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Tama Leaver

Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

Writing in the early 1980s, Michel de Certeau, one of the most influential theorists of 'the everyday', warned:

    Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming a universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.[1]

Throughout The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau argues for methods to resist and escape this cultural hegemony and re-empower the 'silent majority' by reasserting their active status as participants in cultural production, not passive consumers. However, as Mark Poster recently noted, the utility and potential of digital technologies is notably absent from de Certeau's work [2] (although this absence is in large part explained by the period in which de Certeau was writing). In the past fifteen years a number of writers, including media theorists such as Poster and Henry Jenkins, have applied de Certeau's tactical models of everyday resistance to the emerging realms of digital cultural production and participation. Jenkins, for example, has argued:

    Over the past several decades, emerging technologies--ranging from the photocopier to the home computer and the videocassette recorder--have granted viewers greater control over media flows, enabled activists to reshape and recirculate media content, lowered the costs of production and paved the way for new grassroots networks.[3]

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