From old to new publicity

Developing on the four field approach, I made these pictures to clarify the change that is going on:

In the old publicity, individuals entered – willingly or unwillingly – the public sphere as figures: they were appointed to roles available to them in the “public market”, and their acting was mediated to the private sphere through what Debord calls images (see 1.4 in Society of the Spectacle). All the people in the public sphere became “celebrities”, and the strongest admiration was directed towards those who were famous for appearing as images, such as movie stars, models and artists.

The old publicity started cracking when the internet came by force in the 2000s. Via comment sections and discussion forums, the above-the-individual public sphere found itself in a crisis, not being able to impose its simplistic views on the private sphere any longer. Journalists started their outcry, trying to hold on to their role as gatekeepers of the media, and thus, society.

The shouting was useless (of course), but it represented the fear for the future of the media industry. The industry has since taken steps to transform itself towards the new publicity, becoming increasingly engaged in the “dialogue with the readers”. The old top-down approach is holding tight though, because of the structure of the industry.

In the new publicity, the world is divided to the spheres of “self” and “politics”. Self is the center of the human experience, including one’s observations, thought processes and actions. Each individual self enters the sphere of politics in communication. Politics can be thought as the sphere of “things concerning the polis”, and the question posed is: What should we do?

The old publicity’s specialized politics dissolves as democracy is established, both in communication and in action. In the new publicity, all collaborative human activities become politics.

Four fields of publicity

Developing on Habermas’s public sphere framework, I see that internet has changed the publicity greatly. What level of publicity is Facebook or Twitter, is it private or public, political or cultural? Apparently there is a need for different level of analysis.

I first started contemplating on micro and macro level publicity. But: what is the defining aspect when it comes to the scope of the publicity is access.

I ended up developing this four-field that describes publicity in axes of Limited access – Open access and Top-down – Bottom-up. Here are some definitions:

• Limited access: exclusivity of communication and easiness for “outsiders” to participate
• Top-down and bottom-up: means direction of communication and the roles that are built for participants. Can also be thought via “authoritarian/hierarchical” and “democratic”.

I have tried to estimate the positions of various mediums and the picture represents my understanding. Surely it can be debated e.g. whether Facebook is more top-down than Twitter or Twitter more limited access than blogs. It also comes to usage habits varying from person to person and between countries and continents, but I think the big picture is correct.

Publicity, now with meanings

In the democracy to come publicity is the expression of the collective consciousness. This means publishing is no longer governed by money, but instead guided by the journalists’ moral compass. This leads to the spectacular breakdown: the media understands the absurdity of objectivity and realizes its role and responsibility in the society.

Now is the moment just before the Great Realization, that is, the last hour of meaningless politics and the absolute nothingness represented in interest rates, indexes and percentage points. Shift from the instant gratification mindset to the publicity as political space one is inescapable.

Contemplating on the spectacle

Reading Google News can be enlightening sometimes. For example: Consider the various political discourses – different spheres of “what is true” – existing in different countries and language areas. Truth in the USA is different than it is in Finland. Or as Blaise Pascal put it:

truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other.

Since news are also products of consciousness – of those living in a particular sphere of reality, in this case that is, the journalists – they are always reflections of that persons attitudes, dreams, conflicts and fears. Journalists reflect their “spectatorness” (being merely a spectator to the world) into their reporting and, through that, to everyone in the society. That’s how the spectacle is reproduced and reinforced.

It is also intriguing how pointing out this obvious fact seems to make people furious. There is no lack of journalists shouting how they are “only reporting”, politicians telling they are doing “everything they can” and scientists claiming their field as value-free – and to top it all, there’s no shortage of spectators who rush to point out that they enjoy their position as passive participants in the society of the spectacle.

But it is not that their position is “wrong” or that they are “lying to themselves”. On the contrary, their statements are absolutely true as reflections of their consciousness.

***

The concept of objectivity also includes bias, and that is perhaps the deepest of them all: how individual consciousness relates with other people and the world. There’s actually a simple question that should point out this attitude:

What do you think of God?

The answer “There is no such thing. It’s a nice story, but fairytales are for children” translates to

There is objective reality in which things either exist or don’t and I am spectating it directly. I’m too lazy to think so I call it a question of belief that is useless to ponder. Stories are stupid. Also: Children are inferior to me.

Answers such as “God punishes people for doing X” reflect another type of attitude: “I don’t like this thing X that other people are doing, hence God does not like it.”

Posing questions like “if there is all-powerful God, why does he allow bad things to happen?” reflect the absolute spectatorness, since it is God who is allowing or not allowing things to happen -­­ not man.

P.S. See the views of Marx, Durkheim and Weber for more scientifically structured presentations of these thoughts.

Publicity, economics and economic sociology

Today I borrowed three books from the Fellmannia library. The first is Habermas’s Structural transformation of public sphere (Finnish translation), in which I have been long interested. I somewhat know the thesis, but I really want to know the mechanics: how did publicity turn into what it currently is?

A few days back – while editing Wikipedia articles about economic sociology – I also understood that I don’t really know how the capitalist system works besides these basic invisible-hand-supply-and-demand things. So the other two books are Carlo Trigilia’s Economic Sociology: State, Market, and Society in Modern Capitalism and Andrew Gillespie’s Foundations of Economics. These books will surely be interesting.