The Play Ethic by Pat Kane

Author:Pat Kane
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781447207115
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The liberal semiocrats

Let’s return to the moment where I first apprehended these artists. A standard scene of domestic consumption – but one which exploded my consciousness out of this space, and has sent me roaming across the informational networks to find out more about these extraordinary figures. We can no more call this merely a ‘leisure’ or ‘entertainment’ moment – some fantasy of community, or sexuality, or potency, to compensate for our profound containment in work culture. Even in their currently underdeveloped state, the media portals of the twenty-first-century household encourage us to be more like active ‘researchers’ and ‘aesthetes’, exercisers of sensibility and taste, than simply couch potatoes or passive viewers.

And of course, receptive organizations and businesses are alive to the possibility that one might be able to ‘brand’ this new sort of activism. Who will build the spaces and portals where players might at least begin their journeys into the ‘semiocracy’, into our social order of information and signs? Who are the ‘liberal semiocrats’ who will keep the bandwidth open for creativity and play?35

The BBC has been especially adroit in turning itself, across all of its available media channels, into a kind of semiotic commons. Auntie Beeb is now a carnival of communities of sensibility, a nest of overlapping networks, each of which defines itself by a taste, an idea, a stance in the world. I know that BBC4 speaks to my particular formation but I’m also aware that other channels (the youth channel BBC3, the news channel BBC News24) are targeting different sensibilities. I also know that all these shows now have an Internet back-up, where varying degrees of supporting material, links to sources or cognate areas of interest, are available.

Discovering an item like the Becks Futures documentary in a branded digital channel like BBC4 is only the beginning of the kind of experience a fully play-oriented media would provide in the age of potentially infinite bandwidth. The bewildering eclecticism of the average Web surfer’s bookmark list is a clue to just how customizable we wish our media to be: how much we wish the cultural archive to serve our sensibilities and interests in a very intimate and detailed way.

It’s been apparent for a number of years that the biggest obstacle facing the development of a televisual archive comparable with the Internet – indeed, crossing over with it – is that of copyright: media interests want to hold onto the distribution of their material to develop as much syndication revenue as they can. The defence of ‘fair usage’ has come to a crisis point in America where the rights of artists to morph, copy, transform or even cite artistic and creative works (whether audio-visual or textual) are under attack. Yet the same corporate powers that wish to prevent a radical artist from subverting the eighty-year-old image of Mickey Mouse are also inhibiting much more diffuse forms of media appreciation by their rigorous policing of the content that occupies the bandwidth. Why can’t a generation of ‘teleastes’ (similar

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