Jonathan Franzen’s position in the contemporary American literary landscape is a curious one. His two latest novels – The Corrections (2001) and Freedom (2010) – have been more or less universally lauded by literary critics. Freedom was thus proclaimed a “masterpiece of American fiction” on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, and in the Guardian it was hailed as nothing less than “the novel of the century.” And last fall The Corrections was chosen as the best novel of the past decade in a widely publicized poll involving several prominent authors and literary critics. Despite this lavish praise, Franzen’s novels have been largely neglected by literary scholars, at least compared to contemporaries like David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who have both had entire books and special issues of journals devoted to their work.

As the first book devoted entirely to the work of Jonathan Franzen, Stephen J. Burn’s excellent study goes a long way toward filling this critical lacuna. His book has a double aim: to provide a study of Franzen’s work (with particular emphasis on the novels), and to situate Franzen in a larger group of contemporary authors who can be loosely defined as the successors to literary postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis and John Barth. These successors, whom Burn tentatively labels as “post-postmodernists,” include David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, who are also amply treated in the book.

In his preface Burn discusses Franzen’s critical neglect and he speculates that this neglect to a large extent stems from factors that are external to the author’s novels. Franzen has always been very vocal in his hostility toward the academy and this agonistic attitude may have discouraged scholars from venturing further into Franzen’s fictional woods. Furthermore, Franzen’s clumsy behavior when The Corrections was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club in the fall of 2001 has drawn a lot of attention away from the work itself. (Oprah has apparently forgiven Franzen, since she promptly chose Freedom for her book club just after the novel’s publication. This time around, Franzen gracefully accepted the honor). Such external factors have without a doubt contributed to Franzen’s being passed over by many critics, and Stephen Burn therefore wisely chooses to bypass such distractions in order to focus on Franzen’s novels.

Before his analyses of the three novels (the study was published before the release of Freedom), Burn provides a valuable overview of Franzen’s early writing, much of which has so far remained unidentified. This overview is supplemented by an excellent bibliography at the end of the book, which includes Franzen’s juvenilia from high school and college, as well as his coauthored scientific articles on seismicity. After the chapter on Franzen’s early career, Burn moves on to Franzen’s novels which are treated in separate chapters. In all three chapters, Burn fully demonstrates what was also apparent in his book on Wallace’s Infinite Jest: that he is a very skillful close reader with a knack for detecting intricate patterns, digging up hidden allusions and parsing out complex chronologies. The three chapters confidently pin down the central themes of Franzen’s novels, and at the same time they draw thoughtful parallels to contemporary novels by Wallace and Powers. The analysis of Franzen’s debut The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) convincingly traces the novel’s elaborate intertextual dialogue with T. S. Eliot, while the chapter on Strong Motion (1992) focuses on Franzen’s innovative use of what Burn aptly terms “temporal form.”

The most comprehensive and convincing of the three readings, however, is Burn’s analysis of what remains Franzen’s most important novel, The Corrections. In this chapter Burn successfully shows how intricately patterned, densely interconnected and discreetly experimenting Franzen’s novel of the dysfunctional Lambert family really is, and his analysis constitutes a resounding answer to those critics who considered the novel a retrograde exercise in conventional realism. The most pertinent part of the analysis is Burn’s discussion of the novel’s different ideas of the self. In interviews, Franzen has stated that The Corrections is very much a novel about the self, and Burn demonstrates how different characters in the novel are refracted through different conceptions of the self: Chip’s Foucauldian idea of the self as shaped by institutional power structures, Gary’s materialist account of subjectivity as the inevitable outcome of certain chemical and electrical impulses, Alfred’s philosophical notions of identity, etc. Franzen doesn’t privilege any of these conceptions but stages an ongoing discussion between them, Burn argues.

The readings of the three novels draw a multifaceted portrait of Jonathan Franzen’s achievement, and at the end of the final chapter, I found myself hankering for a chapter on Freedom, which is both a logical extension of Franzen’s first three novels and a step in a new direction. That chapter will have to wait for the paperback edition of Burn’s study which will hopefully be published eventually. Such a subsequent edition could also benefit from a more elaborate discussion of Franzen’s non-fiction. Throughout the book, Burn exhibits a marked impatience with Franzen’s essays, where thorny contradictions are often glibly resolved through “rhetorical flourishes” (in Burn’s words). Burn rightly argues that such contradictions are held in tension in Franzen’s novels, which he therefore holds in much higher esteem than the essays, but his book could nevertheless profitably have included a chapter on the essays collected in How to Be Alone and on Franzen’s memoirs The Discomfort Zone, both of which remain integral parts of Franzen’s collected work.

As stated in the beginning, the purpose of Stephen Burn’s book is two-fold, and even though his introduction to Franzen’s work is very valuable in itself, the most important part of the study probably lies in its ongoing discussion of Franzen’s position in a larger American literary landscape. This position is primarily outlined in the first chapter of the book, where Burn draws a map of American fiction at the millennium, with particular emphasis on literary postmodernism and what came after. While postmodernism has gradually grown weary throughout the 1990s, a new generation of authors have come of age; a generation that attempts to move beyond the pervasive irony and self-reflection of postmodernism. This movement, which in addition to Franzen includes figures such as the late David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer, is tentatively labeled post-postmodernism by Burn, who outlines three major characteristics of post-postmodern literature: 1) Post-postmodernism explicitly looks back to its roots in postmodernism. 2) It is informed by the postmodernist critique of the realist belief in language as a mere mirror of reality, but at the same time it is characterized by a greater urge to represent something real than its postmodern predecessors. 3) It is much more concerned with notions of character than postmodernism.

Burn apologetically admits that the term post-postmodernism is an ungainly one, but he rightly points out that the term has already been widely employed by e.g. David Foster Wallace and the critic Robert L. McLaughlin. Nevertheless, in its awkward accumulation of prefixes the term seems to be one of the more unfortunate names for a movement that has elsewhere been called for instance “postironic literature” or “the new sincerity.” Neither of these alternatives are perfect, but with their implications of the movement’s specific aesthetic and ethical aims, they seem preferable to Burn’s (and Wallace’s and McLaughlin’s) term, which mainly implies a purely chronological succession. And if we accept the label post-postmodernism, then what are we to call the literature of the 2030s: postpostpostmodernism? Maybe we should simply take our cue from Mark Nechtr, a character in David Foster Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, who like Wallace and Franzen wishes to move beyond the trappings of postmodernism:

Mark Nechtr desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares. (Westward, 332-33)

Gfhrytytu really seems to be as good a name as any…

In addition to the name of the beast, one could also discuss the specific traits Burn includes under his post-postmodern heading. The three major characteristics outlined by Burn are a very good starting point, but the list could easily be extended to include for instance a fiercely ambivalent relationship to the electronic mass media, a critique of postmodern irony and a corresponding emphasis on sincerity, a marked interest in materiality and the body, a preference for the suburbs as a setting, a strong emphasis on family – all of which would add to the discussion of post-postmodernism’s corrections of the postmodern patriarchs and help bring the movement into clearer focus. Still, it must be emphasized that Burn’s lucid, sober and well-argued study of Jonathan Franzen and his post-postmodern peers marks an inspiring and indispensable opening of a discussion which will hopefully continue in the years to follow, as we try to plot a meaningful route through the tangled topography of contemporary American fiction.

Three months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Don DeLillo wrote in an essay titled, “In the Ruins of the Future”: “The writer wants to understand what this day has done to us. Is it too soon? We seem pressed for time, all of us. Time is scarcer now. There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted…The writer begins in the towers, trying to imagine the moment, desperately.”[1] DeLillo asks, as many have and continue to do in the time since that awful day, whether it is possible for literature to reconstruct what happened, to provide a medium for making meaning, and thus move beyond the traumatic. Kristiaan Versluys, in his critical examination of “9/11 fiction,” argues that while the great September 11 novel has not been written and maybe never will, there have been genuine attempts made to “affirm and counteract the impact of trauma” (13).

Versluys’s book is primarily, though not consistently, structured around this idea of the 9/11 novel as a means of, “wrenching trauma out of the realm of the inarticulate and nudging it toward expression [as the] first step in the healing process” (70). In the two strongest chapters, he examines the process of both national and self-recovery in the wake of September 11, as depicted in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), a graphic representation, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). Spiegelman’s depiction is worth noting in part, Versluys states, because he was a direct witness to the event. As such, he experienced the trauma in a way incomprehensible to those authors who have written about it from a remove and experienced it indirectly through the filter of the media, which Spiegelman charges with having “cheapened [the] trauma into mere sensationalism” (75).  His direct experience is said to allow Spiegelman to approach the subject matter with the authenticity necessary to ensure that the trauma of the day, and the difficult process of recovery that followed, is relayed appropriately–something that, in one of the few political discussions in Versluys’s text, it is charged the Bush administration failed to do when it, “hijacked September 11 and ‘reduced it all to a war recruitment poster’” (74).

Versluys is also keenly interested in Spiegelman’s work because of his role as an indirect witness to the Holocaust. As the child of Auschwitz survivors who, through the recording of the story of his father’s experience in Maus, also functions as a secondary witness to that tragedy, Spiegelman’s debilitating reaction to September 11 was, in part, a product of the history of trauma in the 20^th century. Spiegelman had, as he states in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers, stumbled upon “that faultline where World History and Personal History collide” (qtd. on 51). Through his engagement with Spiegleman’s “faultline,” Versluys is able to demonstrate the dangers posed by the continued “transmission of trauma” and the need for a means through which to come to terms with great shocks, something Spiegelman credits the writing of In the Shadow of No Towers with having done for him. The discussion regarding the role of trauma in 9/11 fiction continues fairly straightforwardly in regards to Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close, which also provides an important examination of the role of language and the paradoxical inability of words to replicate the experience of trauma while remaining necessary for the working through of trauma.

Continuing the question of the resolution of trauma, Versluys discusses the continued reenactment of trauma in his critical reading of DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). DeLillo’s work, however, is not credited with reaching the same cathartic outcome as Spiegelman or Foer’s. Instead, Versluys states that Falling Man “is, without a doubt, the darkest and the starkest” of 9/11 narratives because it “allows for no accommodation or resolution” (20). Situating his criticism of the novel within the context of the post-modern condition of drift, Versluys charts the novel’s apparent lack of central narrative structure. The characters experience little growth or development, plot lines are rarely, if ever, resolved, and the literal and figurative fall of man is a repeated theme. The explanation given for DeLillo’s choice of structure is that the novel is intended to serve as “a counterdiscourse to the prevailing nationalistic interpretations” (23). Versluys further suggests that the novel, “in stressing the paralyzing effects of September 11…is a novel contrary to the national trend” (30), and could “serve as a prelude to, or be used as an excuse for, wholesale, reactionary and even totalitarian movements of redress and moral restoration” (48). What remains unclear from Versluys’s argument, however, is to what extent he believes that rather than imagining a pessimistic outcome, DeLillo is simply reflecting in literature a very real and significant current that exists in society in the wake of September 11, and that the novel lacks resolution precisely because society has yet to find one.

The strength of these three opening chapters makes it difficult to fully understand Versluys’s decision to switch gears and refocus his discussion in the next chapter on the representation of hyperrealism in the critically panned, French novel Windows on the World (2004) by Frédéric Beigbeder.  The choice of Windows on the World is especially confusing, as Versluys himself admits the book to be a “shallow” examination in which “the cliché wins out” (121). The novel is characterized by what Beigbeder terms “hyperrealism,” taken in this context to mean a “departure from the strictures of conventional realism” (125). However, the technique, in this case, seems to be less a way of adding depth to the narrative, as DeLillo’s unconventional narrative techniques do in Falling Man, and more a way of justifying poor writing. Versluys tries to excuse Beigbeder’s technique by stating that it reflects the notion that, “there is no narrative ploy strong enough to deflect the event, no trope or stylistic device capable of stopping the irreversible progress of time” (144). Even if there were such an argument to be made here, however, the chapter, like Beigbeder’s book itself, meanders too much away from this line of thought and focuses instead on arguing that September 11 was a globally experienced event that had as much of an impact on those outside the United States as it did for individuals who directly experienced the event in New York. Versluys even tries to justify his inclusion of Beigbeder by stating that it is an important representation of the “international dimension [of] this discussion” (121). There is no denying that September 11 had global repercussions; but this argument by Versluys seems to only prove Spiegelman’s assertion that the trauma of that day has been hijacked (74).

