From reality TV to social media, the boundary between entertainment and news become more and more blur and almost collapse. Edwards thinks, to understand the phenomenon, we need to investigate the role of media played for Trump—”What complicates the distinction between reality TV and Twitter is that some of the same audience carries over from one to the other. The massive presence of bots in the audience of Twitter is new, and the means of engagement with the president’s utterances are quite different for users of the social network than for consumers of television broadcasts…But to get to Twitter, or rather to arrive at the place where his use of Twitter would be so effective, Trump had to play part in a transformation of television itself”. (Edwards, P32) Additionally, Edwards states the relationship between culture and politics shifts into a soft power formation. In the age of Trump, American popular culture altered the politics in America: “The transformation was not produced only by Trump himself, although he has had an outsized role in altering the manner by which US culture circulates globally. Nevertheless, the effects on politics (both domestic and international) are more important than the causes. The global circulation of Donald Trump’s rhetoric and persona beginning with the 2015 campaign ruptured a crucial divide between popular culture and political discourse, and under Trump, the US political system itself has become a form of global entertainment”. (Edwards, P 27)
In the new relationship between digital media and society, technology itself becomes the centre of politics in some way. The example of Trump`s tweet illustrates how his performance style solidifies his audience by direct contacting and thus challenged the traditional mainstream media. Edwards says: “The decade since then has generated social formations that intersect and interact with digital technology so closely that it is often difficult to name where one begins and the other ends. Of course, historical perspectives on a moment while it is still taking place are both difficult and urgent. It is not incidental that we have seen the expression of revolutionary impulses around the world, which, whether they have been successful or not, are in some way built on people finding a voice that they did not have before, and now think they have”. (Edwards, P29)
Similarly, Poster brings up the idea that how digital media technology contributes to the social reality construction—He questioned in the information era, Western political ideology such as the liberal and humanist are seriously questioned. The subject of citizenship and previous social relations are overturned by the new technology. –” The architecture of the internet, by contrast, is that of a decentralized web. Any point may establish exchanges with any other point or points, a configuration that makes it very difficult if not impossible to control by the nation-state. ..In all of these ways, the internet contains the potential of new practices. The process of realizing this potential is, it must be emphasized, a political one”.
Poster discuss the new relationship between people and society by the redefining the notion of human and citizen in the information era. By drawing the postmodern theory, Poster argues that new media may contribute to decentralization, brings interaction to people, and may not leads to new imperialisms. Poster was critiquing Hardt and Negri`s theory: “The internet holds the prospect of serving to introduce post-national political forms because of its internal architecture, its new register of time and space, its new relation of human to machine, of body to mind, its new imaginary, and its new articulation of culture and reality. Despite what may appear in the media of newsprint and television as a celebration of the internet’s harmony with the institutions of the nation-state and the globalizing economy, new media offer possibilities for the construction of planetary political subjects, netizens who will be multiple, dispersed and virtual, nodes of a network of collective intelligence. (Poster, P84)
The national identity has been challenged by globalization. Poster says: “In the present context, one must tread lightly and carefully in any critique of the limitations of these bulwarks of human freedom. Yet circumstances today present an extraordinary case of transcultural and transnational mixing.” Also, Poster brings up the notion of netizen to demonstrate how identity crosses the countries: “In contrast to the citizen of the nation, the name often given to the political subject constituted in cyberspace is “netizen.” …Yet the netizen might be the formative figure in a new kind of political relation, one that shares allegiance to the nation with allegiance to the net and to the planetary political spaces it inaugurates. Certain structural features of the internet encourage, promote or at least allow exchanges across national borders”.
While Poster discusses about how digital performed in the politics, Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) analyse the new paradigm of digitality by investigating culture vectors, such as digital economy, digital arts, information theatre—”the formation of digital theatre (in the broadest sense of this term) is a struggle over the micro-sociology of the performative matrix of everyday life” . (CAE, P151) “Over the past century, a long-standing tradition of digital cultural resistance has emerged that has used recombinant methods in the various forms of combines, sampling, pangender performance, bricolage, detournement, readymades, appropriation, plagiarism, theatre of everyday life, constellations, and so on”. (CAE, P151)—CAE talked about how digital resistance challenged tradition social specialization division and art form, to lead a call for interdisciplinary collaboration.
Digitality creates hybrid analogic forms of aesthetics: “however, in the aesthetic realm of the commodity, the appearance of difference is more desirable. Today auto manufacturers offer a digital infrastructure with an analogic superstructure…To this day, digital aesthetics is still on the economic margins. While it is dominant in appearance in the form of the mass media-now literally the domain of the digital-the high end of value is still found in the analogic “ (CAE, P154) The notion of Plagiarism seems become a form of cultural production. When aiming to the expectation of sameness, counterfeit is no longer simply counterfeit. One good example of digital arts may be Duchamp: “With his readymade series, Duchamp struck a mighty blow against the value system of the analogic. Duchamp took manufactured objects, signed and dated them, and placed them in a high culture context. Duchamp’s argument was that any given object has no essential value and that the semiotic network in which an object is placed defines its meaning, and hence, its value.’ (CAE, P155)
Also, by mentioning recombinant theatre and information theatre, CAE argues the authority can be distributed through bodies and reshaping the subjectivity: “Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have persuasively argued in A Thousand Plateaus that the matrix of authority is centered on the body…In other words, those involved in the virtual theatre are nothing more than neutralized subjects incapable of disrupting the matrix of authority and thus establishing an autonomous subjectivity”. (CAE, P162)
Reference:
Brian T. Edwards, “Trump from Reality TV to Twitter, or the Selfie-Determination of Nations”
Mark Poster, “Citizens, Digital Media, and Globalization”
Critical Art Ensemble, “Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance”