless they have distinguished themselves by winning awards and prizes. Appearing on such programs is of incalculable benefit in a publicity hungry society and it can literally make a career in literature. It opens up avenues to lecturing, public speaking and appointments in academia as creative-writing lecturers and professors. In
The rise of prizes over the past century, and especially their proliferation over the past decade, is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success and that is in fact replacing a rich and varied culture with shallow and homogenous McCulture based on the model of network tv.14
What English calls McCulture we have called sham culture or Ersatz Kultur. In the next section we will look more closely at the role that television, particularly network tv, has played in its creation and then in the final section at the role of the internet.
3 Culture and the Media
Our previous discussion of football and the sportification of culture brought into prominence the crucial concept of surrogates for culture or a sham “culture” that substitutes for real culture, for which the German term is Ersatz Kultur. Some sham culture is completely synthetic and does not have any real
The presence of processed culture is everywhere apparent in the media, which will constitute the next major topic of our investigation. The degree of processing varies with the type of media and is more prevalent in the electronic media than in print media or other more traditional types. In the electronic media it becomes more intensive as ever newer electronic devices are developed and as these drive changes also in the older ones. We are thus faced with a process of continuous technological revolution which makes ever larger inroads into culture, until finally there is almost nothing of real or traditional culture left and sham culture becomes all pervasive.
To outline this continuous development of the electronic media, we will break up the historical span into three somewhat arbitrary divisions of half a century each, namely, 1900–1950, 1950–2000 and 2000–2020, possibly extending to 2050. The first period marks the start of the electronic media with the so-called Edison inventions of cinema and recorded sound, together with Marconi’s radio, and their steady diffusion from around 1900 onwards. The second period is that immediately after the Second World War when television arose as the main platform and became quickly widespread throughout the populations of America, Europe, Japan, Russia, China and the rest of Asia, and finally Africa in roughly that chronological order. It was also the period of great improvements in recording, such as tape-recorders and cassettes with high-fidelity sound and image recording on videos. The third period, starting approximately at the turn of the century, saw the widespread use of personal computers, the internet, cell-phones, and the digitization of all information, including television and radio. Technology has certainly been the driving force behind these developments, but technology alone could not have achieved the diffusion and utilization of inventions and systems of communication that took hold and assumed a mass character. Eventually these technologies became a global system of communication that linked together just about everyone throughout the world. This has had far-reaching cultural consequences and has led to the emergence of a global culture as distinct from all the local cultures. We shall come to that later, but first we must explore the two preceding periods 1900–1950 and 1950–2000.
As we already noted earlier, the beginning of the electronic media is almost coeval with the start of the professionalization of football and sport in general,
Behind both these revolutionary cultural developments stood the steady growth of the capitalist economy and the first incipient form of globalization with an international market for goods and services. Things were improving for the working class, even as the bourgeoisie were becoming ever wealthier. This process was interrupted by the First World War and after it by a continuous series of gigantic upheavals both in Europe and America, such as the Great Depression and growing militarization in Europe and America, culminating in the Second World War and the end of this period. Around 1950 a new start began involving continuous economic growth, known as the various economic miracles in Europe. These began to peter out around the mid-1970s, and since then the pace of globalization has steadily increased, with mixed consequences for the various classes, stagnation for those on the bottom and even greater wealth for those on top. This, then, is the economic and political background for the cultural changes we shall be considering.
In the first period 1900–1950 we shall mainly concentrate on the cinema, for this became for most people their main cultural pursuit, particularly so for women and children. Their attendance at the cinema, like football for men, was one of their main weekly preoccupations, though family outings were also common. In many ways this was the great age of cinema. The studios of Hollywood and all the other national film producing centres, such as Ealing in London, Babelsberg in Potsdam and Cinecitta in Rome, were producing all manner of films suitable for every sector of the population, for everybody went to the movies. In quality, these streams of films varied enormously from masterpieces by famous directors for the discerning few to standard B-grade fare for the masses.