Versluys’s final chapter lacks an obvious connection to the rest of the book, but it has merit. In the epilogue to the book, in which he briefly discusses Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2006) and Anita Shreve’s A Wedding in December (2006), two novels that only indirectly deal with September 11, Versluys admits that as time continues to pass, “the concerns expressed [in 9/11 fiction] will be less directly related to the experience of trauma” (183). Instead, he recognizes that the literature is already shifting toward the aftermath of the event, dealing instead with, “the confrontation with the Other” (183). In this respect, the inclusion of the final chapter of the book, which focuses on the concept of the Other and the process of “othering” makes sense. Interestingly, Versluys chooses to frame his remarks using the concept of the Other proposed by Emmanuel Levinas, which “locates [signification] in responsibility for the Other”–meaning that “everyone is essentially and before anything else interpellated by the face of the Other” and “we are preordained to be touched by what happens to the Other, in particular the suffering Other” (149). Using this theoretical framework proves particularly illuminating in his reading of Martin Amis’s “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006) and John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), both of which have as their main character a terrorist. Though Versluys ultimately, falling in line with much of the critical response to these works, finds both Amis and Updike’s portrayals of the terrorist to be limited by their role as projections of the ideologies of the authors, he is also right in pointing out their success as exercises in coming “face to face with the Other” (182).

Overall, Versluys presents an important, engaging text that deals thoroughly and expertly with the role of trauma and post-9/11 fiction. It would interesting to see what, if anything, he does with further investigations into the trend toward a more indirect treatment of September 11 as its role changes in the “collective imagination,” especially considering the critical success of novels not touched on in the book, including Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006) and Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland (2008).[2]

Notes

[1]DeLillo, Don. “In the Ruins of the Future.” The Guardian. 22 Dec. 2001. Web. 6 Mar. 2010.

[2]Versluys, Kristiaan. Interview by Mark Athitakis. “Q&A: Dr. Kristiaan Versluys, Out of the Blue.” Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes. 29 Oct. 2009. Web. 14 Dec. 2010.

New York: Penguin, 2007.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online platform on which employers can post ‘Human Intelligence Tasks’ (HITs) that are searched by prosumers looking for paid employment who select and perform these knowledge tasks with the help of their computers, submit the results, and then get paid. ‘Developers use the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical Turk website, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work’ (mturk.com FAQs, accessed on November 23, 2007). The reward per task ranges between zero, a few cents (in most cases), and some dollars. One example of an HIT assignment is to determine the presence of opinion in a text article and submit the result, e.g., ‘Your task is to read the news article or blog post below and determine whether it is editorial in nature or is an expression of opinion, and whether it is positive, negative, or neutral’ (mturk.com, accessed on November 23, 2007). Multiple users will input their results which will be used by the task assigner who aggregates and sells the results as a commodity. The example is characteristic for what Tapscott and Williams celebrate as Wikinomics – an online economy based on networking, peering, and collaboration.

Sounds like a good way for earning some money? The shadow side in which Tapscott and Williams are not interested, is that the remuneration is poor. In the example just cited, the reward is four cents for an estimated task time of 10 minutes, which results in a total hourly compensation of 24 cents if you repeatedly carry out similar tasks. Hence, this ‘new’ economy of mass collaboration seems to support and advance an extremely flexible regime of accumulation that brings about precarious labor.

Tapscott and Williams claim that the emergence of Social Software (the ‘new web,’ as they call it) has brought about a potential for an economy that is based on mass collaboration, which they term ‘Wikinomics.’ The task of the book is to show why and how mass collaboration does not reduce, but rather enhances profitability. The Wikinomics model is based on the four principles of openness (of standards and external involvement), peer production, sharing, and acting globally (20-30)[1].

Tapscott and Williams introduce seven Wikinomics business models: peer pioneers (chapter 3), ideagoras (chapter 4), prosumers (chapter 5), new Alexandrians (chapter 6), platforms for participation (chapter 7), global plant floor (chapter 8), and wiki workplace (chapter 9). These models of competition all have one thing in common: ‘These new forms . . . enable firms to harvest external knowledge, resources, and scale that were all previously impossible. Whether your business is closer to Boeing or P&G, or more like YouTube or Flickr, there are vast pools of external talent that you can tap with the right approach. Companies that adopt these models can drive important changes in their industries and rewrite the rules of competition’ (269sq)[1]. Per Tapscott and Williams, these models are not so different from prior ones. As this quotation shows, in the end, it really is still all about profit-making and achieving overall capitalist economic goals. The difference is that Wikinomics strategies are more subtle. They colonize spare time and transform free time into labor time, in which surplus value is created and appropriated by capital. However, the prosumers do not realize that they are being exploited because exploitation now seems fun to them; it is entertaining, and takes place during their spare time.

Wikinomics, hence, is not only a subtle form of exploitation of unpaid labor, but also an ideology. The main idea is to outsource labor to globally distributed customers and collaborators that act as prosumers so that labor and other costs are reduced. Marx showed that if variable capital costs (labor costs) decrease, the rate of exploitation (the relation of surplus value to variable capital s/v) increases. With the rise of Wikinomics, exploitation expands to the realm of spare time, economic colonization and instrumental reason become universal, and the rate of exploitation increases because prosumers, as a tendency, deliver unpaid surplus value. Tapscott and Williams do not call this process exploitation, but they implicitly admit that it is all about the extraction of surplus value from consumers: ‘Companies can design and assemble products with their customers, and in some cases customers can do the majority of the value creation’ (289sq). This is not a novel form of management and organization because it has in common with Taylorism the overall goal of increasing competitive advantage and the reduction of humans to economic reason in the last instance (cf. Fuchs, Blachfellner & Bichler, 2007).

Most of the authors’ Web 2.0 accumulation strategies are based on the notion of the cost-cutting effects of the global outsourcing of labor, supported by the internet. In reality, this strategy takes the form of new self-employment, which already in the past produced precarious forms of flexibility with more risks, less social security, and less secure employment. The most probable result of an economy based on Wikinomics will be an increase in precarious and unpaid labor that benefits certain companies that exploit unpaid labor. Such a situation remunerates more people for only a strictly limited time for specific tasks. The result will be more precarious jobs and living conditions, with an increased income gap between corporate workers on top, and then flex-workers, temporary workers, and the unemployed at the bottom.

Tapscott and Williams have an idealistic and unrealistic view of capitalism. They argue that in the end, all actors involved in Wikinomics will benefit. For example, they say that the new business models would ‘drive new innovation, create jobs and wealth, and add tremendous value for customers’ (234). If there is one general principle of capitalism, it is that capitalism is a system that never benefits all, but only some at the expense of others, and some more than others so that relative or absolute inequality is generated. In capitalism, economic freedom stands in antagonism with social equity. Capitalism is, overall, always a non-co-operative (i.e., competitive) system because it is particularistic: Capital is accumulated by someone or a group at the expense of others who are being exploited or excluded. There is a dialectic of ownership and non-ownership, accumulation and dispossession of money capital. Tapscott and Williams create the impression that all will benefit from Wikinomics, but they do not see that those who gain competitive advantages will do so at the expense of other economic actors and that those prosumers who work for free in the Wikinomy are exploited by capital.

Capitalism is a competitive society in the sense that it benefits certain groups at the expense of others. I have argued in another place, based on the principle of Essence taken from dialectical philosophy, that co-operation, understood as human collaboration that brings advantages to all, is the Essence of society because a fully competitive society is self-destructive, whereas a fully cooperative society is possible, which makes co-operation a more grounding phenomenon of society than competition. If Truth is seen as the correspondence of Essence and Existence, then capitalism is a false society, and only a fully co-operative society is a true state of human existence. One important quality of capitalism that has been grasped by Marx is that capitalism, in advancing productivity by technological and organizational progress, at the same time deepens exploitation and alienation and produces potentials for a fully co-operative society (Fuchs, 2008). In this context, Marx has spoken of the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production. One novel quality of transnational informational capitalism is that co-operative potentials are no longer predominantly advanced in forms that feel alienating and uncontrollable for the masses. Instead, information, ‘immaterial’ labor, media, and technology advance the overall competitive and instrumental character of society by integrating the subjectivity of human actors so that the impression is created that their work and lives are fun, participatory, rewarded, acknowledged, etc. Yet in reality, those actors become ever more subsumed under the control of capital to a greater extent and in ever more spheres of human existence. In an economy based on Wikinomics principles, spare time, as a tendency, becomes labor time in which surplus value is produced.

Wikinomics shows how mass collaboration and digital gifts can be subsumed under a capitalist logic. The difference between my own approach and the authors’ is that the latter welcome this development, whereas I consider it from a neo-Marxist perspective as the extension and intensification of alienation and exploitation (Fuchs, 2008), yet I recognize that, at the same time, it bears certain potentials for alternative developments. Transnational informational capitalism is characterized by a paradox situation that was foreseen 30 years ago by Herbert Marcuse, in which subjective unfreedom is accompanied by the highest objective potentials for emancipation that have thus far existed in human history (Fuchs, 2008).

I have characterized this paradox economy as the gift commodity internet economy (Fuchs, 2008). Commercial Web 2.0 applications are typically of no charge for users; they generate profit by gathering as many users as possible by offering free services and selling advertisement space to third parties and additional services to users. The more users, the more profit, that is, the more services are offered for free, the more profit can be generated. Although the principle of the gift points towards a post-capitalist society, gifts are today subsumed under capitalism and used for generating profit in the internet economy. The internet gift economy has a double character; it supports and at the same time undermines informational capitalism.

The gift commodity internet economy can be read as a specific form of what Dallas Smythe (1981; 2006) has termed the audience commodity. He suggests that in the case of media advertisement models, the audience is sold as a commodity. ‘Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands a price and is a commodity. . . . You audience members contribute your unpaid work time and in exchange you receive the program material and the explicit advertisements’ (Smythe, 1981/2006: 233 & 238). Audiences constitute unpaid labor; the consumption of the mass media is work because it results in a commodity, which is to say it produces that commodity. In this model, the audience’s work would also include ‘learning to buy goods and to spend their income accordingly,’ the demand for the consumption of goods, and the reproduction of their own labor power (Smythe, 1981/2006: 243sq).

With the rise of user-generated content and free access social networking platforms and other free access platforms that yield profit by online advertisement, the web seems to come close to the accumulation strategies employed by capital on traditional mass media like TV or radio. The users who Google data, upload or watch videos on YouTube, upload or browse personal images on Flickr, or accumulate friends with whom they exchange content or communicate online via social networking platforms like MySpace or Facebook, constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. The difference between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the internet is that in the latter the users are also content producers: There is user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community-building, and content-production. That the users are more active on the internet than in the reception of TV or radio content is due to the decentralized structure of the internet which allows many-to-many communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status as prosumers, I would, in the case of the internet, argue that the audience commodity is a prosumer commodity. The category of the prosumer commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but the total commodification of human creativity. Much of the time spent online produces profit for large corporations like Google, News Corp. (which owns MySpace), or Yahoo! (which owns Flickr). Advertisements on the internet are frequently personalized; this is made possible by surveilling, storing, and assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases. This is another difference from TV and radio, which, due to their centralized structure, provide less individualized content and advertisements. But one can also observe a certain shift in the area of traditional mass media, as in the cases of pay per view, tele-votes, talkshows, and call-in TV and radio shows. In the case of the internet, the commodification of audience participation is easier to achieve than with other mass media. The rise of the internet prosumer commodity also shows that the visions of critical theorists like Benjamin, Brecht, and Enzensberger of an emancipatory media structure have today been subsumed under capital.

Capital is accumulated by collaboration, the provision of free access, peering, sharing, networking, communicating, and opening resources. Consumers become producers of surplus value: ‘In each instance the traditionally passive buyers of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value creation’ (Tapscott and Williams, 2007: 14). There are ‘models where masses of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors co-create value in the absence of direct managerial control’ (55). The result is not the emergence of ‘a new economic democracy . . . in which we all have a lead role’ (15), as Tapscott and Williams claim, but a subtly operating, coercive, and highly exploitative capitalist economy that tries to reduce labor and other investment costs by the global dynamic of labor outsourcing to prosumers, competitors, and subcontractors with the help of web 2.0.

Wikinomics is worthwhile reading for readers who want to observe how affirmative thinking and bourgeois ideology operate within the discourse on web 2.0.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Fuchs, C. (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, C., Blachfellner, S., Bichler, R. (2007) ‘The Urgent Need for Change: Rethinking Knowledge and Management’, in Christian Stary, Franz Barachini and Suliman Hawamdeh (Eds.) Knowledge Management: Innovation, Technology and Cultures. Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Knowledge Management. New Jersey: World Scientific, pp. 293-307.

