Page 91 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

DIY CULTURE

(McKay, 1998). By extension DIY culture referred to newpossibilities
for self-determination down to the individual level, emancipated from
territorial and ethnic boundaries; a kind of voluntarist citizenship
based on cultural affiliation rather than obligations to a state or
territory (Hartley, 1999).
Interactive media changed the by-nowtraditional relation of mass
media, where one centralised (corporate or state) institution
communicated to many anonymous individuals. But the conceptua-
lisation of that relation had itself evolved. Mass society theory posited a
passive mass that responded behaviourally to stimuli. Marxist analysis
wanted an active, struggling mass, but one that was still oppressed,
repressed or otherwise overpowered or ‘overdetermined’ by the
hegemony of state and commercial institutions. A variant of that
position was Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘poaching’, suggesting that
individuals and citizens took or appropriated their own meanings from
within the given structures of power and influence, much as
pedestrians make their own way, their own patterns, meanings and
uses, out of the streets of a city whose structure and direction they
cannot alter (see de Certeau, 1984).
Meanwhile ethnographies of audiences for media began to develop
a notion of community with internal relations of mutuality, solidarity
and action for their various subjects, whether these were studied in
terms of their social class (Morley, 1980), gender relations (Morley,
1986; Gray, 1992), ethnicity (Gillespie, 1995) or sexual orientation
(Doty, 1995). With interactive media, customisation and feedback, the
concept of the user displaced that of the audience. Instead of culture
determining or even dictating identity, via institutions and obligations
people had to live with whether they liked it or not, DIY culture
described a more interactive relation between centralised institutions
and individual people or groups.
Hartley (1999) extended the concept of DIY culture into this
context on the basis of the evolving history of citizenship. Classic
citizenship theory, based on the work of T. H. Marshall in the 1940s,
recognised three historical stages to citizenship:

. civic freedoms (individual rights)
. political freedoms (voting rights)
. social freedoms (welfare and employment rights)

Following analytical trends of the time, Hartley suggested adding two
further historical stages to citizenship:

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