Hyperconnected Culture And Its Discontents

Fernando Kaskais

Jan 4

Raw & Rendered

Digital connectivity's democratizing impact on the production, circulation and consumption of culture has been greatly exaggerated.

BY ROGERS BRUBAKER, Rogers Brubaker is a professor of sociology at UCLA and the author, most recently, of "Hyperconnectivity and Its Discontents" (Polity, 2022), from which this essay is adapted.

Digital hyperconnectivity — the condition in which nearly everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else, everywhere and all the time — has colonized the self, recast social interactions, reorganized the public sphere, revolutionized economic life and converted the whole of human culture into an unending stream of digital content served to us by personalized algorithms.

But while disenchantment with the political and economic ramifications of hyperconnectivity has been gathering force, with dreams of digital democracy and the sharing economy curdling into a nightmare of polarization and "platform capitalism," enthusiasm about digital culture remains vibrant. Hyperconnectivity in the cultural realm promises abundance, decommodification and democratization. Everyone has at their fingertips an infinitely rich and varied universe of cultural products. New cultural forms and innovative practices have proliferated. Much digital culture is freely shared rather than bought and sold. And ever-expanding circles of people are actively involved in the production and circulation as well as the consumption of culture.

Digital abundance is a mixed blessing: exhilarating, yet flattening and homogenizing. Culture is converted into "content" that blurs together as it flows through the same conduits and across the same interfaces in an endless stream. As we struggle to keep abreast of the accelerating flow of content, drawn by the perpetual lure of the new, we come to know less and less about more and more.

The promise of decommodification, for its part, has been honored more in the breach than in the observance. Islands of decommodification like Wikipedia have been engulfed by an immense sea of recommodification. Cultural production is ever more finely attuned to attention, which is ever more pervasively measured and monetized. Commerce and culture are locked in an ever-tighter embrace.

The promise of democratization would seem to have been most fully realized in the domain of cultural production. Inexpensive and user-friendly digital tools for manipulating text, images and sounds — think Photoshop or GarageBand — have dramatically broadened access to the means of cultural production and blurred the lines between amateurs and professionals. But the question is not just how many people engage in cultural production — it's how people engage. The AI music company Amper promises to help customers "create your own original music in seconds." The creativity involved is rather attenuated, amounting to editing and tweaking the music generated by the AI, but that didn't stop Amper co-founder Drew Silverstein from evangelizing in a TED talk about how AI can "democratize music" by enabling "anyone to express their creativity through music."

"Digital abundance is a mixed blessing: exhilarating, yet flattening and homogenizing."

What would it mean to democratize cultural creativity? TikTok enables and invites the pointed, witty, playful, allusive, zany and endlessly inventive combination of video, music and text. But the creative energies of its more than one billion users are circumscribed and channeled by the architecture of the platform.

TikTok's spectacular success in enlisting consumers as producers depends on making production astoundingly easy. A user can create a new video — the overwhelming majority of which, reflecting the platform's memetic logic, riff on other TikToks — in a matter of seconds with a few taps on the screen. You just grab a song extract (from an existing video or a library of pre-cut extracts), choose a filter, shoot the video, select an "effect" (distortions, clones, "green screen" backgrounds, augmented reality effects that interact with the videographer's environment and so on), sprinkle on a few hashtags — and post. Some invest a lot of time and skill in crafting TikTok videos, but neither time nor skill is required. If TikTok "enables everyone to be a creator," as its former mission statement proclaimed, this is because creative labor on the platform has been automated and deskilled.

The digital media scholar Jean Burgess has identified a key tension in technology design between "usability" and "hackability," the former emphasizing "easy access to a predetermined set of simple operations" and the latter open-ended manipulability and scope for "complex experimentation." TikTok and many other digital tools and platforms encourage broad participation by making them extremely easy to use. This is an old idea. "You press the button, we do the rest," was George Eastman's slogan for the new Kodak portable camera in 1888.

Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into "walled gardens" and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the "triumph of seamless usability" to a new level. This "tyranny of convenience," to borrow Tim Wu's phrase, should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization proceeds through deskilling...

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