The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media

YouTube is designed to catch you and not let go. Sometimes I access the site just to watch one thing, but then one of the related videos catches my eye. I watch that one, then another and another, and soon a five-minute visit has stretched far longer. If it’s half an hour of movie trailers, then I’m just indulging in a guilty pleasure. But what if I followed a link to “Q—The Plan to Save the World” and wound up staying for one outlandish conspiracy video after another? YouTube’s associative linking is designed to keep me clicking and watching. It has turned into a mechanism for political indoctrination, suggesting through sheer repetition that an international cabal is threatening to take over the world.

These false conspiracy theories can delude the public. But social media’s negative impact on the political process isn’t just a matter of their content—which includes, for example, intentional misinformation and hate speech directed toward ethnic and religious groups. The problem is also built into the structure of these digital applications.

Propaganda is nothing new; it has appeared in pamphlets, books, and newspapers practically since the invention of the printing press. But social media seem particularly susceptible to spreading disinformation. That’s because social media engage viewers in a way that designers call “flow,” a psychological idea adopted as a digital-design strategy by video games. Flow focuses on keeping the user moving from one element to the next, repetitively, in search of gratification from the act of consuming media rather than from engaging with its content.

When programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are used for political messaging, they bring flow along into the political process, even if the messages they carry are truthful and nonconspiratorial. That makes these media a threat to coherent political discourse from the age of print.

In the 1970s, the Hungarian American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi adopted the word flow to describe a state of engagement that arises when people are completely focused on an activity, such as tennis or rock climbing. Around the same time, the sociologist Raymond Williams also used the term to describe the way American television’s rhythm of programs and advertising is calculated to keep viewers watching hour after hour. More recently, flow has become a term of art in video-game design. Unlike television, games require interactivity, and designers try to keep the player in the “flow channel,” where the play is neither too difficult and frustrating nor too easy and boring. Social media combine the flow of television and the flow of video games to keep the user scrolling through post after post. The motivation here is obvious: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram only earn money if you stick around to view more ads. All flow media engage people through repetition and association. Ideally, for the businesses that run them, that engagement would be endless.

Social media sometimes feel addictive. But as entertainment, flow doesn’t seem like it would threaten the fabric of society. The problem arises because social media have also become a major platform for political information and discussion. According to the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of Americans received at least some of their news from social media in 2018. Both mainstream politicians and extremist groups use Facebook and Twitter to spread information.

Applied to politics, flow buries discussion about civic action under endless streams of text, images, and videos.

Let’s consider one of the clearest manifestations of the politics of flow: online conspiracy thinking, such as the kind spread by the movement QAnon. It flourishes not only on Facebook and Twitter, but also in the videos and channels of YouTube, and now on Instagram as well.

It works like this: An anonymous figure known as Q emits a stream of “data dumps” on the imageboard 8chan. These oracular pronouncements are then analyzed and spread by the QAnon group to a larger audience of readers and viewers. The dumps cluster around a core idea: that Donald Trump and some loyal followers in the military and government are engaged in a clandestine, existential struggle against an international cabal of evildoers. Q claimed to have discovered, for example, that Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats were running an international child-sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington. “Pizzagate” was only the first of a series of improbable claims Q manufactured: Robert Mueller is actually working with Trump to expose the Democrats; Angela Merkel is the granddaughter of Adolf Hitler; and the Queen of England is part of the cabal.

As each new claim emerges, it is added to the network of conspiracies. There is no end to the process of interpreting Q dumps and adding new conspiratorial strands, especially because QAnon can simply incorporate contradictions and disappointments into its future messages when the predicted apocalypse doesn’t arrive. Q had predicted that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta would be arrested. When that didn’t happen, QAnon followers just incorporated it into the conspiracy. The false dates were designed, they claimed, to trick the cabal into complacency.

