Critical Reading Response#2

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10 Popular Culture in the TwentyFirst Century Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his worker adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down; we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

(Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex, 95)

In with the New? At the start of the twentyfirst century, popular culture is undergoing shifts and changes that are reshaping how we experience it, where we experience it, and what our experience of it means for the ways in which we engage with our lives. New technologies have played a major role in this shift: we are connected to one another as never before through mobile communication devices, email, and social networking technologies; more of life is lived in front of screens both bigger (TV screens the size of rec room walls) and smaller (the near ubiquitous iPhone) than ever before; and there are new forms of popular culture coming into being as a result of new technologies—or at least the promise of new forms. Many educators, psychologists, and neurologists see a wholesale shift in thinking associated with the use of digital culture. Socalled digital natives—those who have used computers since toddlerhood (many of the readers of this book)—are thought to have different thought patterns, even different brain structures, than those “digital immigrants” (including the authors) who were born before the widespread use of personal computers (Prensky).

It is important not to overestimate the significance of this change. A lot of what seems to be brand spanking new is simply a variation on something that has been a part of our lives before: no matter how addictive it might be, Angry Birds is still just a video game, and Bridesmaids watched on a tablet is still just a movie. But the fact that you can play such games and watch such movies whenever and wherever you want, and might do so instead of working, talking with your friends, or even getting enough sleep, might well prove to constitute genuine changes in how we experience popular culture—both signs and symptoms of larger social developments whose significance we may fully understand only decades from now.

While we have addressed a number of recent developments in popular culture throughout this book, in this concluding chapter we want to focus on some key issues in contemporary popular culture that capture the rapid social shifts through which we seem to be living. One danger in focusing in this way on the “new” is that it is all too easy to get things wrong by giving too much force to a particular development that might well prove to be less important in hindsight,

Szeman, I., & O'Brien, S. (2017). Popular culture : A user's guide. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ufvca on 2020-12-01 11:21:09.

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thus misrepresenting the complex array of forces that in fact give shape to historical change. In discussing the social significance of new technologies, for instance, there is a tendency for scholars and critics to imagine that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift that will fundamentally alter how human beings live, work, and relate to one another. At the most extreme end of this euphoria over new technologies are futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, who has predicted that the “technological singularity” will be soon upon us—that is, the coming into being of a human–computer superintelligence as a result of (among other things) exponential increases in the speed of computing power. At the other end of the spectrum are critics such as Wendell Berry, who suggest that our reliance on digital technology is largely driven by advertisers, and that the manufacture, use, and disposal of personal computers contribute to the destruction of the Earth. Countering the usual assumption that increasing digitalization is the way of the future, Berry proclaims: “If the use of the computer is a new idea, then a newer idea is not to use one” (10).

While it is of course important to pay attention to the ways in which our activities are being reshaped by the technological devices embedded in our lives, it is just as important to keep in mind historical continuities and the persistence of older social and cultural practices, habits, and forms. Every parent who worries about the amount of time their kids spend in the imaginary world of video games instead of in their rooms reading should remember the fears that greeted the explosion of reading in the late eighteenth century. Today, we celebrate the idea of selfcultivation through reading and worry about the consequences of videogame playing —a practice that seems little more than a waste of time and brain cells; two centuries ago, however, there were “suggestions that, with all the new ‘reading societies’ springing up across what still counted as the Holy Roman Empire, a new disease, that of ‘reading addiction’ (Lesesucht), was arising, an ailment which was believed likely to strike impressionable young students, loose women, servants not properly respectful of their masters, and other questionable sorts of people” (Pinkard 50). There is a great deal about popular culture in the twentyfirst century that is new in ways to which we have to be alert. But we have to be alert, too, to the excitement of the perpetually new, a force whose hazy energies have been repeatedly tapped in the vocabulary of marketing to support sales of consumer objects and experiences.

Suggested Activity 10.1

How has technology changed your experiences and expectations? In what ways has it reshaped your interaction with popular culture? Do you think that new technology has changed your life in fundamental ways, or has it only changed the content and not the form of daily life (i.e., you might now do different things in your spare time, but the way in which your spare time is organized in relation to study/work time has stayed the same)? Finally, to what extent and in what ways do your uses of technology differ from those of your parents or grandparents?

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Many Popular Cultures? Watching television in the mid1980s was an easy task: click on the TV set, quickly look at the offerings available on the three or four broadcast stations available (or even fewer in some countries), and voilà! You were ready to ease into a few hours of Happy Days or Dallas. The next day at recess or around the water cooler at work, you could check in with friends or colleagues to see what they thought of the latest cool exploits of the Fonz or the devious shenanigans of J.R. Ewing. To a degree that wouldn’t have surprised Horkheimer and Adorno (see Chapter 4), a common popular culture existed that provided a shared landscape of cultural experiences, desires, and experiences.

Even in the midst of this common popular culture landscape, there were always alternative and underground forms of culture, too; popular culture was never as uniform and singular as some critics feared it to be. Even so, talk in the school hallways or by the office water cooler is invariably more complicated today than it once was: instead of comparing favorite points about the past evening’s shows, such discussions are as often as not occasions at which one learns about television shows, phone apps, web sites, and YouTube videos with which one hasn’t yet come into contact. Cable TV has expanded the range of programs one can watch: a session in front of the television now begins with the navigation of a menu of hundreds of viewing options. The prevalence of DVDs, ondemand video, programs and films streamed via the web, and personal video recorders (PVRs or TVRs) has messed about with the temporality of viewing: many of us now watch programs when we want to, not when they are first broadcast. And we’ve yet to talk about all of the other forms of popular culture—the availability online of an enormous range of music of every conceivable style and genre (instead of being only from big record labels), the plethora of web sites where one can access information, the estimated (as of July 2015) 1.6 million iPhone apps available to play with and use, the 10 years’ worth of viewing content now uploaded to YouTube, and so on. Given all of these developments, in our current cultural landscape it may make more sense to speak about the existence of many popular cultures as opposed to popular culture per se.

There remain seemingly obvious exceptions to this picture we’re painting about the fragmentation of popular culture into many popular cultures. Major sporting events, such as the Olympics, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, draw a huge number of viewers; in doing so, they bring people together through the mechanism and medium of these singular events on a national or even global scale. But even here, the raw numbers suggest a different story. Super Bowl 50 (2016) was the highestrated TV show in US history, with an average audience of 120 million viewers—just over onethird of the US population. This is an impressive number, but it raises the question: What were the other twothirds of the population doing during this (supposedly) can’t miss event? According to the Nielsen Ratings, the topranked TV program (other than sports) for the week of January 25, 2016 was NCIS, which had 12 million viewers, while the highestrated cable show was the Republican Presidential Debate at 12.4 million viewers (the highest regularly scheduled cable show was The O’Reilly Factor, at only 5.5 million viewers). While both these shows produce considerable buzz on industry programs like Entertainment Tonight or in magazines such as People and HELLO!, each forms a small

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piece of the large puzzle of popular culture in the twentyfirst century—an era in which it is becoming safe to assume that most people don’t watch the most popular television shows or listen to the bestselling albums of the day. If one needs any further evidence of the fragmentation of popular culture into smaller and smaller segments, consider YouTube’s plans to create hundreds of new channels on its site, designed by professional writers and producers, and geared to niche interests (examples include “123UnoDosTres,” a channel for Latin American young adults; a channel programmed by The Onion; and “Smart Girls at the Party,” created by comedian Amy Poehler). According to Robert Kyncl, the senior executive at YouTube overseeing this development, “People went from broad to narrow and we think they will continue to go that way—spend more and more time in the niches—because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness” (Seabrook “Streaming”).

Does it matter that today popular culture seems to consist of a bunch of niches? And is this really a new development? There is no question that the landscape of popular culture has altered. However, it is questionable whether this changes or challenges in a fundamental way the points we have made in the preceding chapters about the operations of popular culture in shaping and reinforcing—or challenging—cultural, ethnic, and gender stereotypes, or the primary role played by money and profit in the production of popular culture, or the way in which we understand our bodies and our place in the communities in which we live—and so on. On the one hand, the explosion of choice represented by the sheer size of the content available on TV, web sites, streaming radio, and so on suggests that popular culture has in some ways become newly and genuinely democratized. On the other hand, the choice on offer seems to be variations on what is already available. To return to the example of YouTube’s niche channels, for instance, there are comedy networks (Official Comedy, Comedy Shaq Network), sports channels (Kick TV for soccer, the skateboard channel RIDE, and the action sports channel Network A), news outlets (Slate and Wall Street Journal), and Look TV, one of many fashionandbeauty channels. The genres represented by these channels are hardly under or unrepresented on television or online at present; at best, they seem to be slices of the existing entertainment pie rather than an expansion of popular culture into new realms that, for instance, take up the many social, political, and environmental challenges the world faces today. Indeed, it needs to be remembered that YouTube’s decision to launch these new channels was connected to the company’s desire to maximize its profit. The challenge for YouTube—a company purchased in 2006 by Google for $1.65 billion—is to get visitors to linger longer than the few minutes on average they spend during each visit to the site. The average North American spends four to five hours watching television each day. Getting them to spend more of this time on YouTube, engaged in the specific niche programming that fits their needs best, means more advertising money for the web site—a lot more.

