Lecture 21 November 2005

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• Lecture 21 November 2005
• Citizenship between politics, culture ideology
• Marianne van den Boomen

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About the course NMNC

• Level 3 heavy workload, indeed 20 hours a week,
  English
• Academic level references and sources
  analyzing, confronting and criticizing concepts
  Tip scholar.google.com, Omega
• Lectures and seminars, active participation,
  reading (60-70 p.)
• Formats weekly mini-essays
• Missed something? Compensate with substantial
  extra work
• Rough grades Jan. 5th, Jan. 26th

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(No Transcript)
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LITERATURE 1. Book Re-reading popular
culture 2. Reader Incomplete! To be copied
10 p. Fraser, 30 pp Chapter 5 David Trend 3.
Online articles Print or copy (course mailbox
KNG 29)
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Assignments/requirements

• Individual Assignments
• 1. Min. 7 formatted min-essays (21 Nov.-16 Jan.)
• 2. Individual course review (3 Feb.)
• Formats
• Comparative review of min. 2 articles/chapters
• Mini-essay, building block final paper
• Choose from
• 1. motto, 2. critique, 3. reference,
• 4. authors background, 5. hot issue, 6. lecture,
• 7. debate
• Group Assignments
• 3. Presentation citizenship project (12 or 19
  Jan.)
• 4. Paper on citizenship project (3 Feb.)

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Content of the course

• Colaboration Womens Studies New Media
• Gender is an issue
• New media is an issue,
• new changing media
• Cultural citizenship
• popular culture, mediated culture

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What is citizenship about?

• location, nation, state, nation-state
• politics, elections
• rules, regulation, law
• rights, duties
• culture, ideology
• public infrastructure, state and non-state media
• public debate, public sphere
• values, norms, habits
• traditions
• belonging, community
• participation, shared morality
• differentiation, assigning subject positions
• inclusion/exclusion
• on all the above levels

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5 themes in the course

• 1. Rights human, civil, political, social
  rights
• 2. Public sphere public infratstructure, public
  opinion, public debate, popular culture
• 3. Subjection/subjectivation surveillance and
  data gathering, discipline, normalization of
  subject positions
• 4. Inclusion/exclusion based on subject
  positions defined by class, gender, color,
  sexuality, age, nationality, ability etc.
• 5. Democracy political representation equality
  and expression of difference local and global
  structures

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Definition

• Citizenship is the sense of belonging to and
  participating in an abstract social whole, on a
  mediated level somewhere between politics and
  ideology.

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Not only nation-state

• Greek city states
• Roman empire
• 18th century Republic of Letters
• French revolution (freedom, equality, fraternity)
  
• European citizenship?
• World citizenship?
• Netizenship? Cyborg citizenship?

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New media characteristics

• digital, computerised (stand alone and connected)
• access to a wide range of information
• communication at relatively low costs
• space time compression almost instantanious,
  worldwide
• do it yourself-culture (DIY) producing
  information, tools and environments, creating new
  public/private spheres
• interactivity, connectivity, multimediality,
  virtuality
• distributed intelligence

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Top-down bottum-up

• Tension between top-down/bottum-up
• Politics top-down bottum-up!
• Ideology top-down bottum-up!
• Top not a univocal monolitical unity
• Bottum not a univocal monolitical unity

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Its the economy, stupid.

• Political economy of communication (advertising,
  entertainment, media conglomerats)
• General political-economical tendency to
  privatization, deregulation, and commodification
• The emergence of a labour force of symbolic
  analysts, a.k.a. digerati or the virtual class
• The widening gap between the poor and the rich

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Barbrook Cameron

• the rise of a virtual class cognitive
  scientists, engineers, computer scientists,
  video-game developpers, and all other
  communications specialists
• laisser faire ideology, promoting an electronic
  marketplace instead of an electronic agora
• myths of the free market as a determinating force
  of wealth and democracy
• private ownership of estate and people (slaves)
  as the fundament of society

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Cultural-political contradictions

• Revolution? What kind of?
• music.mp3

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Barlows Declaration of Independence

• declaration of independence from all outside
  powers
• intended to keep any state intervention out
• recognizing only individual agency
• assuming a inherent democratic and egalitarian
  domain
• declaring no material constraints

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Critiques on Barlow

• 60s heritage of utopian visions, as a merger of
  alternative hippie culture and entrepreneurship
• disembodied Western platonic philosophy (free
  Mind, not material conditions or restrictions)
• critique on notions of presumed inherency of
  liberating and democraticizing dynamics of ICT,
  in short utopism

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Utopian perspective

• no bodily or material constraints
• autonomous new social formations
• media monopolies broken
• free floating minds, free speech
• no state regulation needed
• clean technologies
• everyone sender/receiver
• direct democracy (electronic agora)
• new liberated citizenship

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Dystopian perspective

• erosion of social cohesion by pseudo communities
• cultural decline, trivial entertainment and crime
• state surveillance and discipline everywhere
• consumerism and commodification
• exhausting natural resources
• citizens reduced to consumers
• exclusion, digital and other divides
• state protects private ownership and slavery
• big revolution of ownership relations needed

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Left

• non-equality is not natural but
  social-economically induced
• improving position of the poor
• including minorities
• citizenship a matter of rights and public
  protection
• state regulation and policies
• collectivity and public goods above individual
  freedom

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Right

• non-equality is natural
• stimulating free market or elite power
• law and order
• citizenship a matter of duties
• minimum of state regulation
• individual freedom or elite above collectivity
  and public goods

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Political spectrum from left to right

• communist -gt marxist -gt old left -gt new left -gt
• -gt communitarian -gt libertarian -gt liberal -gt
• new right/neo-liberal -gt old right/conservative

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Indications political spectrum

• communist total state planning and control
• marxist struggle between capital and labor
• old left political organisation of working
  class
• new left inclusion minoritieS, alternative
  life styles
• communitarian social cohesion in local civil
  society
• libertarian individual freedom and
  independence
• liberal free market, no law and order state
• new right/neo-liberal free market, but law and
  order state needed
• old right/conservative established elite,
  strong law and order state