Prof. Dr. Andreea C. Petrache - The
New Media Aesthetics and Young Bloggers
In the first part of this report, The New Media Aesthetics and
Young Bloggers, we face with a young Romanian writer, Ionuţ Caragea, and
his success in creating new media aesthetics. He believes that imagination
must be developed by any means and that media culture should be used in
pedagogical purposes to achieve this, either by creating a multi-media
collage, a personal homepage or blog, as a space where art can be promoted
and commented upon.
By using the internet in cultural and pedagogical purposes, under a
strict schedule and surveillance, children may shape an identity of active
and educated consumers. Thus, the internet gains aesthetic value, surpassing
its limits of a medium which promotes copy-paste technique and scrolling
over photos, images and ready-made superficial news on social media. Ionuţ
Caragea’s literature, blog and personal site are an example in this respect,
assessing the internet as a medium which promotes culture and imagination,
if it is used wisely. Caragea is, as he admits, a “Google Product”, who
adapts his work of art to the new trends of Net Art.
In this part of the thesis, we have focused on different ways of
giving an aesthetic value to mass culture. As better informed and educated a
person is, as more chances he has to resist to the consumerist society’s
turmoil. An individual who has set his aesthetic boundaries high from early
childhood, will be harder to be seduced by consumerist illusions of
prosperity and happiness.
The New Media Aesthetics and
Young Bloggers
Through the rise of the new media aesthetics the possibility has
been created for every owner of a homepage or blog to create or to comment
on art. This kind of owner can post an essay, or a multi-media collage of
poetry combined with music or painting. Every owner can construct his
identity through the visual aspect of his homepage and the information
provided on it. The Banking Section of the Homepage can coexist with a quote
from Shakespeare or a dedication in verse. If deconstructionists had not
done sufficiently much to demystify the existence of a coherent and stable
meaning structure in texts, their contextualization through various
activities and feedback gathered on the site has the effect of dispersing
the attention of those interacting and linking simultaneously to other
internet resources who are thus exposed to heterogeneous or even
contradictory semantic fields. School can be the perfect place for creating
multimedia sites, where children’s taste can be refined in order to develop
their imagination and cultural appetite.
Nowadays, children and especially teenagers are passive consumers
of internet, being delighted to chat online or scroll Facebook. By using the
Internet for cultural or pedagogical purposes, children transform themselves
into active and educated consumers, capable of creating something personal
and original. In this way the internet shows its aesthetic potential, its
capacity to surpass its ill fame as a medium which does not promote culture
and instead encourages copy-paste plagiarism.
As we have seen in the previous chapters, the notion of art in
general has suffered certain mutations. Whereas until the nineteenth century
art could be divided into painting, literature, music, sculpture, and
architecture, the subsequent industrial or mechanical developments have
contributed to the rise of different art forms, such as photography, the
movies, video and so on. “The assumption that artistic practice can be
neatly organized into a small set of distinct mediums has continued to
structure the organization of museum, art schools, funding agencies and
other cultural institutions-even though this assumption no longer reflected
the actual functioning of culture”(Manovich 2001: 1).
Due to technological development, art mediums have started to
interact and combine into hybrid forms, generating mutations which have in
common a multiplicity of art forms, which can hardly be separated from each
other. Although the loyalists of the
“Great
Tradition”, as F.R. Leavis famously calls the high culture canon in his 1848
book, have raised the alert on the death of art, “among supporters of New
Media Art, there is the idea that the new technologies have had a
significant impact on artistic practice, and that art has the duty to
explore this potential” (Quaranta 2013: 32). Types of new artistic forms
have lately emerged: “assemblage, happening, installation (including its
various sub-forms, such as site-specific installation and
video-installation), performance, action, conceptual art, process art,
intermedia, time-based art, etc” (Manovich 2001: 1), which generated a
crisis in art theory. This crisis has at its core the conflict between
traditional versus modern aesthetic definitions of art. As Manovich suggests
in his article, a good example to offer in this respect is the difference
between television and the video culture:
Both mass medium of television and art medium of video used
the same material base (electronic signal which can be transmitted live or
recorded on a tape) and also involved the same conditions of perception
(television monitor). The only justifications of treating them as separate
mediums were sociological and economic, i.e. the difference in sizes of
their respective audiences, in mechanisms of distribution (via television
network versus museum and gallery exhibition), and in the number of copies
of a tape/program being made.