Learning to Love Céline: TwentyFirstCentury Taste There is one change produced by the existence of many popular cultures to which it is worth drawing specific attention. As we explained in Chapter 5, one of the outcomes of the choices made in the forms of popular culture one consumes—what styles of music one listens to or what clothes one wears—is to distinguish oneself from others. As Pierre Bourdieu argues,

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popular culture participates in a social game of distinction—a game with significant consequences, chief among them being the establishment of class boundaries or our position in social space. Our position within social hierarchies depends as much on our display of appropriate cultural tastes, manners, and behaviors as how much money we have or our class background. In addition to highlighting the ways in which our choices about the popular culture we consume participate in shaping our social and class status, Bourdieu’s theories also challenged the degree of agency we feel in the cultural objects we consume and practices we engage in. Though it might feel as if we are articulating our greatest degree of autonomy and selfexpression when we state our interest in music, films, or magazines, it is important to recognize that such choices are unconsciously motivated by social forces of distinction through which we express group belonging and distinction.

Distinction depends on a shared cultural landscape, one in which the choices one makes about one’s cultural likes or dislikes can be read meaningfully by others as an expression of a move within a shared social game. What happens to the social power exerted by taste—“the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others” (Bourdieu 45)—when we no longer have one popular culture but many, each with its own coordinates and rules of distinction? Has the fracturing of popular culture into niche interests—to whatever degree this has happened—put an end to this key social function of cultural consumption?

A preliminary answer to this question can be found in Carl Wilson’s book Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007). A music critic for The Globe and Mail, Wilson is drawn to music of indie rock bands and experimental musicians. The task he sets for himself is not just to try to understand how pop musician (and fellow Canadian) Céline Dion can be loved by so many people, but to get to a place where he, too, can like (maybe even love) her music. At the outset of the book, Wilson is clear that he doesn’t like Dion. Indeed, he loathes her, describing her music as “bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast—R&B with the sex and slyness removed” (11).

And he’s not the only one: “As far as I knew, I had never even met anybody who liked Céline Dion” (11). The mystery that Wilson wants to understand is how Dion could possibly sell more than 200 million records, becoming in 2004 the bestselling female recording artist of all time.

Wilson describes Let’s Talk About Love as “an experiment in taste” (18). In the course of providing some context to the unique pop culture environment out of which Dion emerges— French Canadian vedette (star) culture, in which homegrown celebrities get enormous attention for being one of the six million francophones in Canada—as well as tracking down her fans around the globe to learn just what they like about Dion, Wilson also engages in a quick survey of the philosophy of taste; that is, aesthetic theory. He is struck especially by the theories of Bourdieu, seeing them as offering particular insight into some of the reasons why some people love Dion, while others can’t stand the sound of her voice. “Taste is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction,” Wilson writes, “and its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure” (89). But he’s also well aware of the fact that

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“your love of hiphop or hatred for Céline Dion is part of your cultural capital, but it only gains value in the competition for distinction if it is legitimated in the contexts that matter to you” (93). Wilson notes that in the case of Dion, “a disproportionate part of her audience was in the lowest income bracket, under $25,000 a year, and again in the nextlowest category” (102)—a near perfect example of the social mechanics of taste to which Bourdieu drew attention in his work. In terms of income, however, this audience “is not as far from the average white pop critic as we might have expected” (103). This is where the context of legitimation comes into play: if one’s attitude to Dion were only a matter of one’s paycheck, Wilson would already have been trying to sing along with Quebec’s famous chanteuse.

While Wilson might be part of the same economic class as many of Dion’s fans (just like music critics, they don’t tend to make very much money), his capacity to make judgments about the dominant aesthetics of this group—shaped partly by his education—is a way of defining his own life as other than “the life of subservient career, suburban lifestyle and quiet desperation we imagine befalls people like Céline Dion’s white American fans, as well as fans of Billy Joel, Michael Bolton and other midlevel musicians whose names so often serves us as epithets” (103–104). A key theme in Wilson’s “journey to the end of taste” is an exploration of the role he himself plays as a rock critic in the operations of popular culture and the distribution and legitimation of taste. He is clear that the work of the critic is based “on the power to exclude, not just to canonize” (15). His encounter with the music of Dion and the worlds inhabited by her fans causes him to come to doubt this role, not only because of how it helps to support class distinctions, but also because of the changing landscape of popular culture itself:

What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren’t about making cases for or against things?…It might be more frank about the twosidedness of the aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narratives into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music. (156)

Today, everybody has the capacity to be a critic, whether through comments written on their own blogs, critiques about books on Amazon, restaurant reviews added to Urbanspoon, diatribes against dirty hotel rooms on TripAdvisor, and so on. The position of professional critic hasn’t been eliminated altogether. But the ability for everyone to offer their own two cents about a television program on web sites that anyone can access (e.g., Google Maps search results for businesses almost always come with user reviews attached), combined with a decline in the readership of magazines and newspapers—the home of professional critics— has unsettled the game of social distinction and hierarchy. At the same time, the existence of multiple subgenres and cultural niches actively cultivated by the cultural industry—like the explosion of specific YouTube channels described above, or the appearance of streaming music services on national broadcast radio (NPR, CBC, BBC, etc.) that allow one to select the

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specific stream to which one wants to listen—is producing a situation in which popular culture is shaped less and less by the game of distinction to which Bourdieu alerted us.

It would be a mistake to imagine that such forms of distinction have disappeared entirely. Luxury brands of all kinds (such as Swarovski, Versace, and others—the kinds of brands that one typically finds in dutyfree shops in airports) still signify wealth in taste as well as wealth in dollars, and what one listens to or watches (or doesn’t) shapes not just one’s sense of identity, but the groups to which one belongs (or doesn’t). Still, when there is a growing capacity for people to engage in conspicuous consumption as a result of the growth of middle classes in the developing world and the massive extension of credit (with consequences we will discuss later in the chapter) in the developed one, and when capitalism depends increasingly on profit from its consumers, the “democratization” of taste is a development that should not come as a surprise.

If the existence of many popular cultures—even a “many” surrounded by all the caveats that we have presented here—cuts the feet out from under the role of the critic, Wilson seems to be more than happy to undertake a more “pluralistic criticism” that puts “less stock in defending its choices and more in depicting its enjoyment, with all its messiness and private soul tremors” (157). It is a form of criticism that, of necessity, has to be seen as “becoming democratic,” which involves

not a limp openmindedness, but actively grappling with people and things not like me, which brings with it the perilous question of what I am like. Democracy, that dangerous, paradoxical and mostly unattempted ideal, sees that the self is insufficient, dependent for definition on otherness, and chooses not only to accept that but to celebrate it, to stake everything on it. Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves. (151)

New Technology and Its Discontents Democracy—its presence or lack, its decline or enhancement—turns out to have become one of the key issues involved in discussions of popular culture in the twentyfirst century. This is nowhere so true as in ongoing debates about the impact of new communications technologies and social media. On the one hand, the growing number of cell phones (for instance) has created new connections between individuals, with information about social and political developments finding their way directly and rapidly around the world, such that citizens can immediately challenge, debate, and question choices made by governments and nongovernmental agencies. Connections between individuals via new communications technologies have created communities that exist beyond borders, enabling an active exchange of information that surpasses the gatekeeping role played by daily newspapers or television news broadcasts. On the other hand, the organizations that operate social media are fewer and fewer in number, with a growing “concentration of power, especially in the hands of capital— as represented by the massive corporations that dominate stock exchanges and bourses worldwide, as well as the mobiles and telecommunications industry” (Goggin 176). In

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addition, the sheer number of events and developments that individuals can now follow, combined with the steady erosion of legitimacy of any given news agency, site, or critic, has made it difficult for political and social challenges to result in determinate action on the part of publics. We are living through a period in which technological changes are reshaping our experience of and relation to one another politically, socially, and culturally.