Thus, the cinema at that time, during the 20s, 30s and 40s, and to a lesser degree since, assumed a double aspect: on the one hand, it was a new art form in a new medium; but on the other hand, it was the opium of the masses, contrived to provide sentimental dreams or thrills and spills of spectacle or other such intoxicants, which workers in factories and offices craved in order to break the monotony of their daily routines. What Marx unjustly called religion, namely “the opium of the people”, the cinema in fact became. Little wonder Hollywood became known as the dream factory. This double aspect
During its initial period, largely between the two great wars, the bulk of the subject matter of the cinema came largely from nineteenth century popular and high culture. This material was suitably processed to make it fit the technical capacities of the camera and simplified and shortened for the limited attention spans of mass audiences. There was hardly a nineteenth century art form or literary mode that was not adapted for the cinema, from music hall and vaudeville at one extreme to the great novels at the other. Charlie Chaplin films exemplify the former category, for he had started as a variety artist, and “Gone with the Wind” indirectly exemplifies the latter, for that is a movie rendering of a novel that was itself a Civil War version of War and Peace. Hardly anything that fully belonged to the twentieth century ever appeared on film unless it had something to do with war. Of course, propaganda films by the Soviet and Nazi regimes did reflect contemporary issues, but only in a highly distorted way, and even that very rarely. Realism in the cinema only came in with the Italian directors de Sica and Rossellini after the Second World War or in rare British productions such as “The Third Man” based on a script by Graham Green. This is, of course, not a requirement for great films, which could be based on other resources, such as Jean Renoir’s “Les Régles du Jeu”, whose wit and plotting owes something to Beaumarchais’ “Marriage of Figaro” but is, nevertheless, an original work, which reflected its time, the period just before the war. One of the greatest Hollywood productions, Orson Wells “Citizen Kane”, also an original work, casts a strong critical light on much of American media and politics.
The story we have told of cinema might also be told of the other electronic media during this period. Radio varied in quality from bbc programs in Britain under the tutelage of Reith at one end to the commercialized stock fare of standard networks in America at the other. Recorded music enabled a wide audience to hear great music for the first time ever; and also made it possible for popular music, such as that of the great chansonniers in France or jazz in America, to reach a mass public. But at the same time, Tin Pan Alley was already dominating by churning out schmalzy sentimental fare.
Starting in America, but rapidly spreading, the stranglehold of advertising was already asserting itself over all culture, and this would increase ever after
The dominance of advertising over all the media and eventually over art itself became ever so much greater in the second period 1950–2000. It was then that television arrived to displace the cinema in the lives of the masses, and rock music substituted for most of the other popular musical styles. With the advent of television, hucksters did not have to wait for customers to come and buy or meet them where they could be ambushed with ads; now they could invite themselves into their very homes at any time of day or night, as long as the television set was turned on. And almost everything that was on television, soon to be known as the idiot-box, revolved around advertising, at least in America. In Britain the bbc initially put up a rear-guard fight against the total commercialization of the tv screen, and something similar took place in the other West European countries. But it was a losing battle, as the commercial interests of the capitalist economy proved too strong and eventually prevailed upon governments. Commercial stations were registered and government ones were allowed to broadcast advertising.
Beginning with television, technology has changed the way we engage with society, substituting passive consumption of content and ideas for civic engagement, digital communication for conversation.15
A passive non-participatory consumer attitude to all culture, whether real or sham, took over from actually doing anything, even if this only means attentive and engaged listening or viewing. A mentally lazy, disengaged attention requiring least effort came to prevail even while experiencing the great works of the
Such conditioned habits of attention developed from the way television came to be used as an anodyne to relieve the stresses of working life and provide distraction for people. Whole families relaxed before the box in silence and individual isolation, each in a viewing bubble detached from the others. This kind of viewing can become highly addictive and symptoms of withdrawal can be experienced when for some extraneous reason it is no longer available. This is particularly the case with children, for whom special programs and advertisements were carefully crafted to keep them glued to the screen, so to speak. Children can become addicted if they are brought up from infancy on this sham culture, and are not easily weaned off it and can no longer be brought to care for anything more engaging. This is how young people become averse to real culture; which partly explains the rise of the counter-culture of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll soon after the television age was inaugurated.
