Bingchun Meng: The Death of the Public, Second Thoughts on "Girl Power," and "the Resistance of the Elite Middle Class" | Interviews

"Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will"

The media scholar Bingchun Meng is an associate professor at the London School of Economics and deputy head of its Department of Media and Communications. For years her research has circled the same set of relationships: institutions, technology, markets, and social class.

Working through cases such as copyright, Super Girl, Double 11, and parody videos, she has traced how power works in everyday communication, from the smallest scale to the largest, across government, big companies, and individuals. In 2018 — the year the founder of the digital rights group EFF died, the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, and "Goddess Day" was invented to lift consumer spending — these questions got harder to avoid.

Her university years began almost exactly when China's market transformation did. Deng Xiaoping's "Southern Tour" became the country's economic engine and its official philosophy; ideological argument faded out of public discussion, and a pragmatism keyed to efficiency, technology, and wealth took its place. Real estate took off, the internet was gathering, and classes pulled apart fast. Rarely had people felt "opportunity" so close at hand — even though history shows that only a few ever seized it.

The stories of those few were enough to build a myth of optimism. It is a myth about "development," which gives full speed ahead an allure no one may challenge; it is also a myth about "consumption," which puts goods at the center of life, tailors people's desires and ways of living, and rewrites human nature the way you would rewrite code. Those who missed the train, those who feel they gained nothing from it, those who are no longer happy — all of them are told the fault is their own stupidity and incompetence.

Meng tries to explain the media culture that consumerism produces, and the social conditions that produce that media culture.

She is often more restrained than others. She calls Chai Jing's Under the Dome "a very limited act of decency by a middle class protecting itself." And she rejects the elitist position that is "intellectually the most convenient and morally the most advantageous."

We asked her some "serious questions about life." Her answers are compact but not short, and we hope they are useful.

Q: QDailyM: Bingchun Meng

1. The death of the public, and the commodification of leisure time and creativity

Q: Since the 1960s — Guy Debord, for instance — Western Marxism has worried a great deal about the "society of the spectacle" built by mass media such as advertising and television. Which keywords would you use to describe today's cultural landscape?

M: Western Marxism's critique of the culture industry did not begin in the 1960s. It goes back at least to the essay Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School wrote together, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." They were Jewish scholars who fled to the United States during the Second World War, and when they came face to face with the American mass culture industry they were shocked. They thought they had left Nazi ideological control behind, but in America they saw that commercial mass media controlled thought and shaped culture with a force no weaker than the fascist propaganda they had lived through in Germany.

If we follow the argument of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle to describe today's cultural landscape, the most important word is probably commodification. When that book talks about the "spectacle," it means that the commodity logic of media products is everywhere, takes in everything, and seeps into every part of society. Media products and media content are produced as commodities and circulate in the market as commodities. "Produced as a commodity" means made for profit; "circulating as a commodity" means given a price. And a media product made for profit has to chase maximum profit.

But in modern digital media, commodification has gone well beyond products and content. Take "leisure time." In the 1970s the Canadian political economist Dallas Smythe proposed the "audience commodity" — he was still writing about commercial television. He argued that North American commercial television only looks free: what it actually does is sell the audience's attention and leisure time to advertisers as a commodity. The audience thinks it is watching something free, resting; in fact that rest is work done for the station, and leisure time has become a commodity, because the station charges for advertising according to its ratings.

In digital media this is even plainer. Everything you do on social media leaves a digital trace, and all of it can be logged, packaged, and sorted by the platform into data used to predict user behavior and sold to advertisers and political marketing firms — the recent Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal is a very clear case. The process is everywhere and almost invisible; you never notice it happening.

Creativity has been turned into a commodity as well. Look at the so-called user-generated content platforms, YouTube among them. At the start, users made the content, and the accompanying talk was all about how the creativity of ordinary people had been set free, how you could make your own media products, how the barrier to entering media production and circulation had dropped, how everyone could tell their own story.

That soon slid into the logic of the commodity. What users post brings traffic, and traffic sharply raises the platform's advertising revenue; the more users do on the platform, the more data the platform collects, which then turns personal information and privacy into commodities too. Before digital platforms, that information and that privacy were not sorted, managed, or traded as goods.

So as digital media takes on a larger role in daily life, the logic of commodification keeps expanding — into leisure time, into individual creativity, into personal information and privacy.

