|
|
|
The Surf, Cultural Production and the Value of Cultural studies: How the Web Leads to a Tidal Shift in Orientation.
P David Marshall, English, University of Queensland
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
Surfing has been one of the metaphors of choice to describe the experience of new media. The Web is regularly surfed by its users, while channel surfing has been employed to express the light and affective touch of how multichannel television environments are negotiated by the remote control. Certainly pleasure is embedded in the reasons why the concept of the surf has been attached to these relatively sedentary experiences and this is in need of exploration. This paper has the larger objective of working out how the insights that cultural studies has generated for the study of media can be redeployed, reconstituted and fundamentally retooled for their application to the study of the Internet’s Web. The paper argues that the active audience approach of cultural studies is useful but needs to reoriented for the study of the general will–to-produce that has been part of the first generation of the World Wide Web. The surfer is a user of the Internet as much as an audience member, as the very categories of analysis begin to break down in their application to the Web. The paper proposes a cultural production thesis for analysing the web as a media form.
