Very much. Especially social media. I’ve been frustrated at times with the lack of understanding from the music industry of what social media should be […]. I still hammer on constantly when I talk to people about email and I tell them: You’ve got to be on Facebook, you’ve got to do what you can on Facebook. Tag people. Go to the private pages, not to your band pages always. And those […] the people that understand that are usually good […]. And it sort of comes back to a question of coaching people at that. We really had to […]. Because again it brings us back to that idea of most artists just want to be artists. They don’t want to be marketing people or promotion.
It seems obvious then that a significant proportion of the activity of managers is dedicated to this managerial and psychological guidance, and therefore to forms of production that are entirely ideological. Consequently we may ask to what extent these players, ultimately, are specialized ideological producers, even if this is not exactly the ‘heart of their job’. And are they producers of cultural and ideological forms in just the same way as the cultural project creators they virtually work with, and whose work they ofer to host and to help them propagate? For we must keep in mind that all of this takes place thanks to means of communication that the managers do not necessarily own—even if they may hold shares in these companies and operate in accordance with the wishes of their financial commissioners. Or is the relation between managers and project creators an asymmetrical one, insofar as the ideological production of the former serves objectively to frame the latter, in the sense defined by Robert Bihr (1989)—to form and to agitate them? We use the latter term advisedly, in reference to Plekhanov’s distinction between propaganda and agitation: the first is the presentation of an important number of generally complex ideas to a small number of people, and the second is the difusion of a few relatively simple ideas to a mass of people (Plekhanov 1892).
Conclusion
‘Free your creativity!’ are the words with which KissKissBankBank welcomes every Internet user to arrive on their website. This tagline is aimed primarily at artists, as an invitation to become project creators, but ultimately it can be read as a leitmotif of the managerial and ideological production of such platforms. In an interview with the newspaper L’Humanité on the publication of The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello declared: ‘We set out from the principle that people are capable by themselves of gauging the gap between what they’re told and what they actually experience, so that capitalism somehow has to provide factual reasons to adhere to its discourse. However, the weakness of capitalism is that it all it has to ofer is the insatiability of its process of accumulation. Since it is profoundly amoral, it must find outside of itself the motives for engagement, and it is critique that often furnishes these motives.
Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour
73