Towards a Sociology of Massive Cultural Production
I've spent the last two days devoted to the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), who wrote extensively on what he calls the field of cultural production. I think "cultural production" is an important category for study, because I think a lot of recent work on Web 2.0 (such as Tapscott & Williams' Wikinomics book and Benkler's Wealth of Networks) focuses too narrowly on professional collaborations in the discovery, production, and dissemination of "knowledge" and "information." These are important contributions, but many of the big sites aren't about knowledge or information. They are fundamentally about experience: of culture (YouTube, Newgrounds), of friendship (Facebook, MySpace), of shared fantasy (Second Life, World of Warcraft), etc. The Web isn't an encyclopedia: along with the home and the workplace, it's a primary environment in which we live, play, love, learn, and express ourselves. Thus, the sociology of massive cultural production is as necessary to study as the economics of networked collaboration. Which brings us back to Bourdieu.
Among Bourdieu's goals are disentangling and even modeling the incredibly complex inputs that lead to epochs of cultural production, such as late 19-century French literature. These inputs include things like the following:
- The intentions and dispositions of the artist or author
- Economic and political contexts, including material production, income, and influence of dominant class ideology
- The artist's particular use of a generic "language," such as the visual and thematic conventions of a contemporary science fiction movie
- The role of the critic in justifying, discovering, or downright creating the value of a work (think of Oprah's effect on a novel's sales and prestige)
- The education, dispositions, and tastes of the audience and how they combine to create demand
The obvious strength of Bourdieu's approach is that it avoids reducing cultural production to an oversimplified account, such as "the author's intention," or "serving the needs of the dominant economic class," or "whatever happens in the cognition of the reader/viewer," etc. Reductiveness is particularly a problem in scientific sampling, which seeks through its "operational definitions" to place discrete boundaries around phenomena whose very essence is the struggle to create boundaries; in other words, for Bourdieu, sampling of phenomena relating to cultural production predetermines the data, rather than enabling its representation.
The obvious weakness of Bourdieu's theory is that this is not an easy model to go out and apply. Fortunately, Bourdieu does apply his model in analyses of French literature, which we can, in turn, at least try to emulate in a domain of cultural production that we all care about, say, Newgrounds animations, SecondLife builds, or MySpace mini-apps.
So, simplifying for clarity and brevity, Bourdieu characterizes the "field" of cultural production as a "space" in which actors (artists, critics, etc.) struggle. They struggle not only to promote their own ideas over others, but also to draw boundaries of inclusion and exclusion as to who has a voice, who belongs in the struggle. This field he represents as a two-dimensional graph. Different agents, through an interaction between their own predispositions and the objective world of options they have in front of them, position themselves in this space.
The X-axis maps the range of popularity, from no audience to a large audience. Related to that are economic matters: large audiences tend to mean lots of money but also lots of market interference on the artist's vision. Small or no audiences mean lots of autonomy for the artist--who can do whatever she or he wishes--but at the expense of economic profit.
The Y-axis maps the degree of consecration. High consecration refers to academic and institutionalized consecration: the work is recognized as "high art," "worthy," or "important"; it also correlates to the category of the "old." Low consecration is associated with youth, the merely popular, throwaway culture.
Now, here is my central question: Can Bordieu's model be used to represent massive cultural production in the era of Web 2.0? Here are some objections that have occurred to me:
- Both French literature and contemporary mainstream film, books, and comics have high barriers to entry, that is, restricted access; that clearly is not the case (at least, not in the same way) for Web 2.0 creativity.
- Institutionally, we know how to handle all aspects of 20th century mass media: production, distribution, and consumption. Thus, we have established protocols for "consecration." With massive cultural production, the relationships between the relevant institutions (such as the hierarchies of blogs and wikis on the one hand versus universities and journalism on the other) are anything but clear, and the protocols for consecration are likewise confused.
That's all pretty abstract. Let me make it more concrete. In April, Jeremi Karnell, Carl Marci, and I did a presentation for MITX on the Numa Numa dance viral video. It doesn't get any more establishment than the president of a digital marketing services firm, a corporate researcher, and a university researcher coming together to present under the auspices of something like MITX. In Bourdieu's model, that would be a consecration of high order. Did we consecrate Numa Numa in that presentation? Surely we did on some level, but what does "consecration" even mean in this context?
Another example. Earlier this year, YouTube held awards for its "best" videos of 2006, as divided into seven categories. Each category had 10 finalists. That's 70 finalists taken from around 24 million videos uploaded that year. What possible protocol could justifiably identify the best 0.0003% of YouTube videos, from a cultural standpoint? And once this task is complete, for better or worse, again we are faced with the question of what kind of consecration is it to be a finalist of a YouTube video award.
Returning to the original question: Can Bourdieu's model be used to expose and represent the field of massive cultural production? The answer is yes, but with a caveat. Many of the underlying characteristics and concepts of Bourdieu's model will apply (e.g., field, habitus, position-taking, cultural capital), but identifying the specific categories of the space of massive cultural production, that is, finding alternatives to, or at least redefinining "degree of consecration" and large versus small audience, will require deriving or defining the new categories empirically. And that's gonna be a bit of a job. And I've got six weeks to do it. Hrm.
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