* I have been giving a lot of thought recently to media and its relation to human communities. I think back to the dinner tables in Paris, where everyone would gather around the table, eating up delicious food, chatting, but in the presence of the television. After dinner, a little more television, or shift off to the computer to play some games, or back to homework. At least that's what I can remember from my school days. Much was said at the time about the omnipresence of television, although the adults didn't mind watching it so much, and we left it at that.
* Since then the media and the omnipresent "media onslaught" have taken their toll on our advanced media societies. By advanced I mean media's very strong relation to humans as community-makers. Our communities are now not so much isolated from each other in a fjord of nihilistic islets: on the contrary, we are now connnected via the fabric of the media, the ether that has replaced community bonds. If you reject this frame of mind, sociologically you are in a lot of trouble, because the social net that was supposed to pick you up again is not there. Sorry, end of story. But if you do believe in it, one system has replaced another: the old elder community vs. younger community dynamic power balance has now shifted to media production companies+elite interests in power vs. voter ratings+on-screen performance. So now we have a mass media bond that connects us all with one mass message coming down from "above". Vox dei sold as vox populi.
* So when commercialization meets the media and the media is community, marketing becomes the strings of power and branding becomes identity. Hence, the new identity is commercial, not political. People see themselves not as a part of an ideological group, but as part of a community of like-minded consumers. In Japan, the ubiquity of Gucci handbags means something: it means you aspire to belong to a particular type of community, glamorous, well-off, good taste, foreign, all good stuff. Just remember that these people may aspire to this, much like lower-class Americans aspire to the American Dream, but that's where the aspirations stop: you are hardly more likely to get actually get there socially. A recent study by the Sutton Trust and the London School of Economics suggests that social mobility is actually decreasing in what are "advanced" media societies. So we are looking at an aspiratory community - a community of people bound by their aspirations in consumerism - and which is safely out of bounds of political power struggles unlike communities with other power needs such as pesky marxism-leninism-communism, or pesky non-Christian religions like Islam.
* This is why books like "Trading Up: The New American Luxury" by people over at Boston Consulting Group make for such interesting reading. Middle-classification of consumers is a great success for the consumer society, such that everyone reaches for goods outside their spending limits, because it is a must-have, must-be. And for a mass-middle-classified population, you need targeted marketing to make up for the boredom you would otherwise feel looking at line on line of Cola bottles (containing ultimately the same thing). But targeted advertising doesn't work anymore, so you need multimedia marketing and advertising, product placements on shows, films, music videos, the more outlets the better. Not that you can cope with all this information, but you soak it all in, picking up the odd fancy feather or tried-and-true brand, deleting the other stimuli from your flash-memory-ified brain.
* The world of blogs is attempting to bring back the voice of the individual and the community back into reality, away from the media message so often conflated with the desires of the ruling party, and towards a real vox populi - a media empowerment by the masses. One day, we will all be able to set up our own 24h TV station online, like we can all set up a website or blog with a free Internet service today. But this is not necessarily leading in the right direction. Delving into one of my favorite books, Jack Synder's From Voting to Violence's chapter "How Democratization Sparked Counterrevolutionary German Nationalism" argues that back in Weimar Germany (1919-1933), a vigorous professional press and a dearth of points of view were available in what he calls a "marketplace of ideas". But he points out that "[...]a unified public sphere in which Germany's segmented publics came together to discuss one another's views did not exist [...] Though urban workers and Nazis both read the liberal press for news of local events and activities, neither groups engaged the liberals or each other in real dialogue". He goes on that "[...] the division of the marketplace of ideas into non-communicating segments was deeply embedded in Weimar social structure. [...] Thus, opinions and discourse in the different market segments proceeded on independent tracks". In the same way, as our hypertargeted marketing create communities of consumer identity, we are all the less inclined to engage each other in meaningful dialogue. You enjoy Coke, me Pepsi. You are Gucci, she is Versace. No competition, no rivalry, no questions.
* Never has this been more relevant than in our iPodized/Walkmanized/Hummerized worlds where we cocoon ourselves in what we want and need, in a one-way message that brands products by exclusion. The rise of RSS feeds are very similar, very convenient granted, but at the end of the day you only listen/read what you want to listen/read, no contest. You become the segment of 1, the holy grail 1-to-1 marketers have always wanted you to fall into. The problem arises when you try to comm-unicate. A segment of 1 is not conducive to segments of 2, it leads instead to two segments of 1. What we need is a common ground of social interaction, mediated by blogs if need be, a kind of open public place, a new "agora", "plaza" or "market square", where the grievances of the community can be aired and actual participation encouraged.
* Our reaction to information overload has been naturally defensive: ignore, forget, exclude, switch off, marginalize. By offering ourselves the luxury of terabytes of worldwide Internet information, we have isolated ourselves in a defensive shell of information protection. We are not computers, we cannot compute all this data like a search engine, we need to reduce and rationalise. By bringing information back into the realm of the natural and of the human, we can re-enlarge our definition of what is necessary, and can start "browsing" each other's points of view, just as we shop around for the best deal on some good or service. By cutting down on the information available to a manageable set of info directly related to the information around you, Naviblog allows you to reconnect with the real world of information, blogs, products etc. By switching effortlessly backwards and forwards to other categories of customer-generated information, it is easier to reconnect to the human fabric of information, and those that generated it.
* We are slowly making our return back into the real world from the heady days of the "virtual" Internet. But we are not as before, we are now enhanced by the omnipresence of this data, we feel it is there, it is now in a dimension of its own. We have developed a sixth sense for information, need to have it at our fingertips. Just we are now realizing that it was just another means of communication, another means of finding out who we are, who the other is, and what the hell we want to do with ourselves anyway.
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