Page 147 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

receivers. The person himself or herself is now a ‘cultural programmer’ (Lull
2000: 268) rather than just a ‘cultural member’, ‘audience member’, or
‘consumer’. For this reason, social science research traditions in mass com-
munication and media studies such as ‘direct effects’ or ‘cultivation’ have been
mightily relativized by the recent trends in technology and society. 1

The global divide
Constructing a robust superculture presumes the abundant availability of sym-
bolic forms that can be appropriated and orchestrated as cultural resources.
Such cultural activity requires ‘complex connectivity’ (Tomlinson 1999) in
order to access the ‘multidimensional circuits’ of communication and culture
(Castells 1996: 371). But because access to technology and to symbolic
resources is by no means distributed equally across social groups in any nation,
or across national cultures on a global scale, supercultural construction does not
take form in any uniform or egalitarian way. Consequently, cultural construc-
tion in the global context continues to sort human beings into categories of
extreme difference related to social class, race, age, gender, and country – a
tendency that was of course well in place long before the current era.
What has changed is that people and symbolic forms move about today as
never before in an atmosphere that is nourished and accelerated by the spec-
tacular, irreversible explosion of mass and micro communication technology
and, for the economically (and therefore culturally) privileged – the inter-
national middle class – by convenient, relatively unregulated access to con-
stantly multiplying sources of information and emotional stimulation – an
expanded array of cultural resources. As available symbolic universes become
more robust and extreme, so navigation, experimentation, and symbolic creativ-
ity – the keys to contemporary cultural construction – increase greatly. People
combine local cultural traditions and practises with the pertinent and attractive
fields of more distant cultural information to which they have access – the
cultural ‘galleries’, ‘malls’, or ‘supermarkets’, we might call them to reflect their
predominantly commercial nature – in order to construct their signature,
customized cultural hybrids – their supercultures.

Connectivity and community
People don’t do all this just for fun. I am not just talking here about ‘surfing the
Net’, for instance, as a hobby or simple pastime, although ‘cultural surfing’ is
not a bad metaphor for what’s going on. Supercultural construction under-
scores the ability of human beings to transform the mundane cultural worlds
they inherit through birth and physical presence in particular locales of time
and space in order to explore the unknown, and to overcome limits while
creating new modes of personal stability and belonging. Indeed, the construc-
tion of a superculture is a contemporary way to organize cultural elements into

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