It might be wrong to call QAnon a conspiracy theory at all. In a recent study, the political scientists Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum distinguish between conspiracy theories and this new brand of conspiracism. Traditional conspiracy theories are relatively coherent narratives that seek to explain some disturbing aspect of the political or social world. The new conspiracism presents incoherent, often contradictory assertions rather than a consistent story.

Conspiracism flourishes on social media. In part that’s because it’s so easy to tweet or upload. But the flow-oriented structure of social media also fosters conspiracism. You can’t tell a coherent story in a 280-character tweet, but you can provide a tantalizing assertion or allude to shared story fragments, especially if you use code words and acronyms (such as QAnon’s WWG1WGA) or iconic images (such as the alt-right’s Pepe the Frog). Taking part in the QAnon conspiracism means learning how to read these codes and fragments, and perhaps eventually contributing to this flow with your own posts or videos.

Online conspiracism offers an extreme example of the politics of flow, but an obsession with streams of information instead of their content is also affecting the political mainstream. Donald Trump has become a consummate flow politician, and Twitter is his medium. During these first two years of his presidency, according to Trump’s Twitter Archive, he has tweeted more than 600 times about Russia and collusion, more than 400 times lamenting fake news, and more than 200 times each about Clinton and Obama. Often, the tweets carry a simple, emotional conclusion, such as “No Collusion” or “Just more Fake News.”

Taken together, the tweets embody a theme of personal grievance and betrayal. But they do not form a coherent or even consistent narrative. In the weeks after the release of the Mueller report, Trump declared the report both a total vindication and a hit job—in the same tweet. His supporters don’t seem to notice the contradictions. And his detractors might not notice either—the flow generates too much material for anyone to keep up with, even professional political analysts and reporters.

A presence on Twitter has become almost a job requirement for columnists and pundits. YouTube can also be a valuable educational resource with videos of political roundtables, academic conferences, lectures, and interviews. But the flow-oriented design of these media inhibits extended debate. When the liberal economist Paul Krugman tweeted a critique of the inconsistency of Republican policies on interest rates, for example, most of the more than 100 replies were simply derisive comments about Republican hypocrisy—posts created to derive pleasure from online riposte rather than advocacy for a particular position.

By contrast, blog posts and articles in online newspapers and magazines are not flow media; they are digital extensions of the kind of political writing that characterized printed newspapers and journals in the 19th and 20th centuries. There might be an opportunity for the readers to comment at the end of the article, but their responses do not contribute to flow and engagement in the same way. Even formal news and commentary often decays into flow fodder, such as when people post gut-feel responses to social media about articles they haven’t even read, based on the headline alone.

The politics of flow now poses a serious challenge to the earlier tradition of political debate. Some pundits have interpreted Trump’s populism as a realignment of the traditional political narratives of the left and the right. In both his presidential campaign and his presidency, Trump showed how easy it was to break both narratives into incendiary fragments that could be reshuffled into a variety of combinations. From the left he took opposition to international trade agreements and economic globalism; from the right, hostility to social programs and the federal bureaucracy (“drain the swamp”). On health care he managed to borrow from both left and right simultaneously, implying that he could repeal Obamacare (as conservatives fervently desired) and yet somehow replace it with something better and universal (that liberals had hoped for). He promised tax cuts and a large infrastructure program at the same time.

This was not a coherent agenda, but it works as a tweetable series of promises. Yet it was compelling to much of the American electorate, who no longer seemed to care about the coherence of political rhetoric. What mattered was that these promises all felt gratifying in the moment, addressing the feelings of grievance and betrayal that some citizens shared with Trump himself. That’s also why it doesn’t matter if the promises were kept, or if they contradicted with one another.

Trump’s opponents have had a hard time adjusting to this new order. In her 2016 campaign, Clinton was stymied by Trump’s unlikely candidacy and kept vacillating between presenting her complex agenda and attacking his lack of fitness for office. Trump has doubled down on flow politics since the election, tweeting thousands of times since his inauguration in 2017. The television and print-news media now broadcast and publish his and other politicians’ tweets, which they rarely did in the Obama years.

