YouMarxism: The Frankfurt School, the Internet, and the Shrinking Public Sphere

Something is provided for all so that none may escape. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

In Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas conceived of a sphere in between the private space of the home and the public space occupied by the state, where individuals could convene to critically reflect upon politics, culture, and identity. Though Habermas is speaking primarily about the public sphere of 18th and 19th centuries, his analysis and those of other Frankfurt School theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, are instrumental in understanding both the boundless promise and the tremendous waste of the Internet. YouTube provides a simplistic microcosm to explore these ideas and enhance our understanding of otherwise invisible industrial control.

Censorship Through Regulation

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Habermas lamented the decline of this so-called bourgeois "public sphere," blaming, among many things, the concentration of economic power. The engorgement of economic power, he observes, in turn produces a call from both the public and the conglomerations themselves to regulate, thereby shrinking the public sphere. In the case of intellectual property, the call for stricter regulation of property rights of cultural products came as smaller production companies became consumed and transformed into larger ones. The primary mechanism is copyright laws, which allow conglomerations to supplement the tremendous control they have over the production of content with the subsequent control of content. Few other industries allow the producers to control consumers in this way, and in doing so, the culture industry dominates the public sphere.

YouTube has become one of the predominant mediums for amateur expression. Its mission to "provide a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others" is severely hampered by its Terms and Conditions, which provide an easy procedure that allows copyright owners to remove users' videos and, in essence, shrink our public sphere. YouTomb, a research project by MIT Free Culture, continuously monitored the most popular videos on YouTube and tracked how many were taken down. In a two-month period from December 2008, YouTomb noted Warner Music Group alone had taken down over 4,500 videos. It is not only exact rips of industry products that face expulsion; remixing, mashups, slash, and tributes all technically fall under YouTube's terms and conditions. Users can fight to have their videos put back up by filing a counter-notice, but many have and will continue to give up. But why should they have to? The premise of the site is very much one of a Habermas-ian public sphere. It is through participation and engagement with culture that allow us as a society to progress. YouTube provides the mechanism to translate personal projects into public ones, a process, as Habermas explains, that is crucial to any public sphere. Intellectual property constrains the use of cultural material and therefore constrains the size and shape of the public sphere. Strangling content in this way results in less discussion and fewer opportunities to learn from fellow users. By appropriating YouTube, the culture industry has stolen space to experiment from the users, pushing them back into roles of passivity and ignorance to different perspectives.

Maybe. That depends on the extent to which the remixing of others' content is necessary rather than desirable for this experimentation. The point of view you are reusing here was developed in relation to the public spaces of 18th century Europe, as you note, interpreted through the lens of 20th century acquaintance with mass media. These are both valuable points of connection, but we don't live there anymore, and our understanding of the previous terms in the series should be shifting. Here, in particular, you should be asking rather how the new technologies interact with the existing array of copyright limitations (as they are thought of almost everywhere in the world except the US). You might also want to ask how much the copyright policymaking of a single entity, namely Google, now constitutes a supra-jurisdictional set of copyright realities, a subtly beautiful example of Lessig's "code becoming law" idea.

Bread and Circuses.com

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This, of course, is assuming the best of YouTube content. More often than not, the content is entirely inane. As of this moment, the most viewed video of all time is Justin Bieber's "Baby." The first non-commercially sponsored video, coming in sixth place overall, is "Charlie bit my finger – again!" When Jerzy Kosinski coined the term videocy, he was speaking of a dystopian nightmare, of a society where people were chained to the exciting, yet trivial wiles of the Tube. Writing in 1975, he could hardly imagine how much the Internet and YouTube would serve to further aggravate this problem. In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse examines "advanced industrial societies" and the way in which ideology serves to wholly integrate and contain individuals as consumers. Mass culture, he observes, "takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable." By disseminating corporate- sanctioned cultural material that caters to superficial aesthetic tastes, mass media keeps people satiated while molding imaginative faculties through, at its manipulative apex, containment narratives that serve the motives of the empowered.

But all these thinkers assumed the difficulty of competing directly with mass media; a difficulty which is being destroyed at present and will in another generation be only a distant memory.

Ancient Rome's elite believed that food and cheap entertainment were all that was necessary to keep the masses comfortable with the status quo and submissive to authority. Though YouTube fails to provide the Bread, they are among the primary Circus supplier. YouTube's "circuses" fall into two general categories: (1) home videos and (2) clips from popular movies/television/music video. Both fail to conjure anything but involuntary emotional impulses, usually disgust or amusement. However, while the amateur buffonery in the former give the viewer a sense of superiority and validation in her own lifestyle, the glossy images in the latter enthrall and summarily subjugate her using the commodity crown jewels. When they're done watching, three billion viewers are not thinking about their outrage at Wall Street; they're thinking about the jewelry Jennifer Lopez was wearing in her video.

This is one part of the story. The other part is all the polemic, scientific, educational and experimental activity occurring in the Web (which of course is slightly larger than YouTube). HTML5 and its successors will make video so integral to the Web that mere clipboards like YouTube will barely matter, anyway. But even if we artificially freeze the advance of technology in this frame to make your analysis, the question of what we can learn from YouTube isn't very well explored in an essay that tells us nothing about "the allegedly infringing" and "the inane," but says nothing about the best that can be found, which will most assuredly not be the most popular.

-- StacyAdelman - 20 Oct 2011