Just want to cite this from the very recent Demos publications and say: must read!
The point here is not to deny that popular literature, television and crossovers on the whole produce rubbish (they do, although they occasionally produce brilliance); rather it is to
assert, as does Latour, that there is another way out of this opposition between authority and anarchy, between cultural exclusivism and a debased, diluted, popular culture. If we stop
thinking of the demos as an anarchic mob, and start thinking of them, of us, as a self-governing, enlightened citizenry, with the capacity to make judgements and decide questions,
then a trialogue develops: ‘Instead of a dramatic opposition between force and reason, we will have to consider three different kinds of forces… the force of Socrates, the force of Callicles, and the force of the people.’34 In culture, we will have to stop thinking of a dispute between high and popular culture, and enter into public debate about cultural quality wherever it is manifested across all three spheres of publicly funded, commercial and home-made culture — in opera, crime
writing, ballet, salsa, art galleries, TV, MySpace and so on. We will ditch the sixth-form debates between the avant-garde
and the cultural snobs, between one set of experts and another, between Robert Hughes and Damien Hirst, and enter
a much more interesting discussion that includes all of us.
… and see how this meets the debate about User Generated Content
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