Rogers Brubaker (UCLA)

The Cultural Promise of Digital Hyperconnectivity

This talk critically examines three hopeful claims commonly made about the cultural promise of digital hyperconnectivity. The promise of abundance is that of frictionless access to the whole of human culture. The promise of decommodification is that the production and consumption of culture can be freed from market constraints. The promise of democratization is that broader access to the means of cultural production, the eclipse of gatekeepers, and the decline of elite tutelage make the cultural production, circulation, and consumption more broadly participatory, active, creative, and self-directed. This threefold promise has been realized in certain respects. But the manner in which it has been realized and the ways in which it remains unrealized call for critical scrutiny. The digital cultural cornucopia, while exhilarating, is also flattening and homogenizing: culture is converted into “content” that tends to blur together as it flows through the same conduits and flickers across the same screens in an unending stream. Decommodification in some areas has been overshadowed by recommodification in others. And while hyperconnectivity has certainly opened up new avenues of cultural participation, more normatively robust hopes for the democratization of creativity, the redistribution of cultural power, and the active self-direction of cultural consumption remain unrealized.