The consequence is the death of the public. Once commodification is everywhere, the relation between a person and a cultural product becomes purely one of consumer and commodity. What kind of relation is that? First, the consumer needs a certain purchasing power, because cultural products carry a price — pay per view, pay per service. Second, in developed capitalist societies the consumer's relation to the commodity is disposable. That takes us back to capitalism's basic contradiction, the relation between consumption and production. Media, or information products, are now overproduced: far more content is made than anyone can consume. One source of capitalist economic crisis, as we know, is overproduction with too little consumption — the capitalist cannot take enough profit to reinvest and produce again, and the chain breaks.

That is why David Harvey, in The Condition of Postmodernity, insists on the tie between culture and ideology on one side and the capitalist political economy on the other. You need an ideology to keep consumption going. You need a body of talk that expands and hardens the desire to consume. You need to tell people that everything runs through consumption: defining yourself (the marketing language of brands and personality), meeting what your social role demands (being a good mother means making the right purchases for the family), solving any difficulty in life (buying emotional support and companionship). The whole culture industry keeps reinforcing this. You have to upgrade, the way you upgrade an iPhone, and that takes a consumerist ideology urging you on. So when people picture their relation to media and cultural products, they picture it as consumer and commodity.

Digital media has also brought mediatization. Media logic has worked its way into every corner of cultural life. In a country with democratic elections, a politician has to design a policy platform for the campaign and find every possible way to persuade a constituency. Many of the people who now run campaigns are veteran media professionals, because an election cannot happen without mass media, and every contact with voters has to account for media logic. Often what matters is not what your policy is but what image you want voters to see. You have to decide which platforms to buy ads on and who those platforms reach. Media logic has entered the machinery of politics.

Cultural life goes without saying: media logic turns everything toward entertainment. Politics is bound up in this too — elections often become media spectacles, programs staged like talk shows. Media logic can make any serious public question into a talk show, into spectacle. People do sometimes argue in earnest about something, but one flare-up passes and another takes its place, and none of them lasts long; while a flare-up is being hyped, nobody has the time or energy to look at the context, the history, the causes behind it.

Any public question can be made into entertainment. There is no room for serious, thorough discussion, so it usually turns into picking sides and shouting. This is a long way from what Habermas once hoped for: media building a public sphere where people could deliberate and reach agreement.

Then there is everyday life. Baudrillard wrote about simulacra and simulation, arguing that the opposition between sign and reality, between signifier and signified, has dissolved. A story or a television drama used to be a representation of reality; you could call that representation a distortion, say it hid something or misled someone — but you were still discussing the two on the assumption that sign and reality stand apart. In the "two-dimensional" world of anime and games, though — a world I know very little about, and mostly hear about from students — the question of whether anything is signified behind the signifier has simply been suspended. One student told me her master's thesis would be on an online game; you probably know it, Mr Love: Queen's Choice. One of the male characters is called Li Zeyan, and on his birthday female fans raised money to buy him a neon billboard wishing him many happy returns. This is what Baudrillard meant, I think, when he said there is nothing signified behind the signs of a Disney theme park: those cartoon figures never corresponded to anything real in the first place, so the park becomes a sign of signs. Call it another case of high mediatization, and of the link between mediatization and commodification.

For a left-wing scholar, what these two trends threaten is the supply of alternative imaginings. Debord's pessimistic view was that there is no longer any chance to put forward and develop another ideology. That was also central to Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of the culture industry: mass-reproduced cultural goods manufacture an illusion.

You feel you are in a rich media environment and can't decide what to pick — spoiled for choice. But Adorno says your choice and your freedom as a consumer sit inside boundaries someone else has drawn. You are choosing among the goods this system offers, and you don't even know whether an alternative exists.

2. The logic of short video, and does livestreaming really offer "diversity"?

Q: When you talked about disposable consumer goods and user participation as "digital labor," the two examples that came to mind were livestreaming platforms and short video. Do they represent something about how culture is produced today?

M: Yes, both matter. Short video arrived when the conditions were right. There is a technological context: the smartphone is an integrated platform where one device lets you do many different things, and short video grew out of that. I've also talked with a lot of short video platforms, and they all weigh the same question: what is the best length for a video? They found that many people watch on the commute to and from work, so it can't run long. That alone lays down a great deal about what short video can show and how it shows it. It has to work visually; the subject can't be too complicated; anything complicated has to be simplified as far as possible. A problem you can only explain through an investigative report cannot be done as a short video. The logic of the technology, the logic of the platform, and the logic of how people use it have already dictated much of the content.