The challenges posed by new communication technologies can be witnessed in the different reaction of publics to decisions by governments that are trying to amend their practices in light of shifts in media. In 2012, Tim Uppal, the Canadian Minister of State for Democratic Reform, announced that in future federal elections the government would no longer penalize individuals who reported the results from eastern provinces before polls closed in the west. In the twentyfirst century, such election blackouts are no longer feasible: publics in one part of the country can easily communicate the results to others using email and social media sites. While this change was greeted positively as an appropriate reaction to new social and technological circumstances, Bill C30, introduced a month later by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, was criticized by members of the public from across the political spectrum. The intent of the bill was to give police and government easy access to the emails of individuals in order to catch criminals—specifically (according to the government) child predators. The public backlash against this intrusion into their privacy was so fierce and direct that it led the government to set the bill aside in order to rework it in light of privacy fears. In yet another example of the complex power of social media, Toews himself became the object of the kind of eintrusion that might have been generated by Bill C30. A Twitter account— @vikileaks30—later traced to a Liberal Party staffer, sent out dozens of embarrassing tweets from Toews’s exwife concerning their divorce.

Over the coming decades, the possibilities and limits produced by new technologies are likely to become an everpresent part of public debate and discussion. In what follows, we look briefly at three key cases that raise questions about the powers and problems of new communications technologies in the twentyfirst century, and that together provide a place from which to begin to map the increasingly complex landscape of contemporary popular culture.

Social Media and Political Change New communications technologies and quick access to a huge range of online information open up possibilities for citizens to engage with one another and with their governments in a potentially more democratic way. The mobile phone is one technology that has been especially celebrated as a device that has the potential to contribute to social and political change by enabling ideas—especially those ideas that stand in contrast or opposition to official new reports or government pronouncements—to spread like wildfire through a community. In January 2001, thousands of Filipinos converged at a major crossroads in Manila to protest the actions of the Philippine Congress in relation to corruption proceedings against President Joseph Estrada. What brought the crowds to Epifanio de los Santos Avenue was a text message sent rapidly around, which read: “Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk.” Such incidences, which have become ever more frequent in the age of Twitter, have led some critics to equate the revolution

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in information and communications technologies with the possibility of political revolution as such.

For newmedia commentator and professor Clay Shirky,

as the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory, the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated publics demand change. (28)

While such examples of “microcoordination” have brought about significant developments in culture (everything from the mobilization of consumers through coupons sent to their phones to the creation of “flash mobs” who perform spontaneously in public space) as well as politics, the enthusiasm of many pundits and scholars regarding the impact of hardware like cell phones or apps like Facebook to bring about social transformation can (and all too often does) go too far, with claims that these new communications media produce change by their very presence. Even President Estrada blamed textmessaging technology for his ultimate downfall, rather than public responses to the allegations of fraud directed at him or, indeed, his own illegal activities while leader of the Philippines. How citizens uses their devices and apps, and just as importantly what they communicate by means of them, is as important as the devices themselves, as is the larger historical context in which messages circulate. In contrast to Shirky’s enthusiasm for technology’s political possibilities, cultural critics such as Evgeny Morozov have challenged a growing belief in the kind of technological determinism that once believed “that the Western radio informed Soviet citizens about the superior value of Western goods—and the Soviets eventually rebelled.” The story of the collapse of the Soviet Union is much more complex than narratives that name the presence and content of radio ads would suggest, just as political change today comes about through processes, forces, and movements, not just the devices that mediate them.

Facebook Revolution The presumed link between the communications revolution and political change became a key element of the story of the Arab Spring, the name given to a series of political confrontations between citizens and authoritarian governments in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, beginning in late 2010 (with the selfimmolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia in December) and continuing throughout 2011. The most widely and dramatically reported of the Arab Spring uprisings took place in Egypt, culminating on February 10, 2011 with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power (see Figure 10.1). The Western media’s interest in the events in Egypt had much to do with the mechanics through which protest against the state was organized. “By the second day of the Egyptian uprising,” writes Mona ElGobashy, “CNN correspondent Ben Wedeman was calling it a ‘very techie revolution.’ In the following days, every major news outlet framed the uprising as the work of wired, savvy twentysomethings awakening the liberating potential of Facebook.”

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Figure 10.1 An Egyptian antigovernment demonstrator takes part in a candlelight vigil at Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 9, 2011 on the 16th day of consecutive protests calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

Source: © MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/Getty Images

There is no question that Facebook placed a huge role in helping to challenge the Egyptian government through the mobilization of youth in the country. One of the most important figures in the events of the Arab Spring was Wael Ghonim, an employee of Google in the Middle East with a background in marketing and finance. In his account of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Ghonim traces his own shift from tech geek to political activist. As with many others of his generation, “I enjoyed spending long hours in front of a screen on chat programs. I built a network of virtual relations with people, most of whom I never met in person, not even once” (24). And while he believed himself to be immune to politics, the dire situation faced by most members of the Egyptian population—especially young people like himself—and the increasing corruption and violence of the state began to pull Ghonim into political intervention via the Web. Prior to the 2011 revolution, Egypt was ruled by an authoritarian government that fixed elections and blunted opposition groups (the existing regime had to formally approve new parties in order for the latter to be able to participate in voting). More than half of Egyptians lived in poverty, with 12 million of the 80 million citizens having no access to shelter and 1.5 million living in cemeteries. As of 2010, Egypt ranked 115th out of 139 countries on the Corruption Perception Index, was dead last in hiring transparency, and had the

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highest rate of newborn deaths in the world (Ghonim 165). Nobel Peace Prize recipient Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s proposal in 2010 to run against Mubarak for the presidency of the country led Ghonim to support him by using his technical and marketing skills to create a Facebook site for ElBaradei; within three months, 100 000 people had signed up.

Ghonim’s involvement with ElBaradei’s camp led him to appreciate just how powerful Facebook could be in mobilizing political interest in a country in which political expression was otherwise controlled and suppressed. The Egyptian government had little sense of the significant of Internet use in its country; the number of users had increased from 1.5 million in 2004 to 13.6 million in 2008, the vast majority of whom were youths and young adults (38). Ghonim found a similar lack of vision regarding the political potential of new communications technologies in the ElBaradei camp:

We constantly argued about the role of the Internet in the process of change. [Mostafa al Nagar, ElBaradei’s campaign manager] believed that the Internet was a virtual world with limited impact on reality, while I found it to be the key vehicle to bringing forth the first spark of change. The Internet is not a virtual world inhabited by avatars. It is a means of communication that offers people in the physical world a method to organize, act, and promote ideas and awareness. The Internet was going to change politics in Egypt, I wrote on Facebook and Twitter, and the 2011 elections would not be similar to those in 2005. (51)

The brutal beating and death of Khaled Mohamed Said, a young Egyptian man, by secret police on June 8, 2010 prompted Ghonim into further action. Given the number of people who were already members of ElBaradei’s Facebook page, Ghonim initially considered posting images of Said’s bloodied and broken body to the site. Instead, he decided to create a new page: Kullena Khaled Said, “We Are All Khaled Said.” This Facebook page would play a crucial role in the Arab Spring, quickly becoming one of the main sites for the exchange of information concerning the actions of the Egyptian government and a safe place where protestors could organize events rapidly and with relative anonymity. Within two minutes of creating the page, 300 people had joined; by the end of the first day, 36 000 people had signed up. At the outset, the site circulated information (videos, photos, a certificate of Said’s military service) that countered propaganda circulated by the police and the official state media about the events leading to Said’s death.

From the beginning, Ghonim imagined the page as a space that would help Egyptians who wanted political change to move from communicating online to taking action in the streets. The first event generated by Kullena Khaled Said was a silent protest that consisted of people arriving individually along the coastal road in Alexandria, where they would meet up and form a chain of people holding hands and facing out to sea with their backs turned on Egypt. Images of hundreds of linked protesters lining the road, hand in hand, were posted to the Web. “Such images tend to annoy security forces,” writes Ghonim. “Anything that is visually documented is evidence for the whole world to see” (79). The success of this initial peaceful gathering— made possible by the strategic use of social media—was critical to the events that would follow. On the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, Ghonim posted a celebratory message:

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Last Friday this page was launched….On Tuesday Mohamed sent his suggestion [for the Silent Stand] and it was announced to everyone….On Friday more than 100,000 members had joined this page and thousands went out in Cairo and Alexandria implementing an idea that was never done before in Egypt….So can we do just about anything or what? (81)

The capitulation of the Tunisian regime on January 13, 2011 gave the last bit of inspiration needed for members of the page and others opposed to the Egyptian government to realize that things could also change in Egypt. For much of the life of Kullena Khaled Said, from its origins through to Mubarak’s resignation, state officials paid little heed to the role of the Internet and of Facebook in particular in shaping the protests. Soon after the Silent Stand, Ghonim conducted a survey of his users and discovered that more than 70% of them were under 24 (84). The largest portion of the Egyptian population as well as of its Web users are youths; the older generation of state officials and security had very little sense of the power of Facebook as a communication tool, and reacted too late to stop the developing opposition movement. Though access to the Internet was blocked for many users in advance of the important mass demonstrations on January 25, 2011, and Ghonim himself was arrested and interrogated in the days leading up to Mubarak’s resignation, the Facebook site continued to play an important role in shaping participation in the protests even in his absence. The details that Ghonim provides in Revolution 2.0 of the debates and discussions that took place among the everexpanding number of members of his Facebook page (invitations to the January 25 protest reached more than 700 000 people) make it all too clear: the Egyptian revolution would not have happened as quickly and effectively as it did without social media, and may well not have happened at all. In the absence of a functioning civil society—a free and open space for debate and the exchange of ideas—Facebook and other social media became crucial spaces for Egyptians to voice their frustrations and to organize themselves to do something.

