Here at the end of all things

MCM0230: Digital Media Max Krugman

Final Project: Jenkins on convergence, Deleuze on control society.

Perhaps the most important element of modern (postmodern) cultural studies is the impact of the internet on society. Certain sections of academia, popularly represented by people like Marshall McLuhan, have been talking about globalization for a long time, without, perhaps, being taken as seriously as they should. Today, presented with the manifestation of these theories in the form of a global internet network—and their enormous impact upon all facets of global economy—many more people are paying attention, if mostly to figure out how best to profit from it, and by virtue of this attention spreading the network into the entirety of the population. Two interesting angles on the phenomenon are Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of control society and Henry Jenkins’ thoughts on what he calls convergence.

In “Postscript on the societies of control” Deleuze uses various different analogies to illustrate his idea of the control society we now inhabit as different from the disciplinary societies that immediately preceded it. As he puts it, disciplinary “enclosures are molds … but controls are a modulation,” or a “self-deforming cast,” or a “sieve whose mesh transmutes.” Essentially, what he means is that this is the next step in collective action. Disciplinary societies attempted to deal with the issue of conflicting motives by producing artifacts like the factory, which would regulate employees as a mass, and used incentives like bonuses to ensure good work. We are no longer limited by those possibilities. Today, corporations “present the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation,” make employees internalize the sense of competition-through-participation that drives such organizations. Rather than being regulated by mass technologies like the factory, people in control society are made to regulate themselves by this internalization of rules and personal ethics in the form of appeals to their basic motivation, so that as circumstances change, each person in the control system—if it’s finely tuned enough—acts in such a manner that it will benefit the whole system, because as a part of the system he or she furthers personal goals at the same time. The idea is that internally self-regulating systems are the most efficient, because they can modulate themselves at any point, and have no center whose destruction could jeopardize the entire construct.

Jenkins’ idea of convergence seems to be simply another angle on this event. He doesn’t, however, analyze things as dryly and generally as Deleuze—for one, he provides several specific examples to illustrate his thoughts, and for another, he begins by looking at the individual rather than the system. “Media” is a very broad term, and Jenkins understands that it forms a continuum—while some people believe that media forms can die, become obsolete, Jenkins thinks (to put it one way) that the medium doesn’t die, only its current representation. Media objects don’t affect us through their physical bodies, but through our mental interpretations of them—that is, their relevance is cultural, not physical. Thus the obsolescence of the 8-track doesn’t mean that a media form has died—the media culture affected by the audio it transmitted has simply modulated itself as new technologies produced new motive forces, distorting the net but not breaking any of it. This concept of differing motivations is one of the most important things in Jenkins. “Convergence” implies a coming together of forces—which is exactly what society is, more and more obviously as the world becomes more connected. Everyone has personal motivations, but when people do things en masse certain things become apparent, as the system modulates itself ever more precisely to be more efficient. The most important of these is, of course, economic power.

Whether you call it control or convergence (and whether or not you think those two are the same thing), certain things seem to be occurring because of the new networks. Jenkins mentions a curious—seemingly, even contradictory—fact. Forms of media are coalescing into multi-media objects, or put differently, the “black box fallacy” (though considering the evolutionary potential of things like the iPhone, I don’t agree that it’s a fallacy), the creation of computer-like objects that are ubiquitous and supply all media to consumers, thereby allowing consumers to access enormous quantities of information cheaply, quickly, and at will. This empowerment of the consumer by the infinite extension of media-driven education is growing concurrently with the consolidation of enormously powerful corporations into monolithic organizations. So, it appears superficially that the two clearest manifestations of convergence are opposed to each other—one the growth of difference, the other the destruction thereof. Deleuze is particularly frightened by the latter prospect—he sees systems like regimented education and the constant prolongation of schooling as part of a universal corporatization, “the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.”

Jenkins mentions that he doesn’t think there’s anything to be afraid of, all we can do is hope for the best. I agree. Deleuze seems to miss an important consequence of what he says, perhaps because he hadn’t been exposed to the potential of mass media in the 21^st century—namely, the quasi-empowerment of the consumer that Jenkins mentions, which occurs simultaneously with corporations’ growing awareness of what Jenkins calls “participatory culture,” a world in which consumers are self-regulating nodes in Deleuze’s control system, not passive audiences. Jenkins makes sure to say that he doesn’t really know what’s going to happen, because “no one group can control access and participation,” and time and circumstance will determine the outcome of things. But precisely because of this—because the system appears to be evolving into a self-regulating collective organism—the monolithic corporations that are justifiably feared by so many will be forced to alter their functioning, because as nationalistic philosophies of capital are superseded by the philosophy of control in all its incarnations, the difference between corporation and individual, producer and consumer, will likely thin and eventually even disappear—perhaps producing an entirely new paradigm, perhaps simply becoming stable. This seems unlikely, and it would be extremely naïve to hope for it, but a global control system that functioned like Jenkins’ corporations, by causing its employees to internalize the idea of individual self-promotion through collaboration with the broader goals of the company, could hypothetically modulate itself to a refined enough degree for international collective actions to produce something approaching true solutions to global problems.