Foucauldian Technologies of the Self,
Participatory Cultural Production and New Media
Christina M. Smith (bio)
Arizona State University
Abstract
As new media technologies proliferate, cultural production is becoming increasingly participatory – spawned by the prominence of what Foucault (1988) called “technologies of the self.” Shortly before his death in 1984, Foucault embarked on this new intellectual endeavor, the groundwork of which would inspire debate over the meaning, application, and utility of his concept. Some studies using Foucault’s largely unarticulated concept potentially overlook the dual aspect of technologies of the self: whereas these technologies are key in “how the self recognizes itself as a subject involved in practices of self-constitution, recognition, and reflection,” (Barker, 2000, p. 234), such technologies are also inextricably linked to power and, without adequate reflection, individuals merely work to reinscribe existing social relations. This paper discusses Foucauldian technologies of the self in light of new media forms and the participatory cultural production and “care for oneself” engendered by such technologies. Foucault’s concept is applied to participatory media technologies which are highly instrumental in contemporary self-constitution: blogs, social networking sites, and video dissemination sites. The paper argues that new media created subjectivities potentially fail to engage in all the necessary aspects of personal reflection and “care for oneself” described by Foucault, thus ignoring important socio-political relations of power. Therefore, cultural producers must be educated in not only the technical abilities needed to participate in cultural production, but also the underlying structural and ideological biases that lead to surveillance, control, and hegemony.
In her award-winning book on the Farm Security Administration photographs, Picturing Poverty, Cara Finnegan (2003) describes the “documentary decade” of the 1930s. Specifically, she focuses on Roosevelt’s use of the words “facing” and “recognizing” as indicative of the social relationship between seeing and knowing during this timeframe. If the photographs from the 1930s FSA initiative were indicative of that era’s documentary nature, then the “new documentary decade” of the mid 1990s to mid 2000s is characterized by grainy videos consisting of various content, streamed through the computer screens of the nation via video dissemination sites such as YouTube. Indeed, cell-phone video has come to represent the immediacy and authenticity of tragic events such as the London train bombings, the Indonesian tsunami, and the War in Iraq. As audiences, composed of angst-ridden teenagers to soldiers in combat gain access to affordable high-quality digital image capturing devices, coupled with simple dissemination techniques, the public screens of Americans are dominated by video blogs, politician blunders, and intense combat footage.
Finnegan (2003) argues that several assumptions must be made when studying images: the meaning of images is neither fixed nor universal, images are best studied in the context of the visual culture through which they circulate, and all images are part of a visual culture that privileges some form of visual expression over others. In the “new documentary decade,” digital video is privileged over other forms. Finnegan suggests images must therefore be understood as both a product (the historical context) and a process (through which historical context was visualized for the public). In contemporary visual culture, active audiences are using their technical skills and creativity to craft and circulate their own images, engaging in a form of what Burgess (2006) calls “vernacular creativity.” As new media technologies proliferate, cultural production is becoming increasingly participatory – spawned by the prominence of Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self.
Shortly before his death in 1984, Foucault embarked on a new intellectual endeavor, the groundwork of which would inspire debate over the meaning, application, and utility of his concept of technologies of the self. Foucault first explicated the concept in a seminar and public lecture at the University of Vermont in 1982 and the transcripts of this presentation are all that remain for scholars to interrogate and elaborate. In an interview with a university representative, Foucault characterized his new area of inquiry as follows:
What I have studied are the three traditional problems: (1) What are the relations we have to truth through scientific knowledge, to those “truth games” which are so important in civilization and in which we are both subject and object? (2) What are the relationships we have to others through those strange strategies and power relationships? And (3) what are the relationships between truth, power, and the self? I would like to finish all this with a question: What could be more classic than these questions and more systematic than the evolution through questions one, two, and three, and back to the first? I am just at this point (cited in Martin, Gutman, and Hutton, 1988, p. 15).