Given both his professional work and his experience using Facebook in order to generate a revolution, one might expect Ghonim to make a direct equation between technology and democracy. In his concluding remarks in Revolution 2.0, he appears to do just this:

Now that so many people can easily connect with one another, the world is less hospitable to authoritarian regimes. Humanity will always be cursed with powerhungry people and the rule of law and justice will not automatically flourish in all places at all times. But thanks to modern technology, participatory democracy is become a reality. Governments are finding it harder and harder to keep their people isolated from one another, to censor information, and to hide corruption and issue propaganda that goes unchallenged. Slowly but surely, the weapons of mass oppression are becoming extinct. (292–293)

Yet while he does celebrate the power of technology, he is also careful to assign it its proper role in the developments that led to the Arab Spring in Egypt. For instance, Ghonim is well aware of the digital divide within his own country. Since “reaching workingclass Egyptians was not going to happen through the Internet and Facebook” (145), protestors also distributed information via text messaging and printed fliers as well. For the revolution to happen, it required people to be willing to risk their lives in the streets. “It was easy to write, rant, and mobilize people using the Internet,” Ghonim writes. “The real heroes of the revolution were

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the people who had died and been injured” (257). And for people to be willing to risk their lives, conditions in Egypt had to have reached a level so abject that, for many, continuing with the way things had been heading was simply no longer an option. For Ghonim, what distinguishes the revolution 2.0 model—revolutions enabled by social media and other new communication technologies—from its 1.0 predecessor is the wisdom of the crowd. Earlier revolutions were led by “charismatic leaders who were politically savvy and sometimes even military geniuses” (293). By comparison, the new model of radical political change, empowered by access to information that government once sought to manage or control, involves the participation of everyone. The democratization of access to information will not on its own address corruption—the United States ranks third in Internet use but ranked 18th on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in 2016 (i.e., 17 countries are considered to be less corrupt than the United States; “Internet”, “Corruption”) —nor will it directly address problems of poverty or inequality. However, it can’t help but make possible more widespread challenges to political systems run for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.

The Fate of Information Friends who might have wanted to settle a bar bet about the name of the capital city of India, or kids looking for some quick help on their homework assignments, would have been surprised on January 18, 2012 to find that Wikipedia was… gone. In order to draw attention to the threat posed by two legislative acts then under discussion in the US House of Representatives (SOPA: Stop Online Piracy Act) and the US Senate (PIPA: Protect IP Act), Wikipedia and a number of other sites voluntarily engaged in a blackout. Had they been passed, these Acts would have increased copyright provisions to such a degree that many existing information services on the Web would have been legally threatened; at the same time, they would have given the US government considerable powers over the Internet, allowing the Attorney General to remove web sites deemed objectionable for whatever reason, and without any legal oversight. In her statement explaining the reason for the decision to blackout Wikipedia, Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, spoke of the site as

a resource that wants to be used for the benefit of the public. Readers trust Wikipedia because they know that despite its faults, Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place. It’s not aiming to monetize their eyeballs or make them believe some particular thing, or sell them a product. Wikipedia has no hidden agenda: it just wants to be helpful.

The blackout of Wikipedia had the desired effect—at least for the time being. Even before the blackout took place, the Obama Administration issued a statement saying that it would oppose any act “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet” (Espinel).

The availability of almost instantaneous information online is one of the genuinely amazing features of the Internet. The information provided is, however, far from innocent or trustworthy. Indeed, the almost infinite number of sites from which one can get information, in conjunction with the threat posed by the Internet to the practices of “legitimate” critics, has had two

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contradictory effects. In some cases, sources trusted off the Web have become sites to which one turns on the Web as well. For example, the websites of the New York Times and The Guardian have become places to which one turns for news and opinions, in large part because of the high reputations that they both established prior to the creation of the Internet. The existence of so many sources of information, however, has led to challenges to the legitimacy of these selfsame sources. During the race for the 2012 US Presidential campaign, for instance, Republican hopeful Rick Santorum frequently invoked lies and fictions to motivate his followers. To give but one example, Santorum said that 10% of deaths in the Netherlands were from euthanasia, a fate that he further claimed was forced on many helpless patients. A Washington Post article showing that this was not the case was greeted by a blogger supportive of Santorum as merely evidence of the questionable tactics of the “elitist” mainstream media. Similar patterns were evident in the 2016 US election campaign, when the regular exposure of Republican candidate Donald Trump’s manipulation of the truth had no perceptible effect on his popularity among core supporters. In the view of journalist Ian Buruma, “the public is increasingly segmented into groups of likeminded people who see their views echoed back to them in blogs, comments and tweets. There’s no need to be exposed to different opinions, which are, in any case, considered to be propaganda.” Even as it has given us more information, the Internet has also made the always difficult task of separating truth from fiction all the more difficult. In the 2016 US election campaign, many more candidates played games with information in the same way as Santorum, with little worry about being corrected by mainstream media for their mistakes and false assertions.

There are other developments that are equally important in assessing the fate of information and knowledge in the twentyfirst century. The fight over SOPA and PIPA raises important questions about who has access to information on the Internet, to what uses it is put, and under what conditions access is or should be provided. Wikimedia’s intervention in the implementation of a potentially restrictive and invasive action by the government can’t help but raise the question: If the government isn’t regulating the Internet already, then who is? And to what end and for what purposes might they be involved in circulating information on the Web, including information about those who use it? In her explanation of the actions of Wikipedia, Gardner draws on ethical language to make her case: Wikipedia’s heart is in the right place; it has no secret agenda; it’s not involved in the market; “it just wants to be helpful.” In the case of Wikipedia, these good intentions and lack of ambition to make a profit might well protect Internet users from having their search histories and record of Web visits used and abused by businesses or governments. At the same time, good intentions are far from being equivalent to laws or regulations generated by and for the good of publics; while Wikipedia’s heart might be in the right place, anyone who has surfed the Web knows that other providers of services and information are neither so forthcoming about their intentions, nor shy about making money from Internet users.

In Wikipedia’s appeal to its own ethical standards, one cannot help but hear echoes of an even more famous code of Internet conduct. Google is a company that has had an enormous impact on both the organization of and access to information on the Internet. As Daniel Soar, an editor at the London Review of Books, aptly puts it, Google’s “ubiquitous search box has changed the

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way information can be got at to such an extent that ten years after most people first learned of its existence you wouldn’t think of trying to find out anything without typing it into Google first” (3). The success of Google in becoming the site to which one turns for everyday information is such that it has played a major role in bringing about the end of such resources as the Yellow Pages (the physical version at least) and even the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica, which announced in 2012 that it was ceasing publication of its printed version. Google has become so big so fast that, as early as 2006, even before it had acquired YouTube and became (in 2007) the most visited web site in the world, many were asking “whether Google is becoming too dominant in too many areas” (McArthur). In a review of books about Google, Soar lists the enormous amount and range of information to which the company now has access. The material it makes publicly searchable—everything from its index on the Web, to the texts on Google Books and videos on YouTube, to images of neighborhoods and strip malls on Google Street View is

only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4:33 p.m., I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Androidpowered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on….If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages…[and] of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Googleenabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.

