Example Of A 40 Mark Communication and Culture Exam Question
It has been argued that places and spaces ’speak’ to us in ways which reinforce out cultural identity. Drawing on contrasting examples, critically evaluate this view of places and space.
Henri Lefebvre argues that as a people or society we inherently make the spaces and places we live in reflective of the culture, the society, the time in which they are created. He has argued that people of an ancient city did not simply make an arrangement of things but created a space that was suitable for itself. His philosophy here recognises that in this ancient city where society was primarily made up of academic life architects and planners would have created its spaces and buildings to recognised this. We might, in contemporary life, see these as creative learning environments or landscapes, libraries, universities and schools. These places being considered normative resources for academic life speak to architects and theorists about the society and lifestyles of the people that created them.[1]
To understand the ancient city in terms of a space that has been designed by a society that places high value on academic life the spatial practice needs to be understood. Looking at the style of the buildings and comparing them to styles that have gone before and those that are to come gives the framework to define the lived spaces. Secondary to the spatial practice are the representations of space where although the library may have been intended to be a space for people to read and study it may also be used as a social experience, for people to gather and meet, this presents a different view of the space itself. The library then can become a representational space, something that means study or social activity but is not used by the people seeing it as representational. In this context the library itself is similar to painting, a piece of art, were different view points, ideas and representations are formed to describe the environment. So the ancient city can only be described as being lived in by academics because of the narrative and mode of address either directly from the people who lived there or from the study of language of those who study the space. The difficulty with design in such instances is that the architects, with or without a redundant mode of address, is the interpretation readers of their work have, which is still beyond their control. Where architects may have designed a college with its primary function to contain learners for the purpose of learning, the students and teachers themselves may not see the beauty of the entirety but focus instead on the possible ‘ugliness’ of the classroom. A modern functioning classroom may have the furniture, layout and design arranged for maximum benefit to students but the aesthetics, its polysemic meanings will be different for many of the students. The context of spaces and places, however vital, is also open to interpretation and negotiation.
The technological advances of recent years has added another dimension to the ideas of creating spaces, instead of ‘looking up at the stars’ more people than ever can now create from the signs, symbols and narrative seen everyday. The fact that websites and especially films can be made by a greater number of people than ever before, and have them published, does not detract from aspects of space and its production outlined above. A visit to YouTube or LittleBigPlanetTM will show that creating new ways of producing spaces and ‘places’ follow the conventions of the time. YouTube with its seemingly unending struggle with intellectual property rights where large numbers of people either gather to steal the work of a variety of artists or a great way to publish, learn and redefine what we mean by community. Moving into this space is “like renting an apartment” transforming “another person’s property into a space borrowed for the moment” with de Certeau (2002) seeing the habitation of spaces as an act of creative writing.
YouTube has all the signifiers of those spaces that now label its users ‘pirates’. There are no technological boundaries to what people can upload to the site, the content of many videos may have questionable legalities in terms of copyright but these images are mainly to define or give style to something new in much the same way that the architects refer to those that have gone before them to show that the building is ‘Gothic’ or in an ‘academic’ style. Both these views can also reinforce our cultural identity. With the battle for intellectual copyright in the form of legal constraints and assimilation being at the forefront of cultural ownership in the digital economy, traditional publishers are using legislation to claim the rights of culture of creative people and the sense of rebellion, youth and beating the corporate masses on the other side is also seen as enforcing cultural identity. The notion of the hero in many narratives of modern and traditional film is struggling but ultimately winning out over many arduous and oppressive acts can now in some small way be played out en mass in hyper reality[3]. Until the argument moves from hyper to actual the space online, on YouTube, on websites, will represent people being their own hero’s in the context of their own plot in their own narratives and perhaps still for the entertainment of others?
1.Lefebvre, Henri The Production of Space, Blackwell 1991
2.CODE: collaborative ownership and the digital economy By Rishab Aiyer Ghosh
3.“An anthropological introduction to YouTube” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU
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