The corruption of children’s culture is one of the most pernicious effects of television and the new media in general. It constitutes a new kind of massacre of the innocents in that innocence is killed off very early in life. Even in play, children are not left to their own devices to follow their own imaginings. Instead, commercialized games and sets for playing games have invaded childhood activities. Little girls, who used to play with rag dolls and had to resort to imagination to make them life-like, are now provided with prefigured paraphernalia. The older ones are supplied with Barbie doll sets that channel their fantasies into predictable commercial desires for fancy clothes and other gear. The little boys are similarly supplied with realistic looking guns and given videos that teach them how to use them to shoot people. The vast array of traditional children’s’ games, sayings, verses, riddles and all else that was passed on by children themselves from generation to generation have almost all disappeared, as the work of the Opies has demonstrated.16
It all became much worse in the internet age, our third period from around 2000 onwards. Those brought up on computers almost from birth in this period are known as internet natives and considered to be computer literate. Among many of them, gaming on consoles and special internet platforms has become an all-consuming activity, and some neither rest nor sleep in order to
As we now enter the twenty-first century, I suggest that perhaps the most effective short-hand that characterizes this new state of play is the designation cognitive-cultural economy, meaning the economic order that is internally formed on mobilizing the knowledge, creativity, cultural attributes, sensibility and behavioural characteristic of the labour force, in combination with the technological infrastructure based on digital computation. As such, the cognitive-cultural economy coincides with sectors like science-intensive manufacturing, business and financial services, fashion-oriented production, neo-artisanal industries, audio-visual media, publicity, and so on.18
In other words, there is now a total integration of sham culture into the economic system of media production, based on digital computer programs, together with the consumerist market of entertainment. Sham culture is just another product of this system of economy and technology. As Scott puts it:
One of the defining features of contemporary capitalism, then, is the conspicuous convergence that is occurring between the domain of the economic, on the one hand, and the domain of the cultural on the other. Vast segments of the output of the modern economy are inscribed with significant cultural content (in the sense given above), while culture is
increasingly being supplied in the commodity form, i.e., as goods and services produced by private firms in conformity with price signals and profitability criteria.19
Thus, there are now firms with a global reach that cater to all aspects of sham cultural production, from product conception to marketing, advertising and distribution in numerous forms. The idea of synergy is invoked to rationalize production so that the one product, idea or theme can be utilized in various ways across numerous media, as in print, film, television, video and many more. This can only be done by the largest all-inclusive media firms that bear the familiar names of Time Warner, Sony, Disney, Daewoo, Bertelsmann, News Corp, and a few more. Mostly they are American by origin, but some from other countries have also entered the global market for cultural commodities.
Hosting such companies turns America and various other countries, at present mainly European, into post-industrial societies. They specialize in the production of sham culture together with fashions, adornment, fast foods, alcoholic beverages and everything else that caters to the luxury living that more and more rich people across the globe can now afford. These so-called culture industries now employ a sizeable proportion of the labour force of the advanced economies. According to Scott:
… in the United States just over three million (2.4 percent of the total labour force) were employed in the culture-products sector, representing both manufacturing and service activities. In Britain, according to Pratt (1997), a little under one million workers (4.7 percent of the total labour force) are employed in cultural industries and their main input providers.20
Notwithstanding the many cultural clashes that continue to break out as globalization runs its course, we seem to be steadily moving in a world that is becoming more and more cosmopolitan and eclectic in its modes of cultural consumption. Certainly, for the consumers in the more advanced parts of the world, the standard American staples are now but one element of an ever-widening palette of cultural offerings comprising Latin-American telenovelas, Japanese comic books, Hong Kong kung fu movies, West African music, Korean pop culture, London fashions, Balinese tourist resorts, Australian and Chilean wines, Mexican cuisine, and untold exotic fare …21
Who could fail to be enthralled by all this variety, ready and waiting for the consumer to choose from at any moment of the day or night? One can choose as one pleases what to eat, to wear, to listen to, to read, to watch on screen, with whom to interact, what to communicate to so-called “friends” or all and sundry. In short, this becomes a life where one is free to sample and taste everything without being committed to anything or anyone. One can feel perfectly free to arrange one’s life just as one fancies. But what kind of life is this, and what kind of person does one end up becoming? This is not a question that the many who aspire to that life ever ask themselves.
