Owning one's own culture

[ladyofastolat]

I've just been reading a Radio Times feature in which various people give their opinion on which is the "greatest age of rock." Malcolm McLaren (svengali of the Sex Pistols) chooses the punk era, on the grounds that it was music by the people, and thus helped usher in interactive computer games, blogs and file sharing. For the first time in history, he said, we now have a generation that owns its own culture.

Really?

I have to admit that I don't know an awful lot about modern popular culture. My ignorant outsider's impression, though, is of a generation that is being conned – or is conning itself – into thinking that it owns its own culture, but is still largely paying money to enjoy a culture created by others. Yes, perhaps there are some examples of people owning at least parts of their own culture. Fan creations, such as fanfic, are arguably an example of this, and the internet has seen an explosion of such activities. However, they have existed for decades, and, besides, only involve a small minority of the population, anyway.

When it comes to wider popular culture, a lot of the so-called interactivity seems very cosmetic. You can press the red button to get "interactive" elements to a TV programme, but this is just a tiny little extra to the fact that you are still watching a programme created by others. You can phone some premium rate number to evict someone from Big Brother, but you are hardly creating your own culture. You are having a very small say in the details of someone else's concept, according to someone else's rules.

On the BBC news website, you can "have your say" on any news item, and you can express your opinion on it on your own personal blog. However, this doesn't seem to me to be much different from sitting in the pub with your friends chatting about it. All it offers is a potentially larger audience. The medium has changed, but the process is the same. Chatting to a friend is chatting to a friend, whether you do it face to face, over the phone, or through instant messaging.

When it comes to popular music, does this generation own their own culture? People can select which tracks to download, and create their own playlists, but someone else has still created the music, and it's been issued and marketed in a commercial fashion. Putting your favourite band's latest pop video up on YouTube is not creating your own culture. People still pay massive prices to go to concerts and festivals, where they are the audience, and the band is on stage, and never the twain shall meet. Some young people still form bands and create their own music, but that's nothing new – e.g. the skiffle culture in the 50s.

But enough of that. McLaren doesn't just assert that this generation owns its own culture; he also implies that no previous generation has done so. This doesn't really match what I know of folk culture in pre-Victorian Britain. It seems fair to say that these people, in part, at least, owned their own culture. At a local level, there was a huge repertoire of customs, celebrations and festivals that went on completely independent of the ruling elite – and, frequently, very much disapproved of by them.

The common people were, of course, had to go to Church, and had quite a lot of Christianity-related culture imposed on them from above. However, most people seem to have been very good at interpreting religion in their own way. Religious themes crop up in folk song in interesting ways, that bear little resemblance to anything preached in the pulpit. You just have to look at any book on calendar customs to see the vast difference between the common man's celebrations of a religious feast, and the way the establishment wanted to celebrated. Even the theology was often rather different from anything preached in the pulpit.

Each village had their own local stories, and their own local heroes and villains and superstitions. There was no television, radio or recorded music, so they would gather in the fields or the pubs to sing their own songs.

Of course, not all folk songs were written by peasants, and transmitted orally. Many songs were transmitted through writing, through broadside ballad sheets that were bought and sold. However, the broadsides were hardly an example of the elite imposing their songs on the masses. Provincial printers often wrote their own songs – murder ballads etc. – but they also collected songs from the common people, printed them, and passed them on to wandering chapmen to sell at fair. The common people who learnt songs from printed broadsides went on to interpret them in their own way. Cecil Sharp and co. often collected dozens and dozens of very different versions of a song. Although the song was traceable back to a printed ballad popular a few generations before, each community, and each singer, had made it their own.

There was, of course, a fair amount of culture imposed by above. One of the reasons given for the rapid decline of folk song in the late nineteenth century was that mass communication was improving, so the youth were singing the "new songs" from London, and no longer wanting the old-fashioned stuff their grandfather sang. Education Acts meant that more people went to school and absorbed the sort of culture that the ruling classes wanted them to absorb. Victorian middle classes didn't like the common folk's drunken revels, and "primitive" folk song, so set up community choirs to direct their musical leaning into more respectable channels.

