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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
In this compelling book, Graeme Kirkpatrick argues that computer games have fundamentally altered the relation of self and society in the digital age.
Tracing the origins of gaming to the revival of play in the 1960s counter culture, Computer Games and the Social Imaginary describes how the energies of that movement transformed computer technology from something ugly and machine-like into a world of colour and ‘fun’. In the process, play with computers became computer gaming – a new cultural practice with its own values.
From the late 1980s gaming became a resource for people to draw upon as they faced the challenges of life in a new, globalizing digital economy. Gamer identity furnishes a revivified capitalism with compliant and ‘streamlined’ workers, but at times gaming culture also challenges the corporations that control game production.
Analysing topics such as the links between technology and power, the formation of gaming culture and the subjective impact of play with computer games, this insightful text will be of great interest to students and scholars of digital media, games studies and the information society.
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Seitenzahl: 359
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
Digital Media and Society Series
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE: Computer Games in Social Theory
1. Gaming and the Social Imaginary
2. The Gamer as a ‘Streamlined Self’
3. Social Theory and Critique
CHAPTER TWO: Lineages of the Computer Game
1. The Revival of Play
2. Technology and the Dialectic of Invention
3. Artistic Critique and the Transformation of Computing
CHAPTER THREE: The Formation of Gaming Culture
1. The Discovery of ‘Gameplay’
2. The ‘Authentic’ Gamer
3. Gaming's Constitutive Ambivalence
CHAPTER FOUR: Technology and Power
1. Organizing an Industry
2. Globalization and the Cultures of Production
3. Technology, Power and Resistance
CHAPTER FIVE: The Phenakisticon
1. MMPGs in Recognition-Theoretic Perspective
2. The Limitations of Engineered Sociability
3. Ludefaction and the Diminution of Gameplay
CHAPTER SIX: Aesthetics and Politics
1. The Aesthetic Dimension
2. Art, Play and Critique
3. Critical Gaming?
References
Index
Digital Media and Society Series
Copyright © Graeme Kirkpatrick 2013
The right of Graeme Kirkpatrick to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4110-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4111-9(pb)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7190-1(epub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7191-8(mobi)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com
For Sarah
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Drugan and Lauren Mulholland of Polity Press for their patience, support and encouragement at various points in the writing of this book. The book could not have been written without the kindness and intellectual generosity of friends and fellow scholars in the game studies community. Andreas Gregersen, Velli-Matti Karhulahti, Olli Tapio Leino and Feng Zhu gave selflessly of their time to read and comment on extensive portions of the manuscript and they each made many helpful suggestions. I haven't been able to incorporate all of their ideas but, thanks to them, the book is much better now than it was before.
I am grateful to the following people for their encouragement, support and some fascinating conversations that have influenced my thinking while I've been working on this project: Andrew Feenberg, Espen Aarseth, Piotr Sitarski, Nick Crossley, Mike Savage, Christian Ulrik Andersen, Jonas Linderoth, Staffan Björk, Helen Kennedy, Cheryl Martens, Steve Hall, Andrew McCulloch, Bo Kampmann Walther, Charles Ess, Melanie Swalwell, Andreas Lange, Jakko Suominen, Petri Saarikoski, Yoni Van den Eede, Simon Niedenthal, Ann Cronley, Martin Watkins, Gareth Crabtree, Paul Brown, Eliah Tupou, Adam Trela, Ashley Brown and Gagun Chhina.
I would also like to thank Andy ‘Roy’ Holmes, who let me play games on his home computer in the 1980s, helping me to overcome various prejudices and phobias in the process. I am grateful to Theodor Araby-Kirkpatrick for his criticisms, numerous examples and distinctive outlook on life. This book is dedicated to my wife, Sarah Carling.
Introduction
Computer games and the distinctive culture that is associated with them are beginning to receive the attention they deserve from social theorists and sociologists.1 This book argues that closer attention to games and gaming adds an important dimension to our understanding of society and contemporary culture more widely. Computer games have played a central role in the development of the digital technologies that are widely acknowledged to have transformed the global economy over the past four decades. They were central to the emergence of personal computers, to the diffusion of easy-to-use interfaces on technologies, and to the rise of the internet and the naturalizing of our experience of ‘virtual’ space. The spread and popularity of computer games can also be seen as a consequence of these developments but, I will argue, they exist in a complex and intimate interaction with the digital society and culture we now take for granted and they have shaped the world we live in.
