On the occasion of a feature article in the Globe and Mail Saturday January 14th 2006. The term discussed below has been gathering some currency since it was explored in The New Atlantis No. 7, Fall/Winter 2004/2005.
Egocasting is a term deployed by the conservative name-game. It is part of a long standing practice of attenuating the force of the liberal-minded young middle class and demonizing new literacy.
It is largely an invisible weapon fired effectively enough to rally both the aristocracy and the left-wing representatives of the working class together for a “bourgeoisie” hate-fest. And it politically immobilizes new progressive movements made possible by new communications tools by morally chastising a community for being, ironically, anti-social.
This is not accurate. But, as conservatives learned long ago, it is not necessary to be accurate or truthful when playing the name game.
Beatnik, Hippy, Yuppie, Gen X, and now Egocaster, are all terms that have been deployed by conservative forces to stem tide of cultural movements that are born largely of liberal-minded educated middle class youth who are disaffected and dissatisfied with the status quo. These youth are the ones who typically embrace new kinds of technology and form new literacy movements out of them in pursuit of advanced communications.
They don’t start out marching under a designating banner. They become present to the surveillance systems of conservatives originally as an organic mass, its behaviour a consequence of progress. They are then grouped together by the intellectual and media clerics of conservatism, and given an identity and a banner to gather under, but only in order to divide and conquer them.
By so gathering, by accepting the badge, as it were, they are drawn into a deliberation of the criterion of their own membership, and of the particulars of their own identity. They are defeated by their own preoccupations, wasting their time caught up in defining themselves and fracturing themselves on the specifics, thus dividing, choosing sides and enervating the movement altogether.
“Egocasters” is another lob by the conservatives to create another rift. Sure, the left will think its their term to levy at a so-called apolitical youth. The left are the biggest and easiest suckers of conservative baiting. They will think it consistent with the consumer criticism of recent social and political thought, drawing a line from George Grant, Harold Innis, the later work of Marshal McCluhan, and more recently, Arthur Kroker’s work, all examining the embedded ideologies within technological utopianism. But they’d be wrong to think so.
Those are all engaging and worthwhile analyses to consider, but that’s not what is being referred to at this stage by “Egocasters.” Later when it is fully deployed, it will be difficult if not impossible to nail down exactly what that term means at all. It will just be vaguely distasteful, something indicating a kind of amoral selfishness, the way that yuppie has come to be understood.
But at this early stage of its emergence it is clearly another attempt to disenfranchise a cultural movement that is no longer reliant on traditional and conventional organs of discourse and communication. And the reasons why it has displaced the primacy of these organs, the classic media, is because they have been clearly compromised by a centralized controlling agency, and because there is little if no possibility of participation on the part of the public outside of the parameters of the media’s controlling editorial, agenda, code of etiquette, etc. That and the inescapable feeling of complete pointless of any sort of engagement with it anyway. The pervasive feeling the involved and interested public has is that it’s opinion, if it is to the contrary of the status quo, of the prevailing conservative hegemony, is of no or little consequence.
There are many more interesting and encouraging ways to look at pod-casting and blogging, and to configure it as anti-social, solipsistic and vain, is either the result of ignorance or an act of aggression against a new cultural movement with a highly tuned sense of politics and an organic understanding of the distinction between individual rights and collective rights – the fundamental and profound conundrum that beats the heart of liberalism.
I think a series of newspaper and magazine articles that invents by naming and a group, which it then vilifies while defining it on the basis of a new literacy and its organs of communication, particularly when those newspapers and magazines appear to feel threatened and (wrongly) expects their exclusion, is suspect.
We hate what we fear and we feat what we are. And that is what drives the need to control. To name something, in this respect, is to control it. and conservatism at its heart is all about control.