Due to his untimely death and the corresponding theoretical void surrounding technologies of the self, scholars have implemented a variety of approaches to the concept. Increasingly, the notion of technologies of the self has been applied to material devices that serve as tools for identity construction and maintenance. Scholars have started using technologies of the self as an underpinning for investigations into new media technologies and their role in subjectivity formation and regulation, including information technology (Capurro, 1996), the internet (Aycock, 1995), online gaming and personal websites, (Garnar, 2007), and cellular telephones (Campbell, 2006). However, some of these studies potentially overlook the dual aspect of technologies of the self: whereas these technologies are key in “how the self recognizes itself as a subject involved in practices of self-constitution, recognition, and reflection,” (Barker, 2000, p. 234), such technologies are also inextricably linked to power and, without adequate reflection, individuals merely work to reinscribe existing social relations.
This paper undertakes a “revisioning” of Foucauldian technologies of the self in light of new media forms and the participatory cultural production and “care for oneself” engendered by such technologies. Foucault’s concept is applied to participatory media technologies which are highly instrumental in contemporary self-constitution: blogs, social networking sites, and video dissemination sites. Klinenberg and Benzecry (2005) call on scholars investigating cultural production in a digital age to examine: a) how the circulation of digital artifacts contributes to the process of cultural production, and b) how people creatively use technologies for cultural work. This paper is an initial foray into these research questions. First, I will discuss participatory media technologies whereby individuals create and cultivate their subjectivity. Next, Foucault’s concept of technologies of the self will be elaborated.
Finally, as Eagleton (1984) asserts, the role of the critic is to foster an understanding of how cultural processes relate to social and political power. In staying with a cultural studies approach that emphasizes the social and political consequences of media representations, I will argue that new media engendered subjectivities potentially fail to engage in all the necessary aspects of personal reflection and “care for oneself” described by Foucault, thus ignoring important socio-political relations of power. Therefore, cultural producers must be educated in not only the technical abilities needed to participate in cultural production, but also the underlying structural and ideological biases that lead to surveillance, control, and hegemony. In doing so, I hope to address the theoretical gap identified by Slack and Wise (2006), who contend that little work outside of Foucault’s technologies of the self has been done within a cultural studies framework to address technology and identity. This paper is one modest attempt to begin such an increasingly important endeavor.
Active Audiences and Participatory Cultural Production
Currently, media audiences are utilizing digital tools to actively participate in cultural production. New media technologies have led to a proliferation of documenting, evidenced by the images of Abu Ghraib prison, the millions of MySpace and Facebook pages, the blunders of politicians, the popularity of bloggers, and the numerous videos available for viewing on YouTube. Indeed, Marc Glaser, a journalist, describes a plane crash where the witness first took cell phone pictures before helping the people onboard: “that was his first reaction, and that’s the way people are starting to live their lives” (cited in Chadwick, 2005). The growth of participatory culture is a result of new tools for the archiving, manipulation, and circulation of content, the availability of accessible media production technologies, and the economic trend of media convergence, which demands more active audiences (Jenkins, 2006a), as well as by the digitization of content (Klinenberg and Benzecry, 2005).
New communication technologies potentially reduce the entry price into the cultural field, opening new means for actors to gain admission into the public sphere. Whereas some actors are using the reduced entry price to challenge political or media dominance, other actors use these technologies to capture the mundane existence of everyday life in all its hilarity, disappointment, or brutality. Understanding both the digital and cultural spheres involved in such cultural production is key (Galloway, 2005).
These participatory media technologies are characterized by heterogeneity and de-massification, problematizing longstanding notions of audience and flattening the hierarchy inherent in views of corporate media as hegemonic. The hegemonic view is often foundational within cultural studies, where the audience is given agency in decoding the texts provided by the corporate media (Hall, 1981). Within this view, audiences actively produce meaning from within their cultural contexts (Barker, 2000). Additionally, such a view interprets media texts as polysemic, with multiple meanings inherent in a single message. According to Hall’s (1981) encoding/decoding formula, the media organization produces a text that is encoded with the preferred meanings of the dominant power structure. These texts have “interpretive guidelines” for audiences to interpret the message according to the preferred meaning, but audiences can decode messages in a variety of ways.
