Presider: Rachel Rosenfelt (@rachelrosenfelt)
Hashmod: Angela Chen (@chengela)
This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled Discipline and Publish: The New Politics of Publishing
It is hard to overstate just how profoundly and completely the Web has changed publishing, both as a profession and as a set of technologies. Every major category of publishable content, from punk zines to encyclopedias has undergone massive changes and yet some things remain doggedly the same. Mastheads are still very white and male, (even the new ones) although some of the most intriguing and innovative publishing platforms are more representative of the world. Rachel Rosenfelt, founder and editor of The New Inquiry will preside over a panel of four presentations looking at how the politics of publishing are changing and what it means for authors, readers, and society in general. Ana Cecilia Alvarez and Joseph Staten investigate the apparent disconnect between the popularity of a topic, and any individual piece on that topic. Alvarez, looking at feminist writing on Tumblr and other social media platforms, asks the provocative and absolutely necessary question: “Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?” Staten asks his audience to reconsider the thinkpiece and how it can be mobilized as a more effective tool for cultural critique. Matthew Clair and Mathias Klang consider the new kinds of ownership models and access systems that have cropped up over the years and outline their roles in expanding the control of private property. Clair takes a uniquely micro-level approach to studying neoliberalism within avante-garde writing communities and Klang discusses the implications of DRM on ebooks for both authors and readers. The panelists in Discipline and Publish approach this field with a critical eye towards the affordances and stated promises of new publishing technologies however, taken together, the panel paints a fairly optimistic picture of the future of publishing.
Ana Cecilia Alvarez (@_llorona) Tumblr Grrrl: On Feminism and Digital Publishing
As a writer publishing primarily on digital platforms—blog articles, Tweets, Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts—I often evoke “feminist discourse” in my work. Although indefinable (hence the quotations marks continuously hovering over the word), within these digital channels, a feminist vocabulary is palpably identifiable, especially between a specific subset of writers whose work circulates around feminist issues. I am one of them, most recently writing critical essays on the perils of feminism’s branding potential. For Theorizing The Web I want to complicate my own invocation of feminism for paid web content by asking the following questions: Feminism gets a lot of likes, but does this mean a lot of people like feminism?
In the not so distant past, having a blog, an independent form of publishing, was a libratory gift. No longer were writers subject to the power structures of old publishing models. In an astonishingly short span, the freeing potential of digital publishing has been strangled by the insistent drive to monetize digital content production. Currently the two most common forms of generating revenue—selling certain number of page impressions for banner ads, or selling advertisers the very publication model so they create their own advertorial content—demand an unsustainable amount of content, lowering the quality for sake of quantity.
Today, the most “successful” web content—content that generates the most engagement, be that through page views, likes, or retweets—often features rapidly digestible and incendiary subjects. A feminist diatribe, now populating Twitter feeds on a regular basis, is a more successful lightning rod for social media engagement than similar content that appeals towards other social justice causes. (For some reason) an article speculating whether an actress has been re-touched, under the guise of a feminist appeal towards realistic representations of women in media, will gather much more digital klout than an expose on the climate change, or food justice, or animal cruelty. If “the meme is personal is political,” feminism’s meme potential is particularly salient. What does this mean for writers (from here on, content producers) whose political inclinations work particularly well with social media engagement? How can we measure the effect of their influence? Do these feminist critiques circulate beyond the insular group of social media practitioners who are already too well plugged into these debates? How has the existing business model for for-profit digital publications implicated the political potential of its content?
I hope to be hopeful. Social media allows for an “affinity (or animosity) to collapse distances;” it draws attention towards injustices; it encourages exchanges. What I am forced to ask daily as a writer on the Internet is—how can I reap the potential of digital publishing platforms while I am forced to mine them for profit? How are my political leanings as a writer implicated in my profitability as a content producer? Can I separate the two?
Joseph Staten (@joseph_staten) Rethinking the Thinkpiece
The “thinkpiece” has become, in the last few years, one of the most recognizable (and shareable) forms of cultural criticism on the internet. Focusing on popular cultural artifacts typically consigned to the space of “entertainment” (music, music videos, TV), thinkpieces take these forms seriously and critique them on the basis of their expression of certain norms or ideas, often their representations of women and people of color. Thinkpieces typically cast the objects of their criticism as socially retrograde in their perpetuation of stereotypes, and deem them generally harmful. In the last two years, some of the most thinkpiece-d artifacts have been Lena Dunham’s TV show Girls, Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines,” and Miley Cyrus’s performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.
The internet has allowed both cultural artifacts and their critical thinking-through to be distributed more widely than ever before, seemingly increasing the social stakes of both forms dramatically.
But for all the realms of the social and political that thinkpieces consider, there is one they frequently exclude: the realm of the aesthetic.
