Page 172 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

SUPERCULTURE FOR THE COMMUNIC ATION AG E

most complex, mediated, and personalized supercultures. In cases such as this,
supercultural sensitivities simultaneously co-exist and interact with more
pressing, often contested, local, regional, or national cultural aspirations. The
new tribalisms from around the world represented spirited examples of these
tendencies away from the eclecticism that inheres in superculture formation.
The superculture, thus, can best be regarded as one important general trend
operating on a global scale – a cultural nuance reflecting new directions in
cultural globalization, not some uncritical, exhaustive replacement for trad-
itional collective understandings and identities. After all, cultural activity is not
a zero-sum game under any conditions, but an ever more expansive and
dynamic interplay of impulses and influences.
We are left now to ponder issues that have troubled other observers as well:
can the material goods and symbolic resources of a market-driven, hyper-
interconnected, globalized culture and economy truly meet people’s needs, or
does the mass marketing of lifestyle options only ‘offer the illusion of equal
participation’ in the creation of what should be more integrated and uni fied
societies and cultures? (Chaney 1994: 19). Are the kinds of cultures that are
created by means of today’s complex communication processes producing a
‘veneer of shared experience that informs and amuses, but does not necessarily
serve or unite people’ (Dertouzos 1998), or is development of a cosmopolitan
global ecumene of moral responsibility, a democratic ‘mediated public sphere’
(Thompson 1995), or a shared, civilizational ‘public space’ (García Canclini
1995) really possible or even desirable? Under any present-day scenario – from
the most daunting doomsday nightmare to the most Pollyannaish utopian
fantasy – symbolic, communicational, and cultural complexity inevitably con-
tribute to the increased fragmentation, acceleration, and personalization of life
experience, exactly what the superculture addresses and represents. Through it
all, one fact is clear: creativity and hybridity have always been at the heart of
cultural construction and embody some of the best human tendencies. In my
view, those tendencies should be reflexively respected and embraced, not
unreasonably feared, now that the range of cultural improvisation has reached
global proportions.

Note
1 The concentration of many major media and culture industries in the hands of few
corporate owners remains an issue that in some respects contradicts the shift of
power to individual user/interpreters, but does not undermine the significance of
the general transition of certain kinds of power from institutions to individuals.

References

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism. London: Verso.

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