Page 90 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Interventionist Tendencies in Popular Culture 65

in the making—the internet—especially when the latter is fragmenting
on the one hand and stratifying on the other?
Nevertheless, one should recognize that technologies such as direct-
to-home (DTH) transmission and CMC are something new and their
effects on anti-systemic politics do not have historical precedents.
Moreover, their specific social applications have demonstrated that
they could be employed as a means to question the state (through
counter-information campaigns) as also challenge private property (by
redistributing organized knowledge). Recognizing the ways in which
political discourse has been mediated in the electronic era, we need to
act on the possibilities this ‘new’ publicness might provide in terms of
decentralization and dialogue—all through keeping in mind that they
continue to be largely guided by access to ‘technology’, viewed here in
terms of both a machinery and a language.
Consequently, we must examine changes in technology, their econ-
omic organization and related cultural practice, together with the char-
acter of the public sphere they create, without either a euphoria for the
‘new’ or a nostalgia for the ‘traditional’. Only a thorough understanding
of communication processes unfolding in an aggregate of ‘traditional’
and ‘new’ publicness in general will facilitate critical and collective
interventions being integrated with larger anti-systemic forces.
We have arrived at a situation where institutions of culture and
communication are being absorbed by the techno-organizational
complex of a consumerist culture industry, which reproduces them in
a homogeneous and homogenizing manner. Simultaneously, cultural
practice is being relocated by the state seeking to construct and impose
a fabric akin to a national culture. Towards attaining their respective
forms of conformism, both the state and the market tend to subvert
diversity and dissent, which has been an intrinsic character of cultural
practice.
If cultural practices associated with larger anti-systemic processes
are envisaged within the terrain of the public sphere, then the praxis
of alternative communication would constitute the ‘playing field’ of
this terrain. However, it is through a certain political tendency that
cultural practice in general is able to articulate a critique of the his-
torical present. As long as alternative communication as a political
praxis is able to retain its capacity to reflect the urges and aspirations
of anti-systemic processes, it will maintain its political dynamism.