(Manovich 2001: 2)
As we can see, people begin to think in sociological and economic
terms, aesthetics being deprived of its modernist cult of autonomy while art
is becoming indistinguishable from mass culture: “While modern art system
involved circulation of objects which were either unique or existed in small
editions, mass culture dealt mass distribution of identical copies-and thus
depended on various mechanical and electronic reproduction and distribution
technologies” (Manovich 2001: 2).
The Digital Revolution is one more contributor to changes in the
perception of art:
On the material level, the shift to digital representation and the common
modification/editing tools which can be applied to most media (copy, paste,
morph, interpolate, filter, composite, etc.) and which substitute
traditional distinct artistic tools erased the difference between
photography and painting (in the realm of still image) and between film and
animation (in the realm of a moving image).
(Manovich 2001: 3)
Concomitantly with the emergence of these artistic tools and the
capacity of combining them, a new form of art has appeared, in the form of
the multimedia document. New media aesthetics has conferred upon the
Internet an important aesthetic value: “On the level of aesthetics, the Web
has established a multimedia document (i.e. something which combines and
mixes different media of text, photography, video, graphics and sound) as a
new communication standard” (Manovich 2001: 3). This multimedia document
knows different versions as it is adapted according to its audience, use and
distribution networks: “And if one can make radically different versions of
the same art object (…), the traditional strong link between the identity of
an art object and its medium becomes broken” (Manovich 2001: 3).
A homepage, a site, or a document posted on a person’s blog may
have one viewer or a million, doing away with the gap between the art system
and that of mass culture, as the difference between limited distribution and
mass distribution has been, theoretically, removed. A new kind of art has
thus been born at the turn of the 21st century, which may be
labelled “Net Art”. But not everything which is based on internet technology
may be subsumed under the umbrella term of Net Art. Authenticity is still a
condition for validation: “The copyright industry stigmatises takeovers of
some parts of an art work protected by copyright as piracy, as intellectual
property theft. (…) Procedures of quotation, plagiarism and transformation
are used for unveiling, exaggerating or alienating criticism of economic and
social conditions” (Dreher 2013: web).
In the Digital Era the emphasis is no longer on the text, but on
its creator/user and his/her behaviour. In order to survive in an
information society, an individual must permanently adapt to certain
information behaviours which are connected to our everyday activities:
checking mails or phone messages, using search engines or organizing folders
in personal laptops. The individual is in permanent need of updating his
activities so as to fit into a world of rapidly evolving technology.
Information-related behaviour, or options in navigating the internet or
using certain search engines can say a lot about one’s identity:
Like other concepts of information society such as software, data, and
interface, the concept of information behaviour can be applied beyond
specific information activities of the present, such as usage of Palm Pilot,
Google or a metro system. It can be extended into a cultural sphere and also
projected into the past. For instance, we may think about information
behaviours used in reading literature, visiting a museum, surfing TV, or
choosing which tracks to download from Napster. Applied to the past, the
concept of information behaviour emphasizes that all past culture was not
only about representing religious beliefs, glorifying rulers, creating
beauty, legitimizing ruling ideologies, etc.-it was also about information
processing. Artists developed new techniques of encoding information while
listeners, readers and viewers developed their own cognitive techniques of
extracting this information. The history of art is not only about the
stylistic innovation, the struggle to represent reality, human fate, the
relationship society and the individual, etc.-it is also the history of new
information interfaces developed by artist, and the new information
behaviours developed by users.
(Manovich 2001: 8)
In the same degree as our information behaviours are shaped by
society will society be readjusted by our information behaviours. They are
interconnected and dependent on one another. As information behaviour is an
attribute of the 21st century artists, they adapt their art works
to the new trends of Net Art. They have understood that neither the artist
nor the work of art is the main focus anymore, but the user:
The shift from the text to the reader took a number of forms and it can be
thought of as following two stages. At the first stage, the abstract text of
structuralism is being replaced by an abstract, ideal reader, as imagined by
psychoanalysis (Kristeva) and psychoanalytically informed criticism,
Apparatus Theory in film theory, or Reception Theory in literature. By the
1980 this abstract reader is being replaced by actual readers and reader
communities, both contemporary and historical, as analyzed by Cultural
Studies, ethnography, the study of historical reception of early cinema in
film studies, etc.