Hall proposes three possible decoding positions: 1) the hegemonic decoding which accepts the preferred meaning, 2) a decoding that simultaneously accepts the legitimacy of the hegemonic and adapts the message to cultural meanings, and 3) an oppositional decoding. Yet, Hall’s model is largely based upon total corporate control of media content. Participatory cultural production through blogs, MySpace, and YouTube offer not only the opportunity to engage in an oppositional decoding, but opens up new possibilities for oppositional encoding as well. The multiple possibilities for message encoding/decoding challenge contemporary formulations of authorship, content, and knowledge production (Sharp, 2006). As Jenkins (2006b) notes, “the distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators, creators and interpretations will blend to form a reading-writing continuum, which will extend from the machine and network designers to the ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activities of the other” (p. 121).
As indicated, participatory cultural production takes a variety of forms, including blogging, social networking sites, and video dissemination sites – each medium of which challenges total corporate control of content. For example, blogs, or as Deuze (2006) calls them, petits narratives, were started in the early 1990s by computer programmers, and increased most rapidly during the 2004 Election, when bloggers were given legitimate press credentials and provided an unprecedented amount of information, of varying quality, to devoted readers. The Pew Center’s Internet and American Life Project concludes that, in 2004, there was a 58% rise in blog readership, with a total of 27% of the American population reading blogs. The 2004 Election was the first where citizen-consumers used their new media technical skills to engage in widespread political activism (Jenkins, 2006b). The replacement of mainstream media as the exclusive source for political information again highlights the changing media landscape. In this case, new media technologies open up spaces for antagonism and allow for limited contestation of political hegemony.
Individuals who feel that the mainstream corporate media neglects important stories or geographic areas are also engaging in participatory cultural production. The rise of citizen journalism is indicative of a growing distrust in media conglomerates (Brown, 2006). With a variety of web-based outlets available for dissemination and the ease of use and publishing options, “it’s vox populi meets reality t.v” (Romano, 2005, p. 14). Increasingly, the circulation and progression of on-the-scene images originates not with local television stations, but with consumers, who send their images instantaneously to various news outlets – as occurred with the London bombings (see Braiker, 2005). Furthermore, television stations are now training mobile journalists in video production and editing techniques, in order to capitalize on low-cost, enthusiastic citizen prosumers.
Other forms of media are opening up spaces for participatory cultural production and identity construction. Video dissemination sites such as YouTube permit user-created content to be posted on the internet for audiences to view via streaming video. The YouTube.com website describes the service as: “A place for people to engage in new ways with video by sharing, commenting on, and viewing videos. YouTube originally started as a personal video sharing service and has grown into an entertainment destination” (www.youtube.com/t/about). YouTube chronicles the mundane to the serious, with content ranging from lip-synching teenagers to oral histories and news events. With the purchase of the company by Google, its capability and reach has dramatically increased. As noted by founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, “the whole philosophy is we want everyone to participate. . . it’s a very democratic process” (cited in Goo, 2006, p. D01).
Finally, MySpace and Facebook are social networking sites that allow users to create and modify their cyber-identity through the use of a variety of verbal, visual, and aural mechanisms. Users can post pictures, send email, and maintain their “friends” list – all functions that serve as a digital archive of one’s espoused identity. Despite the mediums’ numerous drawbacks (think predators, potential employers, and police surveillance), the website continues to attract increasingly diverse audiences. This control over one’s identity presentation is attractive to audiences beyond just teenagers and college students. Political candidates are now utilizing these mediums to disseminate their messages to younger constituents.
Appropriation, manipulation, and re-circulation are key elements of participatory cultural production. Though Benjamin (1969) contends that reproduction can sacrifice authenticity and ultimately substitutes many copies for an original existence, some forms of participatory culture challenge this notion. Often, the meaning is created through usage – what audiences do with the product (Willis, 1990). In fact, there are possibilities for resistance via the “popular tactics by which these forces are coped with, are evaded, or are resisted” (Fiske, 1989, p. 8). Fiske argues that folk culture is one such mechanism whereby audiences can challenge dominant meanings, however, “in capitalist societies, there is no authentic folk culture” (p. 8). I would argue that the growth of participatory cultural production could be one such instance of a new folk culture. Whereas “the older American folk culture was built on borrowings from various mother countries. . . the new convergence culture will be built upon borrowings from various media conglomerates” (Jenkins, 2006b, p. 137).