Smythe, D. W. (1981/2006) ‘On the Audience Commodity and its Work’, in: Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Eds.) Media and Cultural Studies KeyWorks. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 230-256.

Bio

Christian Fuchs is Associate Professor at the University of Salzburg (Austria). He studied Computer Science from 1994-2000 at the Vienna University of Technology. He specialized in sociology of technology, wrote a diploma thesis on ‘The Self-Organization of the Information Society’ (Selbstorganisation in der Informationsgesellschaft) and received a diploma in Computer Science in 2000 (Dipl.-Ing.). He wrote a dissertation thesis on ‘Aspects of Evolutionary Systems Theory in Economical Crisis Theories with a Special Sociological Consideration of Technological Factors’ (Aspekte der evolutionären Systemtheorie in ökonomischen Krisentheorien unter besonderer Berücksichtigung techniksoziologischer Bezüge) and was awarded a doctoral degree in technical sciences (Dr.techn.) in 2002. Christian Fuchs has completed his habilitation at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in February 2008 with a work on ‘internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Society’(Routledge 2008; http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html), by which he gained the academic title of Privatdozent (associate professor). Homepage: http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at

London: Routledge, 2003.

At the time Richard Barrios published Screened Out in 2003, the cinema going audience had not yet met with Ennis and Jack, the two ‘gay cowboys’ from Brokeback Mountain (2005). At the point of writing this review, we still have to wait for the theatrical release of Milk, Focus Features’ next ‘big’ gay film. Just like Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Milk is directed by a well-respected director (Gus van Sant) and has major stars as its gay protagonists. Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger were praised for their acting, and it is likely that the same will happen for Sean Penn who plays the San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected for such a substantial political office. What makes both these films outstanding is their singularity. Major films that feature gay and lesbian characters as main protagonists remain rare in mainstream cinema. One still has to turn to smaller art houses for independent queer film productions. Homosexuality is often used as a source for stereotypical parody, and although a slight sense of subversion should be encouraged, one could wonder if popular mainstream comedies such as I now pronounce you Chuck and Larry (2007) can make a difference in representing the queer community. Independent film production, world cinema and certainly television production do dare to politically and socially challenge contemporary society’s presumptions on sexuality and identity. But ever-present Hollywood is staying behind in relation to the rest of Western society, portraying a reality where on-screen queer sexualities are often lacking. Of course, some dramedies such as My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997) and The Object of my Affection (1998) had a ‘gay best friend’, but major adventure and action films did not yet feature a queer lead.

From this point of view, it is interesting to consider how queers were portrayed in the past – if they were even represented at all. Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1981) was the first groundbreaking research into Hollywood and its fictional and non-fictional queers. It was written from a strong minority position, foregrounding the few queers in the history of cinema and underlining the major absence of a substantial queer presence. Russo wrote his book in a period that was marked by the rise of AIDS and a remount of homophobia. In contrast to Russo’s book, that was fueled by anger and indignation, claiming that queers were portrayed as objects of ridicule or homophobia, and without any character complexity. Barrios sheds a more optimistic light on early cinema. One of the main reasons is that Russo did not have access to the same sources as Barrios had, for instance footage of (formerly) lost films and documents by the Production Code Administration (cfr. infra). Based on these sources, Barrios is able to claim that homosexuality was on the screen all along. He rejects the criticism that homosexuality was not mentioned in the early motion pictures, stating that the queer portrayals spoke for themselves. It was only until Western society started defining homosexuality as opposed to normative heterosexuality that former queer representations were forgotten. In Screened Out, Barrios focuses on these forgotten queers while chronologically retelling the history of US gay and lesbian representations, from Edison to Stonewall in fifteen chapters. He strongly emphasizes the role of the historical context, looking at queer representations knowledgeable of the queer community codes from the past. According to him, characters did not need to say out loud that they were gay or lesbian, when they already had ‘queer’ written all over them. He states that homosexuality used to be part of mainstream popular culture and that it was fairly represented, stressing that the stereotypical images of the pansies and the dykes were rather exaggerations than propagated stereotypes. He adds that silent film depended on its actors’ gestures and that they needed to be exaggerated for dramatic purposes. In his opinion, ‘any’ visibility was a good sign. It seems that Barrios embraces all queer representations in early cinema. The first chapter entitled Silent Existences looks upon the few silent queer characters, for instance ‘sissy’ character Algie (Billy Quirck) in Algie, the Miner (1912) who is read as queer only through cinematographic codes such as gestures and mannerisms. This contrasts with the narrative which emphasizes Algie’s heterosexual relationship. One could argue that Barrios’ examples of the 1910s are rather related to sexual ambiguity than to outspoken sexual identities, for instance the gender switching story of A Florida Enchantment (1914). The 1920s did offer an alternative, bringing Franklin Pangborn to the screen and showing how queer characters were well accepted in films that were set in the world of theatre and haute couture. For instance Capra’s The Matinee Doll (1928), which featured David Mir as a queer actor who engages in cross-dressing and who is defended by the members of his company. Barrios adds that while queer men were clearly represented, queer women were out of sight. According to him, the mannish rebellious women in My Lady of Whims (1925) and The Crystal Cup (1927) came the closest to lesbians.

Sound did not change the queer representations as it was only used to underline the mannerisms of the queer. The talkies did stir up the society of the early 1930s, evoking the Motion Picture Production Code – a set of do’s and don’ts concerning film content – which was defied at first. However, from 1934 onwards, it defined the US cinema until the early 1960s. Barrios gives the Production Code Association a central position in the book: A whole chapter on De Mille’s The Sign Of the Cross (1934), a film that used depictions of sex and violence in order to moralize and condemn, is discussed as an illustration for the failing of the first Production Code. The film featured a lesbian dance scene with two non-stereotypical women that caused a scandal. Although the former Code requested heavy censorship, the film was released as intended. The film is considered to be one of the triggers that empowered the self-regulating body of the cinematic industry, the MPPDA, to rule on the suitability of the content, based on the do’s and don’ts of its Production Code. Although the Code strongly restricted any reference to sexual ‘perversion’, sexuality was not easily traced in contrast to on-screen nudity. The representation of sexuality depends on more than visual codes, as narrative elements are equally important. As such, in order to avoid censorship, a broad range of coded queer representations emerged. What did had to disappear, were the codes that pointed to queerness such as words like ‘lavender’ or ‘pansy’ and pansy mannerism. New types of queer characters emerged, for instance the gothic lesbians like Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (1940) and Miss Holloway in The Uninvited (1944). Although both films passed the Production Code, lesbian audiences picked up on the same-sex attractions and the latter even became a lesbian cult film. This made the Legion of Decency, a coalition of different catholic movements that condemned films that offended decency and Christian morality, wonder about the efficiency of the Code. However, often not only the Production Code Association, but also the studios and producers did not know about the queer subtext. It could only be inscribed by audiences. In Rebecca, the way housekeeper Mrs. Danvers fetishistically fondled the clothes of her dead mistress was such an element that could be interpreted as a queer adoration for the mistress. It seems that even before queer reading became an academically acknowledged practice (see for instance Alexander Doty’s Flaming Classics (2000)), audiences were already queering the ‘preferred’ readings. Barrios does not address the practice of queer reading explicitly, even though his method is mostly relying on it, for instance in his reading of characters such as early cinema’s Algie or Kip on Adam’s Rib (1949) as gay rather than effeminate. Queer readings reveal one interpretation, but it is never the only reading. If polysemy is not recognized, we could end up with essentialist readings in which for instance behavior that relates to gender is automatically linked with sexuality. As such, an effeminate heterosexual male or butchy heterosexual female could become an anomaly, or an impossibility. A famous example is Tea and Sympathy (1956) which tells the story of a sissy-boy who walks with a swish and proofs his heterosexuality by sleeping with the headmaster’s wife, a film that Barrios calls the precedent of gay and lesbian visibility, even though this film is more about hegemonic heteronormativity than about closeted homosexuality.

Towards the end of the 1950s, the Production Code Association began to lose its grip on the content of films, and gay and lesbian characters were shown on the screen, for instance in Girls in Prison (1956), How to Make a Monster (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). The queers represented in these pictures did not only share a queer sexuality, they were all more or less articulated as evil, as being gay posed a (possible) threat to society. Barrios stresses that there were occasionally neutral queer portrayals, for instance Claire in the tropical horror movie Voodoo Island (1957), but he considers these neutral depictions from the late 1950s to be rare. The image of the sad suicidal queer for instance was embodied by two early 1960s features, The Children’s Hour (1961) and Advise and Consent (1962). Although these films forced the Code to adjust their ban on depicting sexual ‘perversion’ (which made it possible to include homosexuality and other sexual ‘aberrations’), it is ironic that hereafter queer sexualities were not treated more liberal, nor did their presence increase. One of the major reasons, according to Barrios, was that these films were not profitable. The mainstream audience did not seem to care to go see these films, especially when ‘queer’ was the main theme. Barrios describes a pattern that started in 1962. Every few years, different producers created major queer films that failed to attract an audience. This was followed by an absence of queer portrayal in mainstream cinema, until the cycle restarted. Barrios ends his book with a chapter on such a cycle in the late 1960s, which featured mostly negative portrayals of for instance lesbians in The Fox (1969) and of gays in Staircase (1969). The last film he discusses is Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band (1970), often viewed as a milestone, but not fully embraced by Barrios. He rather sees this film as yet again a portrayal of gay lifestyle as pathetic and sad. He does acknowledge the diversity in queer characters. Notwithstanding, to a certain audience, this film evokes the eve of gay liberation, but as a mainstream film it turned out to be a financial disappointment.

Mainstream cinema is still locked into this pattern. While the big screen occasionally scores with films such as Philadelphia (1993) and The Birdcage (1996), it lacks a steady queer presence. The small screen, although only recently, has had more success in regularly portraying the queer. Will & Grace (1998-2006), The L Word (2004-…) and Queer As Folk (2000-2005) are critically acclaimed queer series, and popular daytime soaps As The World Turns (1956-…) and Coronation Street (1960-…) nowadays have recurring queer characters. Although Screened Out’s second half is drenched in a more pessimistic tone, Barrios could do more to acknowledge the progress that has been made on television, even during the years when the Code was still in operation. This is in contrast to early cinema, which suffered less gay-bashing, but still only had side characters, often granted little screen time. Their visibility has since then increased. And although I do not fully agree with Barrios when he states that any kind of visibility should be appreciated, it seems contradictory that he himself diminishes the value of films such like The Children’s Hour, which had a major star (Shirley MacLaine) play the role of a lesbian and which discussed openly the social position of queers in a repressive milieu. These are of course relatively minor criticisms launched at a crucial book that offers a substantial alternative to Russo’s work, with an essential focus on the Code’s role in cinema content. I also want to stress the importance of international historical research into queer representations, as the work of Richard Dyer (1990) and Didier Roth-Bettoni (2007) have already shown. What often lacks is a focus on television fiction. Certainly nowadays, with more popular television queers than there are film queers, a look into television’s queer past would be undoubtedly valuable.

References

Doty, A. (2000) Flaming Classics. New York: Routledge.

Dyer, R. (1990) Now You See It. New York: Routledge.

Roth-Bettoni, D. (2007) L’Homosexualité au cinema. Paris: La Musardine.

Russo, V. (1981) The Celluloid Closet. New York: Harper & Row.

Bio

Frederik Dhaenens holds a MA in Communication Studies and a MA in Film and Visual Culture. He is a member of the Working Group Film and Television Studies at the Department of Communication Studies, at Ghent University. He works on a research project entitled ‘Out on Screen: a research into the social and emancipating role of gay and lesbian representations in contemporary visual culture, using the concept of queer theory’.

Better Living through Reality TV. Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship.

Laurie Ouellette and James Hay.

Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008.