My paper uses as its jumping-off point the concept of “coincidental consumption” recently introduced by Robin James and Nathan Jurgenson: the process by which the actual content of links shared on social media seems to become “coincidental” to their shareability. (A primary example is sharing an article without reading it first.) In a blog post expanding the concept (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/11/15/coincidental-consumption-thinkpiece/), James notices how thinkpieces tend to reinforce the coincidental aspects of content: “”most of these thinkpieces discuss the social and political implications of these pieces without talking about the actual music–as though the music was somehow separable from the social and political work these songs and videos accomplish.”
My paper takes this idea one step further, and argues that it is not just music (or whatever particular medium) that think pieces ignore, but the entire dimension of the aesthetic as a category of investigation. Though there is certainly plenty to be gained by examining a music video or TV show for its socio-political significations, the question is, in James’ words, “what gets lost, what’s obscured,” by focusing on these elements to the exclusion of aesthetic ones. Part of my answer will be that the question of artistic quality–what is quality? does it even matter?–becomes severely confused because of the aesthetic leveling-off that the thinkpiece performs. Another part of my answer will be that thinkpieces *themselves* become drawn into the exact same dynamic of coincidental consumption that the objects of their critique reside and are distributed within, dramatically attenuating their potential impact on social thought. Thinkpieces themselves are shared, but not read.
Finally, I will suggest that a reintegration of aesthetic considerations into the social project of the thinkpiece will both sharpen it as a critical weapon and expand its impact as a tool of social good.
Matthew Clair (@mathuclair) Rethinking Technology and Culture: Digital Technologies and Neoliberalism in the Literary Field
This paper considers the relationship between digital technologies and neoliberalism, which I define as a contemporary set of economic cultural logics about the proper role of government, the market, and the individual in economic and everyday life. Over the past 40 years, sociologists have offered various explanations of the role of new technological developments in shaping, enabling, and reflecting socio-cultural and economic beliefs and practices. Most of this work has been theoretical, macro-level, and focused on the use of new technology in expressly economic contexts. Little work has considered if these theories hold at the micro-level in non-economic contexts. In this paper, I ask: what is the relationship between digital technology and micro-level beliefs and practices? In particular, do neoliberal cultural logics accompany the use of digital technology in non-economic contexts? I answer these questions through interviews, content analysis, and fieldwork among editors and writers in the avant-garde literary field. Assessing how and when they use digital technologies, I find that the relationship between digital technology and neoliberal cultural logics is not as straightforward as macro theories assume. While some neoliberal logics are enabled by digital technology, others are contested. I find that digital technology’s relationship to cultural beliefs and practices is heterogeneous and context-dependent. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of my findings for: (1) macro- and micro-level theory on technology and society; (2) the study of neoliberalism as a set of everyday, micro-level cultural logics; and (3) neoliberalism’s role in structuring contemporary social life.
Mathias Klang (@klangable) Is that your book? The impact of e-books on culture
The book as we know it has been declared dead several times in modern history. This trend has only been on the rise in the last decade with the rapid developments in smartphone and tablet technology. It is hard to argue that these devices do not provide a level of convenience to the reader but cogent arguments have been put forward that these devices cannot be functionally equivalent to the analogue book and that by adopting e-books we are losing a vital element of our culture.
While the analogue book remains healthy online sellers, like Amazon, report that they are now selling more digital than analogue books. Pew Internet & American Life project reports that a higher proportion of U.S. adults are reading e-books than ever before. The purpose of this paper is to map out and explore the differences in reading habits and the ways in which these habits are impacting on the way in which we access written culture through technical means.
Technical measures, Digital Rights Management (DRM), have been developed order to maintain control over the ability to copy. On the one hand DRM, in relation to copyrightable material, is a technical measure implemented to ensure adherence to legally established rights. The reader who buys a book does not acquire unlimited legal rights to make copies of the book. Therefore, adding DRM to ebooks ensures that users cannot use technology to go beyond their legally established rights. However, DRM can also restrict users from using their ebooks in ways that are both socially and legally acceptable if we were dealing with analogue books.
Thus, ebooks bought via Amazon can only be read on their Kindle ebook reader, they cannot easily be lent to others and they cannot be resold. These limitations are impractical to implement on analogue books. However, the implementation of DRM with the limitation of certain practices is redefining the nature of the book, and in extension the whole ecology of reading. Technology is re-shaping, and maybe regulating (Baym, 2010; Winner, 1985), an established social practice. The role of technology as regulator has naturally been problematized earlier (Winner, 1985; Latour, 1992; Norman, 1988).
The focus of this work is to point out the ways in which the e-book reader is lured by convenience into using a tethered technology that removes some of the affordances the analogue book provided. Through examples and illustrations these limitations to book use will be demonstrated and their impact on the wider cultural future of books and readership will be mapped out.