Playing with Power: The Cultural Impact of Prosumers

Abstract

Cultural policy is a fascinating construction. It is fascinating in its endeavors to control, and up to a certain extent tame the concept of culture, which Raymond Williams famously referred to as being “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language” (Williams, 1976: 76). Williams is, of course, right in his assessment regarding the complexity of the concept, but in order to narrow its scope a bit I find it quite useful to refer to the circuit of culture model, which exemplifies the multidimensional use that makers of cultural policy can apply to the concept. The model is composed of the five different, but interrelated dimensions of representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation (du Gay et al., 1997). This still might not be particularly clear; the reason for this is that it is extremely hard to get around the complexity inherent in culture. Indeed, Stuart Hall refers to it at another occasion as representing a system of “shared meanings” (Hall 1997: 1). The important task for makers of cultural policy is to detect and affect the processes of representation, production, consumption, regulation, and how these processes affect the identity formations of people, and for what purposes.