Page 169 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

JAMES LULL

‘burden of an increasing array of oughts, self-doubts, and irrationalities’ because
individual persons will be ‘saturated’ and overwhelmed by such information.
He senses that a ‘multiphrenic condition’ is emerging ‘in which one swims in
ever-shifting, concatenating, and contentious currents of being’ (Gergen 1991:
80). Moreover, the global mixture of communications technologies and cul-
tural forms, acting together with the (often circular) flows of immigrants, guest
workers, tourists, and international students, among others, adds to the cultural
uncertainty and to the ontological instability that the rootlessness and apparent
cold life of the global metropolises seem to produce.
One of our key theorists, Manuel Castells, who in this sense shares the view
of Samuel Huntington, has suggested that these conditions often lead to
cultural retreats: ‘In such a world of uncontrolled, confusing change, people
tend to group around primary identities: religious, ethnic, territorial, national’
(Castells 1996: 3). Cultural identities in any era link the emotional-behavioral
orientations of individual persons to the organized values and activities of the
groups to which those persons perceive they belong – their human reference
points, persons with whom they share experiences and routinely communicate.
In cultural terms, the outcome of this social interaction should be feelings of
security and belongingness for the persons involved.
Can contemporary multimediated streams of cultural information and
personalized cultural hybrids such as those represented by the superculture
generate the comforts of cultural identity? Here I would argue that in many
respects, the answer is ‘yes’. Castells, Huntington, Gergen, and others have not
sufficiently taken the current era on its own terms. Key to bringing the cultural
blur of postmodernity and globalization into focus is the inherent flexibility
and polysemy of symbolic forms and the unbounded potential of the human
imagination – the creative ability of people to synthesize the familiar with the
exotic, and the material with the symbolic, in ways that make them feel secure,
happy, and intrigued with life. The multicultural profile of the superculture
reflects and extends the logic of communicative ‘complex connectivity’
(Tomlinson 1999), and the ‘multiplicity of the self’ (Maffesoli 1996: 10), into
the realm of the cultural imagination. The multifunctionality of communica-
tions technology combining with the open-ended nature of contemporary
cultural resources creates opportunities for construction of far more varied and
dense matrices of ‘niche’ identities and lifestyle groupings that resemble forms
of a dynamic, media-influenced, modern-day habitus (Bourdieu 1984).
While technology co-acts with social structure to help separate people in
some unfortunate ways (e.g. the ‘digital divide’), persons who are spatially
distant can also join together via electronic networks of various kinds to
develop, reinforce, and cultivate cultural contacts and communities. Mass
media, information technologies, and the Internet dramatically enrich
such processes of ‘self-formation’ because they encourage people to ‘actively
negotiate and participate in creating the kinds of mediated experiences they
want’ (Slevin 2000: 176). Although communications technology privileges

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