(Manovich 2001: 10)
In the Net Art era the artist is a sender, the reader is a
receiver, and the work of art consists in a multimedia document. In the
centre of this trajectory is the receiver. Another key aspect when dealing
with technologized art is software: “Contemporary author (sender) uses
software to create a text (message), and this software influences, or even
shapes the kinds of texts being created.” (Manovich 2001: 11). It is very
important that both the sender and the receiver have compatible software in
order for the message to be decoded correctly, leaning thus on the active
role of technology which generated a new “post-media or informational
aesthetics” (Manovich 2001: 14).
At the present moment art in all its forms draws inspiration from
the visual, technologically processed arts. One of the artists who have come
to terms with the circumstance that information behaviour is part of the 21st
century poetics, managing to adapt his works to the new trends of Net Art,
is Ionuţ Caragea, a young Romanian writer. He acknowledges being a “Google
product” from the title of his 2007 book of poems, M-am născut pe Google
(Born in the Google). In this book, the receiver is surprised to read
titles such as: “Iubiri off-line” (Off-line Loves), “Download”, “Delete”,
“Virtual”, “When the Memory Sticks…”, “Disconnect”, “The Page cannot be
Displayed”. In this book, written both in Romanian and in English, the big
number of neologisms is suggestive of the poet’s allegiance to novelty and
experimentation. His poems are reader-friendly, centred on the receiver.
Ionuţ Caragea casts a new, modern light on traditional themes such
as love, death, friendship, mainly through the use of computer orientated
vocabulary. He creates a fictional world, yet giving one a sense of
authenticity. Through his way of putting words, he aestheticizes the
over-saturated computerized world in which we live. The internet has a
tremendous impact on the artist, or “sender” to be more precise, as he
writes about everyday aspects of human life in technical Internet terms. In
his 2006 review of Caragea’s book, M-am născut pe Google, George
Filip quotes the lines about the link established between the artist and
God, a link from which he downloads poetry (Caragea 2007: 7). One of the
best
poems in the volume is entitled Disconnect. We feel the need to quote
the whole poem, as readers need to familiarize themselves with Caragea’s
shockingly new style:
şi
dacă pică serverul mai sunt poet?
şi dacă pică brusc internetul în toata lumea
cine va mai auzi de mine?
mi-ar placea sa se dea o lege
prin care să se interzică poezia în locurile publice
The poem simulates a confession which the artist is trying to get
through to the reader, but he does not manage to find the adequate tone for
it. In a
stifling
era of computers and technology, divinity and sacred places are hard to
find. Although the writer alleges at the end of the poem that he was born on
the Google planet, symbolizing life in a computerized world, his poems are
passed off as a divine gift, as God has endowed him with artistic talent. As
the title of the poem shows, the writer is worried at the idea of Internet
disconnectivity. As his work of art fits in the Net Art Era, what would
happen if the internet server failed to connect? Who would read him anymore?
The writer was born in the Google, but he does not consider himself or his
artistic work a Google product. He manages to mock the Internet Era which
transforms life into a hospital, the
symbol of universal disease, where everyone is distant from his human kind
and face-to-face communication is limited by technology. The metaphor of
life as a hospital is also present in Baudelaire’s poems. Caragea’s poem
quoted above is like an invitation for humanity to return to the traditional
way of doing or interpreting literature, and art in general. Poetry should
be prohibited in public spaces and people should have access to it only in
libraries, studying it with a pen and sheet of paper in their hands. As the
writer is laying bare his soul by writing his poems on paper, as a gift to
the reader, which the receiver will not decode it properly on a laptop’s
screen.
The artist has well calculated the impact of his modern piece of
virtuosity, freeing it from normative limits or conceptualizing boundaries.
He is rapidly shifting in his poems from Classicism to Information Art, from
Modernism to Postmodernism, as through a click on the laptop’s mouse. The
poet creates his work of art as a reflection of the artist. His masterpiece
is his identity card, his credentials which he takes before his readership
looking ahead into the future vistas of art history. In one of her articles,
Maria-Ana Tupan calls him a “cyber-poet” (Tupan 2014: web), although the
poet subscribes to cyber literature in point of channels of communication
rather than through a repertoire of specific themes.
Every individual is self-centred in the world
of computers, creating an image for himself: Personal Homepages, Facebook or
Twitter profiles. All these profiles are attempts to construct an identity.
We constantly check our social media profile, by simply observing photos,
watching funny videos or keeping in touch with friends. But there is more to
social media and Internet connection than these superficial aspects. They
can be used to advertise and promote art. An artist can upload his work of
art on his personal site or blog. In 2009, Ionuţ Caragea created his own
site:
www.ionutcaragea.ro,
as a way of promoting his work and keeping in touch
with his readers. There he posts everything, from personal newspapers
articles to literary books and interviews. The site has gathered so far more
than 52, 000 viewers, his works of art being acknowledged and known world
wide. The number of his viewers is proof of the fact that the gap between
the art system and that of mass culture has vanished, as the difference
between limited distribution and mass distribution has been removed leading
to the distribution of art world wide. He also has a Facebook profile and a
Youtube personal channel, linking up with the virtual world of the Internet.
The viewers may read his posts and add comments, creating thus a
virtual reading club. They can interact both with the poet and with one
another. Viewers are invited in this way to create, to post literature,
becoming artists themselves. They become active consumers of Internet,
using it to educational and artistic purposes. By obliging viewers to
authenticity and creativity, the internet becomes a medium which gains
aesthetic value.
The writer posted multimedia documents on his Youtube channel,
combining successfully graphics with photography, poetry and music,
enthralling the reader. An example in this respect can be one of his Youtube
uploads:
Figure 1 (Dragostea nu are nevoie de cuvinte,
însă..[2],
Caragea 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-OU1bReyw)
In an interview with Ionuţ Caragea I have watched on Youtube, he stresses
the importance of education in school, as it is the perfect place in which
the minds can gain aesthetic lust, as creativity has a major role in our
developing. He considers that creativity
is an important quality which may be used not only in the process of art
making, but also in a future career and human interrelations. It has the
power to differentiate people among themselves (T.V.
Interview 2015: web:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jimHyKPIe48&t=231s).
The taste for creativity can blossom from early ages, beginning
with the kindergarten period. Parents and educators can organize activities
for kids, which imply drawing, singing or sculpting, always from the
starting point of the power of the personal example, because youngster tend
to imitate first what they see and hear. By offering examples, then by
practicing and studying about a field of interest, imagination is developed
and aesthetic values are thus created. With constant lecturing, new ideas
appear, the individual being able to create something personal, unique, that
may persist over history.
Every individual is different, and by implementing aesthetic values
from early ages, a child may grow with the desire to create something else,
to aspire to authenticity. Imagination resides in every one of us,
regardless the age. Teachers must be aware that the process of polishing it
should not stop in the lower-secondary classes, as this quality is an
important trump, which is necessary independent the age or profession.
In the Internet Era, most of the people become passive receivers of
information. Everybody nowadays have a smartphone or a laptop with internet
connection. They look at images on social media, play games or maybe watch a
movie or listen to music. People turn themselves into passive viewers,
without filtering information through their thinking process and knowledge.
That is why individuality is lost, as people think and feel less. Statistics
made by authorized institutions show an annually increase of daily usage of
social media worldwide.
“As of 2017, daily social media usage of global internet users amounted to
135 minutes per day, up from 126 daily minutes in the previous year”
(Statista 2017: web). I especially find this statistic more useful than
others because it is made after they applied an online survey worldwide, on
people from 16 to 64 years old, between the years 2012-2017, in contrast
with other statistics which focused mainly on America, as it is the realm of
mass media, which sets trends. It shows that:
Global social networking audiences surpassed 2 billion users in 2016. The
most popular social network worldwide is Facebook; with 1.86 billion monthly
active users by the end of 2016. Other popular social networks include
WeChat, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr and Sina Weibo. Some mobile messaging
apps such as LINE or Kakaotalk have transformed into social platforms by
including profile timelines and games reminiscent of traditional social
networks. Currently, the global average social network penetration rate was
37 percent. North and South America ranked first and second in this category
at 66 and 59 percent respectively. In total, 21 percent of U.S. online time
was spent on social media content. One of the most popular online
activities, social networking, is becoming predominantly mobile. December
2016 data reveals that in the United States, 60 percent of social media time
was spent via smartphone app. As of the fourth quarter of 2016, Facebook had
1.15 billion mobile-only active users worldwide. Social media has made its
innovators rich – as of March 2017, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg had a net worth of 56 billion U.S. dollars. Other successful
social media entrepreneurs included other Facebook founders and early
investors. With 27.6 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in 2016, Facebook is
also the social network with the biggest annual revenue.