In addition to the relatively obvious technological associations between gaming and other important forces in contemporary society, gaming is also exemplary in relation to fundamental social and cultural processes. Many of the changes to the commodity form in the age of digital downloads and ‘interactivity’ are most clearly exemplified by games. As Scott Lash and Celia Lury put it, ‘the global culture industry is what happens when movies become games’ (2007: 9). Moreover, the gaming industry has played a leading role in developing new working practices and applications of technology that have become definitive of the modern organization in networked capitalism. Computer games have been instrumental in the transformation of modern consumption and production processes, and in the development of practices that increasingly efface the distinction between the two.
This book is written from the perspective of a reflexive tradition in sociology, which starts from the principle that society is unlike other objects of our experience in that it is itself a social product. In other words, in order for us to really live ‘in’ a society, we must first believe that we do. We can only believe this because it is true, but that truth is contingent upon our already living out certain kinds of connection to others and our common possession of a shared way of understanding the world, including some notion of social space, in which those connections are established. The category of the social imaginary is essential to what follows. It refers to the background sense-making operations that make the idea of society and its practical reality possible. As Charles Taylor puts it, ‘the social imaginary is not a set of “ideas”, rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practice of a society’ (Taylor 2004: 2). The idea of an imagined community, which becomes a real one when we all think about it in the same way and act ‘as if’ it were really there, rests upon this creative capacity for imagining and instituting the social that defines us as humans.2
A central and in many ways troubling development of recent times concerns the relationship between the social imaginary and various technological media. As Lash and Lury point out, the social imaginary is a ‘virtual’ property: we have it in common and it is necessary to our experience of the world, but we cannot measure it or locate it empirically. At its heart is play, especially the play of ideas and concepts. This is, of course, an essential point of connection to computer games, and I take it to be indicative of their importance to contemporary culture and society. The character of our play is profoundly telling in relation to the character of our society. Luc Boltanski (2011) raises the question of what happens when social reality is so overwhelmingly flexible, when we are so saturated with ideas and experiences from the outside that we can no longer ‘think against’ the world because the world won't stand still long enough for us to get a good view of it. He suggests that contemporary social reality is too ‘viscous’ in this way for us to exercise our creativity, to bring about social change. Computer games are both a sign of this situation, confirming its reality, and a tool with which to think our way through it.
To do this we need to take a historical approach to computer games, in order to identify the reconfigurations they have brought about and to place these in their proper context. Computer games have shaped and been shaped in a dialogue with the rest of culture and this book attempts to trace out the key moments in this conversation. This book describes three intersections of gaming technology with mainstream computer design and technology change, each corresponding to a shift in the way that we conceive ‘society’. The first is the development of user-friendly, easy-to-use computers, which changed the status and meaning of computers and technology from the late 1980s onwards. The transformation of computers which happened at this time has changed the popular understanding of what technology is and of what it can be, and established new rules for making sense of technology as a part of our collective envisioning of the social as an assemblage of practices and objects. Broadly speaking, prior to this shift, technology was productive tools and as such it was hard and efficient, but since the change machines have become objects of desire associated with play and adventure. The second intersection concerns the innovations in gaming in 1994–5, associated especially with Doom (1994) and Myst (1994). These coincided with the development of the World Wide Web into something culturally mainstream, again associated with changes to usability promoted by the Mosaic and then Netscape browsers. Here, games clearly drive the ‘cyberspace’ metaphor and are integral to the emergence of ideas, many of them utopian at first, about cyber or virtual society as a kind of new frontier, or an extension of established social space. Finally, and most recently, games have played an important role in promoting the metaphor and idea of the ‘social network’, as denoting ideas of connection under a horizon that makes the formation and maintenance of social ties into essentially ludic practices. Here, the way we process and make sense of the reflexive processes of relationship formation are being reconfigured, with implications for how we conceive and make sense of social experience.
