Consuming culture is directly tied to meaning for many who see themselves as purveyors and transcribers, and who also imagine they are creating culture as they consume it. The impact of social media on how culture is produced is part of that assumption. It is essential is for students especially to understand the correlation between their consumption of popular culture and how it is actually produced and proliferates. Writing and popular culture intersect across communication, often blurring access to originating sources. As the public struggles to identify messages that contain credible information, educators are also scrambling to build lessons, texts, and syllabi that offer students methods for deciphering the language in this “post truth” culture. Moreover, college students are cynical about information in general, which lends a kind of tension and urgency to the discussion as to how they can identify and separate fact from fiction. One effect of the cynicism has been for millennials to move away from traditional forms of news and information to social media as a primary source for engaging in and creating culture. In Culture of Connectivity, Jose van Dyk talks about the “ecosystem” that has risen out of public consumption and corporate “exploit[ation of] user connectivity.” van Dyk argues that there are “shared ideological principles” at work in this exchange.
I want to push back at that argument to say that users are not necessarily conscious of the ongoing usurpation of consumer power in digital media. This paper explores that gap between what consumers believe they are engaging in and have power over, and what they are actually participating in as they traverse the digital landscape.
About the presenterLisa Naomi Konigsberg
Lisa Naomi Konigsberg is an Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at West Chester University.