1. Lecture 21 November 2005 Citizenship between politics, culture & ideology Marianne van den Boomen

2. About the course NMNC ● Level 3: heavy workload, indeed 20 hours a week, English ● Academic level: references and sources; analyzing, confronting and criticizing concepts Tip: scholar.google.com, Omega ● Lectures and seminars, active participation, reading (60-70 p.) ● Formats = weekly mini-essays ● Missed something? Compensate with substantial extra work ● Rough grades: Jan. 5 th, Jan. 26th

4. LITERATURE 1. Book Re-reading popular culture 2. Reader: Incomplete! To be copied: 10 p. Fraser, 30 pp Chapter 5 David Trend 3. Online articles: Print or copy (course mailbox KNG 29)

5. Assignments/requirements Individual Assignments 1.Min. 7 formatted min-essays (21 Nov.-16 Jan.) 2.Individual course review (3 Feb.) Formats:  Comparative review of min. 2 articles/chapters  Mini-essay, building block final paper  Choose from: 1. motto, 2. critique, 3. reference, 4. authors background, 5. hot issue, 6. lecture, 7. debate Group Assignments 3.Presentation citizenship project (12 or 19 Jan.) 4. Paper on citizenship project (3 Feb.)

6. Content of the course ● Colaboration Womens Studies & New Media ● Gender is an issue ● New media is an issue, new = changing media ● Cultural citizenship popular culture, mediated culture

7. What is citizenship about? ● location, nation, state, nation-state ● politics, elections ● rules, regulation, law ● rights, duties ● culture, ideology ● public infrastructure, state and non-state media ● public debate, public sphere ● values, norms, habits ● traditions ● belonging, community ● participation, shared morality ● differentiation, assigning subject positions ● inclusion/exclusion ● on all the above levels

8. 5 themes in the course 1. Rights: human, civil, political, & social rights 2. Public sphere: public infratstructure, public opinion, public debate, ‘popular culture’ 3. Subjection/subjectivation: surveillance and data gathering, discipline, normalization of subject positions 4. Inclusion/exclusion: based on subject positions defined by class, gender, color, sexuality, age, nationality, ability etc. 5. Democracy: political representation; equality and expression of difference; local and global structures

9. Definition Citizenship is the sense of belonging to and participating in an abstract social whole, on a mediated level somewhere between politics and ideology.

10. Not only nation-state ● Greek city states ● Roman empire ● 18 th century Republic of Letters ● French revolution (freedom, equality, fraternity) ● European citizenship? ● World citizenship? ● Netizenship? Cyborg citizenship?

11. New media characteristics ● digital, computerised (stand alone and connected) ● access to a wide range of information ● communication at relatively low costs ● space & time compression: almost instantanious, worldwide ● do it yourself-culture (DIY): producing information, tools and environments, creating new public/private spheres ● interactivity, connectivity, multimediality, virtuality ● distributed intelligence

12. Top-down & bottum-up Tension between top-down/bottum-up Politics = top-down & bottum-up! Ideology = top-down & bottum-up! Top: not a univocal monolitical unity Bottum: not a univocal monolitical unity

13. “It’s the economy, stupid.” ● Political economy of communication (advertising, entertainment, media conglomerats) ● General political-economical tendency to privatization, deregulation, and commodification ● The emergence of a labour force of symbolic analysts, a.k.a. digerati or the virtual class ● The widening gap between the poor and the rich

14. Barbrook & Cameron ● the rise of a virtual class: ‘cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developpers, and all other communications specialists’ ● laisser faire ideology, promoting an electronic marketplace instead of an electronic agora ● myths of the free market as a determinating force of wealth and democracy ● private ownership of estate and people (slaves) as the fundament of society

15. Cultural-political contradictions… Revolution? What kind of? music.mp3

16. Barlow’s Declaration of Independence ● declaration of independence from all outside powers ● intended to keep any state intervention out ● recognizing only individual agency ● assuming a inherent democratic and egalitarian domain ● declaring no material constraints

17. Critiques on Barlow ● 60s heritage of utopian visions, as a merger of alternative hippie culture and entrepreneurship ● disembodied Western platonic philosophy (free Mind, not material conditions or restrictions) ● critique on notions of presumed inherency of liberating and democraticizing dynamics of ICT, in short: utopism

18. Utopian perspective ● no bodily or material constraints ● autonomous new social formations ● media monopolies broken ● free floating minds, free speech ● no state regulation needed ● clean technologies ● everyone sender/receiver ● direct democracy (electronic agora) ● new liberated citizenship

19. Dystopian perspective ● erosion of social cohesion by pseudo communities ● cultural decline, trivial entertainment and crime ● state surveillance and discipline everywhere ● consumerism and commodification ● exhausting natural resources ● citizens reduced to consumers ● exclusion, digital and other divides ● state protects private ownership and slavery ● big revolution of ownership relations needed

20. Left ● non-equality is not natural but social- economically induced ● improving position of the poor ● including minorities ● citizenship: a matter of rights and public protection ● state regulation and policies ● collectivity and public goods above individual freedom

21. Right ● non-equality is natural ● stimulating free market or elite power ● law and order ● citizenship: a matter of duties ● minimum of state regulation ● individual freedom or elite above collectivity and public goods

22. Political spectrum from left to right communist -> marxist -> old left -> new left -> -> communitarian -> libertarian -> liberal -> new right/neo-liberal -> old right/conservative

23. Indications political spectrum communist: total state planning and control marxist: struggle between capital and labor old left: political organisation of working class new left: inclusion minoritieS, alternative life styles communitarian: social cohesion in local civil society libertarian: individual freedom and independence liberal: free market, no law and order state new right/neo-liberal: free market, but law and order state needed old right/conservative: established elite, strong law and order state