M. T. Schäfer: Bastard Culture! User participation and the Extension of Cultural Industries

The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerging media practices, my dissertation steps beyond the usual framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation. I argue that participatory culture is rather a dynamic interaction of users and companies, discourses and technologies. The availability of computers and Internet expand the traditional culture industry into the domain of users, who actively participate in cultural production, either by appropriating products from the commercial domain or by creating their owns. But while user activities constitute a significant loss of control for certain sectors of traditional media industries, especially in the area of distribution, the larger culture industry benefits from user driven innovation through the appropriation of corporate design. Furthermore, the media industry undergoes a shift from creating content to providing platforms for user driven social interactions and user-generated content. In this extended culture industry participation unfolds not only in the cocreation of media content and software-based products, but also in the development and defense of distinctive media practices that represent a sociopolitical understanding of new technologies.

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Theodor W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (2001)

“The creation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1920s saw the birth of some of the most exciting and challenging writings of the twentieth century. It is out of this background that the great critic Theodor Adorno emerged. His finest essays are collected here, offering the reader unparalleled insights into Adorno’s thoughts on culture. He argued that the culture industry commodified and standardized all art. In turn this suffocated individuality and destroyed critical thinking. At the time, Adorno was accused of everything from overreaction to deranged hysteria by his many detractors. In today’s world, where even the least cynical of consumers is aware of the influence of the media, Adorno’s work takes on a more immediate significance. The Culture Industry is an unrivalled indictment of the banality of mass culture.”

Editor J. M. Bernstein
Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415253802, 9780415253802
210 pages

Key terms: fascist, mass music, virme, culture industry, mass media, Dialectic of Enlightenment, mass culture, ego ideal, Adorno, acmally, critical theory, jazz, reified, psychoanalysis, astrology, Simone Weil, Freud, Erich Fromm, Gillian Rose

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David Gauntlett, Ross Horsley (eds): Web.studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age (2004)

Bringing together the work of scholars, experts, and established online authors, this comprehensive book offers an analysis of both contemporary Web-based culture and arts and the impact of the Web on international economics, politics, and law. This second edition of Web.Studies combines updated chapters from the first edition with completely new chapters on the latest developments and controversies in cyberspace. Beginning with an introduction to the Web and how it works, the book outlines the theories and methodology of cyberculture studies, before moving on to explore aspects of everyday life online, art and commerce, global communities and the politics of Internet access and activism.

Published by Arnold, 2004
ISBN 0340814721, 9780340814727
327 pages

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