Google knows or has sought to know…your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interestfree loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as “home address” in its location service, to put beside the “work address” where you spend the majority of your daytime hours. (Soar 3)

On the basis of this list alone—and there are spaces and places in which Google has asserted itself into our lives that amazingly aren’t included even in this long list—worries about the size and power of Google are certainly justified. One of the ways in which Google has attempted to counter fears about the scope and scale of its operations is by adapting an ethical phrase as its corporate motto: “Do no evil.” Whether the company has always managed to live up to this guiding mantra has come increasingly into question the larger it has grown. For instance, the company has at times complied with pressures—from sources as various as the governments of China, Germany, France, and Switzerland to the Church of Scientology—to block or limit some

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of the results that user searches might pull up. As Google has grown in size as a corporation, with so much liquidity that it can purchase any corporate target of interest to it (e.g., YouTube, or online ad rival DoubleClick) while simultaneously fending off sizable lawsuits (e.g., for copyright violations in the creation of Google Books), objections to its practices and decisions have grown and multiplied (see McHugh; Palmer). The bulk of these objections fall under the category of what Google would characterize as a kind of “pragmatic censorship,” a decision to comply with limits on searches now as a way of promoting what all tech corporations see as the longterm democratizing effect of Internet access around the world—shortterm anti democratic pain for longterm democratic gain. Others see things differently: following guidelines set by the European Court of Justice in 2014, more than a million people have exercised the “right to be forgotten” and have been asked to be removed from Google’s search engine (Woollaston).

CloseUp 10.1 6. You Can Make Money without Doing Evil

“Google is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering search technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use AdWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find—so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.

We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a ‘Sponsored Link,’ so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no shortterm gain could ever justify breaching that trust.”

Source: Google, “Our Philosophy: Ten Things We Know to Be True.”

There are a number of things one might question about the statements in CloseUp 10.1, #6 of Google’s 10point philosophy. (To begin with, is it in fact possible to make money without

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hurting someone? Is capitalism a system that can ethically generate profit at no one’s expense?) Perhaps the key thing singled out in Google’s claim not to do evil has to do with the objectivity of its rankings and the integrity of its search results. This is the service for which Google is best known and the function that has made it such an integral service on the Internet: a portal through which users can find what they are looking for with a high degree of confidence and reliability. But good intentions notwithstanding, is Google’s path to knowledge really that straightforward? As much as the Internet presents itself to us as a virtual candy land of information—a space in which we are able to prowl around in search of news, reviews, recipes, funny videos, or profiles of our friends and neighbors, free from censorship and guided only by our own choice—it is crucial to remember that the information we access is refracted through a social and cultural mechanism that inevitably pushes some sites and ideas to the forefront, while burying others on page 2 of the search results and beyond.

A different set of challenges and problems of dealing with information in an age when it is widely available can be seen by looking at an ongoing project of Google’s that has drawn numerous objections (one of only many such objections: there is a Wikipedia page for “Criticism of Google”). In December 2004, Google announced a project to digitize and make publicly available 15 million printed volumes (approximately 4.5 billion pages), drawn primarily from the libraries of Stanford University and the University of Michigan, with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bodleian at Oxford, and the New York Public Library involved to lesser degrees; the Bavarian State Library in Munich has also joined the project (Herwig). Such a project has incredible promise. In the words of JeanNoël Jeanneney, the president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Google project (initially called Google Library but since given the more modest name of Google Books) appeared initially as “the realization of an old dream…that a treasure trove of knowledge, accumulated for centuries, would be opened up to the benefit of all, and primarily to those whose family, sociological or geographical situation deprived them of easy access to the cultural and intellectual legacy of humanity” (5). The promise of easy access to the world’s libraries is described by the director of the Bodleian, Sarah Thomas, as accelerating “the emergence of new knowledge tremendously” (Herwig). This narrative of universal knowledge aided by technology seems hard to resist, especially as it feeds into popular discourse linking new gadgets with the perpetual unfolding of the Enlightenment “maturity” of humanity.

Even so, significant concerns were raised about Google’s project almost immediately. Chief among these for Europeans was the potential for a tool such as Google Books to further accelerate the prevalence of English as a language of research at the expense of other languages. Given the paucity of translations from other languages into English (e.g., in 2005, only 3.54% of new adult fiction titles published in the United States were translations; see Hoffman), this would in turn have implications for the circulation of and access to the non English cultural resources of the world. As just one of many such cases, Jeanneney offers the example of a search for famous Spanish writer and cultural icon Miguel de Cervantes on the Spanish version of the Google Books. The first five items returned in the search were in French, followed by three books in English; in the ninth and final position was a collection of excerpts from Don Quixote in Spanish, with the whole work nowhere to be found in its

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original language on the first page—the only one visited by most users of Google (12).

Jeanneney’s short book on Google is full of such anecdotes about the limits and problems of the online library that Google is in the process of assembling. His criticisms of the project are driven by a desire to maintain global cultural and linguistic diversity, in line with UNESCO’s 2005 declaration (UNESCO), which states almost immediately (in Article 6) that “While ensuring that the free flow of ideas by word and image, care should be exercised that all cultures can express themselves and make themselves known.” (Tellingly, perhaps, the United States is not a signatory to this declaration.) Among the many interesting solutions that Jeanneney offers to the current dominance of Google Books is the creation of a European online library, as well as the promotion of search engines that both make their search algorithms public and give users information about the limits of their search and some idea of the “representativeness of the corpus in which it is carried out” (68). These suggestions highlight the important of context in both shaping information online and how such information is used and interpreted.

Still, it is important to recognize the unexpected and perhaps problematic outcome of what amounts to a major reorganization of human knowledge at an unprecedented speed, at the very same time as access to this knowledge through information technologies is being massively expanded worldwide. Despite numerous competing online projects—the European Library, the European cultural platform MICHAEL, and so on—as with so many of the other services that it has collected under its banner, Google Books has quickly become the site to which members of the public, politicians, students, bureaucrats, and researchers turn to access information that one imagines to be comprehensive, if perhaps not universal; the lack of access by students and scholars in most parts of the world to passwordprotected private databases of research almost guarantees it. The very size of the Google library makes a claim to completeness that is seductive: there are only so many of those 4.5 billion pages that one can get through in a lifetime.

What looms large as a key issue for culture in the twentyfirst century are the principles by which access to this information is organized for its users. In the case of Google, the information it provides is hierarchized according to two principles (although, of course, the precise algorithms remain secret). The first has to do with the frequency and density of links, which means in effect—and especially in the case of what would be a relatively fixed archive compared to the rest of the Internet—that “success breeds success, at the expense of newcomers, minorities, marginals” (Jeanneney 45). The second has to do with the demands of the advertising that pays for the digitalization project to begin with. Ads linked to specific books, themes, or topics—Jeanneney jokingly imagines a match manufacturer linking up to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl—have an impact on the organization and hierarchization of search results as well.

There has (of course) to be a way of organizing the search results of such a potentially huge archive as Google Books (not to mention the even larger archive of the Internet itself, which was estimated on February 6, 2016 to have at least 48.9 billion Googleindexed pages; see www.worldwidewebsize.com). But once these particular principles of hierarchization,

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http://www.worldwidewebsize.com

organized as they are by market imperatives as opposed to those that have guided the practices of archivists and librarians for centuries, are combined with the emphasis on English texts previously mentioned, we have in effect the sanctioning of a specific view of the world. To give one example, Jeanneney points to Simon Schama’s book on the French Revolution, Citizens—a market success in the United States, but so skewed in its account that no publisher in France would consider a translation (41–42). If one were to get an account of the Revolution only through Schama as opposed to other sources—even fictional ones like Victor Hugo’s Quatrevingttreize —they would have a very limited view of the past, just as getting an account of the Cuban missile crisis or 9/11 through the most popular American sources would quickly obscure our understanding of the politics of the global present. Yet this is the direction in which the “promise” of Google Book Search is leading us.

There’s an “evil” at work here that is hard for Google or most of its users to identity. That the process of producing access to information on the Web works through a process of hierarchization that generates some problems is a point that Google—and no doubt the vast majority of its users—takes to be simply part of the pragmatic demands of life on the Internet. How could one possibly dismiss the value of having access to the great libraries of the world in one’s bedroom? In the terms according to which Google has positioned its library project, the possibility of unfettered access to books is organized as a market promise—and not just because of the fact that money directly influences the importance of texts through advertising, but because of the illusion of choice combined with the attitude of “buyer beware.” Google understands itself to be doing no evil because it is playing by standard social and political rules; indeed, it imagines that it is extending these rules substantially, contributing to global democratization and the reinforcement of rule of law by means of informational trickledown (a belief that the events of the Arab Spring described above cannot help but reinforce).

As with every other aspect of social life, it is important to recognize that especially in the age of information, information is hardly innocent and is in fact at the heart of the political. “There can be no universal library, only specific ways of looking at the universal,” Jeanneney reminds us (5). These specific ways demand explicit, ongoing, public contestation and debate of a kind that necessarily involves a discussion not only of the specifics of search engine algorithms, but, more broadly, of the kind of world that we want to inhabit and the futures we want to work toward.