The book begins with a further elaboration of the theoretical questions and concepts that motivate the enquiry, starting with the idea of the social imaginary itself. The kind of society that has shaped games and been shaped by them is portrayed, with particular reliance on Boltanski and Chiapello's (2005) thesis of a ‘new spirit of capitalism’. According to that analysis, capitalism has taken advantage of computer and network technology to overhaul its core processes, especially in the sphere of work and management. The bureaucratic and industrial model of production has given way to a flexible system that is horizontally integrated. Instead of being managed from above, workers take responsibility for their own role in creative processes. Increasingly work is creative but it is also economically insecure. Individuals in developed economies face competition for most jobs, not just from local markets but from around the world as increasingly production is located in the ‘virtual’ space of electronic networks. The labour process is more of an ‘adventure’ but it also places demands on inner resources of each individual that were previously withheld from the economic sphere. This situation calls forth a new kind of economic subject, namely the ‘streamlined worker’, who is less concerned with developing a career than she is with playing the game well from day to day.
The origins of these changes lie in the counter-cultural movement of the late 1960s, which Boltanski and Chiapello characterize as offering an ‘artistic critique’ of old-fashioned capitalism and its associated ‘culture industry’. Chapter 2 explores the origins of the computer game, one thread of which traces to a technophilic strain within that culture. This chapter examines the culture of play that existed prior to the eruption of games, looking at the history of play and toys in modern societies and at specific kinds of entertainment that also framed the development of the new form. In this way it emphasizes the contingency of computer games on a number of social and cultural factors. There was nothing inevitable about the creation of computer games and their existence was not ‘technologically determined’. Rather, the actions of specific social groups in the US, Japan and Europe determined that our tinkering with complex digital artefacts should take the form of a game in the sense that we now take for granted. There is what Michael Chanan (1996) calls a ‘dialectic of invention’ between these cultural forces and the expanding capacities of digital technology, and the first games reflect the outcome of this complex interaction.
Chapter 3 describes the formation of a computer gaming culture through the prism of early computer and gaming magazines. It draws on some theoretical ideas from Pierre Bourdieu to present gaming as a cultural field with its own, specialized discourse. A new way of talking about games and appraising them was developed in connection with games played on home computers in the UK and Europe in the early 1980s. For those who internalized this discourse and made it the rationale for their own preferences and behaviours, it entered and informed their identity. Becoming a ‘gamer’ is a means of securing validation for one's activities and recognition from a group of peers. As such, gaming is recuperative for individuals. Learning to evaluate games and becoming an exponent of good ‘gameplay’ are the key to a certain kind of authenticity; to action in accordance with standards that are beyond manipulation by larger economic forces and may occasionally create friction between people who play the games and the companies that make them. At the same time, however, the chapter notes that gaming discourse falters in its attempt to establish fully autonomous criteria for game evaluation. In the fumbling inarticulacy of 1990s game reviews, we can see that gaming culture is marked by a series of constitutive ambivalences. Computer games are more than just games, but they do not become art; gaming is pleasurable and harmless yet also ‘addictive’ and, on occasion, ‘not normal’, and, finally, games are not suitable for children, yet they continue to be fundamentally childish. These tensions are constitutive for gaming culture and they become definitive for games and for their cultural position in a wider sense.
It is forlorn to expect, therefore, that gaming and gamers might be the locus of radical, politically conscious, oppositional movements and campaigns. Although games are things to be played, this play does not extend or update the 1960s idea of ‘playpower’ as an anti-capitalist value. Rather, gaming culture represents the status of play and games after the artistic critique has had its effects and caused its displacements. In so far as this culture does impose itself in an oppositional sense, this is nearly always through its demands for more problematic and contentious games. Chapter 4 describes how the revival of console gaming since the late 1980s involves a series of strategies aimed at managing the production of ‘safe’ commodities for a community that demands the non-safe, the provocative and, on occasion, the downright silly. This chapter explores changes to the production-side technologies of this time, especially the growth of middleware, or game engine technologies. These automate and de-skill the game production process and make it possible to relocate the labour of game production to virtual space, all of which impact negatively on workers in the industry. They also result, however, in games that feel similar to play because they deploy identical routines regardless of ostensible variation between games at the level of on-screen, or fictional content. In consequence, struggles arise between gamers and the industry on which they depend. Player demands for more cheeky, violent and troublesome games should be understood in this light. They are interpreted here in terms of the values that circulate among gamers as an imagined community, values which are knowing and cynical rather than progressive or articulated to wider social concerns.
Chapter 5 resumes the theme of play and games as recuperative for streamlined individuals, addressing the question of the concrete forms of alternative social life that have sprung up in ‘massive multi-player on-line games’ (MMPGs). Drawing on Axel Honneth's (1995) ‘recognition-theoretic’ approach to social relations, the chapter argues that social relationships formed in MMPGs are skewed by the limitations individuals accept when they enter ludic environments. Assuming a role in these games involves embracing a particular character-type, which carries limitations on the kinds of action people can perform in the game. This in turn affects the kind of recognition that can be secured there, which is partial and distorted. The phenakisticon (deceptive image) of the MMPG makes it impossible to reach sound conclusions about people's motivations, including one's own. This is true even despite the fact that we often know ‘who’ our fellow players are – it is not their identity that is in question but their (and our) reasons for being there. This is the sociological context in which we should interpret recent claims for a ‘ludification’ of contemporary society and culture, for while it may be true that ludic principles now permeate more areas of personal and collective life, these principles, and especially the character of the play they involve, have themselves altered in the process. The contemporary game of life is less a matter of ludification than of ludefaction – a corrosion of the creative powers of play.
The final chapter turns to an examination of the subjective impact of play with computer games. Games with screens and controllers stretch our sensoria and play with our habituated responses and expectations. The widespread embrace of such ostensibly quite unsettling experiences is perhaps the most interesting thing about the spread of computer games. Changes to our collective sensibility brought about by playing games constitute one of the most enduring consequences of the ‘artistic critique’ of technology and culture. Drawing on some ideas from Jacques Rancière (Tanke 2012), this chapter explores the contrast between computer games and art. The book concludes by comparing the experiences of what Rancière calls ‘subjectivation’ in connection with the two forms. The ambivalence of computer games, analysed in earlier chapters, here bears quite bitter fruit, but it probably opens up more questions than it answers, especially as regards the future potential of the form. I argue, nonetheless, that it is in their aesthetic aspect that computer games hold most interest for critical theorists. Assessing them from this perspective affords us the clearest view on their social and cultural significance.
Notes
1 Among the most important contributions are the works by Garry Crawford (2011), Aphra Kerr (2006), T.L. Taylor (2006, 2012), Mia Consalvo (2008) and Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greg de Peuter (2009). Williams (n.d., 2003) has made the first steps in developing a social history of computer games, while Frans Mäyrä's (2008, 2010) work lays due stress on their social and cultural dimension.
2 The original use of the phrase ‘social imaginary’ in this context is Cornelius Castoriadis (1987), in his The Imaginary Institution of Society, originally published in 1975. My use of the idea is also informed by Jean Duvignaud's (1972) definition in his study of the sociology of art.
CHAPTER ONE
Computer Games in Social Theory
The aim of this book is to provide a clearer understanding of the cultural importance of the computer game. Computer games have been with us for a long time. They started out as the preserve of a small group of technological enthusiasts and hobbyists and became a multinational industry. In a strange way, this happened twice. At the end of the 1970s the industry grew rapidly and took on international proportions, only to fall back dramatically in the early 1980s. Since the mid-1980s computer games have become a global culture industry with projected annual turnover for 2013 of around $70 billion. It is claimed that computer games have become culturally mainstream, that everyone plays them regardless of age and gender, and that they are part of a new social and cultural reality with political import (McGonigal 2011).
The years in which the computer game has developed have been decades of rapid and momentous transformation, associated with phrases like ‘the information revolution’ and ‘globalization’. Digital technologies including games have changed the fundamental principles of social and economic organization so that we see new goods as well as old ones produced and distributed in completely new ways. These technologies have changed our ways of creating and communicating, so that scientific practices, the arts and the media all now move to a different rhythm than before. Networked computing has reconfigured our understanding of society and our understanding of our own contribution to social life. ‘Social media’ like Facebook are a very clear illustration of how the very practices of social interaction have been drastically altered by the salience of digital devices and the reality of digital connection. These kinds of changes affect the very meaning of ‘society’.
