Page 148 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

patterns that help people make sense, manage their lives, and feel more secure.
The interplay between varying levels of cultural ‘reality’ becomes the core
of cultural activity. Technologically mediated ‘distant’ cultural impulses are
integrated into more physically ‘close’ cultural scenes and situations through
supercultural construction in order to gratify fundamental human needs,
particularly the emotional and expressive necessities.
Life for many members of the international middle class at the outset of the
third millennium is characterized by short-term jobs, changing partners and
families, anonymous neighborhoods, throwaway material goods, and societies
that feature constant distractions and sensations, promises of pleasure, and
opportunities for immediate personal gratification. Although supercultural
construction clearly contributes in some ways to such impermanence and
hedonism, it does more than that. The ‘networking of cultural practices
and experiences across the world’ (Tomlinson 1999: 71) may not create a
McLuhanesque global village, but the transition to imagined cultural collect-
ivities and discourses attracts and pleases people, especially computer-literate
young people who generally construct the most complex and technologically
sophisticated supercultures. The superculture’s creativity, hybridity, and inter-
activity open up possibilities for establishing, maintaining, and linking meaning-
ful ‘virtual cultural communities’, and for inventing and managing other new
encounters and mediations in ways that are positive and productive (Martín-
Barbero 1997). The new technologies have indeed transformed the way we
create and communicate (Johnson 1997).

Symbolic variety and cultural discursivity

The concept of the superculture is based on the central idea that culture is
symbolic and synthetic, and that contemporary syntheses today can be con-
structed from symbolic and material resources that originate almost anywhere
on Earth. In this regard, one crucial point must be stressed: the discursive
qualities of contemporary culture have become central components of cultural
construction. This doesn’t mean that the foundational axes of social inter-
action and organization have become less important, authentic, or intimate,
however. As John Tomlinson points out, ‘The point is to think of tele-
mediated [or computer-mediated] intimacy not as a shortfall from the fullness
of presence, but as a different order of closeness, not replacing (or failing to
replace) embodied intimacy, but increasingly integrated with it in everyday
lived experience’ (Tomlinson 1999: 165; inserts mine). Likewise, the respected
and still-meaningful term ‘culture’ persists in the nomenclature used here in
order to avoid fetishizing or diminishing the sociopolitical significance of
diverse, historically situated human experience. The concept of the super-
culture simply reframes common understandings of culture to fit the current
era better. Moreover, because customized supercultures draw from the
rich, distinctive discursive features of traditional cultures, they often help

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