Producers or Consumers?

by Ruth Barker, 23 Aug 2010

Hello,

A significant amount of cultural thinking these days seems to revolve around the discussion of binaries – you know the kind of thing: are we at the centre or on the periphery? ; or is something public or is it private? ; are we talking urban or rural? and so on. I recently heard a new one though: are you a cultural producer or a cultural consumer?

I’ll bet it’s something you’d never worried about before, but now it seems that you may be invited to. In a moment of synchronicty I spotted this article in the Guardian today – funny isn’t it when you hear about something for the first time, and then suddenly it seems to be everywhere?

So, the problem I have with this producer/consumer division is that most people I know who produce ‘culture’ (writers, musicians, artists and so on) are also rabid consumers of it. Writers read, or course; musicians listen to music; artists go to shows. But artists also listen to music, and musicians also read books and writers also go to exhibitions. And to make matters even more complicated, I read (or ‘consume’) many many books and articles in order to produce creatively. It’s not ‘just’ a leisure / pleasure activity – consuming culture is itself a creative, productive, act. To split people up into those that consume and those who produce seems a meaningless exercise!

So why have I bothered to bring it to your attention? Two related reasons, actually:

1) sometimes a bad example can invite us to re-examine other examples that we previously assumed. OK, so producer/consumer is a silly division. But let’s take another look at public/private or centre/periphery. Are these distinctions valid? Are they useful?

2) what does the fact that ‘producer/consumer’ has appeared on the horizon of our discourse tell us? I think in essence it reminds us that our world is very complicated, and that we’re always looking for ways to simplify it. As humans, we constantly try to understand human behaviour (it’s vital that we do so, after all) and these binary splits are attempts to contain some of the hundreds of thousands of potential possibilities.

Of course, ‘chunking together’ information or ideas like this can be massively useful as a shorthand for us to notice and communicate trends and generalisations in our world. We might even find it an elegant, economical tool to think through ideas and generate new and creative questions. Like any shorthanding though, we need to remain conscious of the fact that we’re concealing complixity and difference for the sake of simplicity.

Sometimes, as I say, it takes a shorthand that just doesn’t work to remind us of how many of them we casually use. As both producers and consumers of culture, it’s important for us to be aware of the language we use to describe and understand it.

more later,
R.

What’s that?! A picture on the Blog! Hooray! Thanks to an upgrade from our fabulous web designer Keavy McMinn of Minimetre we can now embed images directly into the Blogs rather than having to list them all on a seperate page. Thanks Keavy! This, as I was thinking of those producer / consumer questions, is my temporary studio at CCA Glasgow’s Creative Lab, where I’m having a really productive month of reflection on my practice. Productive, yes – but on the desk you can also see a copy of Vogue and my ancient ipod, testifying to my simultaneous consumer status…