4 Culture and the Internet
With the ascendency of virtual crowds on the internet and the pervasiveness of information technologies as the media for both private and public life, the very terms on which such life is based are becoming corrupted. Crucial distinctions between the fundamental oppositions of social discourse are becoming blurred: the real and the fake, truth and falsity, fact and fiction, the actual and the virtual, and many more such basic differentiations in terms of which people can orient themselves in both intellectual and practical life. It has always been the arduous and painstaking task of teachers throughout the ages to instil such norms into the minds of children. Now, no doubt they still labour to achieve such results in schools and higher institutions of learning; but with ever lesser chance of succeeding, for their work is being ever more undermined, if not openly boycotted, by what takes place on social media and elsewhere in society.
There is no shame for those who communicate anonymously whatever vileness they want to express on the net. The world wide web, which its idealistic inventors thought would be a boon for untrammelled and uncensored self-expression, has become a vast sewer of filth, lies and deceptions, a rumour mill where unsubstantiated gossip circulates. At best it is an echo chamber where one’s own views come back reinforced by apparent confirmation from many others. When nobody takes responsibility for saying anything whatever, and nobody is held to account for falsehood, calumny, deception, misrepresentation, or anything else that is liable to litigation and censure in real social life, then the whole of morality, honesty and truthfulness goes by the board.
What chance do schools and teachers have to bring up their charges to understand and abide by the basic norms of discourse when the hucksters of sham culture, the media manipulators and now the dispensers of false social relations have proved themselves to be so much more enticing to gullible young minds? All this began with the propaganda for computer literacy which was swallowed by almost everybody in our advanced societies, including the politicians who are otherwise so sceptical of everyone’s motives. Hardly a voice was raised against it. There were, of course, huge commercial interests at stake, as well as the usual ideological illusions that advanced technology of itself brings progress. We are all now learning to our cost that computer literacy was bought at the price of general illiteracy. The mass introduction of computers in schools and the training of children from infancy in their use has not advanced
Education is perhaps the most obvious of these applications. As William Mitchell puts it: ‘If a latter-day Jefferson were to lay out an ideal educational community for the third millennium, he might put in cyberspace’. Douglas Hague suggests that education will be totally transformed: information technology will not destroy the teaching profession, as some fear, but will change it beyond recognition, by allowing teachers to produce high-quality lessons to suit the needs of individual students.23
But not only will information technology prove greatly beneficial for primary and secondary teachers and students, but also teaching in the universities and other tertiary schools will also be transformed. As Hall goes on to predict:
First-rate remote lectures will replace second- or third-rate direct ones; multimedia presentation will allow students to pace their own learning. Teachers will thus find themselves performing new roles: as ‘guides’ or tutors; as ‘communication/interpreters’ on tv; as scholar/interpreters, turning research into teaching materials, and as ‘assemblers’, packaging
this material into products; all working in teams, on the model set in the 1960s by the UK Open University.24
“Oh, brave new world that hath such people in it!” The result has fallen far short of the promise. For the moment we will postpone considering what has actually transpired in the universities, as another volume will be devoted to this account. Here we will concentrate solely on schools.
