Page 149 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

preserve those mythical ways of life as celebrated, visible dimensions of the new
hybrids.
Just as technological trends in electronic communications have been develop-
ing since the end of the nineteenth century, the principle of creative cultural
synthesis likewise long predates the current era. Cultural construction has
always involved material and symbolic melding and mediation. A basic premise
of the superculture is that today the fundamental nature of this synthetic cul-
tural construction operates with far greater symbolic variety and much more
speed than ever before. As we know, mass and micro media communications
technologies and the distributive capacity and reach of globalized economies
are at the heart of this dramatic elevation of cultural complexity and movement.
The challenge for people today is to navigate and combine an unprecedented
range of cultural territories and resources ranging from relatively unfamiliar
terrain imported to the self through technological mediations and human
migrations of various types, to territory that is far more familiar and stable, such
as that offered by religion, nation, and family, in order to invent combinations
that satisfy individuals’ changing needs and preferences. Because culture is
largely symbolic, and is therefore open to unlimited possible interpretations and
uses, and because culture and cultural identity are so intimately connected to
the human imagination, the actual physical origins of cultural information have
become less obvious but also less important.
The consequences of this transformation are profound. Traditional power
agents such as Church and state suffer an unprecedented challenge to their
cultural and political authority because the nature of modern technologies
decentralizes sources of cultural information, and the symbolic forms which
circulate today can easily be reproduced, edited, and retransmitted in ways that
provoke a range of possible interpretations and ideological conversions. At the
same time, various forms of popular culture rise to unprecedented levels of
exposure and influence, a tendency which further disrupts and relativizes the
hegemony of more traditional, institutionalized varieties of political, economic,
and cultural power (Thompson 1995; Lull 2000).

The cultural spheres
Supercultures draw from the entire range of cultural resources, including
universal values and imported international materials, civilizational and
national cultures, and the more geographically proximate regional in fluences
and local circumstances that make up the most mundane features of everyday
life (see Figure 7.1). In the discussion which follows, I will concentrate on
the discursive relevance of the more ‘distant’ resources for supercultural
construction – universal values, international media, civilizations, and nations.

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