Page 144 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

mediate the available cultural spheres. People today routinely fuse the near
with the far, the traditional with the new, and the relatively unmediated with
the multimediated, to create expansive material and discursive worlds that
transform life experience and radically reconfigure the meaning of cultural
space.
The global explosion of symbolic forms makes patterns of cultural thought
and behavior much more fragmented and generative than integrated and
limiting, and the role of individual persons in shaping cultural styles and
patterns more original and labor-intensive than ever before. Individual per-
sons today no longer live in all-embracing, ‘full-time’ cultures (of course they
never did in any complete sense); instead they invent multiple, simultaneous,
‘part-time’ polycultural composites made up of accessible cultural resources in
order to construct their impermanent ‘parallel lives’ (Tomlinson 1999: 169).
The superculture in some respects resembles what David Chaney refers to in
Chapter 4 as ‘lifestyle’ (a ‘repertoire of styles’ and ‘constellation of tastes’) that
is driven more and more by global commercial forces and a rapidly increasing
consumerist mentality, rather than the more encompassing ‘ways of life’, which
typify culture in far more static and provincial terms.

Why ‘superculture’?
By modifying ‘culture’ with ‘super’ I hope to capture the magnitude, fresh-
ness, and uniqueness of current developments. There are related precedents in
cultural theory. Some years ago Michael Real applied the term ‘super’ not to
culture but to mass media (Real 1989). Real wanted to stress the extraordinary
influence of media and popular culture in cultural analysis at the very time
when information technology, the Internet, and personal communication
devices were just beginning to pervade American society. According to Real,
‘super’ can refer to ‘the position of a thing physically above or on top of
another’, can indicate ‘a thing’s higher rank, quality, amount, or degree’, and
can also mean ‘the highest degree, in excess of a norm, as in superabundant’
(Real 1989: 18). Like super media, superculture refers to a cultural mode that is
above other modes, has a higher rank, quality, and abundance than is reflected
in other conceptions of culture, and certainly exceeds the norms which typify
and limit traditional ways of thinking about culture. Moreover, supercultures
are composed in part of symbolic content that is made available by super media.
Superculture also fits well theoretically with what the French anthropologist
Marc Augé calls ‘supermodernity’ (1995). In contrast to the more concrete,
material contours of late modernity, supermodernity refers to an era in
social history characterized by generic ‘non places’ such as ATM machines,
international airports, high-speed trains, and supermarkets more than the
‘“anthropological places” of the organically social’ (see Tomlinson 1999: 109).
Supercultures embody features from this seemingly anonymous ‘supermodern’
world, and from cultural debris scattered about in what is often called the

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