The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
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The internet has been hailed as an unprecedented democratising force, a place where everyone can participate. But how true is this? Dismantling the techno-utopian vision, ‘The People’s Platform’ argues that for all our “tweeting” and “sharing,” the internet in fact reflects and amplifies real-world inequalities as much as it reduces them. Online, just as off-line, attention accrues to those who already have plenty of it.What we have seen so far, Astra Taylor argues, has been not a revolution but a rearrangement. A handful of giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are our gatekeepers. And the worst habits of the old media model – the pressure to seek easy celebrity – have proliferated. When culture is “free,” creative work has diminishing value and advertising fuels the system.We can do better, Taylor insists. The online world does offer a unique opportunity, but a democratic culture that supports the diverse and lasting will not spring up from technology alone. If we want the internet to be a people’s platform, we will have to make it so.
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When all is said and done, the notion of a hybrid economy turns out to be nothing more than an upbeat version of digital sharecropping, a scenario in which all of us have the right to remix sounds and images and spread them through networks that profit from our every move. The vision of cultural democracy upheld by new-media thinkers has us all marinating in commercial culture, downloading it without fear of reprisal, repurposing fragments and uploading the results to pseudo-public spaces—the privately owned platforms that use our contributions for their own ends or sell our attention and information to advertisers. Under this kind of open system, everything we do gets swept back into a massive, interactive mash-up in the cloud, each bit parsed in the data mine, invisible value extracted by those who own the backend.
In a way, this is the epitome of what communications scholar Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture”—the melding of old and new media that the telecom giants have long been looking forward to, for it portends a future where all activity flows through their pipes. But it also represents a broader blurring of boundaries: communal spirit and capitalist spunk, play and work, production and consumption, making and marketing, editorializing and advertising, participation and publicity, the commons and commerce. The “old rhetoric of opposition and co-optation” has been rendered obsolete, Jenkins assures us.24 But if there is no opposition—no distinction between noncommercial and commercial, public and private, independent and mainstream—it is because co-optation has been absolute.
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