The computer game1 has played a central role in helping people to navigate these changes. It has been instrumental in introducing many people to computer technologies and in making the use of digital devices habitual and intuitive. At the same time, the computer game has been shaped by its historical context. The idea of playing games with a computer was not a natural occurrence – it reflected the outcome of cultural activity and social choices. Both these processes are ongoing: computer games continue to leverage changes and cultural innovations and they are constantly being re-shaped by the environment in which they operate. This book tries to map the implication of computer games in many of the changes of the last 30–40 years and to identify how shifts in the social and cultural environment have shaped the games that we play.
The project of the book, then, is to position the computer game and gaming as a cultural practice in a theory of contemporary society. The rationale for such an undertaking is clear. Computer games matter because a lot of people play them and because they occupy a place of great strategic significance in the culture. Social theorists, I submit, need to think about the issues raised by gaming. For example, there has been much discussion recently about the role of social media in promoting new forms of political action and a new more engaged citizenry (Morozov 2010; Joyce 2010).2 Gamers are an important section of any new public identified in those terms – playing games is something most people do when they join the growing number of the world's population who use networked computers regularly. If we all play games now, it is important to understand how they fit into our lives and affect the other roles that we have as individuals in society. In what follows I will try to show the role computer games play in reconfiguring notions that have framed our understanding of ourselves and our relation to the society we live in.
Aphra Kerr has pointed out that a social history of games ‘would focus less on dates and inventors and more on struggles and uncertainties’ (Kerr 2006: 20). I have tried to observe this principle in the chapters that follow. Writing in ostensibly similar tones, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter have offered a highly politicized ‘account that explores virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations and radical struggle’ (2009: xxix). In contrast, however, this book attempts the more modest task of explaining how computer games have claimed the position they now occupy in contemporary culture. This involves focusing on struggles waged on behalf of the new medium to secure its recognition as a valid pastime. A first set of relevant struggles, then, concerns the effort to make games that appeal to children and parents in a context where parents are told that games are bad for their children and children embrace games partly because parents vaguely disapprove of them. Or the struggle to make games for games’ sake, in a context where those managing the production process are only really concerned with efficiency and marketability. Or the struggle to get games that people can enjoy playing together in a society of increasingly isolated individuals, in which social atomization is often attributed to things like computer games. These are the social struggles that mark the development of the computer game as a cultural form and they are a primary focus of this book.
These struggles, in which the computer game finds itself and wins its cultural presence, so to speak, have wider entanglements. The fact that families incorporate the computer game in all its ambivalence into their homes, for example, connects to wider questions, and touches on long-established distinctions through which we have sorted and made sense of the social world, like the public–private distinction and the difference between production and consumption. The fact that public technology enters the home and permeates intimate relationships is an important social fact related to the historical transformations mentioned above. Similarly, the fact that people associate digital devices with play has implications for the way they relate to their working tools. The apparent blurring of work and play here expresses profound changes in the way that society is organized, including key productive processes. Games have been agents in the transformation of what we might call the aesthetics of technology – what machines feel like to use – and this marks an abrupt and important break in recent social history. It is essential to understand the role played by games in the wider struggles associated with these and other transitions.
These issues are addressed in the chapters that follow. This chapter begins by concentrating on three central topics of contemporary social theory within which the computer game occupies an important place. We start with the bigger picture, by locating computer games within the wider transformations associated with globalization and what has been called the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). This sets the scene for detailed exploration of the social processes that shaped the first computer games, which are the focus of the next chapter, and those through which games and gaming have won the cultural location they currently occupy, which is the theme of chapter 3.
