Costelloe-KuehnMemo23

For this memo, you should write a few hundred words describing conventional or hegemonic ideas about your object of concern.

See Bruce Pfaffenberger's description of hegemonic ideas about technology in "The Social Anthropology of Technology, "Annual Review of Anthropology. Volume 21, Page 491-516, Oct 1992 (available through Folsom Library).

Hegemonic ideas about "independent" and "mainstream" media:
 * 1) at one level, the "mainstream" media has the privilege of operating without the supplemental term "mainstream." this renders "the media" natural and "alternatives" invisible. it is a bit like "white," "male," etc. as unmarked categories. the presupposition that "the media" refers to "mainstream media" positions "the" media at the "center."
 * 2) critiques of "the" media (by chomsky and his ilk) have thoroughly documented and analyzed ways in which - especially with increasing consolidation of ownership and control - media upholds the status quo and largely serves elites.
 * 3) but for folks involved with critical media literacy, alternative/independent/tactical media production, etc. the "mainstream" vs. "independent" binary may hold a sort of "microhegemony" that limits imagination and closes off possibilities for collaboration. there are certainly "progressive" journalists producing content for the mainstream media and the "independence" of indymedia is quite contingent. dominant discourses speak through both sides of this dichotomy. furthermore, people that produce and circulate information and knowledge in creative ways may sometimes limit themselves by accepting received notions of what the "media" is or could be. the goal might not be to "challenge" the hegemony of the mainstream media; rather some projects may prefigure "non-hegemonic" alternatives (r.f. day) that run in parallel and focus on building capacity without struggling for "dominance" in informaiton flows. some of the more innovative new media projects by environmental media organizations (EMOs) may sometimes be almost unrecognizable as "media" at all.
 * 4) just as there are trees in the rhizomes and rhizomes in the trees... ("a new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree" (D&G, 1000Ps, 15)) the most interesting "progressive" projects may experiment with new relays inside of and between "mainstream" (journalists, scientists, state-functionaries, etc.) and "independent" ("activist," "progressive," etc.) knowledge production. but hegemonic binaries operating within progressive movements may block the imagination required to see these possibilities. I picked some of the sites for my dissertation research specifically because I think they may be moving beyond such limits fairly successfully:
 * 5) ** "Not only are you doing this exhibit, you’re also continuously doing GPS mapping of water levels and beds for two years in a row in a small region **** ... So you will collaborate with specialists… **** local colleges, local artists, maybe specialists from outside… just rope in as many people as possible. **** A satellite map eliminates detail to give the broad picture, and we tend to think that that broader picture is what approximation of the world is... The Ring of blue project is a way to use the same technologies to fill in the detail that you miss out in the broad picture… So it’s reversing the whole process of zooming out to see the global one thing, it’s zooming in, but the technologies used in the zooming is the same as the zooming out. Because you’re zooming in, the inputs, the information sources are very different” (interview with a founder of JATAN). **
 * 6) "Zooming in" (ethnographically?) to "mainstream" and "independent" categories may reveal unexpected multiplicities that enable progressive projects to plug in new inputs (expertise, knowledge, technology, struggles) and also reveal potential ways to accelerate circulation and new audiences and outputs. "...one will often be forced to... find a foothold in formations that are... rigidified territorialities that open the way for other transformational operations..." (D&G, 1000 Ps, 14-15).