[Six Questions] | Astra Taylor on The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture ... - 1 views
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Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource
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Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.
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why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.
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