The key concepts in this chapter are the social imaginary and a new kind of subjectivity specific to digital culture, described by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) as the ‘streamlined’ individual. The chapter begins by defining the idea of the social imaginary in more detail and identifying the relationship of the idea to the history of technological media. Section 1 shows how a specific permutation of the social imaginary associated with print technology was fundamental to the development of modern, democratic societies. It then goes on to discuss the negative impact of twentieth-century ‘mass media’ on democratic culture in terms of a constriction of the creative powers of the social imaginary, before offering some first thoughts on how computer games might break with this.
The next section turns to the question of the individual who believes in and participates in the co-creation of this re-configured social space. Social theorists have argued that contemporary individuals experience crises of identity related especially to the rhythms of life imposed by the demands of the new economic situation associated with globalization. They focus on the discrepancy between these and the idea of a coherent self with a biography that ‘makes sense’. Here the ‘gamer’ identity is pivotal, combining as it does aspects that reflect functional adjustment to the new situation with the opportunity to bolster and reinforce personal identity in a new cultural practice. The gaming self is equipped to participate in the new economy but also has access to remedial cultural resources that compensate us for the new kinds of vulnerability associated with that participation.
Finally, the chapter turns to the issue of critique and the usefulness of social theory in the circumstances described here. The purpose of critique is to identify niches, points in contemporary experience where individuals and groups might find a foothold from which they can enhance their own leverage over the situations in which they find themselves. Rather than being swept along with the flow of an increasingly ‘viscous’ (Boltanksi 2011) social reality that demands narrow pursuit of one's own interests, critique exposes points at which action based on deliberation and reflection might lead to an opening for ideas that contribute to the general well-being of society. This is not a top-down operation, in which the expert transmits the truth to a grateful reader, but rather a dialogue in which historical and other ideas are introduced into conversations and practices that are already ongoing. The onus is on the author to identify these conversations and to make appropriately targeted interventions and suggestions. One of the purposes of this book is to try and identify such points within gaming as a cultural practice.
1. Gaming and the Social Imaginary
Regardless of their historical circumstances, people have to be able to think the nature of the social collective they participate in. This thinking necessarily involves an imaginative dimension, which cannot be separated from quantitative or physical descriptions. We know that we are ‘in’ a society, but what that means to us is historically and culturally variable, and, while the strictly physical correlates of the idea are essential, they are indeterminate. Rather, the popular conception of society is made up out of images, ideas and impressions which, in Castoriadis’ (1987) phrase, ‘lean on’ more literal descriptive accounts of relevant social quanta. These two dimensions are inseparable and interdependent. Castoriadis refers to a kind of ‘magma’ of uninterpreted material that conditions how we make sense of the social world and how we position the resulting idea of society in understanding our own experience.3 Describing social phenomena involves creative interpretation and a play of our descriptive resources and capacities: it is never determined, only conditioned by this magma. There are, therefore, rules of sense-making that we use from day to day and which maintain the notion of a society in which we live. The social imaginary is where we find these rules and the margin for interpretative play and innovation that is dubbed the ‘radical imaginary’ by Castoriadis. It is particularly important to notice that even when it seems to us as if society is dominated and determined by forces beyond our control, the imaginary dimension has given rise to that interpretation and that way of thinking about them. Social events are always constituted out of interpretations acted upon and this reflexivity is ineliminable and all-pervasive. The idea of events as determined and determinate is, in fact, an effect of reflexive-interpretative processes that, if understood, would falsify the idea: the social magma is real but indeterminate.
The factors that most affect our specific historical experience of the social imaginary are the communications media through which we share and distribute ideas in a social register. It was media technology, especially print, that established the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1985) that made people believe they were living in modern societies in which they had a role to play as citizens. Key sources here are John B. Thompson's (1995) study of the media and modernity and Jürgen Habermas’ (1989) idea of print culture as providing ‘launching-off points’ for the modern public sphere. Moveable type technology, developed in the fifteenth century, inaugurated a series of historical events that culminated in what theorists call the public sphere. The production and circulation of printed information changed how people imagined the wider social world, from a situation in which local, proximal factors determined their sense of who they were and what they could do, to one in which identification with distant others became more important. Social activity now took place in imagined spaces they shared with others, both as reference points for action and as sources of identity. The modern self is one that develops through engagement with and participation in a new kind of space that is detached from place. This space is the primary effect of the ‘modern social imaginary’ (Taylor 2004); it is the reality that underpins popular discourse on society and it accommodates the structures and unities that are studied by sociology.
