The Obligations of New Media

Beyond basic questions of technical capacity and design, the interesting aspect of New Media is the dimensions of communication that have been drawn in or reconfigured. DuGay referred to “marketing to the imaginary self” in the design of technology. Identity, personal politics, and the imaginary self are all interested parties in the determination of style. Liu describes how knowledge workers express resistance to the demands of the knowledge economy, the industrial production of information.

To some extent, perhaps by virtue of merging work and leisure, everyone participating in electronic knowledge exchange is a knowledge worker, and everyone has an interest in style. Liu goes on to suggest that the color of a cellphone becomes, not just an expression of personal preference, but resistance to an economy of knowledge work that wants cellphones to be black or silver, for instance. This choice represents a complex dialectic or discourse of Horkheimer and Adorno’s equality replaced by conformity, where as Hebdige suggests, style, an expression of resistance, is adopted by the economy as a standard of conformity. In a sense then, new media offers the opportunity, or at least the appearance of opportunity, to choose between style and conformity.

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Iffy