Livestreaming is the same. It can raise the banner of "empowerment," of "letting ordinary people speak," much as YouTube does. It can also claim authenticity, because content used to be made by professionals and filtered by gatekeepers who decided what the audience would see; now that middle step is gone and ordinary people address ordinary people directly.

But this brings us back to the Frankfurt School's doubts about "diversity." Look at the stars of the livestreaming platforms: how they look and what they broadcast are not very varied at all. One kind is spectacle — eating strange things, performing jaw-dropping stunts. The other is women performing and bantering with viewers. The taste behind the "influencer face" is remarkably uniform; the term itself says that if you want to be famous you must fit a single standard. And women's livestream performances carry an obvious element of emotional labor, carrying straight over the gendered division of labor under patriarchy.

3. How precision marketing on digital media broke up the sense of a shared community

Q: There seems to be a hierarchy of contempt between platforms like Kuaishou and Douyin; audiences of different media have built walls, even hostility, and can barely talk to one another. Where do you think this division comes from, and what does it do?

M: Long before the internet, consuming cultural products was already marked by class. A large longitudinal social survey run in Britain by Mike Savage, of LSE's sociology department, makes the point well. They were studying class division in British society, and the questionnaire had a section on culture. One question asked: what is your main leisure activity? Concerts, opera, ballet — or the pub, rock, pop? Cultural consumption has never been separable from class. Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction is about the same thing. In Britain, of course, public service television like the BBC carries a strong mission: to serve the public, to reach most of the country, to build an "imagined community." Even so, ask British working-class people and many will still tell you the BBC is like Oxford and Cambridge — a thoroughly elitist cultural institution.

But as social media has grown, and as platforms have come to know users' habits and preferences more and more precisely, audiences really have been segmented and fragmented. Media and cultural studies call it a shift from mass media to niche media. We said earlier that a person's relation to a cultural product is that of consumer to commodity; the more precisely the institutions making those commodities understand consumers' traits and habits, the better they can market to them. Their logic has always been: give users what they want. That is the logic behind the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal. All this marketing is a form of persuasion, and persuasion works best when you know the person you are persuading — which turns of phrase, which manner of speaking, will move them furthest.

That does produce the problem you describe. As marketing gets more fragmented and more precise, publicness is lost. When citizens' sources of information are completely different, there is no shared ground left to argue from. Take an American election: what social media pushes at you may be nothing like what your neighbors get. People live in silos, their views hardened by precision marketing, commercial and political. Why does a public service broadcaster like the BBC insist on the "imagined community"? Because it believes democratic politics can only work if people share a basic consensus — roughly the same sources of information, at least an agreement about the facts of public affairs, and a sense of belonging to, being responsible for, and taking part in the whole community. Once precision marketing on digital media has broken that sense of community into pieces, people live in separate spaces of discourse. Put them in a room to deliberate and agreement becomes harder still, because even the starting point — the facts — has gone missing. This is why the West now treats fake news as a menace: it really does shake the basic premise of democracy. If you can't agree on facts, opinions are hopeless.

4. Why "Goddess Day" is a step backward for gender politics

Q: The "precision marketing" you mention seems to include marketing aimed at women. Plenty of businesses have mounted online campaigns directed at women — "Goddess Day," perks like priority dispatch on ride-hailing apps. What does that change?

M: I once wrote a discourse analysis using Double 11 as its case, looking closely at what media and social media said around the shopping festival. The language of the so-called "spendthrift wife" was everywhere in it. After one year's Double 11, Jack Ma posted on Weibo thanking China's female internet users, because they shop not only for themselves but for their husbands and children, and so deserve great credit. I took that as a textbook instance of patriarchal capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

To untangle the logic, you probably have to go back to sexual politics and gender equality under socialism, and to what changed after reform and opening up. Under socialism there was the slogan "women hold up half the sky," which mattered and was progressive: it pushed women out of the household and into paid work, into what was called socialist construction. It broke the traditional gendered division of labor. There was a broad political direction behind it, the state played an active and important role, and state-owned enterprises did not discriminate by sex as openly as a market environment does.

After reform and opening up, though — especially after the restructuring of state enterprises — women's employment and their part in production went sharply backward. Once you calculate the use of labor by market logic, female labor is obviously not a bargain: there is maternity leave, for one thing. Some kinds of work are also declared unsuitable for women. Through all of this the state gradually withdrew from enforcing gender equality in work and employment.

Alongside unequal employment came the push to return women to the family and to motherhood — and under consumerist ideology those roles are inseparable from being a proper consumer. Look at what Jack Ma said: a woman's most important social roles are wife and mother. She controls what the household buys and has to look after everyone else as well as herself. So she becomes the natural target of advertising and of consumerist talk.

