Transcultural Confusion

In James Brown’s, Evil Bert Laden: ViRaL Texts, Community, and Collision, he explained how globalized web technologies welcomed great “transcultural confusion.” “Transcultural confusion” is a symptom of the web that has created “a new and heightened level of interaction between cultures” (Poster), and has “radically altered the old limits on the size sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort” (Shirky). With the unsupervised environment surrounding the web, it is easy to understand why different cultures would be offended by certain content. Brown used the Bert Laden image and the Spice Girl concert as an example of “transcultural confusion,” by explaining that Asadullah and other Muslims felt the encroachment of Western popular culture on their Muslim values. Muslims want their “cultures, traditions and religious, and societal standards to be respected” (Brown), but how do we (by we I mean everyone on Earth) go about respecting every culture when the web openly displays everything and anything in an unsupervised environment?

Everyday, I encounter numerous political cartoons, fail blogs, and other seemingly comedic web articles, and realized that they are meant to be edgy and funny. However, I am sure there is a community (as discussed in Brown’s article) that would take offense to those. For example, the Bert Laden image was considered to be a joke by Dennis Pozniak’s standards, but to the Sesame Street producers, the image was “unfortunate” and “distasteful.” According to Brown, “The producers of Sesame Street made an immediate attempt to control their intellectual property.” Ultimately, with a free-for-all unsupervised web environment, and a lack of international intellectual property laws, the web will continue to cause “transcultural confusion.”

…..Unless you live in China, Iran, UAE, Morocco, Thailand, Turkey, Iraq, Brazil, Victoria in Australia, and India (http://mashable.com/2007/05/30/youtube-bans/). Brown stated, “The degree of autonomy of each culture to significantly reduce as a consequence of the global information network.” However, many countries like the ones I listed above, have taken government efforts to control the unsupervised and culturally offensive web technologies. For example, Morocco banned youtube because of videos that mocked the Moroccan king as well as some pro-Western Sahara clips. China has also banned facebook and twitter since 2009 (http://www.chinaeconomicreview.com/cer/2011_02/Open_book.html). And in addition to those bans, China’s government banned microblogging on Sina Weibo because people were comparing Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Tiananmen Square (http://www.hindustantimes.com/Cairo-protests-make-Chinese-censors-nervous/Article1-657400.aspx). Even if you tried searching for “Egypt” on a google search engine in China, you would find this statement “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown” (Patil).

Does government censorship of web technologies help the “transcultural confusion?”

Again we see the tensions from Convergence Culture take shape through Brown’s article. The web created an unsupervised environment, so the tension lies between a community that has learned how to rhetorically deal with web technologies (including offensive material), and a community that works against the new web media (censorship).

SR 1: "Convergence Culture" by Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkin’s Convergence Culture Where Old and New Media Collide documented the cultural transition where old and new media interlock, as prosumers are urged to seek new knowledge, and make connections across an array of media platforms. Jenkins designates us as part of a convergence and participatory culture. Convergence is “the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want” (2). Participatory culture “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship…who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understand” (3). Jenkins described the potential for our convergence culture through Pierre Lévy’s “achievable utopia,” where “people from fundamentally different perspectives see a value in talking and listening to one another, and such deliberations form the basis for mutual respect and trust” (246). Ultimately, Lévy suggests that when everyone has greater access to information and new media platforms, companies alter the way companies market their products. Jenkins expresses this evolving nature and changing roles of communication through the Survivor case study where an emotional relationship was fostered between the brand and the consumer. Jenkins explained how this evolvement in communication spills into politics when he stated, “As we saw in looking at Campaign 2004, what we learn through spoiling Survivor…may quickly get applied to political activism or education in the workplace” (257). Jenkins shows that through each project of transmedia storytelling, a “distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole” is offered in return. Through this evolvement in communication which stimulates new ideas and new knowledge, Jenkins is hopeful that these new social structures will further create more “democratic citizenship

Henry Jenkins introduced Pierre Lévy’s idea of an “achievable utopia.” Everyday we strive to reach Lévy’s “achievable utopia” by communicating more freely and becoming more democratic. Although Jenkins and Lévy do not state if we will reach this utopia, I think that we specifically aim for this utopia through politics. For instance, the knowledge communities of Survivor Sucks, could be paralleled to the political knowledge communities of Wikileaks. WikiLeaks, like “Survivor Sucks,” has their own knowledge community, but instead of Survivor fans, WikiLeak’s knowledge community consists of 800 worldwide anonymous news sources and high-powered people. Wikileaks also stated that that their goal is to “break down the divisions and suspicions that currently shape international relations” (29). Thus, the goal of Wikileaks can be seen as a tactic to reach the utopia by allowing for free communication and being more “democratic” (in their eyes). In another instance, we are using Facebook videos instead of traditional media platforms (CNN, Fox, etc.) to get our news about the revolt in Egypt from young revolutionaries in “Cairo’s Facebook Flat” (http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/02/08/world/middleeast/1248069622796/cairos-facebook-flat.html). This is yet another example of how our convergence culture is using the skills acquired in entertainment environments such as Survivor Sucks, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others, for political purposes. Ultimately, we have not reached Lévy’s utopia, but we are in an “apprenticeship phase” where “we are learning what it is like to operate within a knowledge culture…[and] we are still debating and resolving core principles that will define our interactions with each other” (249). Our active knowledge communities will continue to play a role through media platforms to reach the utopia by exposing all knowledge and democratizing.

Achievable Utopia

In Chapter 6, Pierre Lévy optimistically reiterated the idea of how an “achievable utopia” would allow knowledge communities to communicate freely to the point that we become more democratic. Jenkins stated, “In Lévy’s world, people from fundamentally different perspectives see a value in talking and listening to one another, and such deliberations form the basis for mutual respect and trust” (246). Ultimately, Lévy is suggesting that when everyone has the same access to info, distrust will evolve.

Although we have not reached the “achievable utopia,” we are in an “apprenticeship” phase. In explaining the “apprenticeship” phase, Jenkins described, “We are still learning what it is like to operate within a knowledge culture. We are still debating and resolving core principles that will define our interactions with each other” (249).

I can agree that we are in an apprenticeship phase, but I still wonder what constitutes an “achievable utopia? Lévy’s “achievable utopia” is too vague and abstract because it could mean so many things. Where do we start in order to communicate freely with each other? As more and more information accumulates through our apprenticeship phase, we will become overwhelmed. For example, I have to read 3 different newspapers a day (Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wallstreet Journal) just to get the proper facts of a news story.