[Yeah. So. I was supposed to just comment on a post, but I was impelled to do a post of my own. What I wanted to talk about wasn't really something I could "comment" on someone else's post.]While I find Johnson's argument about the benefits of increasinly complex "smart culture" convincing, there are ideological problems that I noticed along the way. In his Afterward, Johnson acknowledges with an apparent degree of suprise that the majority of criticism against his book "tended to come more from the left than the right" (204). To be honest, I found Johnson's discussion of this "leftist criticism" utterly lacking in substance. What Johnson either fails or just refuses to acknowledge here is the longstanding tradition that the left has when it comes to criticizing the content of mass culture, which progressives tend to see as an apologia for the consumer capitalist status quo. Adorno and Horkheimer make just this point in their famous "Culture Industry" essay: mass culture, rather than empowering audiences to question the capitalist status quo, instead sells capitalist ideology.
I noticed just this thing happening in some of Johnson's examples. Take that anecdote about how his nephew decided he should lower industrial tax rates as a way of attracting businesses to his Sim City. Johnson uncritically celebrates this moment: his nephew is learning! But frankly I'm a bit troubled by what he learned. Johnson just says he learned a strategy, but I say that he learned free-market capitalist ideology. This strategy isn't value-free but is, rather, laden with ideology. Isn't this just the kind of "market thinking" that turned some of our Rust Belt cities into ghost towns and propelled us into our current Great Recession? And this Sim City thing isn't an isolated example. We see the same thing with one of Johnson's favorite reality shows, The Apprentice. Sure, we're learning strategies and mapping social networks when watching the show, but in the meantime we're soaking up corporate ideology. Great, now I know how to both make networks of friends and crush my competition.
No wonder Johnson got criticism from the Left. His book is built upon the foundation that, ultimately, the extent to which media makes us think is more important than its actual content or subject matter, but when those of us on the Left look at the ideological content of mass culture, we know that it's too important--and sometimes too dangerous--to simply dismiss as simply a "less important factor" in media consumption.
I noticed just this thing happening in some of Johnson's examples. Take that anecdote about how his nephew decided he should lower industrial tax rates as a way of attracting businesses to his Sim City. Johnson uncritically celebrates this moment: his nephew is learning! But frankly I'm a bit troubled by what he learned. Johnson just says he learned a strategy, but I say that he learned free-market capitalist ideology. This strategy isn't value-free but is, rather, laden with ideology. Isn't this just the kind of "market thinking" that turned some of our Rust Belt cities into ghost towns and propelled us into our current Great Recession? And this Sim City thing isn't an isolated example. We see the same thing with one of Johnson's favorite reality shows, The Apprentice. Sure, we're learning strategies and mapping social networks when watching the show, but in the meantime we're soaking up corporate ideology. Great, now I know how to both make networks of friends and crush my competition.
No wonder Johnson got criticism from the Left. His book is built upon the foundation that, ultimately, the extent to which media makes us think is more important than its actual content or subject matter, but when those of us on the Left look at the ideological content of mass culture, we know that it's too important--and sometimes too dangerous--to simply dismiss as simply a "less important factor" in media consumption.
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