It may well be that today's generation "own their own culture" more than people did 20 years ago. However, I find it hard to accept that they "own their own culture" more than people did back in the days before television, recorded music and mass communication, when people made their own entertainment in their own houses and pubs.

Comments

[greenwoodside.livejournal.com]

*cheers*

You tell 'em, ladyofastolat!

Seriously, I agree very strongly with all that you've said here. Thank you for posting this.

[gileswench.livejournal.com]

Wave your banner proudly! You are so very right.

[kleio-the-muse.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to apply the notion of ownership to any cultural products, 'cause that's what they truly are, products, with both their producers and their audience, both of which have their influence on the outcome but are, of course, at the same time produced by that outcome themselves. (I just turned a really simple thought into something unintelligible, didn't I?;)

But what I mean is that it's all an illusion, now and in the past. Nobody has ever owned folklore, at least not longer than the act itself lasts, and be it in what ever form, nobody owns popular culture still, and to state that is either pure stupidity or misguided acceptance of this illusion of control.

(I could've just said "Hear, hear!" to everything you said, couldn't I?:)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Well said that woman!

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

One suspects that by the people, Malcolm McLaren really meant Malcolm McLaren...

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm going to join the applause now, too. The internet hosts could be compared to a sort of feudal baronage dictating the terms of interaction.

Musings on culture

[themis1.livejournal.com]

I agree - all music is written by SOMEBODY and is therefore BY the people (or just, by people!) - punk was just that particular generation's way of excluding adults so that they could figure out who they were. But I am not a music expert and will say no more on that and move rapidly on ...

One thing that annoys me about the cultural 'ownership' thing is the modern (in particular political) insistence that everyone has a say because there is a consultation about everything. The responses to these 'consultations' are inevitably analysed in house, often by extremely dubious methods* and at the end of the day it seems what happens is whatever suits that day's political whim or headline opportunity rather than a true reflection of the consultees' opinions.

*As an example, a recent consultation by a govt department (I probably better not say which one!) counted the local authority responses as 'many' because they counted each individual authority, and the police response as 'one' because it had been collated and submitted to them by ACPO.

Everything costs money - the internet is not exactly free! We have to pay for new computers every couple of years because they become obsolete so fast - this one, which I bought last year, even WITH a faster graphics card, still can't handle moving pictures on the intranet very well - and new software, which is never compatible with anything you already have. And then there's the cost of the broadband connection ...

As you rightly note, fandom has been writing fic for years - it's just more visible now, and more easily accessible, and there's zero quality control - we were much fussier about what got printed when it involved using a manual typewriter (bought when I was 18 and still works fine over 30 years later!), a stencil and a Gestetner duplicator. My writing improved hugely when subjected to rigorous editing (not that this was difficult!). Peer review of bad writing by bad writers seems to = a morass of cr*p! making it extremely difficult to find anything readable!

Blogging isn't new, either - it's just the private hobby of diary-writing made instantly public - instead of being published years later (usually posthumously) in book form, again with careful editing.

The more people who use the modern technology, the more money the corporations make. I don't think there's any question about who stands to gain from this so-called 'ownership'!

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

Once again ladyofastolat is spot on in her assessment of the situation.

[alitalf.livejournal.com]

I think you are right, and you put forward a watertight argument. What you say is obvious, but only after you said it, like so many well thought out ideas.

ON a slight side issue, if there is any increased ownership of culture now compared with 20 years ago, it is likely to be because, for example, it is at least possible for a band to self publish their music on the net and become well known and widely listened to as a result.

I think Linux, with which I am currently trying conclusions, may be a significant, if small, part of any marginally increased cultural ownership that might be happening. It is a step towards making the basic infrastructure of digital communication freely available, and not so easily able to be locked down "from above".

Why am I now trying to find a way to move towards using Linux? Partly because I want to have some say over what my computer does - though in learning a little about Linux I find it has some really nice features :-).

[sally_maria]

I agree with what you're saying - no surprise there :-D - but I do wonder if you may be misinterpreting him slightly.