Flow isn’t just for conservatives, either. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rise demonstrates that the politics of flow has a home on the left, too. AOC’s progressive agenda may be more coherent than Trump’s, but she is just as effective on Twitter. Like Trump, she understands how to use the platform to mobilize her 4 million followers in the moment. Last November, for example, she responded to a Fox News report on “radical new democratic ideas” by tweeting, “Oh no! They discovered our vast conspiracy to take care of children and save the planet.” Trump has many times more followers, but AOC’s tweets generate far more engagement (retweets, likes) per follower. When she arrived in Congress last year, AOC even gave a tutorial for fellow Democrats on the use of Twitter to connect with constituents.

She’s even more effective on Instagram, where her casual, personable approach to explaining policy in the context of her daily life wins huge engagement. Her fans see Instagram as an effective way to brand policy, such as the Green New Deal. But some worry that AOC’s Instagram success risks replacing political discussion, including the need to respond to challenges from the press, with social-media broadcasting.

AOC has a more coherent political agenda than Trump, and it’s tempting to say that she is using social-media platforms in the service of a more traditional political program. As a media-savvy young person, she sits between the two worlds. But even when used toward those ends, flow media still encourage a superficial, affective approach to politics that undermines traditional discourse.

The politics of flow likely will continue to redefine political discourse in our country. Flow makes video games and social-media sites more engaging, but the phenomenon might already have refashioned political discourse and permanently changed the institutions that depend on reasoned debate. And yet, flow’s engagement is so gratifying for so many, it’s difficult to let it go. Even if the public decided that the civic costs of social media outweigh the private pleasures, it might be too late, and too hard, to turn back. If it triumphs, the best we can hope for is a new breed of media-savvy AOCs with good ideas—and a sensitivity to the cost of expressing them in social-media form.

This post is adapted from Bolter’s new book, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media. (The MIT Press, 2019).

Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse. By Jay David Bolter. The Atlantic, May 19, 2019. 

When the science fiction film Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman, came out in 2014, Wired called it “the best videogame you can’t play.” The film’s main character, Bill Cage, repeats the same day again and again—a day of futuristic combat with aliens. Each time he dies, Cage wakes up again on the previous day. Everything is as before, with the crucial difference that he remembers all the previous versions of that fatal next day. The repetitions are the film’s equivalent of a videogame’s replayability, and Cage’s battle skills improve, just as a player’s skills improve through replay. But Cage is not a player. He is a character in a narrative film, so the repeated days are in fact consecutive scenes in the film and thus take on a cumulative meaning. They tell a continuous story in which Cage gradually struggles to overcome the alien enemy and break out of the time loop. The film has a traditional narrative arc in which a relationship develops between the male and female leads as they fight the aliens together. In the final scene, with the alien threat defeated, Cage smiles. He has transcended replay, and the film can now resolve itself in typical Hollywood fashion. Film’s sense of an ending triumphs over the videogame.

This is how Edge of Tomorrow illustrates a tension in contemporary media culture. Hollywood still offers catharsis, as it has for decades, but it is both intrigued and concerned that videogames offer something else, a different aesthetic experience with its own strong appeal. Films like Edge of Tomorrow may appeal to some gamers, but it is clear that there are millions of players who prefer the mechanics of the videogame to the narrative, cathartic power of film. The Wired reviewer says of the romantic plot in Edge of Tomorrow: “the romantic subplot is probably necessary just because, you know, people like having feelings at movies, but still feels tacked on.” In fact, that romance is crucial to the emotional structure of Edge of Tomorrow as a Hollywood film.

Videogames’ economic importance is obvious. In 2015, revenues for videogames sales totaled $23.5 billion, and there are large communities of players whose media universe centers on videogames, not film or television. In the 20th century, film promoted itself as the preeminent popular medium, but the eroding of hierarchies now applies to film as it did earlier to the traditional elite arts. Film can no longer claim to perform a function for our whole culture when there is no whole. When Golden Age Hollywood promised to tell the story of our culture, it was usually the story of a cultural mainstream. Now it is even clearer that Hollywood’s promise is meaningful only to one, admittedly still large, audience in the plenitude.

