Indira Neill Hoch

I can’t pretend like I understand Arjun Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. I’ve read it three times now and I still feel like it hasn’t clicked for me. Maybe it’s deliberately obtuse in the way the Frankfurt School is, resisting easy quotation and reduction to kitsch sound bytes. Appadurai’s –scapes sound similar to Castells’ (1996/2000) flows, just described in a more nuanced (complicated?) manner. Still, something seems missing. At the end of the essay, Appadurai calls for questioning “in a way that relies on images of flow and uncertainty, hence ‘chaos’, rather than on older images of order, stability and systemacity (p. 20).” The –scape is meant to be fluid and depend on perspective. So, here I will start with an element of a mediascape (or element within the larger mediascape) that to me appears disjunctive from the other –scapes that make up my imagined world.

http://undercover-witch.tumblr.com is the Tumblr page of a (I think) 22 year old Romanian (she discloses this all the time) woman. She has posted screen shots of her tumblr statistics indicating she has around 9,000 followers at any given time. Generally this number increases, but she loses followers as well. Tumblr does not display followers publically like some other social media sites, so I’ll have to take the stats she posts at face value. I started following her because she translates dojinshi (self-published comic books, often fan works of other, original series) from Japanese into English. Someone (not her) purchases the dojinshi in print, generally at a convention, and scans it. Various tumblr users either give her the scans directly or provide links to books they would like to see translated. Undercover-witch then selects a comic, posts about it to her tumblr, and solicits donations via PayPal to fund her translations (generally 20-50$ USD per book). Once the money is raised, she posts the translated dojinshi to her tumblr. In addition to translating the text, she edits the pages to put the text in the appropriate speech bubble, edits text in the special effects graphics, and in the case of sexually explicit material, removes the censor marks.

These dojinshi posts are intermixed with other media content: aesthetically pleasing photographs of places around the world, animated gifs of Romanian gymnasts, pictures of actor Tom Hiddleston, asking for opinions on what color she should dye her hair, conversations with others in Romanian about politics, explanations for why she doesn’t like feminism, and content that could easily be defined as feminist. Most of this content is reblogs of posts made by other users and circulating around tumblr, appearing on thousands (tens-of-thousands, maybe more) of other blogs as well.

Appadurai describes the function of mediascapes as “elements…out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places…they help to constitute narratives of the Other and proto-narrative of possible lives, fantasies which could become prolegomena to the desire for acquisition and movement” (p. 9). But the -scape of even an individual tumblr user’s page is a series of chaotic disjunctions. Undercover-witch’s English is virtually fluent, and the majority of her content is in English, but some of her posts are in Romanian, others in Japanese. Most of the time our language overlaps, and in the instantaneous, always-on space of the internet, sharing a language seems to collapse a number of Appadurai’s -scapes together. I don’t feel like I occupy a different ethnoscape when we can communicate. Likewise, we have both passed a technoscape threshold that allows for internet access. In the moments where she writes in Japanese, I feel less educated and worldly (though I know she doesn’t speak German, and I do), when she speaks Romanian, I realize we don’t actually share an ethnoscape or technoscape. I use PayPal to send money sometimes, when there’s a book up for translation that I’m interested in, but this finanscape transaction is because $10 is little to me, and a lot for her. We have things in common, but here and there I’m reminded that we’re different. She has cultural capital (9,000 followers), I don’t (89 followers). In a mediascape controlled neither by the state, nor entirely by commercial interests, the disjunctures present seem to outstrip Appadurai’s framework. What narrative of my life or Other’s lives could I possibly shape out of the overwhelming stream of images and content that my tumblr dashboard feeds me (Undercover-witch is just one of over 200 blogs I follow)? Where is this other place or other thing I’m thinking about moving to or acquiring? While I have described the disjunctures of tumblr as if it is about personal identity, I mean for it to reflect the stream of intermixed content that makes up a social media dashboard or feed. Undercover-witch is just one example of many individual blogs I could pull, but the effect is similar.

With such incoherence, even Appadurai’s scapes seem too static. This may well be because I’m inclined to begin at the media and work out from there. Appadurai starts at the ethnoscape, which may be inclined towards more stability than a participatory mediascape. In 1990 participatory media was photocopied fanzines passed out at conventions or posted in the mail. A lot has happened in 25 years, and it may have outstripped the scape framework. But, if we should be able to work with disjunctures from any one of these scapes, and Appadurai seems to suggest we can, participatory media might be too chaotic, too fast, to really junction anything else.

This traces back around to a place where Appadurai begins, with the notion of nostalgia. Rather than thinking of nostalgia for a past that was never had (as in the case of Philippine reproduction of American songs), what happens when the present is filled with a recycled past? Part of the mediacape of social media and participatory culture is that things don’t go away, they cycle back around, popping up on your dash or in your newsfeed. That bit of pop culture is everywhere at once and will be back to see you a month from now. I might have nostalgia for a week ago, but I’ll re-experience that same thing a month down the line. In chaos, at least the type of chaos found in the hectic space of tumblr, there aren’t re-runs, that re-emergence of an old post is something new again. I’d like to talk more about this notion of nostalgia in the digital.