Page 71 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CUSTOMISATION

the radical changes, implications and potential of the phenomena
identified in the right-hand column became more insistent in both
intellectual and public life. It became necessary to reform what
‘counted’ as ‘left-’ or ‘right-’ wing stances, and to treat with scepticism
any presumption that a given opposition entails a given political
position. Intellectually, that process of reform took the form of the
‘culture wars’.
The culture wars had a journalistic aspect, by which established
canons and hierarchies of taste and style were used as punch-bags for
similar arguments. Journalists and critics joined the fray to defend such
things as the Western literary canon, clarity and plainness of writing,
reason and science as the royal road to truth, etc.; apparently they
needed defence against relativism, theory and ‘irrealism’ (respectively).
Despite its heroic appearance much of this stuff was in itself pure
inconsequential entertainment. It was partisan controversialism done
to provoke readers (sales). But in the meantime, it continued to be the
case that Western notions of art, truth and reason could no longer be
seen as self-evidently virtuous. For as well as progress, Enlightenment
culture had produced grotesque negatives – apartheid as a ‘science’;
the Holocaust as an application of ‘reason’; the American Way of
freedom experienced as its opposite by people ‘othered’ via gender,
class, race, ethnicity or colonial subjection. The culture wars were a
public attempt to think through howsuch opposites did and should
interact. The wise observer watched the interaction, and did not seek to
choose between the opposites.

CUSTOMISATION

Customisation is a response to increasingly fragmented niche markets,
whereby businesses are replacing old strategies organised around mass
consumption habits with services aimed at more selective, or
personalised, buying choices. For instance, where cultural choices such
as broadcast media consumption were once limited to only a few
channels directed at large audiences, recent trends in multi-channelling
mean that programming can be directed at smaller, more specific
audiences.
In the media industries, customisation is said to be a result of
convergence. Instead of buying the paper that everyone else reads,
online news service subscribers can now customise what they receive
into a ‘Daily Me’ version of events. This can be seen as an empowering
development. It assumes that greater diversity of products and media

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