Frankfurt School and the Internet

• The Shrinking of the Public Sphere
  • Censorship through regulation
  • Bread, Circuses, and the New Yellow Journalism
  • Commodifying Participation
• The Public Pushes Back
  • A Return to the Liberal Broadcasting Model
  • Production as Guerilla Warfare
• The Future

The very beginning of my paper. I'm continuing to sort it out by the hour.

Frankfurt School and the Internet

In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas conceived of a sphere in between the private space of the home and the public space occupied by the state where individuals could convene to critically reflect upon politics, culture, and identity. Though Habermas is speaking primarily about the public sphere of 18th and 19th centuries, his analysis and those of other Frankfurt School theorists, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, are instrumental in understanding both the boundless promise and the tremendous waste of the Internet. YouTube? provides a simplistic, yet didactic microcosm.

The Shrinking of the Public Sphere

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Habermas lamented the decline of this so-called bourgeois “public sphere,” blaming, among many things, the concentration of economic power. The engorgement of economic power, he observes, in turn produces a call from both the public and the conglomerations themselves to regulate, thereby shrinking the public sphere. In the case of intellectual property, the call for stricter regulation of property rights of cultural products came as smaller production companies became consumed and transformed into larger ones. The primary mechanism is copyright laws, which allow conglomerations to supplement the tremendous control they have over the production of content with the subsequent control of content. Few other industries allow the producers to control consumers in this way, and in doing so, the culture industry dominates the public sphere.

YouTube? has become one of the predominant mediums for amateur expression. Its mission to “provide a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others” is severely hampered by its Terms and Conditions, which provide an easy procedure that allows copyright owners to remove users’ videos and in essence shrink our public sphere. YouTomb? , a research project by MIT Free Culture, continuously monitored the most popular videos on YouTube? and tracked how many are taken down. In a two-month period (December 2008 – January 2009), YouTomb? noted Warner Music Group alone had taken down over 4,500 videos. It is not only exact rips of industry products that face expulsion; remixing, mashups, slash, and tributes all technically fall under YouTube? ’s terms and conditions. Users can fight to have their videos put back up by filing a counter-notice, but many have and will continue to give up. But why should they have to? The premise of the site is very much one of a Habermas-ian public sphere. It is through participation and engagement with culture that allow us as a society to progress. By appropriating YouTube? , the culture industry has stolen space to experiment from the users, pushing them back into roles of passivity and ignorance.

-- StacyAdelman - 20 Oct 2011