Monday, October 3, 2011

The Mean Between Two Extremes: A Culture of Both Push and Pull

Grant Tabler
Natalie Evans
MDST 3040-03
3 October 2011

The Mean Between Two Extremes: A Culture of Both Push and Pull

                In James Lull’s article The Push and Pull of Global Culture, Lull examines two seemingly divided cultures, and attempts to correlate and harmonize their usage. Lull eventually tries to argue that our changing culture requires a changing individual, saying that we must change the way we view, understand, and interface with culture to survive this new landscape.
Lull starts by examining a changing cultural paradigm. Noting that the post 9/11 world is one that has begun a shift from a culture based around community to a culture based in individualization. Lull looks at the ways in which humans understand themselves and their power structures in a more decentralized way. Through this increasing individualization humans are empowering themselves to be in control of their lives. In addition they are apparently working to be less reliant or less concerned with the community, the group, and any herd mentality that may imply. This aim at individualization, and therefore personal power, is what Lull deems the pull aspect of culture.

                Pull represents our choice; we are empowered to pull information to us. In our digital world the pull aspects of culture give us the freedom of autonomy. Pull culture is user driven and is exemplified by search engines, options menus, source code, anything that gives the user the power to change the environment they are interfacing with. Pull is only one side of a cultural dichotomy however; pull seems to have spawned as a counter culture to Push. Push culture is synonymous with community, in the same way pull culture is connected with individualization.
                Push culture is culture we do not create or change ourselves. This culture is already established and merely pushed upon us. Push culture is the world as others have told us, rather than the world as we have experienced. Though these aspects of culture can still shape how we later experience the world. Push culture can act as a bias to our perceptions, through aspects of culture we are often born into like religion, language, and social values; we can perceive things within a cultural context of these inherited values. Though perhaps push culture could seem disenfranchising when compared with the personal power of pull culture, push culture brings the strength of community with it. We gain the strength of our group.
We can often band together with others of our cultural beliefs and values, particularly when faced with hardship or obstacles that we cannot bear alone. Lull looks at this from the standpoint of the September 11th terrorist attacks. Lull looks at how people find a need to recreate the community, and band together for shared strength. Though obviously this aim for shared power is evident during any major disaster or tragedy, groups will appear overnight and an outpouring of support will materialize for relief efforts. Additionally, people may band together to retaliate against some outside aggressor, this situation was also shown from September 11th with the build-up of forces to begin a war in the Middle East. Individuals can choose to give their power to support a larger cause, or may choose to keep their focus more individualized, possibly leaving them without the group’s support when hardship strikes them.
Individualization or pull culture is not without its set of downsides. The drive towards individualization, Lull asserts, often comes with a drive towards self-gratification, commercialism, and the bearing of more pressure upon the individual. Individualization is attributed by Lull as a value that has spawned from Western beliefs; therefore it often gives rise to other aspects of Western culture such as consumerism, globalization, and self-absorption. Lull examines the ways in which a focus on self and self-empowerment – particularly in those in the West who already have a degree of empowerment – leads to a need for personalization and self-fulfillment through consumer purchases. Though Lull may perhaps be somewhat overzealous in his examples of what constitutes obsessive self-absorption, such as a personal ring tone or toolbar. Certainly having a different ring tone from another person is personalization, but at what point is this personalization divided between choice and self-absorption?
One interesting thought Lull brings up in his possible disadvantages of individualization is Robert Putnam’s idea of “parallel play”. The idea of parallel play is simple; children begin their early socialization by playing in the sandbox alongside other children. However, these interactions are not with each other, the children play within proximity to each other but they do not play together. We could say they play parallel to each other, together alone. Putnam’s theory is that through our increasing individualization we could train this same mentality into adults, forcing ourselves into a separation from human interaction. If we were to do this it would be through our fascination with our much more sophisticated toys, those of mediation.
Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone, which looked at this idea. This is my relation to the author as I’ve heard about the book and therefore his theories from another class. This theory was created before such immersion as the internet or sophisticated mobile devices. So we could extend that his theory would now state that our connection to our electronics are such that they may erode our respect for non-mediated human interaction and indeed for etiquette itself. This reading of mediation and electronics certainly puts the power structure firmly in the control of the marketplace. The emphasis seems to be that through our connection to these technologies we our empowering their producers through consumerization.
I would like to address the power structure of parallel play beyond these definitions for a moment. My experience of parallel play is drawn from online computer games. In my example I will attempt to relay the sophisticated relationship between individual and community in these games. In my example I would like to illustrate that electronics can both encourage and deter this abandonment of communal interaction. I will use the example of my experiences in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. These games are played with hundreds of thousands, often millions, of other people. Though, while technically interacting in the same world as each other, each person is individualized. Usually the user will play this game solo, not eliciting the assistance of others or often even interacting with others for the duration of their character’s formative experiences. This certainly exemplifies the negative individualized aspects parallel play implies.
However, this changes when the player reaches the maximum “level” they can attain. Once the player has built their character up to a sufficient level of power they will then seek out others to continue their adventures. At a point known as “end-game” when users can no longer advance alone, they will find other groups of players in order to take on increasingly difficult challenges and puzzles as a collective community. More than this, users who interact in this way enough often begin to create a shared culture with their group. In my experience, they begin to share things such as “speech habits”, “frames of value”, and “a collective image” quotes from this article from Terry Eagleton referring to the ways in which a group creates a culture.
From here, users can often create bonds such that they extend their friendship beyond the mediation and into a more physical atmosphere. Not all groups in these games reach this level of community, but those that do move beyond the assumption of ‘parallel play’ and can instead strengthen their connections with a community culture despite their apparent focus on an individualized pursuit.
Lull also pursues the idea that a pull culture and its often individualizing technologies can be used for communal goals as well. Though Facebook is no doubt a medium of personalization and self-absorption, it is also a realm that allows one to garner social interaction. Whether the social interaction moves beyond the mediated form and into the physical world is dependent on the user though. Lull’s idea that push and pull culture can accomplish each other’s ends becomes an overarching theme in the article, as it forms his final argument and informs his conclusions.
Before he gets there though, Lull examines how individuals of our current time period are expected to bear more pressure and responsibility as a consequence of their individuality. Quoting a Marxist sociologist, he looks at how some scholars find an individual’s role unfair with detrimental pressures forced upon them, and social exploitation taking advantage of them. He ends up countering this point in his valuation that the individual of today is more dynamic than that ideology gives him or her credit for. Using a quote to impart that the individual is not just a blank slate to be acted upon, but is instead able to act and create things as well. This is of course the primary power of the individual that Lull mentions initially. In his final summary arguments I find that I can agree with what he proposes.
Though Lull talks a fair amount about the dichotomy between push and pull, as well as the divergence of the individual from the community he does this only for us to get an understanding of each. Lull is not calling for a Nietzsche-like departure from the herd mentality, nor is he asking us to dissolve the idea of the individual and its excesses in a Marx like elimination of excess. Instead, Lull summarizes his argument with a mean between two extremes. Lull has shown us the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of push and pull culture and their connected community and individualization. He then ends off by saying that these things cannot exist in a vacuum. That community and the individual are in constant correlation. He shows that each culture has power to be utilized.
Lull proposes that we must all appreciate both the individual and the collective, and adhere to the responsibilities of each. Lull asserts that we must not become so focused on individualization that we lose sight of the world around us, or our connections with others. He likewise emphasizes that we must not become simple cogs in the wheel of community, with no agency or thought to the world’s larger implications. He calls for a new paradigm in a changing culture, a culture of both push and pull.


No comments:

Post a Comment