Cultural hegemony and disruption

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony. In a Gramscian sense, hegemony describes the power exercised by the ruling class over the population in order to maintain control of the means of production. Cultural hegemony is imposed as political doctrine largely through the state education system, but also via other means including print media and broadcasting. Sometimes referred to as 'brainwashing' hegemony is actually more complex and is an insidious way to indoctrinate the masses into a 'false consciousness' where each person believes they have ultimate control of their own destiny. In doing this, the elite impose a view that 'that's just the way it is', but as musician Bruce Hornsby once exhorted, 'Don't you believe it.'

Whilst Gramsci used hegemony to refer specifically to the inculcation of political doctrine into society, I believe the theory can be applied in a much wider sense, and that we are witnessing a challenge to the dominant societal discourses through disruptive technology. I emphasise here the power of participatory media to promote democracy and to a strengthening of the influence of the voice of the people. The current exponential adoption of social media has huge implications for the system of education, itself a key component of cultural hegemony.

How does social media disrupt cultural hegemony? Across the connected world we are witnessing a tangible subversion of long standing dominance. Social media for example has achieved a remarkable success in eroding the power of previously elite media channels. One example is the encyclopaedia, long cherished as one of society's most important knowledge repositories. For years the multiple volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica have graced the shelves of libraries worldwide. They are expensive, regularly in need of updating and replacing, and take up a great deal of physical space.

Enter Wikipedia - the online social encyclopedia to which everyone has a stake in. In an extraordinarily short period of time, Wikipedia has taken up pole position as the world's knowledge repository. It is now the first port of call for many, supplanting Britannica and other previously popular reference books. And when all factors are analysed, this should be no surprise. Wikipedia is popular because it can be accessed from anywhere using a web enabled mobile phone.

More importantly it is also popular because it is democratic, and breaks the hegemony imposed by commercial publishers. Anyone can start off a new page, or quickly add content to more than 14 million existing pages (and that is just the English language pages). In response, Britannica has recently announced that it will no longer publish in paper format, but will now be exclusively digital. It's probably already too late. Wikipedia has challenged the hegemony and is now the new killer application. Other killer apps are also challenging the hegemony imposed by previously dominant channels.

Other commercial companies are also falling foul of disruptive technology. Previously dominant multi-national corporations such as the photography giant Kodak have discovered that failing to respond quickly enough to societal changes can be very costly. The market position of Kodak was once thought to be unassailable. Not anymore. Kodak failed to adapt quickly enough to the rise in popularity of digital photography, filed for bankruptcy and now finds itself in a very unstable financial position from which it may fail to recover. Mail companies are also discovering that e-mail and the cloud (and the capability to send large documents and images instantaneously for very little cost) have undermined what had previously been a very secure monopoly in the physical delivery of letters and parcels. What was the Royal Mail's response to the drop in physical delivery? They raised their prices. Nicolas Negroponte's prediction of a transition from atoms to bits has been realised, is disruptive in the extreme, and it is only just beginning.

Blogging and open access journals are becoming the first choice of publishing for many academics and scholars. Many are turning away from the closed journals regardless of the status they currently enjoy, because open access journals and blogs gain a larger audience for their writing, and publishing is quicker. How long will it be before these media disrupt the hegemony the large publishing houses such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley currently impose upon the academic world?

Blogging is not yet considered a real threat to the closed publishing world, but this may change as it gains more momentum and as respected academics begin to exploit its power of reach. Blogging is not generally subject to editorial control, so individuals are at liberty to write what they choose. The peer review process occurs when readers comment and enter into dialogue with the author. Then learning happens as ideas are challenged, arguments ensue and synthesis is achieved. Blogging is a new form of educational democracy. 

Newspapers too are struggling to survive as they cope with competition from the online journals and magazines that are gradually usurping their readership. It doesn't stop there. YouTube and other video sharing sites have gained a significant purchase in the broadcasting world, and are in the process of displacing some of the previously prominent media channels. All mainstream TV channels have now adopted Facebook and Twitter to capture views and news from citizen journalists from news hot spots around the world, just to keep ahead of the opposition. The dominant movie and music industries are also threatened by the likes of YouTube and Vimeo, and there have been several recent high profile law suits over breaches of copyright. Copyright law itself is also under scrutiny as a result of the influence social media have gained. The copyleft movement (which includes Creative Commons licencing) is challenging the dominant discourse of copyright and the contentious notion of ownership.