Back to gender politics. Set against the socialist period, the whole "goddess" vocabulary is a large step backward, and to my mind a deeply reactionary sexual politics. On its face it worships the "goddess" and holds her in the highest esteem, but the expectations it hands women sit entirely inside the male gaze. Think about what sort of women a holiday like "Goddess Day" imagines: it turns women into objects, sexualizes them heavily, and fits them to what men consider a beauty.

This vocabulary is also a reaction against the gender-neutral language of the socialist era. The great 1980s debate about "human nature" held that human nature had been suppressed. One line of argument said the socialist woman was an "iron girl" — a de-gendered, neutered figure that wiped out femininity and stood for the crushing of human nature by an authoritarian state. But from the standpoint of gender politics, the "search for femininity" that followed was a complete regression. It defined femininity against masculinity as softness and delicacy: the "liberated" woman was to recover and display her femininity through cosmetics and clothes, which is a retreat to very backward gender roles and a very old division of labor. Femininity also joined seamlessly with consumerism — only by consuming, by buying particular kinds of goods, can you keep up and construct it. So Double 11 and Goddess Day look like respect for women, and in fact push gender politics back toward the feudal era.

Q: Some businesses use the language of "girl power," affirming women's independence by affirming their economic freedom and the legitimacy of their desires. What do you make of that kind of pitch?

M: Plenty of Western feminists have written about "girl power." That language is tied to the logic of neoliberalism. One part of that logic is its heavy stress on the individual: everyone is answerable for her own circumstances — self-responsibility. As a woman, if you look unkempt and untidy, if you neglect your appearance and fail to match the prescribed image of a "goddess," then you have shirked your individual responsibility and failed to take care of yourself. And how do you take care of yourself? By consuming — by the right kind of consumption. Taking responsibility for your own life still runs through goods.

The affirmation of the female body and of female desire is neoliberal too, or what the West calls post-feminist. The claim is that we no longer need feminism, that equality between the sexes has arrived, that we live in a "post-feminist" age. There are two problems with this.

First: is the "attractive female body," the display of female desire, really for women themselves, or is it there to satisfy the male gaze? Are women asserting who they are and making their own choices, or catering to a male desire that is thoroughly socialized?

Second: the display of the body and of female desire is once again shaped and ruled by the logic of the commodity. Everything, including the demands of the feminist movement, can end up as a product. You can buy a T-shirt printed with "This is what a feminist looks like." Your political demands, your language of liberation, can end up mass-produced like Che Guevara's face.

5. "The resistance of the elite middle class"

Q: We've noticed some non-traditional groups — feminist organizations, LGBTQ communities, hipsters — trying to challenge mainstream culture by gathering online and offline. How do you assess their social engagement?

M: That depends on context too. In China, these groups hold a good deal of cultural and social capital: they are well educated, and most of them are probably urban middle class. LGBT people especially. I know a scholar in LSE's Department of Social Policy who studies LGBT communities in China, and the people he contacts and interviews come across as a very elite group. Widening the space for speech, widening the dimensions of identity, making values plural — these are all good things. But I think this group in China is even more elite than the already elite groups in the West. When we look at social movements and resistance, looking only at them is a serious problem, because we then miss the majority and miss class altogether. We would be watching only the resistance of the elite middle class, while China also has an enormous population of new-generation migrant workers — a group with no cultural or social capital, and not necessarily any media literacy, so that in the fights that matter most they cannot use media to make themselves heard. The media doesn't cover them either; the media has always cared more about the joys and sorrows of the urban middle class.

Q: When the media does look at new-generation migrant workers, or at people outside the city's frame, it mostly seems to gawk — the way Pang Mailang was written about, the way platforms like Kuaishou are presented as spectacle. Does that mark a kind of fragmentation in Chinese society?

M: That appetite for the exotic is certainly there. After Chinese media went through its round of marketization and commodification, its stance, its ideology, the people it serves, and the professionals who make it all became urban middle class. Its attention to those at the bottom is bound to be badly insufficient, and when it does look, it either gawks or pities from above — the phrase "vulnerable groups" says it all.