Active audiences, particularly fans, act as bricoleurs, selecting a variety of competing and contradictory images and creating a new product that re-negotiates and/or re-contextualizes the original hegemonic meaning (Jenkins, 2006a). In the global electronic culture, juxtaposition of various artifacts that defy time, space, and genre limitations are growing. The current media landscape is characterized by bricolage, ambiguity, intertextuality, and parody. The cultural products appearing on YouTube, MySpace and in blogs mirror Lash’s (1990) shift to the figural, which emphasizes the visuals that come out of everyday life. Any visit to MySpace or video dissemination sites such as YouTube reveals a plethora of everyday practices: from dancing to humorous cat tricks, to battlefield footage. Willis (1990) contends that consumers, particularly young people, are sophisticated enough to play with codes and images, creating meaning through the manipulation and circulation of various images. Further, Willis suggests that this ability offers democratic potential through the creative use of cultural artifacts.
Such meaning-making activities highlight Burgess’ (2006) concept of “vernacular creativity.” Vernacular suggests the everyday creativity engaged in by consumers who are outside the economic and value systems of commercial production. Yet it is not the high art/popular culture distinction, but rather Debord’s (1967) notion of spectacle – which emphasizes the social relation among people, mediated by images. Audiences display Levy’s (1994) notion of collective intelligence, working to pool resources and engage in novel forms of knowledge production through the use of technologies that enable subjectivity creation, modification, and re-constitution.
New Media Technologies of the Self
Foucault (1988) claims to have arrived at technologies of the self by asking, via Max Weber, “if one wants to behave rationally and regulate one’s action according to true principles, what part of oneself should one renounce?…What must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything?” (1988, p. 17). He identified four interdependent techniques used by humans to understand themselves. First is production, or the producing, transforming, or manipulating of material things. Second are sign systems, which is the use of symbols and signification. Third is power, that which causes individuals to submit to domination. And fourth, which Foucault declared as the most interesting, is technologies of the self, which allow individuals to perform “operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (1988, p. 18).
Building on his earlier work in History of Sexuality, Volume 3: The Care of the Self, Foucault (1988) located the basis of his notion of technologies of the self in the roots of early Greco-Roman philosophy and practice and 4th and 5th century Christian spirituality. He discusses the Greek practice of epimelesthai satou, or “the concern with self” or “taking care of oneself,” which is tied up with the more familiar notion of gnothi sauton, or “to know yourself.” Foucault notes that this connection implies that one must take care of oneself to know oneself. In Antiquity, taking care of oneself was a widespread activity, consisting of “active leisure – to study, to read, to prepare for misfortune or death. It was meditation and a preparation” (p. 27). Increasingly, taking care of oneself mirrored the prominence of writing, which led to the new experience of self in the form of written introspection and/or self-analysis. Additionally, the Greek notion of askesis, or a remembering, gained popularity as Greek citizens engaged in a process of becoming more subjective and testing their preparation in both imaginary scenarios and real-life situations.
Similarly, Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self were influenced by Christianity, which is, he argues, a confession-heavy religion by nature. Christians must be aware of their temptations and faults and then must divulge such information to God or a holy representative. This, contends Foucault, requires great self-recognition. Typically, self-recognition took two forms in Christianity. First was exomolegesis, or the public acknowledgement of oneself as a sinner and in need of forgiveness through penitence. This notion is key, because it stresses a shift from the private self-recognition of the Greeks via writing, to a public self-recognition of Christians via penitence. Second was exagoreusis, which entailed the verbalization of thoughts in obedience to a holy figure. Foucault asserts that verbalization becomes more important to self-analysis and recognition as history progresses.
Also important to a discussion of new media technologies is the extension by Burkitt (2002) of the Foucauldian technologies of the self with the Greek concept of habitus, or habit. Burkitt posits, “although Foucault does not use this term, I believe it is key to understanding the constitution of self, for habitus is often the non-reflexive aspect of the self that we are forced to partially reflect upon whenever we want to refine or reconstitute the self” (p. 219). In other words, Burkitt stresses a more refined concept of self that incorporates both habitual and reflexive aspects. Burkitt seeks to grasp the means whereby an individual can use technologies to alter aspects of self, in addition to what aspects of self should be included. The habits that define an individual can simultaneously cause that person to become un-reflexive should their habits be routinized. Hence, the need for training emerges as a central aspect.