New audiences, also in the millions, seek their cultural centers elsewhere—in videogames and social media. One of the principal pleasures offered by both videogames and social media is the experience of flow. Flow is an aesthetic principle for first-person shooter games, for platform games, for puzzle games. It is also the state induced by watching one YouTube video or Netflix episode after another or by monitoring Facebook feeds for hours on end. As early as the 1970s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi applied the term “flow” to describe a particular state that he had identified in his subjects: “I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” Csikszentmihalyi’s flow can be evoked by activities common to many ages and cultures. He liked to cite rock climbing or tennis as examples—vigorous physical activities in which the participants lose track of time, fully engaged in the work of the moment. But he also argued that his flow state has something in common with forms of meditation or religious experience.

Still, many experiences go beyond Csikszentmihalyi’s definition. His definition of “flow” requires concentration: when you are climbing a rock face, you had better be fully focused on that task. For Csikszentmihalyi, listening in a focused way to someone playing the piano can induce flow, but playing the piano is a stronger flow experience. Our media culture today offers a variety of passive experiences that share a key characteristic with Csikszentmihalyi’s flow: the pleasure of losing oneself. The pleasure may be intense or muted. Playing a videogame can demand as much focus as playing the piano. Other digital media, like earlier media, demand less concentration. Watching YouTube videos one after another is like spending the evening watching sitcoms on a conventional TV set. Whether active or passive, all flow experiences simply … flow. They offer the viewer, player, or participant not only pleasure in the moment, but also the seductive possibility that the moment might go on indefinitely.

The game designer and evangelist Jane McGonigal believes that in order to solve global social and political problems we should all be playing more videogames. In her TED talk “Gaming Can Make a Better World,” she shows an image of a gamer who is about to achieve an “epic win.” The photo captures, she explains, “a classic games emotion … [a] sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem.” She claims that this intense concentration in a game can be harnessed for social change by turning real-world problems into collective online games. Whether we agree with her that videogames can change the world, McGonigal and many other writers on games are clearly right about the intensity of engagement that games can generate among dedicated players. It is the sense engagement that Csikszentmihalyi identified as flow.

Although videogames have a much shorter history than film, they have certainly developed as much diversity in the past 30 years. Genres (each with player bases in the millions or tens of millions) include: puzzle games, platform games, role-playing games, first-person shooters, and several others. If the classic way to enjoy a film is to sit in a darkened hall with an audience around you, absorbed in the light show on the large screen, the classic way to engage with a videogame is still to sit alone in front of a screen with your controller or keyboard. As digital writers constantly remind us, videogames are interactive, which means that through her participation, the player is subsumed into the procedural circuit of the game. In a first-person shooter, such as the Halo games or Half-Life 2, the player falls into a consistent frame of mind for relatively long periods, as she moves through each level and engages and kills enemies. A game may offer some pauses along the way, for example, with noninteractive, cinematic cutscenes; such scenes are felt as breaks in the flow that is the principal attraction in playing. But elaborate, nearly photorealistic shooters are certainly not the only games that pursue the aesthetic of flow. Platformer games (such as the Super Mario Brothers series) and puzzle games (Tetris, Bejeweled) also insert their players into a potentially endless event loop.

Although flow is by no means a new form of experience, our current media culture pursues the aesthetics of flow with particular enthusiasm. Videogames today enjoy an economic and cultural status far beyond that of traditional games or forms of play, and they are no longer a pastime only for adolescent boys. Some genres—for example, online “casual” games—are popular among women. They account for about 70 percent of the players of matching games like Tetris. In fact, 31 percent of all gamers are women, and the average age of women players is 37. Furthermore, game studies is now a recognized academic discipline with programs in major universities in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Videogames have also become “serious”: they are used in education and training, in the communication of health issues, and in politics for propaganda and for motivational purposes.