Modern societies are democratic because the use of print as a medium of integration creates the possibility that people can recognize themselves as agents in the creation of social life, as participants on the same terms as everyone else who reads the papers. In this way, the modern social imaginary involves a subjective, psychological orientation that is essential to being a free and equal citizen. Habermas (1989) identifies the psychological novel of the eighteenth century as a launching-off point for the public sphere as a space that is uncoupled from place and in which people come together to agree on the rules of social co-existence. Often epistolary in form, these novels offered readers rich portrayals of the inner lives of others with whom they could identify as being ‘like them’ and as sharing a common social horizon. In the public sphere, reason, debate and the struggle for mutual comprehension hold sway rather than money and power, which also rapidly developed new potency and new forms of operation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Habermas 1989). For Habermas, the tension between these two dimensions of social evolution defines the modern period.
The public sphere represents the strongest possibility for a society in which reason and debate can determine the forms of social organization, liberating people from naked domination by the powerful or by the drudgery that Karl Marx called the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ (Marx 1990). Communications media, and especially the print revolution, are at the centre of the idea. Thompson (1995) clarifies the importance of media with reference to three factors. First, media provide symbolic resources with which we can collectively fashion a social imaginary. Once people are exposed to media, the range of symbolic meanings they can draw on to construct an image of society becomes greatly expanded. Second, this influx of symbols is related to communicative action, which now enjoys occupancy of the new space. Reading documents produced in Brussels in my home in Yorkshire and knowing that other people are reading the same words in Berlin greatly enlarges my sense of the space that I, and others like me, occupy. This space is populated by the exchange of ideas, and communicative practices give it meaning and form (consider the resonances of the idea of ‘Europe’). Finally, involvement in these processes involves a new sense of self. As I relate to others and to space on new terms, so I become a different kind of being. The modern sense of self is no longer rooted in ‘the familiar and the routine’ (Thompson 1995: 189) – as individuals are aware of more ‘alternatives to existing practices’.
The rise of modern communications media, then, is experienced as liberating. It frees people from the ties of tradition, exposes them to new ideas and creates a new space in which they can participate as citizens. At the same time, however, it creates a new kind of dependency. As Thompson puts it, ‘the more the process of self-formation is enriched by mediated symbolic forms, the more the self becomes dependent on media systems which lie beyond its control’ (1995: 214).
According to Habermas, this dependency becomes pathological in the twentieth century. The critical social theorists of the Frankfurt School, with which Habermas was associated (Held 1989; Jay 1973), argued that culture as a whole in the post-Second World War period became industrialized, in the dual sense that it subserved capitalist industry and acquired an industrial production logic of its own. Studies of the ‘culture industry’ by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School emphasized the homogeneity of cultural production in the mid-twentieth century. ‘Films, radio and magazines’, wrote Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997: 120).
Behind this system lurk corporate interests that seek to manipulate people and render them docile and compliant. Critically, the media are being used not simply to distract people, but to make them into consumers, whose desires and wants are effectively tailored to the needs of a cyclical, capitalist economy. The products of the culture industry are shallow reflections of what is. They encourage identification with the present as ‘normal’ and restrict our sense of what is possible. Watching a soap opera, you do not come away with ideas about how things might be made better, but with your sense of the normalcy of contemporary social relations reinforced. Your thirst for something other than mundane, repetitive life dominated by social demands that are construed as irresistible and determinate is unaddressed and your real desires remain repressed. For Adorno and Horkheimer (1997), this repression has a physiognomic dimension: the workers who fed off the culture industry were physically exhausted and all too ready to slump in their armchairs in front of TV football or the latest formulaic serial.
