Page 167 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

all cultural activity, old and new, is demarcated in important ways by basic social
distinctions related to gender, race, class, age, and so on. The ‘digital divide’ is
just the most recent way of talking about these social di fferences. In light of
this, communications technology, the rampant circulation of symbolic forms,
and supercultural construction should not be seen as any solution to social
inequality, especially considering the brutal differences evident at the global
level.
But while Castells’s assertion that the world is now structured around an
alienating and excluding opposition between Net and Self makes sense in
macro terms, it fails to take into account how human communication works
beneficially across social divisions in micro practices. The intensive crossing and
meshing of symbolic and material cultural resources that characterizes the
superculture is fundamental to even the most rudimentary varieties of cultural
construction. Current tendencies towards cultural abundance, intensification,
diversity, and hybridization affect everyone on Earth, and not just in negative
ways. The ‘indigenous’ Maoris of New Zealand, for instance, have found a
strong avenue for expressing cultural and political identity by appropriating
North American rap music and hip-hop culture, whose African roots, sounds,
attitudes, and images resonate well with the Maoris – dark-skinned, marginal-
ized, tropical – by integrating the imported forms into local movements to
reclaim land, language, and cultural history (Lull 2000: 246–9). Vietnamese
who fled to Sweden as political refugees blend Vietnamese music videos made
in Paris and California and social dances from Brazil and Argentina with the
proximate cultural contours and welfare advantages of Scandinavia to invent
productive supercultural matrices in unfamiliar territory. Poor Mexican
farmers living in the shade of the volcanoes near Colima regularly gather
together after going to Catholic mass on Sundays to cheer their favorite
soccer teams on satellite television, comparing the Mexican sides with the
Italians and the English who are playing on another channel, and later attend
local ranchero music concerts amplified by a Japanese sound system. Meanwhile,
their wives and girlfriends group together next door to laugh and cry their way
through Mexican telenovelas and reruns of Friends, while preparing enchiladas
verdes and drinking Coca-Cola.
The transformative assortment of ideas, styles, and activities that people
choreograph to compose their cultural worlds reflects how meaningful and
enjoyable (or less miserable) lives can be built in an era when cultural resources
are more plentiful for nearly everyone, and when symbolic communication has
assumed center stage in human experience. Constructing a superculture is like
performing a spirited, unscripted, perpetual dance that oscillates between
routine maneuvers reflecting the familiar deep structures of inherited
‘internal cultural patterns’ (Sowell 1994), and the trickier solo steps of cultural
risk and innovation, back to the familiar once again, forever synthesizing and
creating, never resting.

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