(Statista 2017: web)
Immediately after viewing this alarming numbers and information
about social media which are indeed true, as whenever we go to work or at
the market we observe more than 50% of the people are looking down in their
phones checking their Facebook profile, I was curious to find out what other
activities people do on their mobile phones.
Another survey, this time made only on the United States of
America, answers perfectly my wonderings. It shows that the time spent on
smartphones is increasing year after year, becoming the most popular gadget.
In contrast with the past, when people seek entertainment and relaxation by
watching T.V., listening to the radio or just by using the photograph
camera, by the year 2017 the smartphone manages to encapsulate all this
gadgets in one. The survey shows that people spend almost 5 hours per day
using their mobile phones: “Five
hours per day is a 20 percent increase compared with the fourth quarter of
2015, and seems to come at the expense of mobile browser usage, which has
dropped significantly over the years” (Perez 2017: web). Being aware of this
increase of usage of smartphones, technology companies created special phone
applications, which facilitate consumer’s everyday life. They created
thousands of apps which satisfy all needs, from the one for fashion, to car
navigation, social media, games or even online dating. As this system of
applications evolved so much, people use less internet browsing.
Figure 2
(US
Daily Mobile Time Spent,
Perez 2017: web)
From the statistic made by the Flurry Company, we notice how the
time spent online increases from 158 minutes in 2013 to 300 minutes in 2016,
and how the usage of the Internet browser decreases from 20% to 8%. This may
happen because people got so passive and commodified that they prefer the
ready made information, much quicker to find by just clicking an
application, than even writing entire phrases on a browser.
It is much easier to get the ready-made news than searching on
Google the information. I myself am a victim of passiveness, but it is just
now that I realize it, after studying the issue. At the beginning of 2017 I
downloaded on my phone Bizyday, a news application which informs me
automatically about important issues worldwide. From that moment one my
search habits about news on Google browser decreased, as I felt more
comfortable reading the ready-made information which popped-up on my mobile
screen. This limited my imagination and individuality, as I satisfied my
curiosity only with certain type of superficial information. When searching
on a browser about different aspects, an individual exercises better his
knowledge, filtering the information given more attentively as he did an
effort to look it up, the message being much easier decoded.
Also, Flurry too made a statistic from which we learn about
people’s application preferences and how they spend their 5 hours on the
mobile, as we can see in figure number 2.
With the increased time users spend in apps, the advertising landscape is
being affected, too. Apps can now attract TV ad dollars — and they’re even
going after TV subscribers thanks to new services like DirecTV Now, Sling
TV, YouTube TV and others. Flurry says it believes these entries will have
an impact on time spent in the days ahead, and will “siphon even more
minutes from TV.”
(Perez 2017: web)
As we observe, education, reading online books, writing articles
are not included but, hopefully, we may assume that these activities are
hidden in the 8% browser or the other 8% with “other” activities. The figure
demonstrates the superficiality and emptiness in which we live.
Figure 3
(US Time Spent by App Category, Perez 2017: web)
It is hard to develop the imagination in these five hours in the
ways mentioned above. In an interview given for a certain TV channel, Ionuţ
Caragea
advices the audience to think beyond small talk and surfaces and not to obey
society’s trends unconditionally. He is not against the use of the Internet,
as it provides expediency to our lives and is a major source of information.
He advices us to use it wisely and actively, to our own benefit, to develop
our skills, information, imagination and creativity, not for the profit of
technology or of companies. He believes that humanity’s salvation from the
grip of consumerism lies within education and imagination which can only be
improved by reading. Books, both in print and in electronic form, are the
medicine to treat our phones, applications or social media addictions. Time
is limited and we should use it wisely, to our benefit.
People who read are harder to manipulate, because this is how the
consumer society in which we live creates addictions. By manipulation,
people are absorbed into the hyperreality of the consumerist society.
Ionuţ
Caragea advises people to stop being passive consumers of the Internet,
watching images, and to start creating and using their imagination with the
help of the Internet.
He thinks that technology is against humanity, as people sink
deeper and deeper into the illusions of prosperity in the material world
(T.V.