Wanning Sun of the University of Technology Sydney has written about how Chinese urban news media covered migrant workers demanding unpaid wages. These outlets rarely touch migrant workers' problems, but the moment a worker climbs onto a rooftop and threatens to jump — a spectacular, dramatic form of protest — they pay attention. Commercial media have a very sharp nose, I think: they quickly find the stories that catch the eye and the stories that shore up the sense of superiority felt by media workers and media audiences as members of the urban middle class. These are stories that confirm the existing class order, for the people who write them and the people who read them alike. Then Fan Yusu turned up, and some middle-class intellectuals were plainly uncomfortable: how does a live-in nanny read the same books we read, use our vocabulary, show not the slightest envy or reverence for our cultural capital, and needle us on top of it?

The West has the same problem, and after Trump's election and the Brexit referendum Western elites slowly began to see that elite media institutions are cut off from a sizable part of the public. The media called Trump voters rednecks and assumed they were racists; those voters, in turn, filed the media alongside the whole elite establishment. Trump's election is the classic case. By the late stages of the campaign, nothing The New York Times or CNN dug up could hurt him or shake his voters, because his voters had already concluded that the elite media outlets were in league with the establishment, and that what those outlets said was precisely the reason to vote for him: they wanted someone who would wreck the elite order. So media elitism and the political division it produces are not a Chinese problem alone. Western left-wing scholars — David Harvey, Nancy Fraser — have both written about it.

The groups you mentioned rose in China only recently. Identity politics rose in the West after the counterculture of the 1960s. Fraser has written a great deal on how the rise of identity politics dissolved class questions inside social struggle. Harvey has said that it makes solidarity much harder: if everyone insists on a particular dimension of identity, is there still a baseline in political struggle on which solidarity can be built, instead of a contest over which oppressed identity counts most? Wendy Brown has described it as a competition in oppression: is my LGBT group more oppressed, or are people of color? So the rise of identity politics damaged both the solidarity and the demands of political struggle. Fraser worked on the relation between the politics of recognition and the politics of redistribution. Looking back in the 1990s, after identity politics had already had a loud run, she argued that recognition cannot replace redistribution, and that a genuinely emancipatory political project has to combine the two.

Q: Do you think Nancy Fraser's prescription, the politics of redistribution, is the real cure for commodification and for the loss of public space?

M: From the left, we should today be wary of any critical theorist or left-wing intellectual who steps forward with a cure-all or a blueprint, because we have seen how socialist revolutions unfolded in different parts of the world. Be wary of grand narratives. Any progressive politics, any imagining and design of it, has to be thoroughly historicized and thoroughly contextualized.

But I agree with Fraser, who argues from the position of a feminist political theorist. As a feminist scholar I share her insistence that gender politics and class politics belong together. A couple of years ago she wrote a fine piece titled "How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden — and how to reclaim it". Which brings us back to what you raised earlier: the danger in language that flies the banner of liberating women, liberating desire, pursuing "equality." A person has a gender, but also a class and a race. As a white middle-class woman your place in the relations of power is certainly not that of a Chinese factory worker. If you want to defend the rights of a woman working in a garment factory in China or Bangladesh, and help her state her own political demands, gender alone will not do it. Class and race are in there, and so is the whole order of global capitalism.

6. The global elite grows more alike, while countries split further inside

Q: A lot of what individuals do today is disembedded: people everywhere seem to entertain themselves and spend their free time in the same ways, and nobody stresses that each culture has its own context and history any more.

M: I think there's a problem with your premise. When you say everyone entertains themselves the same way, you may only mean each country's elite. One of the odd things about discussing culture under globalization is that you can always find plenty of examples of global connection: everyone watches Japanese anime, American television, Hollywood films. And the people who comment on cultural phenomena are themselves an elite. Reasoning from their own daily experience, they arrive easily at the conclusion you describe — that the world has more or less converged.

But look at it the other way. As the global elite grows more alike in one respect after another — ideology, the culture and media it consumes, even the way it lives — countries are splitting further inside, and that split runs along class lines and along the gap between rich and poor. China needs no further comment; we've already discussed the middle-class orientation of mass media and its result, an enormous number of people with no voice. Even in the West, Trump and Brexit showed that elites had assumed everyone's interests and demands, everyone's understanding of globalization, everyone's view of neoliberalism and global capitalist trade were positive, and that other people thought as they did. Only when the results came in were they jolted awake: there are people like that in my own country, and I never knew.

After the Brexit vote, the BBC made a special program interviewing people who had voted to leave. You get the sense that these people had not existed before — they were outside Westminster's field of vision. American elites say Trump voters were duped, that a kind of false consciousness is at work, though they may not use the Marxist term. But look at the cultural products "those people" consume: the media they meet day to day must differ enormously from that of the globalized elite.