In their book, Laurie Ouellette and James Hay draw on Michel Foucault’s and Nikolas Rose’s writings on liberalism and governmentality to situate the increase of popular non-fiction on television within strategies of liberal governance. They use the concept of liberalism as a ‘governmental rationality’ to refer to a form of governing through freedom, in which – on the one hand – rulers should minimize any intervention in the affairs of both the free market and individuals, and – on the other hand – individuals are expected to govern themselves, by choosing order over chaos and good behavior over deviance. In these continuous processes of self-governing, people rely on diverse social and cultural technologies, including television. The need for self-governing has become different and more urgent in today’s advanced or neoliberal societies (or ‘post-welfare States’ as Ouellette and Hay call them). For in these neoliberal societies, where the rationality of the ‘free’ market has expanded (resulting in a greater reliance on the privatization and personalization of welfare), citizens are increasingly obliged ‘to actualize and “maximize” themselves not through “society” or collectively, but through their choices in the privatized spheres of lifestyle, domesticity, and consumption’ (12)[1]. Ouellette and Hay argue that one has to understand (and question) the surge and popularity of reality TV from within this larger analysis of contemporary post-welfare States. The starting point of this book is the idea that reality TV has become a quintessential technology of this neoliberal citizenship, since it aligns TV viewers with a burgeoning supply of techniques for shaping and guiding themselves and their private associations with others. ‘At a time when privatization, personal responsibility, and consumer choice are promoted as the best way to govern liberal capitalist democracies, reality TV shows us how to conduct and “empower” ourselves as enterprising citizens’ (2).

Throughout the book they demonstrate how this approach of reality TV within an analytics of neoliberal government offers interesting ways to conceptualize television’s power, illustrating their argument extensively by discussing diverse strands of reality TV.

A first chapter deals with charity TV. The term charity TV is used to designate programs that focus on ‘helping needy people turn their lives around by providing material necessities such as housing (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Mobile Home Disasters), transportation (pimp My Ride), food (Random one), and medical care (Miracle Workers, Three Wishes)’ (40). The authors offer a macro-perspective on this kind of ‘do-good TV’, situating its proliferation and specificity in the larger (intertwined) evolutions that affected both media and government. So it is argued that television after the broad deregulation has not rejected its allegiance to the public good, but on the contrary, has ‘quite aggressively’ (34) pursued a form of civic engagement that enacts the logics of a neoliberal government. The authors convincingly demonstrate how the political rationality of reality-based charity TV endorses a neoliberal ‘can-do’ model of citizenship that values private enterprise, personal responsibility, and self-empowerment. They also argue that these programs show appreciation for the State’s involvement in the care of citizens as ‘inefficient, paternalistic, and “dependency-breeding”‘ (35). The authors also illustrate extensively how this type of reality TV programs fits into Bush’ post-welfare politics. Besides this clarifying macro-perspective the authors offer a detailed analysis of how precisely television manages neediness; how it regulates the life of ‘”real” people as unable (or unwilling) to care for themselves adequately’ (32). This is mainly done through a close analysis of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

A second chapter addresses what Ouellette and Hay call life interventions programs. They use these term to describe programs that mobilize all kinds of ‘professional motivators’ and ‘lifestyle experts’, to help people overcome all kinds of obstacles in their personal, professional, and domestic lives – from obesity and housecleaning to ineffective parenting – by instilling self-management techniques. The intervention can focus on transforming a person’s entire self or it can attempt to resolve more specific problems. Life interventions TV includes, amongst others, very popular formats such as Supernanny, How Clean is your House, and Honey, we’re Killing the Kids, series that all originated from the BBC; and very successful American series as Dr Phil and Judge Judy. These programs are characterized by what the authors call ‘an applied form’ of public service (71). With this concept, they point to the fact that these programs do not simply educate viewers about, for example, the problems of obesity or addiction, as traditional journalism or documentary might do, but ‘actively intervene to solve particular manifestations of the problem’ (71). This involves that television is taking up roles and duties normally carried out by professional social workers. The authors contend that what unites the diversity of these programs is their self-governing idea, their concern with producing citizens who are not merely capable, but ultimately grateful to learn how to increase their capacity to govern themselves. The authors demonstrate that both participants and TV viewers are expected to be part of this mission of empowering by self-governing, but, however, are addressed in different ways. The needy participants are classified as ‘other’ people (and typically presented as less knowledgeable and less personally motivated than the general audience) who require authoritarian and intrusive governing techniques such as home visits, hidden camera surveillance and pedantic lecturing. TV viewers are offered more comfortable sources of self-empowerment through all kinds of derived services and products commercialized on websites, in books and magazines.

This connection of self-empowerment with the logics of commerce and consumerism is echoed in the diverse chapters of the book, throughout the analysis of all kind of strands of reality TV. Ouellette and Hay claim that reality TV ‘has situated the power to shape social life entirely within the logic of the commercial market’, it has ‘neoliberalized’ social welfare assuming that ‘there’s no distinction – and no presumed need for one – between do-good activity and the manufacture and sale of cultural product’ (38-39).

However, it is in the chapter dedicated to makeover programs that Ouellette and Hay develop this idea of the commodification of the self-empowering processes in the most far-reaching and peculiar way. In this chapter they go into diverse beauty/style makeover programs that aim to transform ‘ordinary people into improved versions of themselves’ (102). Examples are Extreme Makeover, Ten Years Younger, The Swan and the most extensively illustrated (once again originally BBC) format What Not to Wear. Their central point is that by instilling rationales and techniques for fashioning the self, reality TV also works indirectly to guide and govern workers, and to facilitate their self-government in the flexible neoliberal economy (102). They claim that ‘although makeover programs are not only (or even primarily) focused on people’s vocational lives they do make promises about TV’s capacity to help the unemployed and/or unfulfilled help themselves as managers of their “greatest assets” – themselves’ (103). Ouellette and Hay observe a parallel with what the sociologist Paul du Gay identified as the managerial philosophy of ‘excellence’; a philosophy emerging in the 1980s and 1990s that motivated workers merely by putting emphasis on the promise of more opportunities for self-management and self-fulfillment, rather than on material rewards. This philosophy is most explicitly present in televised talent/job search programs such as American Idol or The Apprentice where a team of experts, teachers and judges seek to transform ‘raw human potential into coveted opportunities for self-fulfillment through the realization and expression of talent’ (127).

In the two final chapters of the book Ouellette and Hay elaborate on the more familiar notion of television as a civic laboratory. They start with a discussion on reality TV programs that present practical demonstrations about rules and techniques for membership, participation and group government. Programs with a more ludic dimension, such as The Survivor and The Apprentice, and series that accentuate the seriousness rather than the play of the experiments, such as Wife Swap and Black/White, are taken in consideration. These kinds of experiments in self-actualization are situated within US television’s preoccupation with representing and managing diversity (186). However, the authors only briefly develop this idea and keep away from questioning the way diversity is addressed. This omission might partly be explained by the way that Ouellette and Hay position their work in relation to other critical projects in cultural theory, sociology, cultural studies, feminist studies, and political theory. The book contains no overview of these other research traditions; it hardly makes any references to them. Yet, in the few – implicit and explicit – references, one can easily read a clear dissociation from what Ouellette and Hay call ‘leftist’ approaches that conceive television culture as a system of representation (14), and that critique misrepresentations and manipulations through a comparison of these representations with ‘reality’ (38). Ouellette and Hay also shy away from the projects in cultural media studies whose mission seems to consist of ‘countering the view that TV is undemocratic’ (205). They dispute the idea of democracy as something authentic, as a universal idea, and approach it as ‘a provisional achievement, involving ongoing failures and break-downs and whose technical procedures provisionally allow citizens to govern themselves actively and responsibly’ (206). ‘So rather than asking whether these developments have made TV more democratic’, they argue ‘it is necessary to ask how TV has been redesigned to accommodate more techniques of self-government and more forms of the democracy game, and how that development has been useful to a discourse and reasoning about the present as being “more democratic” than before’ (206-207). In this way, the project Ouellette and Hay present in their book, clearly closes many roads that critical traditions in cultural media studies have been using for a long time, but at the same time it opens other interesting other routes that link up with the more recent attention for governmentality.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

Bio

Kristel Vandenbrande is lecturer in Media, Democracy & Journalism, Politics & Popular Media, and Qualitative Research Methodology at the Department of Communication Studies and senior-researcher at the Centre for Studies on Media and Culture, both at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB). Her research deals with glocalization, marketization and EU reporting; docu-soap production, governmentality & narration; political debates & power in institutionalized interactions; ICT and organizational changes in newsroom.

London: Sage, 2008.

Children’s media culture has been assuming a central position in public debates regarding cultural values, social norms and future expectations, but often these debates are media-oriented and ignore what has been researched on children’s cultures. This handbook, edited by two of the most prominent European researchers on Audience Studies, fills this void as it aims ‘ to map out the diversities and the commonalities in children’s media culture around the world as they are positioned in relation to particular sites, at particular times and within particular social relations’, as the authors say (4[1]).

Although based on the work of mostly European authors, this International Handbook travels the world, collecting contributions from research conducted in Africa, Latin and North America, the Middle East, India and Asia-Pacific countries, pointing to the importance of global and comparative perspectives on children and media.

Another aim of the editors is to bring together contributions from different fields, ‘in order to scope the interdisciplinary domain of research on children, media and culture, and to demonstrate its collective strengths as well as highlighting the current gaps in knowledge’ (4). As such, this book invites its readers to explore many and very distinct points of view, and the interconnections and cross-fertilization between studies of media and of childhood.

Taking the historical, geographical and social dynamics of children’s media culture into account, the book is organized in four parts. Part 1, Continuities and Change, discusses children’s media culture from a historical perspective. Archaeological approaches are used to analyze and explore sets of social arrangements such as children’s relations with material and symbolic technologies, or children’s relations with toys (as objects) and media (as symbolic resources). These archeological approaches adjust the rather common determinist and linear ideas about childhood and media, while producing interesting insights that trace commonalities among different ages and generations. All the authors in this part of the book (Alan Prout and Patricia Holland (UK), Dan Fleming (New Zealand) and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (Canada)) underline the role that media play in shaping children’s lives, not only today but also in the past. Throughout different levels of analysis and theoretical frameworks, the chapters of Part 1 contribute to a better understanding of modern (and westernized) definitions of children and childhood. For instance, Prout presents an interesting meta-discursive analysis of the construction of childhood within the ideological frameworks of modernity, based on dichotomies such as nature vs. culture (e.g. Darwinism or the nation-state thinking). From within the paradigm of the new sociology of childhood but also based on developmental psychology, Prout deconstructs the modern concept of childhood, and stresses how technological devices are an important factor in rethinking the idea of a world divided into mutually exclusive entities. In conclusion, Prout sustains that the study of childhood should involve an inclusive vision, a ‘reconceptualisation of childhood’s ontology’, moving towards seeing children as a multiplicity of ‘nature-cultures’, ‘a variety of complex hybrids constituted from heterogeneous materials (biological, social, individual, historical, technological, special, material, discursive, etc.) and emergent through time’ (33).

Conceiving of childhood as a social, cultural and political concept, Holland analyses ‘the popular imagery and the public imagery designed for indiscriminate public consumption and widely circulated within the media and public spaces’ (37, authors’ italics removed), and uses a interdisciplinary framework involving the sociology of childhood, visual culture studies and semiotics. In order to understand the public imagery of childhood that includes particular representations of children (such as consumers, students or ‘other’ children), the author presents visual moments associated with the ‘birth of childhood’ in different times and within different socio-cultural Western contexts. An imagery of children as ‘playful innocents,’ which emerged from paintings in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, was adopted by corporations as support for their ‘marketing of sentiment’. This imagery is still present (in postcards or in traditional brands, for instance) and is the counterpart of other imageries: the evil boy, the sexy girl or even the hybridization between adults and children, in the ‘transgenerational address’ (50) of consumerism that requires childish qualities.

Other contributions explore old and recent toys as tools that promote modern definitions of childhood (Fleming), and how media interactivity has been explored since the moveable books of the early eighteenth century to contemporary videogames (Reid-Walsh). Both articles stress also commonalities that span time, in spite of societal changes.

The challenge for this historical perspective is how to avoid the ‘bias of sources’ since the children’s own accounts tend to be sparse in the historical studies of children’s media culture, a question which also involves the present and the future. As the editors say (19-20): ‘for while children around the world produce an abundance of mediatized communication today, just how many text messages or chat strings are stored and by which criteria? How will we know about the significance young people pay for being offline or online, if studying their social uses is decoupled from their textual practices?’

Part 2, Problematics, is organized around the persistent and ongoing concerns over children and the media. Common to the eight contributions in this part is the consideration that ‘public concerns over children and media are not chiefly about media, but about socio-cultural relations of authority and negotiation of cultural and social boundaries’ (87). These socio-cultural relations involve changes in relation to concepts such as free-time and leisure, public and private spaces, dependency and autonomy, to name but a few.

