Public Spaces in American Capitalist Culture: An Endangered Species

Cinzia Padovani

Patricia Aufderheide. The Daily Planet: A Critic on The Capitalist Culture Beat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. xv + 347. $19.95 (Paper).

Thanks to this collection of essays, a representative selection of Patricia Aufderheide’s writings is made available to the public at large. The collection is an opportunity to become familiar with her work as a public intellectual whose writings center on telecommunication policy, public broadcasting, public access media, and various topics on American popular culture.

As Aufderheide detailed in a previous study (1997), her intellectual project is to “carve out distinctive spaces for public life, . . . to point to concrete projects, [and to find ways of] participating in policy making to make sure we get [those public spaces]” (p. 169). For Aufderheide, the importance of public spaces (which, according to her, represent the only way we can have a public sphere, an informed public, and ultimately, a vital democracy), stems from the belief that abundance of communication media does not necessarily indicate an amelioration of shared understanding and cultural evolution. From one essay to the next, her arguments lead to the conclusion that public spaces are becoming more and more endangered in America’s commodified culture, and that the active participation of citizens and institutions is needed in order to reverse the tendency.

Early in her career, Aufderheide became interested in public service broadcasting as an alternative to a commodified television culture. She has written extensively on the history of public service broadcasting in the U.S., and its potential as a public sphere, thereby becoming a respected scholar in the field. The essay “The What and How of Public Broadcasting” highlights the history of the U.S. public service broadcaster (PBS) and “ground[s] discussion of its present, promise, and future” (85). Aufderheide acknowledges the political, technological, and financial challenges facing public service broadcasting world-wide, and emphasizes PBS’s “least visible aspect: its work with educational institutions and its programs for learning outside these institutions” (95). The author envisions future possibilities for public service broadcasting as a community public information resource and as a primary agency of distance learning. She also affirms, however, that in order for the Public Broadcasting Service to effectively represent “an important site of democratic behavior,” it has to “define and exercise a public mandate that goes beyond niche marketing to the upper middle class” (96).

But what exactly is the mandate of public service broadcasting? In the essay titled “Public Television and the Public Sphere,” the author illustrates the independent producers’ struggle to make their voices, and consequently their definition of the public interest, be heard within the circuits of the public television establishment. The independent producers’ struggle, which culminated in the creation of the Independent Television Service in 1988, points attention to the historical “vagueness of the [public] service’s mandate” (112). Aufderheide argues that the confusion regarding “what is public in public television” is generated by the inability of public television to define “coherently who or where the public is, as an entity separate from individual consumers and citizens. [PBS] . . . has not defined how it should mediate [its] role” (104). The author concludes that, “[A] truly public television would have to become an institution whose first job is not to make programs . . . but to fortify the public sphere. Assuming this challenge . . . would foreground the struggle to establish relationships among people whose differences are deep, with the goal of finding common ground to articulate and address issues that pertain to the common good” (116).

Other essays contained in part 2 (“Communication and the Public Interest”), concern themselves with public access cable, public space on satellite TV, and the potentials for public debate on the Net. In these essays, the core of Aufderheide’s notion of the public sphere is fully exposed. Aufderheide believes that the public is not simply the summation of single individuals, and should not be confused with consumers. Throughout her writings, she often refers to how important communication is for the creation of an informed public (a notion she takes from Dewey). From Habermas, she derives the idea that the public needs its own space to exist. If there is no space where people can discuss issues of common concern (in a “meaningful way,” as Aufderheide puts it), there can be no public. No space for meaningful communication, no public, no informed citizenry. Nevertheless, having the space in and of itself is of little relevance if such space is not actively used as an “arm of community self-structuring” (127). As is the case with public access cable, Aufderheide warns us that even when space for public access has been carved out, if the cable access directors fail to act as community organizers, the value of that space is greatly reduced.

Also in other sectors of electronic media there seem to be uncertainties and lack of clarity regarding what constitutes the public interest. In her piece titled “The Missing Space on Satellite TV,” the author further denounces the withering away of discussion over electronic public spaces. In a case study, she analyzes the debate surrounding space reserved for public use on satellite television. The public discussion (opened up by the Federal Communication Commission in 1997) on how to use reserved space on satellite TV for public interest (the so-called Direct Broadcasting Satellite set-aside discussion), “demonstrated that this space, at least electronically, is thinly populated and impoverished both financially and imaginatively” (168). According to Aufderheide, such debate reflects, once more, the “consequences of an extended impoverishment of the concept of the public interest in electronic media” (169). In order to offer viable alternatives to “the culture constructed around commercial television . . . [the author proposes] a strong government role to reallocate resources; . . . otherwise, [she argues], the non-commercial set-aside is likely to confirm smug expectations that any alternative to commercial television is indeed not ‘what the public is interested in’” (170).

As a cultural critic and a long time editor of the publication In These Times, Aufderheide has been interested in stripping “communication culture of its apparent naturalness to reveal its social construction” (8). The common thread that makes the essays on popular culture contained in this book meaningful is indeed the attempt to understand the “culture of daily life under capitalism.” From analyzing popular movie trends in the 1980s, or the social significance of Paul Harvey and Howard Stern, to enquiring about the relationship between the Left and popular culture, or the impact of Vietnamese movies on Americans’ collective memory, Aufderheide’s questions have been constant throughout the years: Why is popular culture so popular in America? Why do certain phenomena (like Paul Harvey and Howard Stern) happen, and what they indicate? In addressing these questions, she tries not to follow the cultural demise theories inherited by many in the Left from the Frankfurt School, and explains: “Howard Stern is a creation of broadcast deregulation, and also a troubling icon of postmodern masculinity” (8), whereas Harvey’s “authority derives from being the voice of invisible Americans, the representative of their emotions in the face of cruel and complex rationality” (33). [RR1]

Patricia Auferdheide’s book can be read with interest by a variety of readers. Those concerned with the direction and quality of popular and political culture in America will find updated versions of her essays. Academicians who want to get better acquainted with her writings on such topics as telecommunication and policy issues, public service broadcasting, access cable, public service journalism, and new technologies, will appreciate the opportunity to have a collection of her scholarly writings. I would also recommend this book as source of reading material for senior and graduate classes in telecommunication policy, popular culture, public media, and the public sphere. The essays are usually short, always informative, and often entertaining.

[RR2] Cinzia Padovani is a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Mass Media Research, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado at Boulder.

References

Aufderheide, P. (1997). Telecommunications and the public interest. In Barnouw, Erik, et al. Conglomerates and the media (pp. 157-172). New York: The New Press.