Confronting the challenges of participatory culture

Universe of the Mind:. Semiotic Theory of Culture. Yuri M. Lotman. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990.288 pp. $45.00 (cloth)

Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 352 pp. $29.95 cloth.

"INNOVATION," FROM THE LATIN innovare, innovatio, should signify renewal, rejuvenation from inside, rather than novelty, which is its modern meaning in both English and French. Judging from the examples in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Littrd, the word came into widespread use only in the 16th century and, until the 18th century, its connotations are almost uniformly unfavorable. In the vulgar tongues, as well as in medieval Latin, the word is used primarily in theology, and it means a departure from what by definition should not change-religious dogma. In many instances, innovation is practically synonymous with heresy. Orthodoxy is unbroken continuity and, therefore, the absence of innovation. This is how Bossuet defines the orthodoxy of the great ecumenical councils: "On n'innovait rien a Constantinople," he writes, "mais on n'avait pas plus innoved Nicte." ("Nothing was innovated at Constantinople, but nothing was innovated at Nicea either.") All uses of the word are patterned on the theological. Good things are stable by definition, and therefore untainted by innovation, which is always presented as dangerous or suspicious. In politics, innovation is almost tantamount to rebellion and revolution. As we might expect, Hobbes loathes innovation. In Government and Society (1651), he writes:

Innovation and Repetition

* Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture. John Hartley. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. 290 pp. $36.95 pbk. John Hartley's name has been on the short list of influential television studies scholars for over thirty years. He has held numerous academic posts and is now distinguished professor, Australian Research Council Federation FeUow, and research director of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has earned the right to use a similarly authoritative and profound primary title for his most recent book. What is "truth" with regard to a medium? In Television Truths, Hartley addresses the TV via lenses of epistemology, ethics/politics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. He does so by dividing the book into four parts, each headed by a question: Is TV true? Is TV a polity? Is TV beautiful? What can TV be? While perhaps not entirely or definitively answered, they are the types of questions that cut to the very core of television's being. Hartley covers both the breadth and depth in an eminently portable book. By turns Hartley teaches, theorizes, and muses. He provides, for example, a mini-primer on TV ratings systems and useful definitions of "globalization" and "mediasphere," as weU as an analytical passage on the movement of social identity from the poUtical arena to the cultural arena, often within the same page. Using specific details from programs in the United States, Australia, China, and the United Kingdom, he expounds on his baiUwick of the interplay between television and the public, and its effect on the collective - or what's left of it in today's fragmented media world. Most of what Hartley wrestles with in some way touches upon the consumer-citizen binary. After all, he coined "democratainment" in his 1999 Uses of Television, and it has proven to be perhaps the foundation of his work and a succinct description of at least one school of thought. In this book he spends abundant time on "plebiscitary" formats (those constructed by or around public opinion sampling). He discusses the use of entertainment to reach the popular voter, the popularity of voting for pleasure, DIY participation in reality TV, and connections between voting skepticism in American Idol and in U.S. elections. With regard to news, he observes that today's media content is shaped by editorial practices rather than authorship, and consequently our most trusted sources are organizations as opposed to individuals (which I interpret as CNN: 1, Walter Cronkite: 0). Hartley also makes important statements about the mediated environment as a whole, of which television is only an element. He reveals some optimism about the current mediasphere in pointing out its positive attributes. For instance, "People are responding to different speeds of public communication, but this doesn't necessarily mean the end of democracy. It's not dumbing down but speeding up." While he may not directly answer his four questions, he nonchalantly embeds small truths throughout the text. …

Television Truths: Forms of Knowledge in Popular Culture

In his studies of culture, Juri Lotman implicitly expressed several ideas that have been rendered explicit by the contemporary mediasphere. The aim of the current article is to explicate a link between Lotmanian cultural semiotics and transmediality as one of today’s more innovative communicative practices. Transmediality is hereby located in the context of cultural autocommunication as a mechanism serving both creative and mnemonic functions. Thus, the notion is related not only to the questions of textual construction but, even more importantly, to text’s processual existence in culture in diverse media languages and discourses over time. By explaining the roots and developments of Lotman’s concept of autocommunicativity, which is central to his understanding of culture as a whole, the article simultaneously indicates the areas of his cultural semiotic studies that we consider relevant and fruitful for contemporary research into transmediality.

Transmediality of cultural autocommunication

On the Digital Semiosphere: Culture, Media and Science for the Anthropocene

This article first builds on the semiotics of culture approach and argues that the increasingly widespread transmedia practices may be valuable for contributing to the dynamics of how modern cultures are innovated. Transmedia practices facilitate intersemiotic translations at all levels of cultures, which conditions increased dialogism and the feasible evolution of these cultures. In the second part of the article, we demonstrate that there are hindrances in the existing media systems that may prevent this potential being fulfilled. It is often argued that transmedia can empower micro-sized content providers to participate in such dialogues and in the production of culture. However, recent studies demonstrate that in a European context the transmedia era may instead enforce the oligopolistic structures of media markets.

What Is the Cultural Function and Value of European Transmedia Independents

Much writing on, first, analogue and, later, digital archives has focused on related power-dynamics and the structuring effects of archives and their technologies on discursive freedom and cultural...

The Creativity of Digital (Audiovisual) Archives: A Dialogue Between Media Archaeology and Cultural Semiotics:

For the past three years, the Transmedia Research Group at the Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, has been developing open access online materials for supporting the teaching of humanities-related subjects in Estonian- and Russianlanguage secondary schools. This paper maps the theoretical and conceptual starting points of these materials. The overarching goal of the educational platforms is to support cultural coherence and autocommunication by cultivating literacies necessary for holding meaningful dialogues with cultural heritage. To achieve the goal, the authors have been seeking ways of purposeful harnessing of transmedial, crossmedial and other tools offered by the contemporary digital communication space. We have started with an understanding of culture as education – a model which is grounded in cultural semiotics and highlights the role of cultural experience and cultural self-description in learning literacies. From these premises we proceed to explicating the value of a transdisciplinary pedagogy for methodical translation of the theoretical concepts into practical solutions in teaching and learning culture.

/pdf/culture-as-education-from-transmediality-to-tdlqdhjd1z.pdf

Maarja Ojamaa

Papers

Transmediality of cultural autocommunication

On the Digital Semiosphere: Culture, Media and Science for the Anthropocene

What Is the Cultural Function and Value of European Transmedia Independents

The Creativity of Digital (Audiovisual) Archives: A Dialogue Between Media Archaeology and Cultural Semiotics:

Culture as education: From transmediality to transdisciplinary pedagogy