Again coming from developed industrial countries, such as the UK (Chas Critcher, Leslie Haddon and Máire Messenger Davies), Denmark (Anne Jersley), Israel (Dafna Lemish), the USA (Stewart Hoover, Lyn Schofield Clark, Rich Ling and James Paul Gee) and Australia (Jane Kenway and Elisabeth Bullen), the authors tend to reflect on appropriations and re-appropriations of frames of experience in [Western] societies, where ‘authority negotiations have moved away from the area of work and into the spheres of school and leisure’ (88).

Changes in relation to the role of time in the children’s everyday lives are analyzed by both Lemish and Jerslev, from the toddlers’ appropriation of TV timetables to the adolescents’ choices when watching video. Spatial experiences are particularly complex in the era of mobile media, with the mobile phone illustrating contradictions and negotiations between autonomy and parental control (Haddon and Ling) or with commercial video games blurring borders between learning and entertainment (Gee). Moreover, children’s voices and experiences (Messenger Davies) tend to be excluded. Critcher notes how reoccurring waves of moral panics about children and media (film, radio, comics, TV, video games, computer, …) have been associated with ‘class-based cultural preferences and mythical images of childhood’ (103). The contrast between this search for moral regulation and the ever-present negotiations that surround consumption (pictured by Kenway and Bullen) and media uses in the households (in the ethnographic research of Hoover and Clark), points to ‘the need for more detailed studies, attuned to the often imperceptible, but significant, ambivalence involved in family negotiations over media’, as the editors comment (89). Drotner and Livingstone also question the socio-cultural (Westernized) backgrounds of these analyses, asking if the ‘contradictory taxonomies of childhood are particular to Western, industrialized societies or to frames of understanding embedded in Christian religious traditions’, or whether ‘they reflect more deep-seated adult ambiguities concerning power and control over offspring on whom adults will ultimately be dependent’ (90).

Part 3, Cultures and Contexts, is the most ‘cosmopolitan’ section of this International Handbook, with ten contributions from research conducted in several countries from all continents: South Africa (Larry Strelitz and Priscilla Boshoff), China (Bu Wei), India (Usha S. Nayar and Amita Bhide), Brazil (Norbert Wildermuth), Greenland (Jette Rygaard), Hungary (Maria Heller) and the UK (David Buckingham). This section also includes analyses from the Asia-Pacific region (Stephanie H. Donald), the Arab countries (Marwan Kraidy and Joe F. Khalil) and a cross-continental research on the ways children consider television culture (Caronia and Caron).

A cultural studies approach to the analysis of children and media is presented by Buckingham, reviewing its academic narration and noting that in the Birmingham centre, children were almost entirely absent from the research agenda. ‘Social class, gender and “race” were key concerns: but age, as an equally significant dimension of social power, was strangely neglected’ (220). At the same time, cultural studies has contributed to the study of children and media by placing ‘the attention on the ways in which meanings are established, negotiated and circulated’ (221, author’s italics removed). Besides Buckingham, who has conducted research on three levels (media production, texts and audiences), other contributions in this book also use cultural studies approaches, for instance in relation to youth subcultures (Jersley or Ling and Haddon).

A focus on reception and on the uses of media formats and contents by young people is present in the research conducted in different cultural contexts such as today’s South Africa, Brazil or Greenland, and the former socialist country Hungary (Heller). Streklitz and Boshoof integrate a culturalist with a political economy perspective to question concepts such as national identity in a contemporary African context. Exploring ‘the hybrid intersection of global and local’ (243), visible in youth practices, Streklitz and Boshoof take aim at a ‘textual determinism’ and subscribe to Ang’s call for ‘radical contextualism’ in media studies (249). A similar approach is used by Rygaard, focusing on ‘cultural aspects of globalization as seen through the eyes of young people in Greenland’ (255). In the deprived Recife, Wildermuth follows practices and voices of disadvantaged Brazilian adolescents and underlines how far they are removed from the choice-making possibilities that characterizes the Western and North media-centered lifestyles.

The fourth part, Perspectives, invites the readers to reflect on and to reconfigure the concept of children’s media culture. It draws upon a diversity of themes and subjects, both from a political economy and cultural studies approach: media mixing and participatory contexts (Ito), the de-Westernization of research stressing the contrast between concepts of public and private spaces in Japanese and Western cultures (Takahashi), media literacy and its challenges and distinct meanings (Hobbs), the media in the changing family (Pasquier), the pressures of commodification (Wasko), the demands of media regulation (Oswell), the potential of interactive media to revitalize civic and political participation (Dahlgren and Olofsson) and the potential for including communication rights within the children’s rights movement (Hamelink).

In conclusion, the intersection of insights from two academic fields, the sociology of childhood and media and communication studies, has produced a rich understanding of the specificities of children’s life contexts grounded in a more general perspective on media, culture and society. This is a stimulating reading for researchers from different backgrounds, as well as for students, regulators and those interested in social and cultural issues that emerge in contemporary societies.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

Bio

Cristina Ponte, PhD, lectures at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and has done research on children and media for years. She led an interdisciplinary project, Children and Young People in the news (2005-2007), which included children and young people’s perspectives. She is a member of the EU Kids Online network (www.eukidsonline.net), coordinating the Portuguese team. Her work focuses on TV programs for children, media literacy, and decision-making processes involving young people, but also on journalism and social issues.

New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2006.

Information and communication technologies are becoming more prominent everywhere, especially in their mobile form. The increasing variety of mobile communication devices is affecting people’s lives dramatically, directly and on a vast scale. As for the mobile phone itself, no technology has ever been adopted so quickly by so many people in so many different parts of the world.

With about two billion mobile users worldwide and mobile services proliferating, James E. Katz tries to analyze the mobile communication revolution and the social transformations both stimulated by and reflected within it. In fact, this is the second book he has written about the telephone, although the previous one (Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life) analysed both the fixed-line and the mobile phone. The main purpose of this publication is to reflect upon how people make sense of this technology and how this technology changes human beings both as individuals and as social participants. The volume is divided into two major sections. The first section deals specifically with mobile phones and their use, their abuse and the social consequences of both. The second section deals with the social role of telecommunication and information. Throughout the volume, Katz uses many different modes of argument and evidence in addressing the different issues. For some of his claims he provides empirical substantiation, other insights are based on selected examples uncovered by observers and reporters, while still other ideas are founded on his own professional judgments and even speculations about the future.

The author’s reflection starts with an explanation of which mobile communication technology has been adopted and heavily used in many places around the world in order to pursue and promote spiritual matters. This fact inspired the Apparatgeist theory (Katz & Aakhus, 2002), which is extensively explained in the book. This theory predicts that personal ICTs would be increasingly embraced as spiritual emissaries and are even imputed to have spiritual powers themselves. In this respect, Katz considers the astrological services that are available via SMS, the way churches use ICTs for spiritually connecting with their members, and the magical powers ascribed to some mobile phone numbers. Later, he addresses the way that ‘being there’ in space and time seems to have been modified due to the use of mobile communication technologies. On the one hand, some people often feel irritated by others’ mobile communication in public spaces. On the other hand, many of us try to maintain perpetual contact with significant others through these communication devices. At the same time Katz analyses the way people behave while using mobiles, stating that public performance dimensions have been underscored by other researchers. Mobile communication usage resembles for him a form of folk dance as it is performed in public, with the performers acting in a rhythmic and ritualistic way (61[1]). Katz emphasizes that users are co-creators and tend to manipulate their devices in order to reflect personal tastes and to present themselves to the outside world. Moreover, for the author, knowing how to use the mobile phone with ease can give users prestige, as it strongly influences others’ perceptions. Following this line of thought, he gives many examples of the way mobile communication technologies have become fashionable designer objects. Katz emphasizes the importance of fashion and identity in the co-creation and consumption of mobile communication technology. Basically, mobile phone buyers are clustered into two different categories: those who purchase a mobile as a communication tool and those who buy one partly because of the status that a design, logo or brand imparts. According to Katz, this second category is in fact more numerous than the first. The mobile phone should not only be seen as a ‘necessary accessory’ for the body; it also is a communication device which reflects and embodies the user, and is used to communicate effectively with both the person to whom the call is directed and with the audience which is physically present around the user.

As far as the role of mobile communication in schools is concerned, Katz gives ample evidence of the growth in mobile phone ownership among teen-agers in some parts of Asia, Scandinavia and the USA. Mobile phones can be very useful in schools, as they connect students with teachers and other students, and help them deal with class attendance issues, rearrange meetings, provide information about the schedules and assignment data, discuss assignments, coordinate study groups, and seek help with academic and life problems. However, Katz also gives evidence of negative behavior associated with the use of the mobile in the classroom, such as disrupting class, stealing mobile phones, bullying, cheating, and even the teachers’ own use of the mobile phone in class.

At the end of the first section Katz emphasizes the uses and social consequences of telecommunication technologies in modern society, and illustrates this with a very particular case. He analyses the way people used the telephone and related technologies to address the situation and to fulfill their communication needs during the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. In this chapter, based on personal testimonies, ample evidence is given about the way telephone technology can be used as a medium of faith, hope, terror and redemption.

In the second section of the book, Katz explains the impact which the telephone has had during the last century, and the way it has affected the structure and quality of human life. Its effects can be seen in every area of human existence, from business to sex, and even in the way in which war and peace are conducted, i.e. it exercises an influence at every level, from an international to a personal level, for instance on the family unit itself. Katz discusses the influence that the telephone has had on the geographical distribution of people, on the economic development, and on political and social interactions. As far as mobile telephones are concerned, in an age of increasing perpetual contact, the mobile can seem to take on the role of a dictator because the opportunities for supervision are enormous. Yet, despite the frustration, which too much supervision can provoke, Katz argues that on the whole the telephone has become a servant to those pursuing profit and pleasure, rather than a dictator. ‘On balance, the telephone has clearly done far more to liberate humanity than to enslave it.’ (130)

In the next chapter the author highlights some major theoretical perspectives on the information Society. He begins by reflecting about the meaning of the term information: its relation to change, culture, control and knowledge. He also addresses the digital division as a very important issue concerning social equity. As far as the theoretical perspectives on the social role of information are concerned, materialists (such as Touraine (1971), Bell (1973) or Schiller (1984)) tend to see information as a means of production in the post-industrial society, whereas idealists see information as something that comes into existence independently of social circumstances. From a world-systems perspective, ells (2000) maintains that information is both the raw material and the outcome of processes of technological change. Katz describes the contrast in views adopted by researchers whose orientation towards the information society is economic and those whose approach is based on cultural studies. He points out that the former consider the information society to have objective qualities and measurable entities, whereas the latter believe that the information society is both dynamic and multi-layered and, therefore, does not lend itself to definitive measurements, which might even be misleading and irrelevant.

As far as the consequences of the use of digital communication for social interaction are concerned, even though Turkle (1995) predicted that the sense of community and societal integration would be lost, Katz and Rice (2002) emphasize that digital communication provides a valuable opportunity for people to express themselves and to create new relationships. In the near future the combination of mobile communication with the internet will provide new opportunities as well as new problems. Staying away from the Marxist-inspired view of a centralized information superstructure, Katz remarks that personal communication technology has contributed to decentralize that superstructure, as many co-producers are now spreading their own views.

In the last chapter, based on an examination of the past developments, Katz carries out a speculative exercise and attempts to ascertain how life will be lived in the year 2076, two hundred years after the telephone’s invention. As a major trend, he foresees enormous progress in integrating electronic and genetically engineered systems with the human body. As a result, sending a message in 2076 would involve the same processes of planning and acting, as it does now, but the difference would be that these processes would take place at the mental level. So, checking our email (better described as our ‘mind mail’) would just mean activating our mind to look at it, review it and respond to it. He also explores the possibility of being able to inspect the biochemically stored memories of dead people or of implanting someone’s memories in the mind of someone else. Obviously, such questions would require new social conventions and the creation of ethical limits in order to avoid abuses. As a whole, Katz adopts an optimistic attitude towards progress in communication technologies as, he believes that ‘rather than extinguishing liberty and privacy communication technology seems to be extending them’. (171)

Magic in the Air contains a clear message. Katz principally wishes to encourage the undertaking of empirical research on mobile communication technologies. This is a question which comes up frequently throughout Katz’s book and he suggests that scholars should concentrate on this type of research. Within this work the author provides substantial empirical support and frequently quotes data referring to the behaviour of mobile telephone users. However, whilst this information is obviously of great interest and useful, I would have liked to have seen a stronger focus on the way users make sense of this technology and the way they interpret the role that this technology plays in their everyday lives. In my opinion, the book would have benefitted from a cultural studies approach.

