by Anwesha Dutta
Drowning in a deluge of images without context, words without meaning, information without distinction – this is the subjective experience in an economy of immediacy.
Anna Kornbluh
We live in an age of too much “information”, but not enough context or history. Such information without those tethers is a breeding ground for appropriation by the platforms that house them. The notion of a benign and neutral medium for information to flow freely, anonymously and open to all does not really exist anymore. This is because an Internet driven by traffic and monetizable ideas is bound to be controlled by capital, and is never going to be of the people.
The evolution in how we receive, process, consume and spread information can be observed nowhere as succinctly as in the rapid transformation of media consumption habits in the age of the internet. If television and mass media were the tools with which workers measured their leisure after a day of physical labour, which eventually engineered and accelerated for them a total alienation not only from that labour as well as other people, work and leisure today have become transfused to parallel entities which makes it difficult for them to be demarcated separately. This is largely because the Internet is ubiquitous with both of those demands on our time.
We live in a uniquely enervating cultural landscape. Almost every aspect of our day is mediated by these bright surfaces. What work and leisure have become are “performances” of productivity and anti-productivity respectively, being played out in the theatre of the digital realm. If it is not enough to exist “offline” without reproducing it for the internet, it is not enough to consume culture without producing a testimony of it too.
Culture today is ubiquitous with the Internet - it is Internet Culture, or more specifically, Algorithmic Culture. It is made for the discourse cycle and we consume it to keep up with the cultural zeitgeist. We speak of culture in the same breath as any other event in our personal lives - it has ceased to exist as a distinct phenomenon worth remembering. This is because it is all getting constantly recycled in a time where nostalgia is peak cultural currency. The only distinct markers of a new cultural product are the features in which it presents itself in circulation - trailers, teasers, release dates, pre-orders album roll-outs, social media cleanses, album or cover art reveals, et cetera. These brief glimpses mostly outlive the attention span of the people, failing to survive all these feeds, outnumbered by a different cultural product. Simultaneously, there is so much second-hand fragmented content about the cultural product from short formats like reels and tiktoks that in an age of instant gratification, we have subliminally experienced the film or show without consuming it at all. Thus, culture is over-saturated content - at its most, it is fodder for a brief bout of commentary before fading from memory in less than a month. Painfully evident in the way we talk about pop culture exclusively in terms of spoilers, plots, episodes, and celebrities - establishing a relationship between art and audience that is purely about consumption - culture has thus lost the autonomy to exist beyond commodification, and consumers, the agency to critically differentiate between the two. This is how the obituary of culture gets written today.
We have been subsumed by a singular mode of consumption - the streaming platform. They dominate our consumption habits, caught as we are in the middle of Streaming Wars with innumerable platforms vying for our attention, offering us bottomless vessels of content that is largely homogenized. Premised on an illusion of choice and infinite possibilities, streaming platforms function through the recommendation algorithm. From the homepage, it seems fleetingly possible that we will be led to explore the obscure, the niche, the hidden; but features like “top ten watches” and “autoplay” explicitly show us that their metrics are dependent upon everyone watching the same thing constantly, over and over, all the time. At first glance, this creates a seemingly monocultural environment but in reality, there is no actual communal impact because recommendations are circular even though they work on a feedback-loop. This sameness is what is most profitable to the hegemonic order. Speaking on this very phenomenon, auteur Martin Scorsese had come under fire for criticizing the Marvel-ification of the movie industry, and succinctly pointing out how, increasingly, sprawling superhero superhero franchises are “sequels in name” but “remakes in spirit”. In the realm of music, as writer Liz Pelly had encapsulated so presciently,
Musical trends produced in the streaming era are inherently connected to attention, whether it’s hard-and-fast attention-grabbing hooks, pop drops and chorus-loops engineered for the pleasure centers of our brains, or music that strategically requires no attention at all—the background music, the emotional wallpaper, the chill-pop-sad-vibe playlist fodder. These sounds and strategies all have streambait tricks embedded within them, whether they aim to wedge bits of a song into our skulls or just angle toward the inoffensive and mood-specific-enough to prevent users from clicking away. All of this caters to an economy of clicks and completions, where the most precious commodity is polarized human attention—either amped up or zoned out—and where success is determined, almost in advance, by data.
Our cultural presence is thus structured to enable people who strictly want to do things the easiest way possible, and the production of culture is increasingly centred around that ease. If the Culture Industry was formulated during the initial emergence of mass culture, its acceleration in the present day has given rise to a thoroughly distracted experience of popular culture. We consume in a state of partial dissociation and nowhere is this most noticeable than in streaming content that is exclusively suitable to be played in the background as “second-screen content”.
Simultaneously, on our social media platforms, all of us are scrambling for attention in a crowded room, struggling to differentiate ourselves within an algorithm that exists to turn our personhood into a commodity. When performance of our subjectivity becomes this vital, what figures most rampantly in such a landscape is the curatorial style of “personal branding” rising out of a thoroughly transactional nature of our intersubjectivity. If curation, traditionally, was meant for promoting the art objects at hand, it now means projecting your own narcissistic personal taste. We all curate our cultural footprints on our social media feeds, less for what they mean than as a projection of our own cultural status - a curator of consumption. What we lack in understanding, however, is how every such transaction is most profitable to the platform where these interactions play out, where our reactions and engagement is treated as raw data to be extracted. There has thus been a total loss of tension between a work of art and the commodity form as we know it.
Yet, in attempting to establish similar points of cultural reference and cultivating a deeper relationship with art in whichever way that makes sense to us, there is perhaps a desire amongst us to go beyond merely accruing cultural capital. In an era of such fragmentation in our cultural habits, we often grasp towards things that speak to that feeling of dislocation and loss of simultaneity in order to create a networked sociality. This is noticeable today in the popularity of niche subcultures and the rise of fandoms. Even though such connections are often based on parasociality, the need to be a part of an in-group is within us all. The feeling of such loss is often exploited by the internet-based entertainment infrastructure that feeds us virality to fill such a void of connection. However, recognizing instances when we are being sold to, or just decentring the role of the digital realm in our lives is a step towards reclaiming our agency from this economy. Even when we are largely powerless in the face of multi-million dollar companies, we can choose what we pay attention to. It's not that our attention is gone, it's that our attention has been radically reshaped, and we can attune it to a deeper relation with the burning world around us.
About the Writer:
Anwesha Dutta (@bimbopoetica) is a writer, researcher, and educator. She is interested in articulating the subtle gaps at the intersection of culture, literature, and interpersonal relationships to make the world a place of nuance, justice, and equity.