Drawing on these analyses by his Frankfurt forebears, Habermas was pessimistic about the prospects for the public sphere in the twentieth century, mainly because of the impact of broadcast media on rational deliberative processes. As Adorno (1994) wrote in his analysis of the astrology columns in a 1950s newspaper, the products of the culture industry prey on the fact that their audiences are incapable of the kind of independence of mind, or personal autonomy, needed for active participation in civic life. Rather, they crave relief from the burden of this failure, which the astrology column and other culture industry products provide even as they intensify and aggravate the underlying condition. The dependent readers are encouraged to see themselves as independent, so long as they follow the advice given to them by a completely ridiculous source: a newspaper astrologer. Above all they are admonished to ‘Think positively, be extrovert and have fun!’ Adorno writes that,
The individual is promised the solution to everything if he complies with certain requirements and avoids certain negative stereotypes. He is prevented from really acknowledging the very same difficulties which drive him into the arms of astrology. (1994: 65)
In this way, a real responsibility – to be rational, autonomous and to participate as a citizen – is removed and replaced with the more manageable one of appearing to be happy with the demands placed on us by society:
One is forced to have fun in order to be well adjusted or at least appear so to others because only well-adjusted people are accepted as normal and are likely to be successful. (1994: 75)
Advice in the astrology columns involved things like the instruction not to ‘sulk’ over ‘disappointing acts’ by ‘an influential executive’. The reader is counselled to disregard their true feelings in the pursuit of appearing to be ‘normal’ and enjoying professional success. The astrology column exemplifies how products of the culture industry closed down the margin of the radical imaginary and made each individual responsible for his or her own adjustment to a social reality that demanded compliance (Adorno 1994: 59).
Digital media technology have transformed this situation, primarily because they require us to be active, to participate and to connect with others as part of their functioning. Computer games have been fundamental to this change. As we will see further in the next chapter, games were from the outset social in their orientation. The first computer games were produced with groups of players in mind. Games like Spacewar! (1962) and Adventure (1975) were made to be shared within communities of programming enthusiasts (the first computer ‘hackers’). Moreover, this playful orientation to computers contributed to the idea of trying to get the machines to talk to each other. In other words, gaming was an important driver behind the development of networked computing – it was not something that got tacked on as an afterthought. Even in its earliest phase, computer gaming involved this positive social orientation. Computer games are also at odds with the physiognomic characterization of culture industry products. They do not tolerate passivity but demand active participation by players, simply because without player activity there is no game. In this way they also produce new experiences of space. Here, the spaces are primarily those of play itself: in living rooms all over the world the visual space of television is drawn out and incorporated into the minds and bodies of players. The frenetic activities of players’ hands and bodies are only interpretable on the basis of imagined events taking place in game space. Here, and through developments like mobile and pervasive gaming, gamers use technology to re-fashion their immediate environments, infusing them with new symbolic contents and alternative structures that support activities – including playful competitions, races, puzzles and team games – that are only possible because players share the same ideas and, in acting on those ideas, they confer a specific reality on them (Walther 2005).
In Scott Lash and Celia Lury's (2007) study of contemporary media culture, they define the social imaginary as a kind of ‘collective memory’ that stands between our empirical experience and more abstract, or rationalized, ideas about the social world. They emphasize that the idea is neither purely public in the sense of being embodied in an anonymous structure, nor merely a property of individual minds. Rather, it is what they call ‘a virtual’ on the grounds that it lacks coordinates in the empirical world and yet is constantly being instantiated in social experience. They emphasize the positive implications of a more playful relationship with commodities for the social imaginary.4 A defining feature of contemporary commodities is that they involve a ‘provocation to play’:
the objects of the global culture industry tantalise our capacity to deal with wholes and parts, continuity and discontinuity, synchrony and succession. They extend and disrupt the space and time in which we move. They are the media of flow, a culture of circulation in which we are entangled, sometimes snared. (Lash and Lury 2007: 152)
In what they call the ‘global culture industry’, Lash and Lury argue that the situation is both worse and better than the one described by Adorno and Horkheimer. It is worse because now individuals are far more dependent on the objects they are involved in. We define ourselves more than ever through our purchases and our gadgets. But things are also better because through those objects we reflexively co-participate in the production of new experiences. The contemporary revival and rehabilitation of play and its entanglement with commodities presents possibilities of being ‘drawn outside the frame of purposive, communicative rationality to out-do ourselves and be out-done’ (Lash and Lury 2007: 207).