Burkitt (2002), following Foucault (1988), argues for constant training of oneself in the knowledge and skills needed for continuous reflection. Such training, which can come through interaction with people or machines, transforms the body and mind. The self is trained in certain reactions, reasons, and rules that mark them as a member of a social group. However, the true sign of successful training is the ability to be flexible and innovative with one’s skills. As Dewey (1922) suggests, techniques of the body are necessarily tied up with the use of tools. Dewey asserts, “even the saw and the hammer are means only when they are employed in some actual making. Otherwise, they are tools or potential means. They are actual means only when brought in conjunction with eye, arm, and hand in some specific operation” (p. 22). Similar to Burkitt, Dewey cautions against allowing the use of tools to become mere mechanical reflex and routinization, since non-reflexive habits work to support hegemony and reproduce social conditions rather than re-making them via innovation.
The idea of machine-like labor can be traced in part to Hardt’s (2004) notion of “immaterial labor,” defined as labor that produces a non-material product, in this case, information and subjectivity. Immaterial labor is often machine-like in its efficiency and productivity. As Lillie (2006) notes, “this skilled yet machine-like labor serves to construct the individual as a monad, a single node in the network who interacts with screen-based data more than people, even when the data are created by other people” (p. 10). One type of immaterial labor evidenced in the use of new media technologies involves a version of “affective labor,” characterized as the virtual interaction between laborer and audience. Affective labor produces and strengthens social bonds and a sense of community (Hardt, 2004). Indeed, building and maintaining both individual identity and online community is evident in the popularity of social networking sites. However, “laborers” implementing such technologies must avoid the over-mechanization, and thus, non-reflective use of these mechanisms.
In both Foucault’s original conceptualization and Burkitt’s (2002) theoretical extension, a major component of technologies of the self is writing. The self who writes is the self who continuously analyzes in order to improve. As previously mentioned, scholars have tended to apply Foucault’s technologies of the self to the use of new media technologies that involve subjectivity creation or modification – often via a combination of writing and images. In this view, the creation of personal web pages or MySpace profiles serves as an exemplar of the implementation of such technologies to build an image of self. Furthermore, the use of blogs, which often involve expounding of the author’s opinion, could be interpreted as the modern version of Greek “care for oneself” via writing. However, as the aforementioned theorists point out, the users of such technologies must not allow their use of these tools to become routinized, thus decreasing essential personal reflection. As the lewd content of MySpace pages and partisan ranting of bloggers proliferates, it unfortunately appears that many technologies of the self are being routinely applied without appropriate reflexivity.
The progression through the questions described by Foucault appears to follow his scholarly path from investigations of disciplinary technologies (1977) to his investigations of power (1980) to technologies of the self. Additionally, Barker (2000) contends that this later work counters critics who contend that Foucault robs subjects of agency. Through technologies of the self, openings are created whereby subjects can resist power. However, this is not always the case, as cultural producers may not recognize or acknowledge the continued need for personal reflection and the critical interrogation of underlying economic and political structures that is emphasized by Foucault and others. In fact, Foucault’s (1988) original conceptualization of technologies of the self suggests an additional interpretation: that of viewing such technologies not merely as tools for subjectivity constitution, but also as underlying administrative systems that seek to constrain subjects and reinforce existing power relations.
Personal Reflection, Technologies of the Self, and Surveillance
As McLuhan (1964) maintains, we construct the world we inhabit by the deployment of media technologies that enable and/or constrain particular behaviors. While the ability to take an active role in the shaping of culture is enabled by new media, we must also focus on the constraining aspects of emerging technologies. As indicated, Foucault stresses the need for subjects to consistently engage in personal reflection through technologies of the self. Dewey (1922) also notes that the user of tools cannot allow such use to become mechanical – leading to a loss of critical interrogation. One could argue that the ubiquity of, and ease of access to, the tools of participatory cultural production has indeed produced subjects who are consumed by routinized technology to the point that self reflection is increasingly absent.