Civil liberty is under threat in any society where there is excessive surveillance. But even here, ordinary people are being empowered through the use of personal technology. The internet meme featuring the cop who in an unprovoked act, casually pepper-sprayed peaceful Occupy protesters is an example of surveillance being used against the dominant class. The police in this sense are a state apparatus. They are traditionally the owners of surveillance technology. Yet on this occasion, the cop - one Lieutenant John Pike (pictured) - was captured forever in an act of brutality by cameras owned by ordinary people, and subsequently suffered the consequence of becoming an infamous and universally parodied figure on the internet. Numerous versions of his act, some very humorous, can be found under the Lt Pike meme. Some would argue that this was the best form of retribution. Once again, democratic use of social media and personal devices exposed what was really happening during the Occupy movement.

Governments can also be disrupted. One of the most remarkable series of events to date this century has been the political activism that has occurred as a result of widespread social media use. Videos and blogs emerging from Tunisia alerted the world to what was happening, whilst the use of social networking mobilised the entire country to rise up against its oppressive government. Ultimately, the government fell and the people regained their lost democracy. Similar events caught on across the Arab world, in Egypt and Libya and elsewhere as ordinary people began to challenge their dictatorial governments. At the time of writing, this struggle against the dominant class continues.

Social media, the participatory web, and mobile communications have already radically changed the face of the connected world. Cultural hegemony has been disrupted as a result of the democratic use of technology, but we must be careful not to assume that the hegemony imposed by the dominant classes will disappear. It will not. New killer applications merely disrupt older previously dominant applications. The elite class then move in and gain control of the new tools, ultimately exploiting them, and imposing their power through these new channels of influence. In this sense Marx was correct. This is an ongoing cycle - a class struggle between the ruling elite and the rest of society to gain control of the tools that will ultimately influence our entire culture. Cultural hegemony and the killer application are locked together forever in a dance of death. To survive we will need to avoid complacency.

Hyperhabitat image source
Britannica image by Fotopedia
Lt Pike image by Louise Macabitus


Cultural hegemony and disruption by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Invasion of the privacy snatchers

There is a lot of press coverage at the moment about invasion of privacy, and much discussion on how it can be protected (privacy, not the invasion of it). We have been told about how Facebook and other social networking tools 'own and use' our personal data. Several news items in the last 24 hours have dealt with reactions to the use of technology to snoop on, record or track ordinary people. First there are the very naughty boys at Google who have upset the normally placid residents of a sleepy English village.

Those living in the quiet village of Broughton were alerted to the presence of the Street View Google car as it trundled into their outskirts with its robot 360 degree camera atop. They stopped the car, challenged the driver, gave him a lecture about their privacy, and politely persuaded him to leave the same way he had come. The press and media of course, got hold of the story - and with their characteristic understatedness have dubbed the incident the 'Battle of Broughton'. Now the village of Broughton and its residents have been invaded by dozens more cameras, lighting rigs, satellite vans, intrepid reporters and film crews, all intent on protecting the privacy of the villagers, by broadcasting their faces and identities to the world.

In another news item reported on the same day, Members of the European Parliament (that hotbed of democracy and decency), have called for organisations that track web use, to themselves be tracked and surveilled. The expression 'who watches the watchers?' begins to take on an entirely new complexion. The news item says that the Euro MPs have called for organisations who transgress to be blacklisted.

These reports 'would name and shame organisations carrying out illegal or disproportionate amounts of surveillance' says the news item. Does that perchance also include the UK government then? After all, the British people are the most observed and surveilled people on the planet. There are per capita more closed circuit TV cameras on the streets of Britain than there are in any other nation. For it's encore, the UK government is considering putting trackers into cars to check how many miles each of us do every month. And they are putting sensors inside wheelie-bins to see how much rubbish we throw away every week. Next they will no doubt want to measure how much toilet paper in inches each of us use. Eeew.

The invasion of the privacy snatchers has started. But it's not those naughty boys from Google we should be worrying about. It's the government that gets in no matter who you vote for...

Image Source (inspired by @MarkPower)