Reading of Magic in the Air by James E. Katz causes one to reflect upon the revolutionary changes that are taking place in society as a consequence of the mass-usage of mobile communication systems, and makes one aware of the far reaching effects that these technologies may have upon our lives and society in general in the near future.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Bell, D. (1973) The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social foreing. New York: Semiotext(e).

ells, M. (2000) The internet Galaxy. New York: Oxford University Press.

Katz, J. E. (1999) Connections: Social and Cultural Studies of the Telephone in American Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Katz, J. E., Aakus, M. (Eds.) (2002) Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Katz, James E., Rice, R. E. (2002) Social consequences of internet use: Access, involvement and interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schiller, H. I. (1984) Information and the crisis economy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Touraine, A. (1971) The post-industrial society: Tomorrow’s social history. Classes, conflicts and culture in the programmed society. New York: Random House.

Turkle, S. (1995) Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Bio

Maialen Garmendia is a Senior Lecturer in Social Research Techniques in the Sociology Department of the Faculty of Social and Communication Sciences at the University of the Basque Country. Her research interests include media audiences, gender issues and digital communication.

Budapest, New York: CEU Press, 2008.

In 2009, it will be the 20th anniversary of ‘the fall of the wall’, which triggered the transformation of the sociopolitical systems of the former Soviet bloc and which was – in Claus Offe´s words – ‘an unprecedented, special case of rapid social change’ (Offe, 1999; quoted by Jakubowicz, 2001: 60). Not surprisingly, the jubilee has revived the debates on the course of the transformation in these Central and Eastern European (CEE) societies. As to the communication processes concerned, the debate has – since the beginning of the 90s – focused almost exclusively on the structural characteristics of the CEE media systems (Dobek-Ostrowska & Glowacki, 2008). It is notable that media cultures – unlike the lavishly covered media systems – have hardly ever been analyzed as a fully-fledged dimension of the transformation processes. This is regrettable because when we ask questions about the processes of social and political change, cultural processes (including the new transactions between uncensored media articulations and associated multiple realities constructed by audiences) should not be dismissed. Support for this line of thinking can be found in the concept of cultural citizenship, which highlights the ways communities are cultivated through reading practices (Hermes, 2005: 10). The process of cementing the polis by public meaning transactions, often attached to widely used popular (social and cultural) texts, has to be included. The transformation of the authoritarian past is not complete, if it resists the inclusion of ‘soft’ elements like meaning production and collective/public memory maintenance. For this reason, books on the CEE transformations that deal with media and popular cultures should be welcomed. Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989, a reader with chapters written by scholars connected to the CEU Budapest/New York, belongs to this extraordinary breed. The importance of the role of meaning generation procedures in the transformation process is emphasized, for instance by Zsolt K. Horváth in his chapter. He writes: ‘… the image of the socialist past has been re-shaped as a result of various social, political and cultural developments. It will be argued that this process should be understood as a predominantly symbolic struggle for the ability to define the meaning of the history of the socialist period’ (249-250)[1].

The book is devoted to the visual representations of the socialist/communist past and the forms they took in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Bulgaria, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, the former Yugoslavia and Romania[2]. The interconnected processes of visualization of the past, and the collective memory sedimentation are the main focus in all three parts – Documents of Communism: Lost and Found (3-113), Subjects of Nostalgia: Selling the Past (115-243) and Objects of Memory: Museums, Monuments, Memorials (245-400). A comprehensible introduction has been written by Oksana Sarkisova and Péter Apor. The book thus brings together perspectives of linked but still distinctive ways of enquiry: visual studies, cultural studies, area studies, museum studies and contemporary history with its passion for ethnography and oral evidence.

The book starts with the part on the access to the archives of the secret communist police forces, containing ‘explosive’ personal files. Various forms of accessing top secret archives can be seen as ways to cross the border between states of visibility and invisibility. The challenges of bringing something formerly invisible into the open are manifold and include the moral philosophy perspective on one hand (3-56) and the technical limitations of historical investigation to produce completeness and accuracy on the other hand (57-79). The second section provides thorough insights into the proliferation of nostalgic representations of the socialist past in the CEE region after 1989. Being especially interested in the thematic structure and codes of nostalgia, the chapters explore cinema and television production in (Post-)Yugoslavia (117-141), Russia (143-180), Poland (181-214) and the Czech Republic (215-243). The last part uses the most orthodox approach which is inspired by cultural materialism as articulated by Raymond Williams. It reviews how (the memory of) the socialist past translates into a selection of objects for newly established museums (Williams, 2005: 243). Expositions which were created after the collapse of the socialist regimes, which recapitulated both political events and the everyday imagery of the socialist period, are the focal points. We can conclude that the patchwork of chapters represents a more than acceptable combination of two culturalist approaches: textual analysis (especially in the Nostalgia part) and cultural materialism (in the Documents and Museums parts).

One of the common threads which stitch the chapters together and turn the collection into a quite homogenous regional report on an updated ‘structure of feeling’, are the authors’ horizons referring to the experience of being post-socialist in a postmodern condition. The book helps to sense that there is something peculiar about reconsidering, revisiting and even rejecting a politically evil regime from the perspective that does not allow for any clear discrimination between what is ultimately good and evil. Simultaneity seems to be an important strategy for both researchers and filmmakers as objects of their enquiry. In many cases chapters recall visual texts which deplore the socialist regime while they simultaneously remain aware of the limits of any orthodoxy. This attitude of alertness and reflexivity is far removed from any ‘so-we-will-be-free-now’ optimism, and the collapse of this particular ideology is combined with the awareness that ‘ideology is not a historically specific bad thing’, as John Corner put it elsewhere (Corner, 2001: 527). In addition, the limits of the genres and formal rules are also reflected upon, for instance in Nevena Dakovic´s characterization of Kusturica´s famous Underground: ‘The metafictional perspective is created through a self-referential, narcissistic discourse about film history, popular culture and the making of fiction’ (124). References to ironical representations of socialism, especially its economical prosperity – Kasper Poblocki sees it as an ‘economical farce’ and a ‘political tragedy’ (205) – are also to be noticed. Petra Dominkova points to the Czech comedy The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday (1992) (225), and the Russian documentary Monologue: Private Chronicles is seen by Oksana Sarkisova as ‘at once keeping an ironic distance from the narrative and deeply internalizing it’ (167). More examples of how understanding post-socialism and the postmodern condition interlock, can be found in passages that prize everyday mundane memory as a key element and favor it to ‘hard’ historical records of major events. For instance Sarkisova, who describes Russian cinema developments, calls this the ‘…growing prominence of everyday life with the primary goal of survival among the most absurd and oppressive circumstances’ (168). The post-socialist period thus clearly appears to be an overdetermined social formation, shaped by a simultaneous reconciliation of both the socialist regime collapse and the crisis of modernity.[3] Allusions to the tight interwovenness of post-socialism and postmodernism – which are not rare in the book – confirm that contemporary CEE societies can never be fully understood unless both parts of this articulation are taken into account.

The notion of collective memory is another line running through the entire book. Memory studies are clearly an important part of the CEU matrix of the analysis of the socialist past. The collective spirit of the reader draws heavily on Pierre Nora´s concept of sites of memory (lieux de mémoire) (Nora, 1984: xvii-xiii), as indicated on several occasions (119, 249). Together with this French historian, the authors of Past for the Eyes accept collective memory as the prime producer of relevant interpretations of the past, the one that writes positivist history off, as it has turned into a rigid academic discipline. The authors explicitly discriminate between ‘history’ and ‘past’, favoring the second conception, as is even manifested in the title of the book. The idea of a single history is handled as an anachronism – from the perspective of both writers and their subjects of analysis, histories are numerous and diverse. Some of the reviewed films and television shows claim so themselves, by working with amateurish documentary footage. The Hungarian filmmaker and video/media-artist Peter Forgács is a prime example of mapping the 20th century by collecting and editing film fragments from private family albums. His collage Kadar´s Kiss (part of a larger project called Private Hungary) is recollected in the chapter by Balász Varga. In sum, New Historicism provides the essays with their paradigmatic roots. The interest in collective memory processes consequently leads to questions about its sources and to enquiries about specifics sites of this type of memory in visual culture.

Some might argue though that collective memory is presented as a rather taken-for-granted ‘thing’ that simply exists. The concept could be embedded more in memory studies, articulating its differences with other types of memories, e.g. national memory. This distinction would also be helpful because some of the CEE countries have recently founded national memory institutions: The Institute of National Memory (Czech Republic), The Institute of National Remembrance (Poland) and The Nation’s Memory Institute (Slovakia). Furthermore, it is not entirely clear in the reader if collective memory is a source of visual representation or if visual representations serve as food for collective memory. It could be suggested (unsurprisingly) that these elements interact and that there is a relationship of mutual structuration (in Giddens´ sense). Such an idea of collective memory as constant interaction with no fixed beginning or ending is proposed by Wulf Kansteiner. According to him, collective memory is the interaction among ‘intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers that selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artifacts according to their interests’ (Kansteiner, 2002: 180). Kansteiner´s reflections on collective memory are highly valuable as he bridges history and media reception studies. In fact, he captures collective memory by building an analogy with public opinion. From this perspective, collective memory acquires the contours of a site open to opposing hegemonic vectors, a space that can be intermittently seized by dominant interpretations, but also by resistive popular excorporations.[4] Kansteiner´s emphasis on memory makers as well as on memory consumers, illuminates the moment that is missing in Past for the Eyes, i.e. the audience or users of visual representations of the past.

Except for the above-discussed recurring motifs which appear in the majority of the contributions in the reader, there are also remarkable observations that are unique to individual chapters. István Rév´s opening article in the Documents section deals with the Hungarian version of soul searching incarnated by the world famous film director István Szabó (accused of betrayal in the period after 1956). Rév is not afraid to use the frame of shame, guilt and moral philosophy (though not accepting it fully himself) (6). Revisiting the heroic settings of those days invites a comparison with contemporary post-heroic versions of guilt. Stories of collaboration (far from being black and white) offer the contrast: whereas heroic guilt followed from a lack (of courage, strength, commitment, …), post-heroic guilt follows from excessive consumption (viewing guilt, eating guilt, …). Whereas heroic guilt was organized into clear categories (did collaborate, did not collaborate), the post-heroic guilt, rooted in excess instead of lack, is a matter of degree.

The Nostalgia section addresses one of the most notable sociological and cultural processes in post-socialist countries. The editors correctly suggest that ‘its application to the socialist past has received insufficient attention’ (xvii). Though the chapters of this section concentrate almost solely on nostalgia encoded in analyzed visual texts and audience passion for ‘socialist kitsch’ are mostly left to speculation, Past for the Eyes still associates nostalgia with innovative observations. One of the most challenging insights is the economical theory of post-socialist nostalgia developed by Kacper Poblocki.[5] He suggests that successful representations of socialist imagery reduce the socialist past to photogenic artifacts and props for commercial reasons, which means that they treat material fragments of socialism as fetish objects. (The fetishist ‘propsization’ of the collective remembrance of socialism is also mentioned by Oksana Sarkisova in her chapter on Russian cinema. She recalls the movie Soviet period Park where the props are in fact the actors, e.g. an imitation of Kremlin at a Turkish resort (177)).

More evidence about reification and commodity fetishism can be found in the Museum part. The exhaustive contribution of Izabella Main (a comprehensible and intelligent record of Polish forms of exhibiting socialism as an historical era) points to the cult Proletaryat Café in Poznan. The description of the café’s interior unintentionally provides an excellent example of fetishism in reference to the past. ‘The walls and the counter are red; there are red flags and posters from the epoch encouraging people to fight class enemies. Drinks are served in old glasses which were actually mustard containers. The menu lists many kinds of alcohol, Polish and foreign, but also a special beer labeled ‘Proletaryat’ (376). In the Czech Republic, the function of the entire Poznan café’s decoration was taken up by the picture of a single plastic coffee spoon.[6] Depicted on the film poster for Cozy Dens, it became an icon of socialist everyday life. Petra Dominkova also recalls it in her chapter (221).