Baudrillard (2002) warns that the rapid pace of contemporary thought must slow down. Gane (2003) similarly contends, “there is, for example, little time for writing in the traditional way: through extended processes of reflection that lead to the crafting of a text” (p. 445). Nonetheless, such personal reflection is essential to Foucault’s technologies of the self. In many instances, consumers are forgoing reflection on both their subjectivity and, more importantly, their relation to wider socio-political structures that seek to constrain their creativity and participation. This loss is likely due to the growing digitization of all aspects of life. Lyotard (1984) asserts that knowledge, when reduced to bits and digits via the digitization process, loses its use value:
In sum, the digitization of knowledge, rather than encouraging expression and creativity, for the most part works toward the opposite: to the reduction of thought to the immediate processing of information, and to the selection of pre-programmed, and thus standardized, options from within the framework of the system” (pp. 440-441).
Yet, reflection upon the socio-political structures in which one is enmeshed is particularly important in the digital world. As Peterson and Anand (2004) point out, the key facets of cultural production include not only technology, but also the laws, regulations, and industry structure that influence technology adoption and regulation, and hence, directly affect the users of such technology. Gane (2003) argues that current cultural studies analyses of the media tend to neglect these underlying capitalist structures of technologies: “technologies are not merely ‘extensions of man,’ but extensions of the capitalist market insofar as they speed up and thus promote the production, exchange, and consumption of information” (p. 432). Indeed, the reduction of knowledge to mere information leads to the commodification of information. The electronic cultural policy of the United States - that which delivers both the material architecture and the digital formats of cultural products - engages in “infrastructural imperialism” through the use of organizations such as the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization (Turow, 2005).
Therefore, any reflection surrounding new media technologies must consider the government policy and regulation that determines the current media landscape. Policy tends to address the development and deployment of particular technological artifacts and regulation of media ownership and its corresponding aspects (McChesney, 2004). Stein and Sinha (2004) similarly point out that regulation of information and communication technologies is fundamentally connected to the political process, but not all interested parties are represented in the process of regulation deliberation. They point to three areas where policy development is particularly salient: intellectual property, which has undeniably seen the commodification of information as an asset, privacy rights, and freedom of expression.
Intellectual property policies constrain the vibrancy of participatory cultural production. Lessig (2004) posits that the copyright laws created and enforced by the government work to constrain cultural production by removing creative work from the public domain. Such creative works, such as Star Wars and Star Trek are needed for the innovation, appropriation, and commentary by fans. Lessig contends, hinting at another Foucauldian concept – the panopticon – that artists engage in self-censorship for fear of prosecution. He details the story of documentary filmmaker Jon Else, whose deliciously postmodern scene of an opera’s backstage television playing The Simpsons, ultimately had to be removed because FOX would not grant permission for its use. Ultimately, the shift to a digital or convergence culture is premised on economics, not the socially transformative potential of democratic media.
In fact, new media technologies are actually fostering a growth in government control and organizational surveillance. As Slack and Wise (2006) point out, “we also need to think through how surveillance becomes part of culture, how notions of privacy and control articulate to practices of surveillance” (p. 157). However, there is a need to go beyond the Foucauldian notion of surveillance based on a visual model of control and instead look at the regimes of control based on non-visual aspects (Deleuze, 1995). This includes data management, consumer monitoring, and government archiving of personal information. In a post-9/11 world, articulations of technology and discourses of security are increasing and with them come an unstated recognition by the populace that such monitoring is necessary.
The practice known as customer relationship management, where companies track user information in exchange for special offers, “leads to and provides rationalizations for a surveillance-based customization approach to the production of culture” (Turow, 2005, p. 105). Furthermore, Howard (2005) describes the data mining techniques of political campaigns that use a variety of tools to collect and analyze data about their constituents. Howard argues, “social control is exercised by political campaigns that use information technologies to parse the public sphere into issue-specific constituencies as needed” (p. 163). Data miners use the notion of citizenship in concert with the digital technology hype to convince people to share their valuable personal information.