Videogames show us how digital media in general lend themselves easily to flow. For flow experiences often depend on repetitive actions, which contribute to the feeling of engagement and absorption that Csikszentmihalyi describes, and videogames—like all interactive computer interfaces, indeed like virtually all computer programs—operate on the principle of repetition. The user becomes part of the event loop that drives the action: her inputs to the controller, mouse, or keyboard are processed each time the computer executes the loop and are displayed as actions on the screen. The user not only experiences flow, she actually becomes part of the program’s flow. This is true, if in different ways, for applications throughout digital culture, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The most prominent and popular social media platforms appeal to their hundreds of millions of users in part through the mechanism of flow. The stereotype, which contains some grain of truth, is that flow culture is youth culture. Young people spend their days immersed in flows of text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and streaming music, while older adults prefer to experience their media one at a time. For example, a Pew Research survey from 2012 showed that almost half of all adults between ages 18 and 34 use Twitter, whereas only 13 percent of adults over age 55 do. The younger you are, the more likely you are to multitask: those born after 1980 do so more than Generation X, which does so much more than the baby boomers.

Each of the genres of social media provides a different flow experience. YouTube, for example, remediates television and video for the World Wide Web. A typical YouTube session begins with one video, which the user may have found through searching or as a link sent to her. The page that displays that video contains links to others, established through various associations: the same subject, the same contributor, a similar theme, and so on. Channel surfing on traditional television can be addictive, but the content of one channel tends to have little to do with that of the next. YouTube’s lists of links and its invitation to search for new videos give the viewer’s experience more continuity, with the opportunity to watch an endless series of close variants.

Like other microblogging sites, Twitter offers each user a personalized stream of short messages from all the posters that the user has chosen to follow—including personal friends, celebrities, news organizations, companies, and nonprofits. If she follows enough sources, her stream of messages will change as fast as she can refresh her screen. As with YouTube, but far more easily, she can contribute to the conversation by “retweeting” the messages of others or writing her own. The resulting stream is an unpredictable combination of public and private communication. Twitter interleaves the messages from all the sources so that there is no coherence between consecutive messages and no need for the process ever to end. Those trained in traditional rhetorical practices may find the individual tweets and the whole stream almost meaningless. But for Twitter regulars, the rhythm of short texts is satisfying in its own right.

Multimedia microblogs such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat privilege images and audio, and each platform offers a subtly different version of flow. Snapchat enforces a staccato rhythm by making its photo messages, “snaps,” necessarily ephemeral. The stated purpose is to encourage playfulness among senders and recipients and to counteract the tendency to treat social media services as a permanent record of your online identity. It might seem that Snapchat enables you to lose yourself in the moment without having to regret the next day the selfie that you took in that moment, but it is possible for the recipient to make and save a screenshot. You may lose yourself in the social media plenitude, but others can almost always find you.

Take note of the fact that social media as flow experiences are therapeutic, helping an individual to negotiate her relationship to her social world. Csikszentmihalyi himself ascribed a therapeutic value to flow experiences. He suggested that in a secular and often hostile world, flow gives individuals a feeling of control in their own smaller domains (games, hobbies, work activities). Flow becomes “the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life.” Csikszentmihalyi’s flow culture is one in which individuals aim at nothing higher than personal satisfaction. The psychology of flow does not encourage them to think of themselves as actors in a larger social or political drama. At least from 1800 to the end of the 20th century, politically aware citizens were encouraged to see their own history as marked by the same dramatic curve as that of their state or nation. Flow culture does not endorse such a view. Instead, the identity constructed on Facebook and YouTube is static or homeostatic: its modest goal is to keep itself within bounds, within the channels provided by a Facebook page.

Adapted from The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media by Jay David Bolter (The MIT Press, 2019).