To return to the issue of the post-socialist/postmodern structure of feeling, Dominkova noticed an interesting feature: ‘When reading about contemporary cinema we rarely find films classified simply as “comedies” – the word is usually accompanied by adjectives like “musical”, “nostalgic”, “period”, “bitter”, “Bitter-sweet” or given the prefix “tragic-”. … It sometimes feels as if the Czechs invented a few sub-genres in order to make the majority of films fit somehow into the broad genre of “comedy”.’ We could also come up with the interpretation that Czech filmmakers are reluctant to claim affiliation to the classical, traditional, original genre and try to develop their own sub-genres on the basis of ‘estrangement’ or ‘defamiliarization’. The relationship of genre to sub-genre innovations is one of model to its copy. The diminutive act of differing post-socialist Czech comedies from the classical comedian pattern in fact mirrors the whole process of social and political transformation in post-soviet societies.[7] The process of transformation intrinsically assumes questions about ‘what are we transformed into?’ and ‘what example do we follow on the road of transformation?’. Transformation thus becomes the purely imitative act of relating oneself to the previously applied modes and models. Post-socialist societies mimic the already proven (capitalist/liberal/market) model. In consequence, the social mentality reacts with self-defensive reflexivity. This is a kind of ‘we know we cannot be authentic in what we do, so we will be authentic in how we ridicule it’. Irony, parody, nostalgia, the grotesque, cynicism and distancing oneself are all doubly-articulated markers of the post-socialist/postmodern ‘episteme’ and – as vividly illustrated in Past for the Eyes – can be found in many cultural texts produced in this time and space.

Notes

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

[2] A note on the denomination of ‘the regime’ is needed here. The title of the book refers to the period of ‘socialism’. On the other occasions, the same period and political system is called ‘communism’. Editors explain why they decided to apply this rather benevolent attitude: ‘There remains a plurality of the terms in use in the region – “Communism”, “Socialism”, “State-Socialism”, and “really existing Socialism” among others – which has provoked both reflection and criticism. …our decision was to preserve the diversity of terminology used by the authors and the subjects of their analysis … to further exemplify the heterogeneity of the region’. This also implies refraining from the use of the term totalitarianism, a position suggested by Slavoj Žižek. Because of its reference to fascism, Žižek takes the term as an archetypical (and false) argument articulating any left critique of liberal democracy as a dangerous risk of retreating into fascism (Žižek, 2007: 5).

[3] Although the socialist political and economical system was nothing but a perverse version of modernity, and could not be seen in opposition to it, as explained by the Czech-Italian philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky (1991). Belohradsky was building on Havel, according to which the relationship of communism and modern western society is one of a ‘convex mirror’ (Havel, 1994). (Havel´s philosophical essay was originally written in the symbolic year 1984 for his Doctor Honoris Causa Award from the University of Toulouse-LeMirail. It was read aloud by Tom Stoppard on behalf of the author who could not participate personally.)

[4] From this perspective, Wittlinger is only partially right, when she proposes an analogy between collective memory and ideology (Wittlinger, 2007: 44).

[5] Though Poblocki presents also a disputable political economy of the socialist popular culture revival in the 90s. He ascribes support for nostalgic television programming to the political climate created by the Polish post-communist party that won the elections in 1995. However, the case of the Czech Republic with its changing governments of social democrats and liberal conservatives, and its still persisting demand for television shows, serial narratives and pop-music icons produced before 1989, calls Poblocki´s argument into question.

[6] The plastic coffee-spoon became a symbol of DDR merchandise and the widespread chemical industry. Plastic coffee spoons were exported from the DDR to all country-members of the economic union of the Soviet bloc (RVHP) and were turned into a symbolic object.

[7] As far as ‘differing’ also necessarily means ‘deferring’ in Derrida´s sense, the poststructuralist interpretation of the act would classify it as a never-ending endeavor. This intuition might also be an important part of the post-socialist structure of feeling.

References

Dobek-Ostrowska, B., Glowacki, M. (Eds.) (2008) Comparing media systems in Central Europe. Between commercialization and politicization. Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego.

Belohradsky, V. (1991) Prirozený svet jako politický problem. (Lebenswelt as a political issue.) Praha: Ceskoslovenský spisovatel.

Corner, J. (2001) ‘Ideology: a note on conceptual salvage’, Media, Culture, Society, 23(3): 525-533.

Havel, V. (1994) Spisy: Eseje a jiné texty z let 1970-1989. (Collected Papers: Essays and other texts 1970-1989). Vol. 4. Praha: Torst.

Hermes, J. (2005) Re-reading popular culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Jakubowicz, K. (2001) ‘Social and Media Change in Central and Eastern Europe’, Javnost (The Public), 8(4): 59-80.

Kansteiner, W. (2002) ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory, 41(2): 179-197.

Nora, P. (Ed.) (1984) ‘Entre mémoire et histoire. La problematique des lieux’, in: Les Lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, pp. xvii – xiii

Offe, C. (1999) Drogi transformacji. Doswiadzenia wschodnioeuropejskie i wschodnioniemieckie. Warsaw-Krakow: Wydawnictwo naukowe PWN.

Williams, R. (2005) Culture and Materialism. Selected Essays. London: Verso.

Wittlinger, R. (2007) ‘British-German Relations and Collective Memory’, German Politics and Society, 25(3):  42-69.

Žižek, S. (2007) Mluvil tu nekdo o totalitarismu? (Did Somebody say Totalitarianism?). Praha: Tranzit.

Bio

Irena Reifova, PhD, is a lecturer and researcher at Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Media Studies. She teaches courses on critical media theories, cultural studies and media audiences. Her major scholarly interests are in popular television culture; she especially focuses on Czechoslovak and Czech serial television fiction. She is a co-author of a student book on quantitative content analysis, editor of the Dictionary of Media Communication, and translates media studies works from English. She is a member of the editorial board of the Czech and Slovak journal Media Studies and she is a lecturer at the ECREA Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School.

Manchester University Press: Manchester/New York, 2003.

Gareth Palmer’s main focus is on how television documentary shapes or aims to shape our conduct, lives and identities. Discipline and Liberty is about the processes of governance set in motion through television. Departing from a Foucauldian understanding of governance/government, and the work of governmentality studies scholars like Nikolas Rose, Mitchell Dean and Graham Burchell, governance is defined as ‘concerned […] with the calculated direction of conduct to shape behavior to certain ends.’ (3[1])

Traditionally, Palmer argues, the relationship between governance and television documentary was defined in terms of the installment of social citizenship. In the past, documentary was associated with the pedagogical production of ‘worthy citizens’. The aim of documentary was to provide citizens with the knowledge, language and tools to interact with state authorities. Palmer suggests that this relationship between citizens, documentary programming and governance has changed in the last two decades. This happened in reaction to a range of political, cultural, technological and economic changes, which also explain the rise of new, popular hybrid docu-genres, such as reality TV. In short, in Discipline and Liberty, Palmer explores this new relationship of television documentary with citizenship. He shows how conceptions of citizenship and the social, civility and morality, and the relationship between authorities and citizens have changed and how to understand the role of television documentary in these processes.

Palmer’s analysis is built on four (partially overlapping) dimensions. First comes the panoptic characteristic of contemporary documentary television and reality TV formats. These formats allow us to meet, to know, to scrutinize, and to monitor the behavior and identities of a diversity of distant others. Secondly, there is the governmental character of reality TV, that is how this genre is used by various actors and institutions to govern oneself and others. The ideological character of reality TV deals with the representations, and their underlying (neoliberal) discourses, promoted by reality TV. Fourthly, Palmer distinguishes the critical character of documentary television and reality TV, that is the critical, investigative potential of these genre(s) in the context of a changed relationship between documentary media and authorities.

The panoptic approach refers to the practices and technologies of surveillance underlying contemporary reality TV formats. Nowadays, reality TV formats, Palmer suggests, tempt us in one way or another to become part of a surveillance culture, monitoring and governing ourselves and others. Throughout his examination of different reality TV formats, Palmer shows how these formats contribute to the acceptance of both practices and technologies of surveillance in society. The first four chapters are mainly about the new police documentaries and crime programming. In this breed of CCTV-based documentary (e.g., America’s Dumbest Criminals, Crimewatch UK) viewers are offered the spectacle of a robbery or a real-time car chase. At the same time, they are suggested to monitor their neighborhoods and communities, secure their homes, and to collaborate with the police. Palmer argues that these formats contribute to the naturalization of surveillance culture. Palmer also examines how other reality TV genres draw heavily on and promote practices of (self-)surveillance and (self-)control. For example, a scam-show like Lie Detector deals with monitoring and disciplining one’s family, housemates or friends. A program like Video Diaries is for Palmer mainly about (ordinary) people’s practices of self-scrutiny and self-management.

In close connection to this panoptic characteristic, the second theme examined in Discipline and Liberty is the governmental character of reality TV. Reality TV genres are often considered new democratic spaces in which both viewers and participants can perform their identity politics. Palmer examines reality TV from another perspective, concentrating on how television documentary, and culture more generally, is associated with processes of social management. The specificity of this theoretical approach is in alignment with the fairly recent governmentalist shift in cultural studies. The governmentalist turn (e.g. Bennett, 1995; Barnett, 1999) examines the relation between culture and governance, defining governance as the deployment and mobilization of cultural practices in order to constitute morally elevated and civilized populations. It questions how cultural practices are constituted by and constitutive of a moral order, and how they become the object of modern strategies of governance. Likewise, Palmer sees culture as ‘a set of practices aimed at producing – in line with governmental objectives – self-regulating, self-governing individuals’ (18). Television documentary and reality TV can then be seen as means for governing individuals, communities or whole populations. Palmer links this conception of governance to the aforementioned panoptic characteristic of reality TV. As in these formats individuals are subjected to surveillance and scrutiny, they are simultaneously subjected to a range of normalizing discourses about what is considered to be appropriate behavior or moral conduct. But the governable character of reality TV is also connected to what Palmer calls its synoptic characteristic: ‘it offers the opportunity for the many to look at the few […] while the many now see the few we are encouraged to learn the lesson of self-discipline’ (148). As reality TV allows for opportunities to see ourselves, and for others to see us, it increases our awareness about how we conduct ourselves in public and private spaces. Reality TV is involved with morality as it allows viewers to judge others and at the same time asks them to examine themselves. Both the therapeutic discourses in talk-shows like Judge Judy or the instructional discourses in crime programming invite us to participate in responsabilizing strategies and to judge ourselves (and others) on the basis of the frameworks of morality and authority offered by these programs.

Thirdly, the ideological character of reality TV is associated with its neoliberal representations of society. As mentioned above, reality TV offers us spaces to scrutinize ourselves, to question ourselves and maybe to remodel or transform ourselves. Indeed, the testimony, the malleability, and the transformation of the self are central to reality TV. The underlying ideology of reality TV, Palmer argues, is the promise of empowerment through self-belief. Empowerment is seen to be grounded in liberal discourses, and in what can be called a burgeoning enterprise culture. In this enterprise culture we are asked to scrutinize and realize ourselves in order to ‘be all that we can be’ (176). Palmer furthermore suggests that – as the self in reality TV is constructed as a ‘transformative project’ – reality TV formats neglect or avoid to ‘engage with the social, moral and political contexts in which selves are formed’ (176). He argues that the majority of reality TV genres sidestep social and political issues, as the emphasis is mostly on the individual. In crime programming, for example, the focus is on the victim, rather than on the offender or the reasons behind the criminal behavior, such poverty, unemployment or the lack of resources. In his analysis of Neighbours from Hell, Palmer argues that ‘what remains uninvestigated are the reasons why neighbourhoods become the “hellish” places that they are’ (126). Likewise, government responsibilities such as urban planning or socially inclusive policies remain mostly unaddressed in these reality TV shows. Palmer shows how these programs offer us representations of how people govern themselves within ‘chaotic’ and ‘disordered’, ‘uncivil’ and ‘dangerous’ worlds. Moreover, the idea of self-governance is presented as a democratizing force, as ordinary people nowadays become involved in the maintenance of order and morality. Citizenship, Palmer suggests, thus becomes redefined in terms of self-governance and moral responsibility, and empowerment becomes articulated within a broader neoliberal framework.

Fourthly, the critical potential of the aforementioned formats is another important strand of analysis in Palmer’s book. He suggests that television documentary nowadays is far removed from its traditional objectives rooted in a public service ethos. Documentary is no longer fulfilling a crucial role in enabling societal debate, and in questioning authorities. Palmer argues that this critical, investigate role has vanished in the context of reality TV. He argues for example that, rather than critically investigating the growing surveillance culture that characterizes public life in both the United States and Britain, contemporary reality TV formats have become an integral part of it. In the first chapters of the book, Palmer contextualizes how the relationship between police authorities and documentary-makers has changed, and has become more reciprocal and collaborative over the last decades, resulting in uncritical accounts of police work. Furthermore, Palmer highlights how crime programs sacrifice analysis for spectacle, reinforce stereotypes and fail to foster a deeper understanding of criminality.