7. Why blocking was never a good method

Q: Does political pressure make the loss of public space worse — some topics, for instance, have essentially no chance of being discussed in public at all?

M: Of course. Speech controls and censorship change the space for speech. In that sense China is the worst case scenario: squeezed between political control and the control of capital, the room for speech is very, very small. Set aside censorship with Chinese characteristics — capital's grip on culture and media here may in some ways be worse than in Britain or the United States. Britain at least still has a strong tradition of state welfare and of socialism.

Q: What does the government's cleanup of the internet and of particular platforms, carried out in the name of fighting "vulgarity," do to the internet ecosystem?

M: When we analyze media governance we note that the logic of governance differs across political systems. The Chinese government, for instance, positions media as a platform for publicizing official positions and policies; it has a significant propaganda role. And when the government regulates media, its cast of mind is thoroughly paternalistic. It treats viewers and internet users as children: you "don't know," you "can't tell good from bad," you are likely to be led astray by all sorts of things, vulgar content among them, and "I," the parent, must be the one who sorts and selects on your behalf. That is probably the orientation of media management in China.

But blocking was never a good way to manage culture. Managing a cultural product or a set of ideas by blocking it is very inefficient, and it raises questions about the legitimacy of the policy. That goes double online: rather than blocking things, you would do better to build the culture you want. In this noisy, plural arena of opinion, could you do a better job of building the culture you want to promote? Could you get the cultural products you consider healthy liked and accepted by more people?

Gramsci's "hegemony" has long been rendered in Chinese as baquan, which may be a little misleading, since in Chinese that word calls up military conquest and imperialism. But the hegemony Gramsci meant stresses a party's capacity to lead, its overall command in the realm of ideology; lingdaoquan, leadership, might be the better rendering. The consensus and legitimacy at stake do not rest wholly on military force and the machinery of violence. Marx spent his life dissecting capitalism through political economy, and his account of culture and ideology is comparatively thin. Gramsci picked up that task: his writing on organic intellectuals, on the relation between coercion and consent, and on the strategic shift from the war of maneuver to the war of position all concerns a party's leadership. Seen that way, the more blocking policies a state issues, the more it shows how weak its ideological leadership is. If you had really built successful leadership at the level of ideology — Hollywood, say — you could keep absorbing what is unorthodox and marginal and put it to your own use without ever losing your core. Deciding that this is not allowed and that is not allowed shows exactly how thinly stretched you are.

8. Keep pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will

Q: If the logic of commodification is this strong, how much agency do consumers still have — how far can they decide their own lives? In a blog post you mentioned that WeChat had changed the way you write, that you had grown used to writing in fragments.

M: You can't answer that in general; you have to separate contexts and separate kinds of consumers. Different groups have different media literacy, so their agency and control in daily life differ too. It's also worth watching how agency shows itself and gets used in a specific situation, because under digital conditions the relation between users and platforms, between content and media, is highly fluid, and the balance of power between them depends on the situation and the group. Power reveals itself in the process: you have to see which side holds the initiative, and when. It is a highly dynamic thing.

On the whole, though, as someone who studies the political economy of media, I am not optimistic about users' initiative — although I am unwilling to say there is no possibility left, because that would amount to surrendering without a fight.

Q: As a media researcher, how do you handle media's dominion in your own life, and how do you use media well?

M: If by dominion you mean Foucault's governmentality, then for Foucault power is not only repressive but constitutive, not only institutional power from above but something that reaches down to the level of the individual, working through the use and circulation of discourse and the shaping of subjectivity. On that view there is no escaping the dominion formed by the interwoven logics of capital and technology in a daily life as mediatized as ours. But as Mao Zedong said, where there is oppression there is resistance. Since Foucault extended the sites of power down to the micro level, resistance can happen at that level as well.

As a media researcher I approach media with criticism and suspicion, and I don't imagine I can turn media logic to my own use single-handed. Bourdieu wrote about public intellectuals and the media: in the end the public intellectual submits to media logic and is governed by it, not the other way around.

What resistance I have as an individual is, first, staying alert to media's dominion and, second, looking for chances to say something different — giving you this interview, for example. As a teacher I have a good opportunity and a good platform for reaching young people, and I hope I can help them find a vocabulary for criticism and reflection, and build imaginings that run against the logic of capital and commerce. But even an elite university, a space for discourse with every natural advantage, is no ivory tower sealed off from the world; it is being squeezed and eroded too. So what I can do is probably just what Gramsci said: keep pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

Cover image from: aphelis.net, Black Mirror