It seems that these days the general people are very interested in cute animal videos on youtube. Honestly, I cant deny them either.
The dogs just love it!
Eros Project – capitalism
General question about the Eros Project
What the libidinal economy is
How it came to be
And what its effect is on us
Pay attention to this argument
Disregard a lot of description
Read the conclusion!
A new dogmatism in media theory has shifted the focus from text the audience
This active audience school insists that the audience is in control of the meaning of media products
There are severe limits to through in any culture
Autonomy of the self – is our lifestyle our own?
Limits to thought – our minds are embedded in institutions and society
The thinking that we do we do with the collective ressources around us
Popular culture: the stuff that the masses are consuming that is bad
High culture = good, low culture mass culture = bad
Academics started seeing value in popular culture
Distinguish its tastes from the masses through tastes
That which is popular came from commercial media… sports etc
A very specific type of culture in the 20th century
- deinstitutionalized mode of pop culture production
- Memory, personal history, diaries
- The culture confession
- Important mode of cultural production
- theres always precedent in culture
- Society validates commercial forms
- Artists, journalists etc
- the internet is being feminized as a media space
Chapter 6 – war, politics and religion
- when a new war comes on, we turn on CNN – participate in news, politics and religion significantly as participants
- In any of these categories people are making videos to show what “I believe” or “what happened”
- alter meanings and give preferred meanings to register consumer complaints
- Producing bits and peaces of digital culture
- Appropriating commercial material
Pg 167 – is it possible to think about (with reasonable expectations) a future where video supersedes television
- Is it possible where our cultural productions supercede commercial cultural productions
- Cultural change can happen when a very small minority changed their opinion or values
- Significance of the new cultural system cant be measured by the new demographics
- The significance of it leads to how much freedom you can have
Cultural shift
- from a decade of the notion “I like to watch”
- Culture was defined as a culture of couch potatoes
- Passive watching
- Now we are engaged in an activity of attracting people
This really could have been a love story. In terms of chatting online, facebook chat in this case, the amount that people want to say versus what they actually say is disproportionate. Through this type of medium, people tend to hold back their feelings to appear to look jaded or put a on a facade. This raises the question again on authenticity. What you say on facebook.. would you say it in real life? Is the person you are projecting sincerely you? Self-Expression: Try it. Tell someone how you feel today. You won’t regret it.
More of our consumer electronic devices are becoming multimedia use
More of us are acting like producers in amateur settings
Genderlizing the skill of producing cultural products
Foucoult: compulsory need for visibility
- enables surveillance and social code
- Normalizing process
- The result of confession is to bring you back into society
- To adjust the self to a normal way of living
- Ideal: we should be radically transparent
- Mass withdrawal of the consent (people can stop consenting to be ruled)
Youtube videos
- Mundane ordinary lives
- Home birth (Maelle)
- Spending a lot of time with her children
- New type of memory system
- Were remembered though the social network
The looking-glass self
- done in a face to face network
- Has created a new context in the internet
- Taking our lives and putting them up on display
- Opening up the number of people engaged in telling us who we are
- Sense of self is a series of stories told about ourselves
- Permanent record of growing detail
- Digital memory is now digital too vs before
Celebrity Culture
- creating someones fame, that fame translating into wealth
- And through the rise of paparazzi
- All sorts of dynamics and forces that play in the commercial media system that transfer over to our amateur system with great reward and great risk
Not only has obscure baby names become the recent trend… but this infographic is a great explanation of why celebrities shouldn’t name babies. Poor kids. [infographic]
The Corporate voice is the loudest voice
- Corporate Speech
What is Advertising?
- all is propaganda on behalf of consumption
- Herbert Schiller – (corporate speech) “this whole business of the speech activity and discourse” – the corporate voice is the loudest voice
- The trajectory has been the extension of that voice into more areas of life
- Advertising on the trays in front of us on airplanes etc… doctors office etc…
- Idea: if theres an empty space, advertising wants to fill it
- Big field in advertising is discovering fields
- 2 decades ago, a company used lasers to write on the moon
- Advertising in its totality is a voice
- Multi-trillion dollar expenditure
Trend in Websites
- if you click on something you want to read and you get an ad
- Objective of a brand : is for the brand to become part of culture
- Something that becomes central to our lives
- The result of this is the pmass consumer society that we hav
- Hardpressed to find a more influencial system in modern life
Libidinal Economy
- exists on a foundation of culture and ideas
- Rutherford argues (246) that this economy was based on the assumption of the existence of repression and the virtue of liberation
- The purpose of sex doesnt have to be confined to marriage: liberation
- a past of sexual repression
- The necessity and virtue of liberation
– normalizing the pornorgraphic
Eros project: last century of eroticizing the world
- to make objects, places sexy
- Cleansed practices to sell products
- creates the erotic self
- seeks to make the person the whole body as a sexual being to be rendered sexy
Pornography
- played a subversive role in the enlightenment
- The pornorgraphic obscene is still a part of the political
- Obscene used to make fun – internet (absence of the censor)
- Dali showed the market that signs and symbols of perversion it could be put into promotion (of the taboo)a
- Once decidedly anti-establishment
New Mechanism of desire
- intent to foster the passion of power
Maidenform campaign
- the bra aquired its appear because of advertising
- The diamond gained its appeal through advertising
- Our sense of the self is never innate
- Always constructed by the surrounding society
Capitalism: incredible structuring force
- managed consumer behaviour
- Minimized resistance
- always some sort of economy but is minimal in terms of our overall consumption
- Key difference: de-commodified system of production and de-commodifies the things
- Mode of cultural production
The internet has defined our generation
Bias toward the debated
- Corporate system captured that debate which determined what was normative in the social order
- Not just about producing entertainment but liberating our voices
Youtube Black Women debate videos
- change of structure changes nature
- Theory doesnt tell us what the outcome will be
Post Capitalism Production
– has the potentional to be significant on the formation of our identity and
- transformation of consumption to things that are deeply steeped to meaning
Rutherfords argument of the economy being a theatre of the libido
- argument goes to the 1800s
- Draws a lot upon Michael Foucault
- John Fiske: progressive media of commercial content
- Never revolutionary
- Progressive element: celebration of erotic self
- gone through a centrury of libertion of sexuality
- willing to be on display
Sex-starved
- would capitalism work if we were healthy?
Carry the effects of power within us
Exam: have a reasonable understanding of rutherford’s thesis/argument and how he moves it forward
- not asking for an encyclopedic reference
Thesis: consumption system acts as a theatre of libido that attached highly erotically charged meanings to goods based on our psychological make up we are like flies to honey – and therefore highly attracted to the theatre of libidio
One of these reasons: structures of production system
What happens to capitalisms structure of speech when a new system (internet)
Neo-Burlesque
- women taking pleasure in their bodies
- Changing attitude toward sexuality
- Exercise dance style
- What is new on youtube: housewives, teenage girls and tweens performing the neo burlesque
- Complicated human behaviour: resisting through codes (styles of behaviour) that are tainted by the patriarchal culture that they come from
- Neo-burlesque: areaof women liberating themselves
Pg 57 – Issue of pleasure and how to get it rather than domination and how to end it
- When it comes to reality television the rich do not participate in it
- What is fame to the middle class? Different to the upper class
this is the extent of my attention span 