From Information to Marketing In The Googlization of Everything, Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, “we are not Google’s customers. We—our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences—are what Google sells to advertisers” (3). In response to claims such as this one, Soar thinks that the implication that

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Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers…[is] wrong. It isn’t possible, using Google’s tools, to target an ad to 32yearold single heterosexual men living in London who work at Goldman Sachs and like skiing, especially at Courchevel. You can do exactly that using Facebook, but the options Google gives advertisers are, by comparison, limited: the closest it gets is to allow them to target display ads to people who may be interested in the category of “skiing and snowboarding”—and advertisers were always able to do that anyway by buying space in Ski & Snowboard magazine. (5)

Recent developments, however, suggest that it is in fact Soar who is wrong about the ends to which information about users is being put. There is no doubt that the services and applications many companies provide for free on the Internet are in fact lures intended to generate information about users that they intend to use for their own purposes, or to sell to other companies eager for any possible marketing and advertising advantage. Facebook provides perhaps the best example of a site that captures user information that it passes along to advertisers—for a fee that it pockets. In 2012, it revealed to advertising professionals “revamped Facebook pages and timelines that companies can use to interact innocuously with Facebook’s vast user base” (Marlow “Google” B1). And Facebook is hardly the only such service. Not to be outdone, a month later Google instituted a new privacy policy that permits the company “to sweep together a person’s data across its various services, from YouTube to Gmail and Google+, in an effort to better target the person with ads based on their personal preferences” (Marlow B3). In the intervening years, the use of personal data for advertising purposes has further intensified. As most websites and social media apps depend on advertising to help fund their endeavors, users of almost every web service are now routinely polled with personal information, whether legitimately (offers of air miles in exchange for participating in surveys) or illegitimately (hacks and hijacks of the information contained in services such as Reddit and Twitter).

In addition to the disturbing implications of corporate privacy violation, Evgeny Morozov laments another aspect of the way in which Google, along with social media sites like Facebook, filters our Internet experience. Perhaps a little romantically, Morozov compares the early Internet user to the flâneur, scrolling pleasurably and aimlessly (and anonymously) through virtual arcades, without any pressure to consume. Just as economic and architectural changes in nineteenthcentury France diminished the quality of the flâneur’s experience (with the arcades replaced by “large, utilitarian department stores”), so Google and Facebook have transformed the Internet experience, each of them vying to become the onestop shopping (and reading, listening, viewing, learning, and socializing) place for users, each diminishing the element of freedom, chance, and surprise that defined the joys of the “cyberflâneur” experience (Morozov “Death”). At least some of the promise and possibility heralded by the Internet are draining away into the control and corporatism that define all too much of contemporary experience.

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Suggested Activity 10.2

Consider the ways in which you make use of the search tools on the Internet and the information that they bring up. Do you question the search results? Why or why not? Compare the results (or “hits”) that appear when you use different search engines to find out about a specific topic or phrase (you can find a list of search tools at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engines_list). What do the differences and similarities tell you about the manner in which information is organized by different search engines?

The RealWorld Costs of ELife There is no doubt that there have been a huge range of social, cultural, and political developments as a result of new technologies, especially as a result of the widespread global use of computing and communications technologies; we have only been able to touch on a few of these here. Though we’ve already addressed some of the downsides to the undeniable opportunities and new possibilities that have emerged as a result of these technologies, we would be remiss in not pointing (by way of concluding this section) to a few more ways in which the real world and elife can be out of sync in ways that shape what is and isn’t possible for people around the world.

While everincreasing numbers of people have access to new communications and computing technologies, it is important to remember that in much of the world a digital divide still exists —that is, a divide between those who work in and live comfortably with elife, and those who don’t (see Figure 10.2). The longstanding attempt to create a cheap laptop (as supported, for instance, by the One Laptop per Child Foundation founded by Professor Nicholas Negroponte) is intended to make the services of and information on the Internet available to as many people in the world as possible. The aim is to make a fully functioning laptop that costs less than $100. While the Foundation has not managed to achieve its goal of creating a laptop that costs less than $100, it has managed to distribute 3 million laptops to date. Even so, the Internet remains inaccessible to large swaths of the globe’s population, most notably the up to 2.7 billion people around the world that the World Bank estimates live on less than $2 per day. Despite a rapid expansion of owners of cell phones and computers, access to the physical devices required to visit the virtual landscape of the Web is still more limited than we might believe. While the creation of more and more devices such as the DataWind Aakash, an inexpensive ($50) Canadiandesigned tablet intended for use in India, will continue to pull some people into the Internet era, the digital divide is likely to continue for some time to come.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engines_list

Figure 10.2 A world map in which the size of countries is modified to reflect comparative internet usage shows a stark divide between the Global North and South.

Source: © Benjamin D. Hennig (Worldmapper Project). http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=336

Indeed, the continual expansion of technological offerings has had realworld costs that are becoming increasingly evident to the publics that use them. At roughly the same time as Apple’s stock price was pushing the total value of the company into uncharted territories (in February 2017, the company was worth more than $700 billion), increasing attention was being drawn to the working conditions endured by many of the workers engaged in the manufacturing of Apple products. In a series of reports, journalists Charles Duhigg and David Barboza documented a range of labor abuses in hightech factories based in China:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Underage workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

In addition to harsh working conditions, the push to create cheap, shiny products to satisfy the hightech desires of Western consumers—all while making a tidy profit—has repeatedly been said to endanger workers’ lives. In 2010, 137 workers were injured while using a poisonous chemical to clean iPad screens; in 2011, two separate explosions at iPad factories injured 77 people and killed 4; and hazardous working conditions have been reported at factories of Apple suppliers for years (see Figure 10.3). Apple is hardly alone in this regard: reports of dangerous working conditions and labor abuses have been reported in factories involved in the production of devices for HewlettPackard, IBM, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, Motorola, Nokia,

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http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=336

Toshiba, and other companies. Many of the devices on which we play games, watch films, send text messages to our friends, and check our email have their origins in the kind of sweatshop factories that one would expect to find in the nineteenth century rather than the twentyfirst.

Figure 10.3 “An explosion [in 2011] at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, killed four people and injured 18. It built iPads.” New York Times.

Source: AP/PA Images

In 2012, one of Apple’s main suppliers, Foxconn Technology, announced that it would reduce overtime and raise salaries for its employees by 25% (Barboza). It is clear that the criticisms leveled at Apple and other companies—which have been quick to spread via the very same devices made by Foxconn employees—are having an impact.

Lost Generation? On February 28, 2012, the magazine Adbusters posted “Tactical Briefing #26” on its blog. The brief outlines the next step in the Occupy movement, whose origins lie in an earlier call to action posted on Adbusters’ blog on July 13, 2011. The impulse to Occupy Wall Street—the

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beginning of what became a worldwide movement, with sites in over 80 countries and more than 600 towns and cities in the United States—came from the successful people’s revolution in Egypt a few months earlier. Citing the peaceful occupation of Tahrir Square as evidence of “a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics,” the blog suggests that “redeemers, rebels and radicals” get together in a symbolically important square where they would collectively reiterate a single demand until it was met. In the case of Tahrir, this demand was that President Mubarak step down from power; in the case of Wall Street, the space on the globe identified with the power of finance, Adbusters suggested that protesters “demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It’s time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we’re doomed without it.”

The different stakes of political struggle in Egypt and the United States could not be made any clearer than by the terms of this demand. In the first instance, as we saw in our discussion above, protestors risked their lives to upend a threedecade long dictatorship operating under a 45yearold Emergency Law that suspended constitutional rights, legalized censorship, and allowed the police to do virtually whatever they wanted without repercussions; in the second, those assembled on Wall Street were supposed to ask the President to form a commission to study a problem—an important problem, without question, but one with a solution imagined as being found within the existing system, as opposed to through this system’s negation or elimination. As it moved around the world, the Occupy movement quickly took on a different form than the one initially imagined for it by Adbusters. Instead of asking for governmental bodies to study the influence of money on politics in their own countries—a worldwide phenomenon, to be sure—the common global message of the Occupy movement became something quite different. The now famous and powerful slogan “We are the 99%!” drew attention to the alarming divisions of wealth experienced in every country in the world. Spurred on by a definitive report issued in October 2011 by the US Congressional Budget Office that showed huge and growing disparities in wealth between the top 1% of US income earners and everyone else, the Occupy movement challenged a system that works only for the very few at the expense of everyone else.

The statistics are genuinely alarming. In the United States, from 1979 to 2007, aftertax income for the top 1% of the population grew by 275%; for the poorest quintile, it grew by only 18% (Pear). The disparity in income growth was not the only cause for concern. As might be expected from these growth figures, there was also an increasing disequilibrium in income distribution: in 2007 the household income of the top 1% was 17% of the total (up from 8% in 1979), while the top 20% of households received 53% of income—more than the combined incomes of the other 80% of their fellow citizens. While the situation is perhaps most extreme in the United States, similar patterns of income disparity exist across the globe. In the decade between 1997 and 2007, the richest 1% of Canadians (those whose average income is $405 000) received a third of all income growth and held 13.8% of incomes; the top 10% of income earners in the country received 42.5% of national income (Yalnizyan). “Like the Gilded Age a century ago, Canada is awash in money generated by an emerging new global economy,” writes economist Armine Yalnizyan. “But during both slow and rapid periods of growth, incomes

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have increasingly become concentrated in the hands of the elite few rather than creating greater prosperity for all” (4).