The collection of such information is highly relevant to both public and private spheres. The accumulation of personal information affects hiring (for example, the countless stories of college students who were denied jobs due to questionable content on their MySpace pages) and medical coverage (insurance companies can now obtain information about prospective clients that affect the availability and price of coverage). Such information is valuable because it informs organizations about the desirability of forging relationships with certain individuals (Gandy, 1993). Thus, cultural studies approaches to new media must continue to investigate, as Slack and Wise (2006) contend, Foucault’s technologies of the self for both subjectivity formation, as well as the more crucial administrative systems that enable and/or constrain the development, deployment, and adoption of such technologies.
Conclusions and Implications
Progressively more, cultural studies approaches to new media potentially invoke notions of technological determinism (Lievrouw and Livingstone, 2006; Slack and Wise, 2006). McChesney (2004) describes the importance of overcoming such technological determinism and looking to social, economic, and policy outcomes as shaping factors. McQuail (2005) claims that “technologies are unlikely to have a direct impact on cultural practices; their effects are mediated through a relevant institution” (p. 27). This quote illustrates the problematic tendency in contemporary examinations of the mass media to engage in technological determinism – an approach that must be overcome in order to understand and mitigate the relevant and influential identity, political, policy, and social outcomes of new communication technologies.
Lievrouw and Livingstone (2005) maintain that researchers investigating these new media forms must be careful to avoid both the aforementioned technological determinism, but simultaneously, social determinism. Indeed, Deuze (2006) follows Lievrouw and Livingstone in urging a focus on artifacts that enable or constrain communication, with an emphasis on the social arrangements around devices. Therefore, scholars must not overlook the problems associated with the internet and the important socio- political policy underlying technological changes.
Additionally, media consumers must be educated in these socio-political underpinnings of participatory media technologies. As active audiences continue to gain prominence and engage in participatory cultural production, the need for media literacy becomes clear. One potentially fruitful model is Douglas Kellner’s program of “critical media literacy,” which recognizes the need for students to possess “multiple literacies” in order to succeed in the technologically-driven contemporary marketplace. The model recognizes the demand for robust forms of literacy, including media, but in addition, the need for computer and multimedia literacy (Kellner, 2004). These literacies require different skill sets and competencies. Simultaneously, Kellner contends that traditional print literacy must continue to be refined, as students need such skills to decipher the vast amounts of information and implement modes of writing that are precise and clear when participating in email, blogs, wikis, and other forms of writing-based mediated communication.
Kellner (2004) suggests that teachers should examine what sorts of skills students must acquire in each literacy area, how these multiple literacies and skill sets affect subjectivities and social relations, and what new literacies might come to the fore as communication technologies continue to proliferate. In other words, to be multimedia literate, students must be able to master the computer and its tools for gathering information while also understanding social implications. Students must be able to access, navigate, interpret, and participate in the dynamic hypertext environment that hybridizes images, sounds, and texts.
Kellner and Share (2005) purport, “critical media literacy involves cultivating skills in analyzing media codes and conventions, abilities to criticize stereotypes, dominant values and ideologies, and competencies to interpret the multiple meanings generated by media texts” (p. 372). Successful critical media literacy will go beyond message construction to look at wider socio-political and economic issues while simultaneously empowering students to engage in social transformation. At the same time, critical media literacy stresses the need for students to use technologies for subjectivity formation, self-expression and social activism, so skills in media production and use must also be fostered. Ultimately, the combination of analytic and technical skills will work to promote engaged citizens.
Despite the immediate and future benefits of establishing critical media literacy programs Kellner and Share (2005) acknowledge the difficulty in implementing their approach, due to its status as a non-traditional pedagogy. As Kellner and Share elaborate, several institutional and governmental roadblocks stifle the growth of such programs, including the movement for English-only education, the corporate takeover of schools, and the No Child Left Behind Act, which punishes low-performing schools and mandates standardized testing that de-values the ability to think critically and engage with educational material. However, the authors are adamant that such educational advancements are crucial to promote the vital citizen participation needed for a healthy public sphere.
This analysis has illustrated the potential problems inherent in routinized, non-reflective use of Foucauldian technologies of the self – particularly participatory media technologies. In order to foster a healthy public sphere and participatory culture that encourages use of technology for identity construction and maintenance, as well as adequate and ongoing reflection upon both subjectivity and the wider socio-political impacts of emerging technologies, training in critical media literacy is needed.
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