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Worth reading
From the archives: Remember, remember 11 September; Murderous monsters in flight; Reject their dark game; And let Liberty's flame; Burn prouder and ever more bright - Geoffrey Barto "Bjørn Stærks hyklerske dobbeltmoral er til å spy av. Under det syltynne fernisset av redelighet sitter han klar med en vulkan av diagnoser han kan klistre på annerledes tenkende mennesker når han etter beste evne har spilt sine kort. Jeg tror han har forregnet seg. Det blir ikke noe hyggelig under sharia selv om han har slikket de nye herskernes støvlesnuter."
2005: 12 | 11 | 10 | 09 | 08 | 07 | 06 | 05 | 04 | 03 | 02 | 01
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Is culture only a product?
[Also published in Dagbladet's political blog.] There's a popular belief that to treat culture as an ordinary product is to reduce it to something cold and empty. We see this belief in resistance to the Norwegian government's half-hearted attempt to liberalize the book market, where many insist that the book market is not a market like any other. We see it in arguments for a state-owned public broadcaster, a broadcaster that is free to rise above mere commercial interests, eyes fixed upon higher cultural values. And we saw it during the radio concession struggle two years ago, when Minister of Culture Valgerd Svarstad Haugland attempted to save radio listeners from themselves by replacing popular commercial broadcaster P4 with a channel more obedient to public broadcasting principles. This popular belief rests on two ideas - both false. The first idea is that an ordinary product, bought intervention free at prices set by the market, only has a material value, the value of its usefulness. To treat culture as any other product thus robs it of a spiritual and esthetic dimension. You can't, after all, measure everything in money. And that's right - you can't. The value my books have to me is independent of the price I paid for them. But this value is personal, it is unique for each and every reader. A book may be worthless to me, but valuable to someone else - as may any product, including "ordinary" ones. Money is a communication protocol we use to exchange goods between people who have different tastes and needs. We interact on the material plane not to reduce culture to something material, but because on the cultural plane we don't speak the same language. Not everyone shares Valgerd Svarstad Haugland's ideal about the perfect radio station. The other idea this belief rests on is that the market is unable to satisfy narrow needs and interests. The market supposedly gives the majority the trash they want, but ignores the narrow, the demanding and provocative. Apart from the meaninglessness of dividing culture into "high" and "low" forms, (there are only degrees of popularity), this is essentially correct - for small markets. But the larger the market, the more profitable it becomes to cater to a narrow part of it. There are more narrow products for sale in Oslo than in my home town Halden, and far more on the internet than in Oslo. I believe the world is moving towards a culture that is both globalized and personalized at the same time, where anyone may find precisely what interests them. Narrow no longer means unprofitable. We have market forces to thank for this, not culturally conscious politicians. There is one market that will never grow large enough to support narrow products all by itself, and that is the Norwegian market. The population of Norway won't explode anytime soon. So to the degree that it is important that Norwegians have access to culture which is both narrow and Norwegian at the same time, it is okay for the state to support this, not by restricting the market as such, but by subsidizing those who otherwise would not make it. Who this should be is another discussion - and I'm fine with it in principle as long as it doesn't take place on the premise that the market itself is an enemy of culture. If you believe that, I have an order history to show you from Amazon, the symbol of our new market based, globalized, personalized culture.
Sandy P | 2005-04-30 23:53 |
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OT: Bjorn, you might want to be a part of this, check out Roger L. Simon's blog: Response to Pajamas Media on the part of the blogosphere has been extraordinary with well over a hundred blogs already fully signed up (not to mention some 150 milblogs via Greyhawk) and more coming in every few minutes. Besides the US, countries involved as of this writing are UK, Australia, Canada, Iraq, Egypt, Israel, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Sweden, India and Malaysia with inquiries from as far away as Bengla Desh. (Well, Malaysia is pretty far.) The number of monthly unique visitors this adds up to is as yet indeterminate, but should form the nucleus of a rather large advertising network. Your blog can be part of it by sending email to join@pajamasmedia.com. David, Australia | 2005-05-02 09:12 | Link Culture as a system of shared meaning? Garik | 2006-05-07 12:19 | Link Very beautifully! It was pleasant to me! I wait for you on a visit Trackback
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