What is as alarming as these facts of income disparity are the degree to which they seem not to have generated any significant response on the part of citizens—that 99% of us who are on the outside looking in. Indeed, perhaps up to the moment of the Occupy movement, Westerners seemed to have little understanding of their true economic and social circumstances, despite the fact that the growing economic inequalities had been articulated in numerous places and for more than a decade, including in massmarket books by figures such as former US Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich (Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future) and Nobel Prizewinning economist Paul Krugman ( Conscience of a Liberal and other books). The reasons for this lack of understanding or interest in income disparity are complex, but the fact that there is a general incomprehension on the part of populations of levels of social and economic equality is clear. In a 2011 study by Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Americans were asked to estimate the current level of income distribution in the United States and to offer their opinion of the ideal income distribution. The study revealed that citizens massively underestimated the degree of income inequality: the estimate offered of the percentage of wealth owned by the top 20% (a different measure than income distribution) was under 60%, when it is in fact well over 80%. For those who participated in the survey, the ideal distribution, on the other hand, “resembled Sweden” (10), with the top 20% owning 30% of the wealth and the next two quintiles having roughly 20% each (see Figure 10.4).

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Figure 10.4 The actual distribution of wealth in the United States plotted against the estimated and ideal distribution across all respondents. Because of their small percentage of total wealth, neither the “4th 20%” value (0.2%) nor the “bottom 20%” value (0.1%) are visible in the “Actual” distribution.

Source: Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, “Building a Better America, One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6.1 (2011). Reproduceed with permission of SAGE

The energy of the Occupy movement, as well as the considerable support that it received from the public (polls across the world indicated that the majority of the planet’s inhabitants agreed with the protestors), came from the force with which its slogan captured a problem that has been denied for too long. Publics long accustomed to thinking about social and political developments through narratives of progress that suggested that life could only ever become more just, equitable, and democratic were confronted with the realization that this was no longer the case: history had taken a turn for the worse. “Tactical Briefing #26,” Adbusters’ call to occupy the streets of Chicago on May 1, 2012 during the overlapping meetings of the G8 and NATO, places the problems of the current economic system front and center:

The crisis of capitalism is deepening. Youth unemployment has reached 50% in Spain and Greece…30% in Portugal and Italy…22% in the UK…almost 20% in the US. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are waking up to the fact that their future does not compute…that their lives will be a never ending series of ecological, financial, political and personal crises…and that if we don’t rise up and start fighting for a different kind of future, we won’t have a future.

Though the current inequities we are experiencing have affected most people on the globe, it is Szeman, I., & O'Brien, S. (2017). Popular culture : A user's guide. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from ufvca on 2020-12-01 11:21:09.

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young people who have been disproportionately affected by the 2008 economic crash and by the reshaping of societies via the forces that have created—and legitimated—the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And so it is hardly surprising that young people around the globe are challenging the system that has produced a world that seems to hold little promise for them. What differentiates the Occupy movement from earlier cultures of protest in North America—particularly the 1960s and 1970s counterculture—is the way in which it unites youth with other disenfranchised groups. In the Woodstock era, Roger Lowenstein notes, “radical students preached an affinity with the ‘working class,’ but it was rare that the students and any members of the working class actually joined arms.” The target of American students’ protests back then was not the world of business and finance (which many of them would end up joining), but the government and the military, which were conducting an imperialistic war in Vietnam. Workers did not necessarily share—in fact they generally opposed—the student movement; in one instance, a group of about 200 construction workers clashed violently with students demonstrating against police shooting of antiwar protestors at Kent State University, with the result that 70 students ended up in hospital (Lowenstein). The tensions could not be explained simply in terms of different politics (conservative workers vs. progressive students), but were located in different horizons of possibility, rooted in different class positions. For the mostly middleclass and affluent students, as Lowenstein notes, “upward mobility was a birthright. People feared the cops, the draft, authority figures in general—we didn’t fear unemployment.”

Times have changed. The myth that hard work will lead to success, shared in various forms, to at least some degree, by people in different classes, has been definitively shattered: students, workers, unemployed people, even members of the once secure middle class, are united now in the feeling that the future is precarious (we expand on this below) and in the struggling effort to figure out why, and what can be done.

CloseUp 10.2 A Brief History of the 2008 Economic Crash

The crash of stock markets in Fall 2008 and the resulting global economic recession were the result of a burst financial bubble. In the decade leading up to the crash, real estate prices around the world had become massively inflated; in many cases, increasingly expensive properties were being purchased by individuals and corporations with the aid of large loans and mortgages that were not properly secured by significant downpayments, equities, or other assets. In an effort to expand the market for mortgages—and thus to generate more profits—some banks and finance companies created subprime mortgages (i.e., with interest rates set below the established prime lending rate) that allowed low income earners to enter the housing market and others to purchase larger properties than they otherwise might. Over time, the size of monthly payments would increase, as would the interest on the mortgages, making it difficult for many to manage the size of the debt they had taken on, especially given the fact that the annual income of most people has remained relatively flat for three decades. The expanded ability of individuals to borrow additional funds against their houses (home equity loans) also generated a huge expansion

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in consumer indebtedness.

Real estate value is to a large degree a form of collective fiction: the price of a piece of land and the object on it depends on what individuals are willing—or able—to pay for it. Housing prices can shift enormously alongside changes in the economy; in Detroit, an area hit especially hard over the past several decades as a result of the shift of industrial production to countries outside of the United States, houses that once sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars now sell for tens of thousands, or sit empty and abandoned, unwanted by anyone. When individuals were no longer able to continue to pay mortgages on properties they had purchased, they defaulted, leaving banks and credit companies with an everincreasing stock of homes for which there was no market, thereby deflating the value of the existing stock of homes. The result was that many families had mortgages whose value far exceeded the market price of their homes; in extreme cases, some people simply left their keys in their home and walked away, unwilling to pay an inflated mortgage for an asset worth much, much less. Overleveraged and no longer able to access easy credit, consumers en masse started spending less, with immediate economic consequences, given the fact that companies, too, were in debt and had failing real estate investments.

The speed and severity of the crash were connected to one further factor. As one of few areas of real growth in the economy at the time, the real estate market became attractive to institutional and individual investors, who purchased securities related to the value of mortgages, with more risky mortgages generating greater returns on investments. In addition, a complex investment vehicle called a credit default swap was created that gave its purchasers a payout if a loan defaulted. When the price of real estate began to crash and mortgage holders defaulted in larger numbers on their loans, major banks and investment companies around the world did not have adequate funds to cover their losses, resulting in the collapse of several major companies (e.g., Northern Rock in the United Kingdom, CountryWide Financial and Lehmann Brothers in the United States), a precipitous decline in stock markets, a liquidity crisis (i.e., it was difficult for companies to get the loans they needed), and massive increases in government debt, as states had to intervene in markets to prevent the situation from becoming even worse.

The United States was far from the only place in which a real estate bubble burst. Excessive borrowing by individuals, corporations, and governments, made possible by cheap loans, generated even worse problems in Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain, and by consequence of a currency (the euro) shared by these countries with other nations, major economic problems for Europe as a whole.

The immediate context for the current economic and social problems faced by the world’s youth is the financial crisis that followed the crash of stock market (and so of national economies around the world) in Fall 2008. Besides the creation of the high levels of youth unemployment noted above, there are two other things to note about the crash in relation to today’s youth. First, it resulted in the disappearance of a huge amount of wealth from

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economies, and so, too, from the operating budgets of governments, with implications for unemployment programs and for funding of all manner of social programs. Second, rather than being challenged and widely questioned, the ideological imperatives that produced the crash continue to be those that, for the most part, guided how governments responded to the situation and tried to get their economies back on track. The ideology of neoliberalism, which emphasizes the reduction of the size of government (and thus of the level of taxation needed to keep government programs operating) and the elimination of rules on the operation of the private sector, continues to be the dominant one guiding state decision making. Despite the fact that this ideology was in many ways the cause of the crash, governments around the world continue to imagine it as the solution. The austerity measures proposed by many governments— cuts in programming in order to be able to pay down government debt—are deemed necessary in order to keep economies running. As often as not, however, these cuts are paired with tax cuts to the richest members of society, which means that programs that protect the poor and working classes are slashed for the sake of the 1% whose financial speculations generated the market crash (see Krugman “Four”). The persistence of neoliberalism means that the primary aim of societies around the world is to secure the ability of companies to make profit, rather than to work for the benefit of all of their citizens to live safe, healthy, and meaningful lives (see Figure 10.5).