Interview 2015: web). The process of thinking is limited by technology. That
is why people should leave their options open. It should be a matter of
choice, people should be free to choose what it is that makes them happy: a
book, painting, listening to music, family, love, personal beliefs,
religious values, and so on. By the constant exposure to social media, TV or
movies, people do not have time to think for themselves. Instead, people
should realize that they are confronted with a serious problem, and create a
strict personal schedule, in which they include diverse activities, cutting
off the time uselessly spent on mobile phones. A way of healing and
purifying ourselves from the addictions of the mechanical and oversaturated
media society in which we live will take us to aesthetics, art, imagination
and authenticity.
Studies suggest that lack of communication on social media may make
people feel excluded and invisible: “Social media shunning can even lead to
lower-esteem and a sense of loss of control” (Kirkova 2014: web). In order
to prevent regular users of social media from entertaining such negative
feelings they may be encouraged to remain active, but from another
perspective, a more educational one.
School and the education system may succeed in doing this. We may
start from the example of the multimedia document. Kids nowadays read less
indeed, but are keen on technology and computers. In my teacher experience I
have noticed that children enjoy reading or watching science fiction books
or movies such as Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Matrix, Avatar, and
so on. We, as educators, should teach them how to use their abilities and
imagination in creating a multimedia document which can combine a summary or
text quotes with images, videos, music. They can create even their own
articles or poems in the form of a multimedia document and post them on
their profiles.
This piece of multimedia document would be a product of their
originality. It can be posted on their homepages, sites or social media
profiles, inspiring others to do the same. It is an attractive way to
embrace reading while using modern technology. After viewing the product on
social networks, others can create their own multimedia document, interact
and share opinions about their original document with other kids. Children
and teachers can design their school magazine using all the information
which children have created for their own purposes. In this way, they could
wisely employ their time spent on the internet, giving to the new media
aesthetics value and quality. Their aesthetic taste would also develop, as
kids are guided how to distinguish a masterpiece from kitsch.
An informed and well educated person will be harder to seduce by
the consumerist society. An individual who has strong aesthetic boundaries
set from the early stages of life will develop a strong identity based on
appreciation of art, authenticity and originality. With a healthy set of
values and a well-defined identity through reification of creative drives,
individuals will be less temped to jump into the trap of hyperreality and of
the illusions sold in the malls of the materialistic world.
The attempt to correct the modernists’
aloofness from the historical world and excessive egocentrism or formalism
has driven postmodernity to the other extreme of cultural populism. Actually
this is the title of a book published by Jim McGuigan in 1992, which shows
that the cult of the proletariat was far from being an exclusive practice of
the former communist countries. The topic of culture is politicized, the
author intimating the exertion of public opprobrium against those who dare
declare their allegiance to the elites, to meritocracy or high culture:
An elementary deconstruction of the uses of ‘populism’ would identify its
binary opposite, which is, of course, ‘elitism’. Nobody, well hardly anyone
nowadays, is a self-confessed ‘elitist’. Being thought an ‘elitist’ is just
as bad as being a ‘populist’, if not worse. Both ‘populist’ and ‘elitist’
are, in effect, terms of abuse, used by intellectuals, whether formally
engaged in politics or not, who may be deliberately vague about where they
themselves stand. In this book the term ‘elitist’ is used occasionally as
convenient shorthand for ideological positions that are disrespectful of
ordinary people’s tastes, whilst also recognising, however, that ‘elitist’
itself erases important differences and nuances of intellectual standpoint
when applied too casually.
(McGuigan 1992: 2)
At the other pole, there is Matthew Arnold’s injunction to the
study of whatever was best thought and read in the world along time, or W.
H. Pater’s praise of the new Cyrenaicism at the end of the nineteenth
century, which was replacing the vulgar carpe diem of libidinal
hedonism with a refined enjoyment of intense emotions aroused by the reading
of wise and well-written philosophy, by the contemplation of works of art,
etc. The automatic association of low art with people in low life is what
sounds disturbing to the genuinely egalitarian spirit, and that is exactly
McGuigan’s error. Nor do we agree with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the
identification of people on the outer fringes with pop culture. This is a
kind of determinism that errs on the side of a metaphysical explanation of
phenomena which collapses when confronted with some common people’s intense
desire to ascend to a higher level of civilization, which also includes
refined consumption taste in point of culture as well.