How the Videogame Aesthetic Flows Into All of Culture. By Jay David Bolter. Wired ,  May 7 , 2019

There was a time when bien pensant middle-class people would get enormously exercised over what could and couldn’t count as ‘art’. The last century was periodically punctuated by such debates, from the avantgardist provocations of Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp to the 1990s heydays of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. If today’s bourgeoisie seem nobly indifferent to such questions, this is, according to Jay David Bolter, because the sheer superabundance of cultural production in the digital age is rendering the arts increasingly unpoliceable: since ‘there is no elite whose position on art validates the significance for the rest of us, there is less at stake.’

In his new book, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media, published last month by MIT Press, Bolter contends that the infrastructure of cultural gatekeeping has been destabilized, its critical hierarchies disrupted if not quite razed, in a media ecology where online fan fiction shares equal billing with the literary canon. He believes this is, on balance, a positive development: the cultural landscape is vastly more pluralistic than it once was, and ‘this wealth of opportunity seems [...] to more than compensate for the loss of a single cultural centre and set of universally shared standards’. This appealing thesis requires some qualification. It is a little premature to proclaim the disintegration of mainstream culture: try telling anyone who has followed the recent buzz around Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV series Fleabag (2016–19) that we no longer have water-cooler moments. As for the flattening of hierarchies, any cultural historian will tell you it was underway long before the internet came along.

Undoubtedly, the internet has had a transformative effect on the dissemination, consumption and criticism of traditional art forms such as music, film and literature. But this is probably the least interesting aspect of its impact on culture. The most thought-provoking sections of The Digital Plenitude explore how digital technology is reinventing art itself, birthing new forms. Bolter, who is a professor of New Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, reminds us that information technology was initially thought of as a mere storage tool before it gradually morphed into a medium in its own right. Today, he observes, ‘art and media are [...] the same thing’; ‘Participatory fansites, DIY communities [...] the remixes of YouTube, and the template-bound self-expression of social networking sites all testify to a new conception of creativity as a synonym for art.’

Bolter invokes two technical terms that seek to capture the aesthetic sensibility of the digital age: ‘procedurality’ and ‘flow’. ‘Procedurality’ denotes the rules-bound, process-driven logic of a computer program, whose narrative arc sits outside the normal rules of time and space. This is best exemplified by the experience of the video-game player, who inhabits ‘an infinitely repayable present’ in which ‘simulation replaces history’. ‘Flow’ is a term originally coined in 1975 by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to denote a state of immersive, energized focus in an activity. Bolter applies it to a 21st-century context to describe the state of happy, scrolling stupor wherein the user of a digital app – be it a social media platform or an interactive game – ‘simply wants the experience to continue at a more or less constant rhythm’. Whereas the dominant narrative mode of analogue-era culture was characterized by ‘catharsis’ – a film or novel builds towards a climax, framed within a finite structure whose basic contours are immanent in the linearity of the codex – ‘procedurality’ and ‘flow’ entail a subjective experience that is qualitatively different in texture.

  

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan’s dictum in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) that culture is ultimately shaped by the technological evolution of media, Bolter suggests we are witnessing the inception of a new cultural paradigm comparable to the advent of modernism in the early 20th century: ‘While modernism was vitally concerned with the cultural meaning of mechanical and power technologies in the 20th century, today’s media culture is exploring how far procedurality and simulation can penetrate into and redefine creative expression as well as our politics and everyday lives.’

The arts, as we have hitherto known them, are changing before our very eyes. And yet, as Bolter acknowledges, the codex – and its attendant sensibility – hasn’t died. Far from it: the book publishing industry is in rude health and ‘cathartic [i.e. traditional] film and television are flourishing’. These forms are not in terminal decline, but their primacy is a thing of the past; they now comprise one facet of an unprecedentedly heterogeneous landscape. The past and the future are peacefully co-existing in the present.

The Decline of Elite Culture. By Houman Barekat. Frieze ,  May 14, 2019.