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Figure 10.5 This Audi ad promotes private solutions to public programs, in line with the neoliberal ideology guiding government decision making across the world.

Source: Audi 2011. Reproduced with permission of Audi AG

The Future of Higher Education One of the programs that governments claim they can no longer afford to support at the same levels as they once did is higher education. Cuts have been made to the budgets of universities and colleges across the world, and tuition fees have risen—sometimes dramatically—at both public and private institutions. The most dramatic increases have taken place in California and the United Kingdom, in both cases due to lack of government funding. To address a $500 million funding gap, the California State University system—where tuitions have doubled since the 2007–08 academic year—announced in March 2012 that it would accept no new admissions in spring 2013 and would cut admissions by 20,000–25,000 students in 2013–14 (Asimov). Tuition rates in the University of California system (the research wing of the Cal State system) have climbed to historically high levels, with instate students paying (in 2016) $12.264 a year and and outofstate students paying $38,976. In the United Kingdom, the government of David Cameron lifted the pre2012 cap on tuition fees (at £3290 per annum), leading to a tripling in the tuition rates at most universities. Once again, as part of government’s austerity measures, cuts of more than £4 billion to university funding meant that students would have to pay more for their educations while receiving less. Throughout the world, students are enduring larger and larger class sizes and poorer service in every aspect of university life, as administrators make cuts to the number of faculty members and support staff. And because many students are forced to take on substantial debt loads in order to finance their education, an everincreasing number of young people today enter the workforce in an economically compromised position—when, that is, they can find work at all—which means that their capacity to make choices about the kind of work they do is also compromised. They have to give themselves over to a system that is doing less and less to help them live truly meaningful lives (see Figure 10.6).

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Figure 10.6 An estimated 200 000 people attended a march in Montreal on March 22, 2012 to highlight student indebtedness and to protest the Quebec government’s decision to increase tuition fees by $1625 over five years—one of the largest demonstrations in the province’s history.

One might ask: What does all this have to do with popular culture? Though to a lesser degree than one might have expected given its impact on people around the world, the market crash has become a theme explored within popular culture. Beneath the humor of the popular 2011 film Bridesmaids was a more serious message about the impact that financial crisis can have on an individual life. Because Annie Walker (Kristen Wiig) has had to close her bakery due to the economic downturn, she has to work in a lowpaying retail job at a jewelry store; when she loses this job, too, she has to move out of the apartment she shares and back into her childhood home with her mother. The competition she engages in with Helen (Rose Byrne) over the planning of their friend Lillian’s (Maya Rudolph) wedding is as much about class as it is about personal jealousy. Helen is wealthy and uses her riches to create lavish wedding events for Lillian, who will be entering the 1% through her marriage to a Chicagobased financier. As with many films, the life crisis that Annie endures has what one presumes is a happy ending (she finds a new boyfriend, one with a probably secure, workingclass job as a

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police officer); and the glamorous parties and wedding that audiences get to witness are the typical stuff of pop culture fantasy. Annie’s relegation to the sidelines of that world is represented as an instance of personal bad luck, rather than an indictment of the systematic inequality that sustains its excess. And yet, economic struggle is a part of her story as it would not have been in romantic comedies of the 1990s and early 2000s. Other popular films that feature the financial crisis as a theme also tend to use it in order to create a narrative arc in which, in the end, the ability to endure uncertainty results in individual growth and maturity, with things on the upswing in the closing frames. In The Company Men, downsized corporate executive Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is forced to join his brotherinlaw’s home renovation company, itself struggling with the effects of the downturn. After learning the value of “real” work, the film ends with Bobby’s move to a new company, one in which he has a more prominent executive role to play, and one that promises (under the leadership of Tommy Lee Jones’s character, Gene McClary) to engage in the capitalist game in a more fair and ethical fashion.

There are, of course, more critical narratives of life in the early twentyfirst century, including ones that take a hard look at the consequences of neoliberalism. The bleakness of the contemporary economic environment is the subject of black comedy in the television series Breaking Bad, in which high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston), recently diagnosed with lung cancer, sets up a methamphetamine lab in order to support his family. The 2011 film Warrior offers an only slightly less extreme take on contemporary working life, through the stories of two brothers competing (unbeknownst to each other) in a highstakes mixed martial arts tournament. One, an exmarine, is trying to earn money to support the widow of a fellow soldier who died in combat; the other is a high school physics teacher facing the threat of mortgage foreclosure. For both, ultimate fighting presents itself as the only viable means to make a living. Even though there have been an increasing number of pop culture narratives like these that address the realities of life in the wake of the financial crisis, it is telling that very few of them deal with the impact of neoliberalism on minorities—even though the latter were disproportionately affected by the crash.

Both Breaking Bad and Warrior caricature the myth of the resourceful entrepreneur, taking chances, getting his hands dirty—and in the myth it is generally a “he”, though Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) in Weeds offers a suburban feminine counterpart to Walter White—to keep his family housed and fed. The reality, however, is not that different from the satire, as we see in Werner Herzog’s documentary Into the Abyss (2011), which investigates the lives of two convicted murderers on death row in Texas. As one might expect, the film questions the ethics of the death penalty and probes the US penal system. In his complex and multifaceted exploration of the social context that produced the murderers and their victims, Herzog portrays a community that has largely been abandoned by mainstream America. The majority of the characters have been involved with the criminal justice system at some point and there is widespread un or underemployment. The violent displays of masculinity and fetishism for status objects like cars (the theft of a car is what led to the murders the film investigates) are just some of the outcomes of a society in which accumulation is valued above all else, but available to the degree suggested by images in popular culture only to a very few.

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We all know that real life does not match up to film and television. Our expectations and understanding of the good life are nevertheless shaped by the panoply of images and sounds we consume on a daily basis, which are filled with the fantasy of possibility, much more than a blunt assessment of the character of the reality we collectively inhabit. A few exceptions, some of which we’ve noted above, prove the rule of a commercial media landscape dominated by images of exceptional wealth and success (Keeping up with the Kardashians, Extreme Makeover, Home Edition, The Real Housewives, most sitcoms), which we might sometimes mock, but which also offer fodder for fantasy.

More than a halfcentury after Horkheimer and Adorno’s comments on the culture industry (see Chapter 4), we need to ask ourselves once again: Do the images and symbols circulated in popular culture act as a salve for the wounds of the social and economic decisions we are living with today? Do they prevent even more of us from taking to the streets and questioning why we continue to accept as normal a society in which many are fated to live in debt, with poor work opportunities, and without the objects and experiences that popular culture so freely promises?

Suggested Activity 10.3

How have the effects of economic crisis been represented in popular culture? Is there a difference across genres or forms of popular culture (e.g., music, film, television, YouTube videos, etc.)? What kinds of issues or themes are prominent in these representations? And what kinds of things tend to be overlooked or occluded?

What Is Next? One of the major political mysteries that we collectively face today is how a neoliberal rationality—“a new and virulent form of capitalism…with an even more disastrous impact on the fabric of a common life than its predecessors” (Budgen 150)—has in the space of a few decades become accepted as the new normal around the world. Jean and John Comaroff point to the extremity and depth of its effects:

Neoliberalism aspires, in its ideology and practice, to intensify the abstractions inherent in capitalism itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions … Formative experiences— like the nature of work and the reproduction of self, culture, and community—have shifted. Oncelegible processes—the workings of power, the distribution of wealth, the meaning of politics and national belonging—have become opaque, even spectral. The contours of “society” blur, its organic solidarity disperses. (305)

We face a huge array of challenges in the twentyfirst century. What we need perhaps most of all to navigate these—and the ones still to come—are new narratives of social being and

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belonging. The emerging technologies that we discuss in this chapter may help to organize, synthesize, and share these narratives, but it is popular culture’s makers and “users”— including the readers of this book—who will create and, ultimately, enact them.

Suggestions for Further Reading and Viewing Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. New York: Verso, 2013.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011.

Inside Job. Dir. Charles Ferguson. 2010. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Classics.

Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.

Mandiberg, Michael, ed. The Social Media Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs, 2011.

Mukherjee, Roopali, and Sarah BanetWeiser, eds. Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Nunns, Alex, and Nadia Idle, eds. Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as It Unfolded, in the Words of the People Who Made It. New York: OR Books, 2011.

Page One: Inside the New York Times. Dir. Andrew Rossi. Beverly Hills, CA: Participant Media.

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the TwentyFirst Century . Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

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