It is the school’s priority, given the intellectual decay of the
age, to reestablish the connection between superior forms of art and common
humanity as it existed in ancient Greece when the whole of Athens gathered
on the Acropolis to watch the staging of their well-known mythology. The
new forum in the net can harbour an even bigger audience with the extra
advantage of interaction, offered the codes for meaningful communication,
which are provided through schooling and the media.
References
Caragea,
I., (2007), M-am născut pe Google,
Iaşi: Editura Stef.
Quaranta,
D., (2013), Media, New Media, Postmedia, Italy: Postmedia Books.
McGuigan,
J. (1992). Cultural populism. London and New York: Routledge.
Web
Sources
Caragea,
I., (2013), Dragostea nu are nevoie de cuvinte, însă.... Retrieved
from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV-OU1bReyw.
Kirkova,
D.,(2014), The Facebook Generation: How not posting on Social
Media for just Two Days Affects our Self-Esteem. Retrieved from:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2624112/The-Facebook-generation-How-not-posting-social-media-just-TWO-days-affect-self-esteem.html#ixzz4gwdh3HKc.
As we have understood from the aesthetic emancipation schemata of
mass culture presented in this part of the PhD thesis, consumerism in here
to stay. It can be traced from the 18th century, and we can say
that in 2018 it is still at its highest peek, and it has been there since
the beginning of 21st century.
Baudelaire skilfully used its primitive methods in an aesthetic
manner, Petrescu and Waugh used it in order to criticize and mock people way
of behaving, Gaiman underlined the negative effects it has on this
generation of children or on culture, as landmarks pieces of literature are
being rewritten and copied. Caragea, on the contrary, does not limit his
work only to criticize it, but puts it in a different light, as he tries to
offer a solution.
As it is said that it is advisable to keep your friends close and
your enemies even closer, it is important for us to acknowledge the fact
that consumerism is a huge problem for society and to understand that there
is no way out of it. We should stop criticizing it, as victims who indeed we
are, and try to analyze it, decode it and use it in our own benefit, in
order to refine our tastes and educate our beings. In this way, its effects
on us will be limited, people regaining control on their lives and over
their blurred identities.
The “Who am I?” quest of all modernists is updated into “I don’t
want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be
if I just got everything I ever wanted just like that, and it didn’t mean
anything? What then?” (Gaiman 2002: web).
The world of images grew a lot in importance, succeeding in
reshaping, as we could see in the previous works of literature analyzed
above, architecture and style, cloth industry, mediating due to its force
meaning, pleasure, beliefs and values. This superficial world determined
consumption, because through images the reader is seduced. The uniqueness
and identity of a city’s architectural style has been changed into a
mythical space, full of violence and vices, which anticipate doomsday and
life’s resemblance to a hospital, as Caragea and Baudelaire beautifully
remarked in the poem analyzed above. The change is here to stay and we must
learn how to cope with it and how to educate ourselves and our children so
that its negative effects will not alter their values, beliefs, identities
and taste for imagination and uniqueness. Only in this way art will keep its
aesthetic aura, not being confused by people to mass culture.
In the present moment, neither the artist nor his work of art
matter the most, as now the stress lays on the receiver, the user, each and
every one of us. In an era contaminated by computers and technology, an
individual’s respect for true values will guide him, helping him to avoid
becoming a passive consumer who may easily fell into the trap called
consumerist comfort of hyperreality, and illusions of a better world.
and if the server fails, will I be a poet anymore?
and if the Internet suddenly disconnects all over the world
who will hear about me again?
I would love a law to be given
to ban poetry in public places
and go to specially designated places
with a pencil and a sheet of paper
and write only for yourself
as if your poetry
would be an engagement ring
or a promise of love
I hurt my soul on the paper
in a pile of words
you call it a cliché
waste or just simply a small talk
while poetry is a pedestrian crossing
between life and death
or a wild boar hunted by an arrow
in a virgin forest
what I am writing is not a simple job
but a dedication to God
which sometimes puts His palm
on your forehead
woman
even if life resembles to a hospital
where people treat you
with boredom pills
while death is inventing souls
if the internet disconnects
I would walk on my bare feet through the dust
to feel the cold body of my forebears
or I would cut off all my hair
so that no one can figure out
how beautiful it snows
I would give up this speech
and I would hit you there
where
it hurts you the most
to show you
how much I love you
I was born on Google
everybody knows
and I am looking, I am still looking