In an economically and technologically advanced country such as Australia – where the information technology revolution occurred early, soon after America, and where it was spurred on by substantial government funding – the overall results in all subjects on the pisa tests have been steadily falling. It is difficult to prove conclusively that this is solely due to the introduction of computers into classrooms, since there are so many other factors to be considered, due to the ever-increasing prevalence of sham culture in society. Nevertheless, at least part of the blame must be ascribed to computers, as is evident from the fact that some of the very best performing schools in the country, very high-cost private tuition schools (modelled on Britain’s so-called “public” schools), have banned the use of computers in classrooms.
Twenty years into the post-modern era, creativity scores were generally falling-off and some of the subsidiary components of creativity tested for by the Torrance test had begun to decline as early as 1984. The fall-off was worst among the young, those aged from kindergarten years to third grade. What does this mean? It indicates that the observed decline in creation and innovation in the universities and the innovation economy extends deep into the pores of the wider society.25
What this hints at, is that a typical post-modern ‘clever’ country or ‘smart’ society (like the United States or Australia) might manage in certain ways to be more intelligent, yet at the same time end up alarmingly less creative. This is a paradox worth reflecting on. It suggests, among other things, that the post-modern identification of education and creation is misleading. More education does not make societies more creative. In fact, over the decades that the oecd countries have aggressively expanded higher education social creativity has declined.27
Kids are far more vulnerable to screen-based technology than I ever imagined. For a generation we assumed that exposing kids to technology was an unalloyed positive. This was incorrect, with a high cost.28
In the mindless pursuit of growth, internet platforms had built a range of products for kids. It is hard to know whether the platforms were ignorant of children’s vulnerability or drawn to it, but the kid’s products they created appeared to cause developmental and psychological problems.29
But even apart from such problems of attention and interaction, addiction to computer screens and surfing the net cause deep seated failures of reading, comprehension and thought, such as Nicholas Carr exposes.32 Children and adults who read text on the computer screen do so much more shallowly than those who read ordinary paper texts, especially so if there are hypertexts attached. Reading experiments have shown that “comprehension declined as the number of links increased.”33 What is perhaps even more troubling is that even experienced readers resort to much more superficial reading strategies when reading online; they browse and jump from text to text rather than reading in the traditional sequential way line by line and paragraph after paragraph. As a result, their comprehension is diminished. What Carr calls “deep reading” or thoughtful reading with understanding is disappearing, and with it the whole culture of the book as this is traditionally conceived. The very effort that Google has made, in order to make all books available is destroying what these books seek to convey. As Carr sees it:
The irony in Google’s effort to bring greater efficiency to reading is that it undermines the very different kind of efficiency that the technology of the book brought to reading – and to our minds – in the first place … With writing on the screen, we’re still able to decode text quite quickly – we read, if anything, faster than ever – but we’re no longer guided toward a deep personally constructed understanding of the text’s connotations. Instead, we’re hurried off toward another bit of related information, and then another and another. The strip mining of “relevant content” replaces the slow excavation of meaning.34
Since so much of reality comes to us through the mediation of a technology which can so easily be perverted, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is illusory. On the net, reality and virtual reality begin to seamlessly fuse into each other. Is what one sees on the screen the reflection of a real scene or a made-up visual image? How can one any longer know? Is what one hears in a report valid news or fake news? There are even worse confusions created by human relations on the so-called social media that put into question our moral criteria. Is presenting a false persona on the net deception or just a game of make believe? Is one communicating with a person at all or with a bot, a cleverly contrived program?
The breakdown of the fundamental binaries of discourse, such as those of truth and lies, reality and illusion, genuine and fake, points to the breakdown of the distinction between real culture and sham culture which we have sought to uphold in our account. When the whole of the internet information system has become one media generating technological apparatus, then genuine culture and what is fake culture can no longer be separated. All becomes information indifferently, more or less processed to suit the requirements and interests of those who produce it.
