Page 145 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

‘postmodern’ world, but they are also made up of more enduring, substantive
cultural traits and traditions.
Superculture also corresponds closely with what Manuel Castells calls a
‘supertext’. In his discussion of ‘the network society’, Castells uses the expres-
sion ‘supertext’ to refer to hybrid symbolic products that are created through
the reflexive mixing of various ‘realities’ by ‘blending in the same discourse . . .
messages emitted from [various] levels of existence’ (Castells 1996: 373).
Castells employs an extended example from American commercial television
to demonstrate how supertexts are routinely produced industrially by folding
various cultural fragments and narratives into media productions. The example
he uses is the famous Murphy Brown episode where a videotaped segment of
former Vice President Dan Quayle’s criticism of the show’s controversial and
well-publicized story development (lead actress Candice Bergen was about to
become an unwed mother) was itself edited into an upcoming installment of
the program. This visual and narrative blending of ‘reality’ and fiction pro-
duced a supertext – ‘a new text of the real and the imaginary . . . from [different]
levels of experience’ (Castells 1996: 373). Sophisticated technology and creative
editing techniques make such cultural sampling and fusions possible. The scene
in the film Forrest Gump where Tom Hanks shakes hands with deceased former
US president Lyndon Johnson, or the routine recycling of television com-
mercials and pop music oldies into contemporary hip-hop music are other
kinds of supertexts. Such syntheses have become commonplace in media
production.
These striking examples of media mixing and matching reveal once again
how symbolic resources can be used in very creative ways. But we must not
restrict our understanding of cultural invention to the world of industrial pop
culture production. Ordinary people from all walks of life regularly and skill-
fully infuse their relatively unmediated cultural worlds with far more ‘distant’
(novel, mediated, symbolic) cultural resources to shape the multiple trajectories
of their daily lives. These creative exercises produce positive outcomes for their
‘authors’. They represent complex cultural applications of ‘symbolic power’
(Thompson 1995; Lull 2000). Thus, if we redirect our theoretical emphasis
from text to context, from symbolic forms in and of themselves to processes
of cultural construction, we can move productively from the semiotic sphere
of symbolic representation to the more theoretically rich contexts and
contingencies of everyday life.

Technology and cultural programming
‘The fact that people aren’t only empowered to make music, but to publish it
and broadcast it almost instantly is just tremendous . . . this democratization of
the whole pop-star process is a healthy thing’ (recording artist and software
pioneer Thomas Dolby commenting on how computers and the Internet
make it possible for anyone to make and distribute music globally).

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