Reposessing folk culture for the 21st Century

I have been pondering on what the storming of the bastille is all about.

Once you storm the Bastille you don't go back to your day job - that is all about the total break down of big media trying to control our culture and cultural production.

My muse was on the 50646+ video's on youtube of all combatents telling their stories of what it is like to be in iraq or the Milbloggers in Iraq providing their version of their experiences.

The use of soundtracks that pump up the volume or bring a tear or two to your eye.

Preparing a presentation for HP's CMO summit in Rome , I reflected on the fact that folk culture is all about the telling of stories about ordinary people. These stories create context, are a record of significant events.

Think of the Marching Season in Northern Ireland , or American folk / blues culture , or British folk culture Recorded in songs, stories, clothes and visual works of art.

All of this is cultural production which records our past.

In a recent post Citizen Calling I wrote

Come on - STOP and pause for a moment - Rupublican protest songs passed down over the years, songs of struggle with the industrial revolution etc., etc., all cultures have them. Its culture for the people where folk culture was always about telling a story - and about sharing that together. If you are American - its Gravy for breakfast, Gravy for lunch and Gravy for dinner a story about the Great Depression. Do you know where I heard that in Finland - where a American lady sang that song in a restaurant and I sang The Black Leg Miner - A song about the birth of the uniions in the coal mining industry we were both richer for the experience. Next time you see me ask me to sing it. I have a lovely singing voice

We have taken our culture back to make it for ourselves. The end game of that is an expectation in fact a demand for participatory democracy

So places like Youtube or Myspace or where ever are a reinvention of folk culture for the 21st Century.

We want to have our voices heard and we now have the technology to to make that happen.

In a book I am reading at the moment, Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins, DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and the founder and director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT

Jenkins states

the emergence of modern mass media spelled the doom for the vital folk culture traditions that thrived in 19th Century America, the current moment of media change is reaffirming the right of the everyday people to actively contribute to their culture. Like the older culture of quilting, bees and barn dances, creativity, and a bartering r gift economy. This is what hapens when consumers take media into their own hands

Jenkins mentions Grant McCracken a cultural anthropologist. His belief that in the future media producers must accomodate consumers demands for participation or they run the risk of alienating their most passionate audience.

But back to folk culture. Jenkins argues American folf culture was the victim of mass media. Don't believe him read Community Media. People, Places and Communication Technologies Which tells this story in some detail. Jenkins states that intially the emerging mass media saw folk culture as a talent pool, but once establised, mass media has another agenda which was profit and the drive of mass consumption. To do this it needed not folk culture but mass media stars, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinartra which evolved into Friends, Sienfeld and Frasier.

A mass media product for a mass media.

Increasingly, the commercial culture generated the stories, and sounds that mattered most to the public... Folk practices were pushed underground

But the web, audio-visual and audio software technologies, and distribution has changed that. Something that Yochai Benkler argues is structural and will change how our economies evolve from now on.

We are migrating from Old World to a New World. Technological, economic and cultural changes are going to affect us all - whilst in the US and in Europe there is a great desire by some to lock down culture

But back to the main theme, Blogs and the vlogs and the peer to peer flows of communication which bring us closer together online and offline are very hard to lock down. Especially when being social and telling stories are central to human existence.

Now thats worth pondering on is it not?

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