In Hollywood, studios run their scripts through neural networks of a company called Epagogix, a system trained on the unstated preferences of millions of moviegoers developed over decades in order to predict which lines will push the right – meaning the most lucrative – emotional buttons. Their algorithmic engines are enhanced with data from Netflix, Hula, YouTube and others, whose access to minute-by-minute preferences of millions of video watchers, combined with an obsessive focus on the acquisition and regimentation of data, provides them with a level of cognitive insight undreamt of by previous regimes.35
In reference to this kind of film production one can no longer ask whether this is real or sham culture, as one still could of the old Hollywood films; instead, one begins to wonder whether this is culture at all in any sense. Culture, whether real or sham, true or fake, is always taken to be a human product intended for readily understood cultural ends, even though very often base and lowly ones. But the kinds of films now being produced are as much machine generated as human products, and they are intended to elicit immediate quasi-psychological responses: “Feeding directly upon the frazzled, binge-watching desires of over-saturated consumers, [thus] the network turns upon itself, reflecting, reinforcing and heightening the paranoia inherent in the system”, as Bridle explains.36 As he goes on to show, game developers work in the same way with “real-time monitoring of players’ behaviour until they have such a fine grasp on dopamine-producing neural pathways that teenagers die of exhaustion in front of the computers, unable to tear themselves away.”37 Gaming is an addictive and dangerous sport.
Bridle concludes from many such examples that “entire cultural industries become feedback loops for an increasingly dominant narrative of fear and violence.”38 But can one any longer call these even cultural industries, since there is so little that is cultural about them. Might this not be just as much considered mass unsupervised scientific experimentation carried out by computer engineers. Stalin once called poets “the emotional engineers of the soul”, but only now has this become a literal truth. However, it is no longer poets but
There have been myriad revelations of Google and Facebook’s manipulation of the information we see. For now, I will simply point out that Google’s algorithms derived from surplus [a computing term] select and order search results, Facebook’s algorithms derived from surplus, select and order the content of its News Feed. In both cases, researchers have shown that the manipulators reflect each corporation’s commercial objectives.40
As more and more of the world’s information became digitized, so ever more of it became open to manipulations of all kinds. As Zuboff shows: “By 2013, the progress of digitation and datafication (the application of software that allows computer and algorithms to process and analyse raw data) combined with new and cheaper storage technologies had translated 98 percent of the world’s information into digital format”.41 Thus, for example, nearly all the world’s literature and art now exists in data form. Hence, it is now possible for Facebook, Amazon and Google “to create value out of the vast amounts of data through intelligent computational analyses.”42 This is known as data mining in the trade and it promises to offer greater wealth than the real kind.
We have now entered the stage of what is called ambient computing where data is streaming in from “the always-on instrumentation, datafication, connection, communication and computation of all things, animated and inanimate, and all processes – natural-human, physical, chemical, machine,
The aim of this undertaking is not to impose behavioural norms, such as conformity or obedience, but rather to produce behaviour that reliably, definitely and certainly leads to desired commercial results.46
However, in despotic countries, such as China, it goes way beyond desired commercial results and embraces desired political results as well.
So-called “deep fake” software, which allows sophisticated video recreations of anyone, is available to download online, while we all commit more and more personal information to the internet – images, stories, thoughts, feelings – from which ai “corpuses” to recreate our own personalities can be derived.47
In this postmodern world, individuals flee from the “desert of the real” for the ecstasies of hyperreality and the new realm of computers, media, and technological experience. In this universe subjectivities are fragmented and lost, and a new terrain of experience appears, which for Baudrillard renders previous social theories and politics obsolete and irrelevant.48
This is happening because “people are caught up in the play of images, spectacles and simulacra, which have less and less relationship to an external ‘reality’, to such an extent that the very concepts of the social, political or even ‘reality’ no longer have any meaning.”49 What we have put in terms of the concept of “culture”, Baudrillard puts in terms of the concept of “meaning”, arguing that “the masses seek spectacle and not meaning” because “the narcoticized and mesmerized (some of Baudrillard’s metaphors) media-saturated consciousness is in such a state of fascination with images and spectacle that the concept of meaning (which depends on stable boundaries, fixed structures, shared consensus) dissolves …”50 And as meaning dissolves, so, too, does culture.