These four themes are analyzed within the context of a range of older and more recent reality TV formats. Palmer takes a holistic approach and situates the changes in television documentary and the rise of reality TV in what he calls a ‘changed discursive formation’: a complex of political and cultural changes that have affected the relationships between media, state authorities, and citizens, as well as our conceptions of citizenship and morality, of surveillance and liberty. He shows how the aforementioned panoptic, governmental, ideological characteristics of reality TV became interwoven with the characteristics of neoliberal, post-welfare societies. He successfully avoids a too media-centric account and uses a major part of his book to scrutinize how broader political and social changes work, and how they work through the reality TV formats. For instance, chapter five discusses Britain’s community life and politics, in order to put the series Neighbours from Hell into a political perspective. Similarly, chapter three shows how the new genre of police documentaries connects to the administrative criminology of the 1980s/1990s. This chapter highlights, for example, how a program like Crime Squad connects to UK policies on crime, and the shift from criminal rehabilitation to situational crime prevention. In the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when reality TV shows like Neighbours From Hell dealt with these very issues, the Tory Government strongly emphasized the re-articulations of citizenship and the responsabilization of the community. Although Palmer does not claim that there is some kind of intentional manufacturing of consent going on by the major power centers in society, much of the analysis in Discipline and Liberty deals with how reality TV plays a role in the reproduction of the neoliberal, post-welfare state.

However fruitful this contextualization of reality TV in relation to broader processes of governance is, it also risks becoming interpreted in too functionalist terms. At some points Discipline and Liberty tends to provide an image of reality TV as a practicable tool that can be used by authorities for governing populations. When reading about the program Crime Squad and its connection to neoliberal policy frameworks (promoting self-governance), one is inclined to overestimate the role of reality TV in fashioning individuals’ selves or in modeling communities. And although Palmer’s analysis does not ignore questions of audience reception, this perspective does not get much attention in the book.

More generally Discipline and Liberty provides a stimulating series of arguments, highlighting how documentary television and reality TV are implicated in modern forms of governance. Although an over-arching conclusion remains absent from the book, the last chapter on Big Brother is illustrative for the many questions one could ask. These questions deal with the processes of (self)governance in the context of the wide range of reality TV formats that are circulating in our contemporary media cultures. The book argues that the relationship between documentary media and citizenship has altered radically, expressing how reality TV renders viewer-citizens knowable and governable, how surveillance has become an accepted practice in both our media culture and society, and how reality TV connects to and produces neoliberal discourses.

Note

[1] References to the reviewed book contain only the page number(s).

References

Barnett, C. (1999) ‘Culture, government and spatiality. Reassessing the “Foucault effect” in cultural-policy studies’, International Journal of Culture Studies, 2(3): 369-397.

Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.

Bio

Frank Boddin obtained a MA in Communication Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He graduated in 2005 with a MA thesis concerning the role and audience perceptions of Belgian documentary filmmakers. He is currently working as a PhD student at the Communication Studies Department of the VUB. His research deals with documentary production within North-Belgian public service broading. His work is mainly situated within media sociology and cultural studies and concentrates on media production and professional identity; public broading and new public management; governmentality and discourse theory; television documentary and factual entertainment.

Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

‘Save the Climate! Go Vegan!’[1] One of the questions Citizenship and Consumption addresses is whether this slogan represents a contemporary way to express political engagement and participation. The anthology, edited by Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann, addresses the notion of consumer citizenship from different disciplines and generates a broader discussion around two key signifiers in current political discourse: citizenship and consumption.

If we look at commonly used definitions, the notion of citizenship refers to the status of being a citizen; a concept that is usually determined by law and associated with particular rights and duties (see for instance the Encyclopedia Britannica Online 2008): ‘Consumption however, refers to the spent utilization of goods and services. In the classical economical understanding, consumers are expected to demonstrate effective management of their finances, in order to negotiate satisfactory purchasing.’ (Encyclopedia Britannica Online 2008)

Nonetheless, these types of descriptive definitions can be quite limiting, as they neglect to mention many obvious commonalities encompassing the nature of being a citizen and a consumer. When it comes to contemporary discourses about public issues, both concepts seem to converge and to be intertwined. A current Eurobarometer (2008) survey on Europeans´ attitudes towards climate change shows that to actively influence the situation, a purposive shift in the consumption habits is perceived as indispensable by many of the respondents. Although these references to changes in consumption habits (as a response to environmental problems) can be expected, interestingly, the more traditional channels of expressing political engagement such as protests, petitions, or participation in civil society-based initiatives, are not mentioned at all[2]. This raises questions about our traditional concepts of citizenship, and whether the notion of consumer citizenship reflects a new form of political participation, which affects broader social strata? And furthermore, it does raise the question if the consuming citizen might in the future become the only democratic citizen-actor.

The anthology is trying to reconcile the two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of citizenship (which is community-oriented) and consumption (which is individual/self-oriented). The editors claim that this often-used assumption of binarity does not reflect the complexity of consumer culture. Therefore the collection is designed to broaden the terms of the debate in order to inspire a more holistic understanding of the ways in which consumption and citizenship are interconnected. A dominant premise throughout the book is the suggestion that there is a need to theoretically reflect upon and evaluate new waves of consumer activism, such as the ‘Go Vegan’ campaign.

In their introduction, Kate Soper and Frank Trentmann outline the conceptual challenges by presenting the contemporary discussions about the two concepts, and by providing an overview of dominant research traditions, contemporary norms and practices. This approach reflects the threefold structure of the book: The sections Retrieval, Talk and Action, and Prospect move from the past to the present and highlight future civic prospects of consumption. The anthology includes contributions from distinct scholars from various disciplines, which are as diverse as the scholarly nuances within the research on consumption and citizenship. The authors include sociologists (Zygmund Bauman), political scientists/political economists (Mark Bevir, Michele Micheletti, John O´Neill), media and communication studies scholars (Nick Couldry, Ferenc Hammer, Sonia Livingstone, Tim Markham), and academics working in the fields of history (Karl Gerth, Matthew Hilton, Frank Trentmann), philosophy (Kate Soper) and law (Michelle Everson, Christian Joerges, Bronwen Morgan). These academics embarked on their venture at a two-day workshop in Cambridge, focusing on (not surprisingly) ‘Citizenship and Consumption’. Their main aim is to provide a forum for a broad and multi-layered debate, rather than to defend concepts or paradigms.

The first part of the book, entitled ‘Retrieval’, focuses on the development of the relationship between consumption and citizenship, by reflecting on key moments in modern history. It shows how consumption has nurtured civic life. The spread of consumption coincides with emerging challenges to societal hierarchies and is thus connected to a considerable expansion of the social terrain of citizenship. Direct, liberal and radical politics generated a new sense of consumer rights as for instance the civil action against ‘Free Trade’ shows. It also contributed to the construction of a new ‘consumer’ identity. Within this new concept of the consumer-citizen, consumption is no longer seen as the act of a private, self-seeking individual, but has been merged with a more civic identity.

The ‘Retrieval’ section aims to further expand the scope of citizenship and civic traditions. It reflects upon non-European traditions of citizenship in China, on material politics in socialist Hungary, as well as on progressive ideals in liberal democratic societies. The articles in this section range from a general overview of perspectives on rationality, consumption and citizenship (Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann), to more specific reflections on certain historical developments in distinct social contexts. To illustrate: Karl Gerth explores the continued tension between citizenship and consumption in China. He analyses a situation which is deeply embedded in history and underpinned by consumption in the name of national interest, culminating in the demand to ‘buy Chinese’ as an expression of nationalized consumer culture in the 20th century. Additionally, Ferenc Hammer discusses representations, practices and consumption strategies regarding blue jeans in Hungary from 1960 to 1980, showing that wearing a blue jeans was a type of grass-roots activity. Both articles highlight that consumption can be understood as politics, concluding that the relationship between both notions is not only characterized by a transition from citizenship to consumption, but that they are to be considered co-existent.

The second part of the anthology ‘Talk and Action’ is devoted to norms and practices in the scope of consumer citizenship. The book section presents consumption as a social practice, which is ultimately processual and dynamic. By analyzing mostly mundane and non-conspicuous forms of consumption, the articles build on a broad understanding of the notion of consumption, including both material and immaterial products. These activities may include listening to the radio, taking a bath, commuting by car, gardening and home improvement; as well as watching sports and surfing the internet. Consumption becomes defined as people performing certain tasks with the help of material or immaterial products. This rather broad and general understanding includes media consumption as quintessential consumption practice (Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone, Tim Markham). This part also questions the functioning of ordinary or ‘banal’ consumption as a vital source for political action (Matthew Hilton), and analyses relatively new forms of political consumerism (civil disobedience/payment boycotting/disloyal exit) (Bronwen Morgan). Michele Micheletti looks at consumption’s and capitalism’s capacities to take control of the life improvement of others.

The third and last part of the anthology is looking at the future, in combination with a global perspective on consumption and citizenship. It includes four articles, which question the conditions that both constrain and empower consumer citizenship. Globalisation is seen to have a significant impact on the citizenship dimensions of consumption. This section addresses concerns about the ‘good life’ and specific agents, such as the next-door-neighbor. It deals with questions like: how does the ‘good life’ look like? And how might it be improved by altering work conditions, life priorities and differing patterns of consumption?

Zygmunt Bauman criticizes consumerism from within his framework of fluidity. His rather critical discussion on consumerism and its potential for citizenship, makes this an exceptional chapter. He claims that consumer markets and technologies are symptoms of citizens withdrawing from public engagement. This significantly contrasts with the contributions of most of the other authors who view consumption and citizenship as locked into a potentially positive relationship. This last book section also discusses the legal conditions of consumerism within a national, supranational (European Union) and international (World Trade Organization) framework (Michelle Everson, Christian Joerges). John O´Neill stresses the importance of rearticulating the indicators of individual well-being, in order to combine prosperity with the notion of intergenerational citizenship, linking the individual and the community. Kate Soper summarizes and concludes the discussion by pleading for the abolition of the polarity between citizen and consumer. She introduces the notion of alternative hedonism, which combines pleasure with an interest in the well-being of others as a way to deal with future challenges; boldly asking if the consumer will become the only democratic citizen-actor within future societies.

The anthology provides us with a fundamental insight into the contemporary discussions on the relationship between consumption and citizenship. Particularly, the introductory chapter (Kate Soper and Frank Trentman) and the concluding article (Kate Soper) frame the discussed issues in a comprehensive way. The editors achieved their aim of affording the reader an opportunity to develop a broader understanding of the relationship between consumerism and citizenship. The authors contribute to the reader’s comprehension of contemporary conceptions by disentangling them from the new developments in political consumerism and consumer citizenship at a theoretical level. However, as is usually the problem with compilations and anthologies: seen as an entity, they are only as good as the worst article and they often contain contributions, which are not that interesting for particular readers. The multidisciplinary approach and the diversity of articles risk producing a too specialized volume, which might become incomprehensible for a broad (academic) readership. But the two framing articles excellently help to overcome this problem. Nevertheless, the structure could have used some improvements. In fact, the used structure creates confusion between the different theoretical levels dealt with in the book; for example, the article by Matthew Hilton on the banality of consumption would perfectly fit into the ‘Retrieval’-section and would then be read in a completely different and probably more adequate context.

In conclusion, the book reflects on an enigmatic discussion without being prescriptive. It enables the reader to get at least a glimpse of how different disciplines are dealing with similar issues and how they can contribute to each other’s scholarly work.

Notes

[1] This is one of the slogans of vegan activists (see www.veganactivist.net).

[2] 39% of the interviewees support the statement ‘you are reducing your consumption of energy at home’, 33% ‘you are reducing your consumption of water at home’; 24% ‘you are reducing the consumption of disposable items’ when it comes to the question ‘which of the following actions aimed at fighting climate change have you personally taken?’ (European Commission, 2008).

References

‘Citizenship’ (2008) Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved September 22, 2008, from Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9082718.

‘Consumption’ (2008) Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved September 22, 2008, from Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9106212.

European Commission (2008) Special Eurobarometer 300. Europeans Attitude towards climate change. Retrieved September 22, 2008, from European Commission, Public Opinion Analysis: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_300_full_en.pdf.

Bio

Anne Kaun is a PhD student in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörns University College, Stockholm, Sweden.