I suspect he may be using a rather different definition of generation, not everybody in the last 30 years or so, but rather the contemporary group of teenagers/young people. The one thing that does seem to have changed in the last thirty/forty years or so is that popular culture is so much more aimed at young people than in the past.

It's not that the population as a whole has more control over their culture, but that young people own (or at least are the intended market for) popular culture. Instead of popular music being the kind that appeals to the largest number of people, it's actually a genre aimed at a specific age group. Are the latest chart topping "pop" songs actually more popular with the population as a whole than many traditional songs? I doubt it, but because young people "own" the output of the mass media, those songs are the ones to get the recognition.

It's highly debatable that the current generation of young people actually owns their own culture, for all the reasons you've already explained, but it does seem as if the mass media's idea of "what young people want" is a very strong influence on popular culture - young people making music for other young people.

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear, well spoken Bruce. ;-)

Well I agree with you and I know you find all this agreement slightly surprising given comments above but when what you've done (in my reading) is to ask a question ie "Well how can you, or anyone, say that when there are all these examples that indicate otherwise?" So how can anyone really disagree with the posing of a reasonable question? Especially when it is posed so well.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Um. I think that depends on how you define culture. I think the music industry is still very hung up in it's own commercial context. Punk is just another tradition and I don't see it as in any way unique.

Television again, as you say, I don't think really offers much real interactivity, and is all about spectating.

However, I do agree with the concept of internet as offering empowerment to those who are prepared to make the effort, allowing them to shape their world and culture.

The Open Source movement I think IS new and different. The technologies that shape the Livejournal site we are using to discuss this have been created not by commercial forces, but by people with ideas, using forums to discuss and develop their concepts and test them.

And the sheer power of really open communications among people who have shared interests is something I think we are going to see more of. I really think that is more than just 'chat'.

20 years ago, I could see an old dog in my local rescue centre not being adopted, and think 'that is sad'. I could maybe do something to help that one old dog, with the consent of the 'powers that be' (local press, radio, the 'official' rescue centre.

Today I help run a small charity (the Oldies Club) that I really think has made a genuine difference to that problem in many areas of the UK, and continues to do so. All the people who run it live all over the place, and meet perhaps twice a year. It's a virtual organisation. It arose from just chatting about shared interests.

There are lots of other examples in the area of 'dog culture' with which I am familiar. DeednotBreed. Sighthounds Online. The Dogstar Foundation. Hope. Sighthound Welfare Trust. All set up by groups of people who came together on various forums and decided that there was a problem, and they could work to fix it. That's the 'dog world' - I know little of the fanfic world, but I am aware of many other 'worlds' where people are getting up and doing stuff, and I think you underrate that.

Although it may be true that only a small percentage of the population works to shape their own world in this way, I am fairly sure this is nothing new. The majority of people might sing a song, but will probably not set out to write a new one, and I don't think that has changed. What I think is new is that we should now have fewer and fewer 'mute, inglorious Miltons' as technology decreases social isolation.

[westerling.livejournal.com]

Coming in a little late to this discussion with a bit of a tangent, but one thing that seems very clear to me, particularly here in the U.S., is that the corporations own the culture, or as much of it as they possibly can, and are trying to reach for more all the time. This is a trend that I've seen become more and more pronounced over the last 25 years. Any sphere that is owned by the corporations has had the majority of its creative diversity choked by the bottom line. My personal favorite pet peeve is that the quality of science fiction/fantasy for adults has plummeted since the 80s, as publushers have been increasingly unwilling to publish anything that deviates from what they believe will sell. I was in East Germany in 1990, when the state controlled the book publishing world, and only things that served the state could be published, resulting in multiple copies of few books in bookstores. Although I certainly wouldn't say it's that bad here and now, as more and more smaller bookstores and publishing houses go out of business, less interesting things are being published and suddenly the only place to discuss interesting ideas or be inspired by great writing is the internet (and some children's literature, but that's another subject). My personal opinion is that people have no idea what amazing things they could imagine, so they just don't, because there's no inspiration to. It all becomes very banal and uninteresting. Of course, this whole argument is a somewhat simplified discussion of the problem.

I like to blame it on Ronald Reagan, who basically set the stage for the corporations to take over the world. :)