None of this means that ordinary realities are disappearing, as Baudrillard supposed when he asserted that the Iraq war never took place but was a media hallucination. Unfortunately, the reality of blood and gore was all too true and experienced by those involved. No matter how long people spend online, sooner or later they must return to the mundane realities of their material lives. The technology has not yet been invented, such as Marvin Minsky and other ai gurus imagine, that would permit us to exist solely as information on a
And so, we feel ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of world views now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus of reality, but one riven by fundamentalist insistence on simple narratives, conspiracy theories, and postfactual politics. It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns, an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.52
All this is symptomatic of the fact that we are entering the twilight of a cultural dark age. How and when we might ever come out of it is not for us to know. But if we do not come out of it eventually then humanity as we have known it is doomed. A post-human condition is even now being talked about; what that is nobody can possibly imagine. But we know enough to sense intuitively that it is not one that bodes any good for us as human beings.
The great majority of humanity does not engage with, produce or appreciate any form of culture other than what used to be considered by cultured people, disparagingly, as mere popular pastimes, with no links to the intellectual, artistic and literary activities that were once at the heart
of culture. This former culture is now dead, although it still survives in small social enclaves, without any influence on the mainstream.53
The truth of Llosa’s judgement should now be amply evident from all that has been established in this chapter, indeed, from the book as a whole.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society, trans. John King (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 1.
Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 141.
Ibid, 141.
Ibid, 142.
Ibid, 142.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 27.
Ibid, 28.
Ibid, 28.
Ibid, 29.
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, op. cit, 63–67.
James English, The Economy of Prestige, Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 251.
James English, The Economy of Prestige, op. cit, 250.
Ibid, 2–3.
Roger McNamee, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe (New York: Harper Collins, 2020), 10.
See Jona Opie and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) and Children’s Games in Street and Playground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).
See James Bridle, New Dark Age, op. cit, 230.
Allen J. Scott, “Cultural Economy: Retrospect at Prospect”, in Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthira Ray Isar, eds. The Cultural Economy: Culture and Civilization Series (2) (London: Sage, 2008), 307.
Ibid, 308.
Ibid, 310.
Ibid, 317.
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998), 950.
Ibid, 951.
Ibid, 951.
Peter Murphy, Universities and Innovation Economies, (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 57.
Kim, T.H., “The Creativity Crisis: The Decrease in Creative Thinking Scores on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking”, Creativity Research Journal, 3–4, (2008), 285–295.
Ibid, 67.
Roger McNamee, Zucked, op. cit, 237.
Ibid, 156.
Ibid, 273.
Ibid, 273.
Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember (London: Atlantic Books, 2010).
Ibid, 128.
Ibid, 166.
James Bridle, New Dark Age, op. cit, 130.
Ibid, 130.
Ibid, 130.
Ibid, 130.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (London: Profile Books, 2019), 67.
Ibid, 186.
Ibid, 187.
Ibid, 138.
Ibid, 202.
Ibid, 202.
Ibid, 203.
Ibid, 203.
Harry de Quetteville, The Telegraph (London), reprinted in The Age (Melbourne), 2 January 2020.
Douglas Kellner, “Jean Baudrillard”, in George Ritzer, ed, The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 321.
Ibid, 322.
Ibid, 322.
See Harry Redner, Quintessence of Dust: The Science of Matter and the Philosophy of Mind (Leiden: Brill, 2020), Chapter 7.
James Bridle, New Dark Age, op. cit, 10.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Notes on the Death of Culture, op. cit, 20.