From Periphery to Power: The Digital Renaissance on the Fringe of Culture
Ulf Hannerz wrote back in 1989 that that the twentieth century culture can be characterized as having been built on centre-periphery relationships. This divide has allowed cultural diversity to flow transnationally, empowering cultural creativity through the exchange of ideas and values, especially in peripheral societies.
Hannerz’s centre-periphery model is still highly relevant today, but social and digital transformations over the past couple of decades have seriously disrupted the traditional model. Digital technologies enabled a mode decentralized global cultural exchange, giving way to a more polycentric system. While Western cultural centres still maintain considerable influence, they are now increasingly competing with non-Western cultural hubs. If, some time ago, the Hollywood, European fashion houses or Western media outlets were the forces to be reckoned with when it came to culture, nowadays cultural production and consumption are more decentralized. For example, content creators from peripheral societies can easily distribute their artistic productions via streaming platforms such as Netflix, YouTube or Spotify, sometimes bypassing the cultural West. This also gave more power to independent content, with Amazon or Patreon helping producers make a name for themselves in the world.
All of these changes enabled a reverse cultural flow, with the centre intaking more and more cultural productions from what was once the periphery, e.g., African music, Japanese mangas or Latin American reggaeton. What digital transformations did for cultural productions is not fundamentally different from what they did with many other parts of the economy: they reduced the dominance of central hubs and democratized the sector, thus, in Hannerz’s perspective, giving more power to the periphery. Coupled with the Miracle on the Han River (the rapid development of the South Korean economy during the last decades of the 20th century, which included hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics and the 2002 FIFA World Cup, as well as the boom of the likes of Samsung, LG or Hyundai), K-Pop is now a global entertainment source, attracting more and more teenagers and. What once was a subculture followed by a handful of K-enthusiasts is now a dominant global genre.
Under such circumstances, the West had to adapt and, thus, Hollywood now co-produces content with peripheries (e.g., Netflix investing in Korean dramas such as the highly popular Squid Game). It needs to be added that economic decision-making regarding cultural production is not any longer solely the apanage of the centre, but algorithmic governance of the tech has its share in deciding what is distributed and to whom (e.g., see Netflix producing new series based on viewership data and algorithmic decisions).
If digital shifts weren’t enough to reshape Hannerz’s model, political reconfigurations on global level also leave their mark. Right-wing extremism across the world rejects so-called cultural infiltrations and campaigns for cultural protectionism, some of the most recent examples being the backlash against Netflix’s diverse representations.
While Hannerz’s centre-periphery dynamics still exist, the cultural economy has become more polycentric, with peripheral societies having their say in a world that is not any longer dictated only by the (once) traditional centres. Yet, ironically or not, while peripheral societies now contribute more actively to global culture, they still rely on the likes of Netflix, YouTube or Spotify for distribution. Which means, there is still structural control from the centre. Yet even more intriguing seems to be the question what the centre will mean in the not so distant future?
