Page 146 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

Although the Internet revolution contributes enormously to the construc-
tion of contemporary supercultures and will be a main focus of this chapter, the
trends that underlie the superculture have been shaping up for quite some time.
The explosion in the 1970s in the United States (and later around the world) of
cable television and videocassette recorders, the advent of the remote control
device, and the quickly growing popularity of direct broadcast satellite systems
all work together to expand tremendously the number and range of program
options and their cultural content, encouraging people to customize their
media experiences according to their individual interests and tastes. User
control has also increased through zipping, zapping, grazing, blocking, time-
shifting, and the like. In addition, the marketplace success of the audio compact
disc and the digital video disc, digital still and video cameras, personal com-
munications gadgets such as fax machines, telephone answering machines,
beepers and mobile phones, portable music systems, palm pilots, and digital
planners have all helped prepare the ground for a radical transformation of
culture by giving individuals more control over the way they communicate and
construct routine experience. In Silicon Valley parlance, the flow of today’s
technologically mediated interaction now emphasizes ‘pull’ (by consumers
from information sources) more than ‘push’ (by information sources on to
consumers). The ensemble of expanded options and consumer-friendly com-
munications devices further interacts with the monster of the midway – the
personal computer, and all its attendant hardware, software, and connectivity.
Contemporary communications media further converge in the form of multi-
media configurations, integrated home entertainment centers, WebTV systems,
mobile communications apparatuses, and microcomputer networks of various
kinds.
The technological revolution is characterized overall by modular integra-
tion, miniaturization, interactivity, portability, utility, multipurposivity, increas-
ing user-friendliness, commercialization, and relative affordability. Because of
their widespread attractiveness, abundant and diverse symbolic content, and
ease of use, new media technologies help change the locus of ‘cultural pro-
gramming’ from institutional sources of information and entertainment to
individual persons, small groups, and growing numbers of ‘virtual cultures’.
Doing so, the very nature of contemporary communication and culture is
being transformed so that complex cultural decision-making and communica-
tions multi-tasking have become routine human activities. Such developments
render absurd any idea of culture as a monolithic force that acts on people or
somehow ‘programs’ their minds (Hofstede 1984). Moreover, because of the
strong decentralizing tendencies of contemporary cultural life, and the increas-
ingly evident role of new media in everyday life, we certainly can no longer
think of ‘media audiences’ in traditional ways either. The technological and
symbolic conditions that give rise to supercultural construction emphasize the
motivated ambitions of people as initiators and creators of cultural experience
through communication processes, not some notion of ‘passive’ or even ‘active’

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