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Crowd Funding, De-commodification, Community and Burning Man, Entry #1

Every year from late August to early September a very unique and elusive event materializes in the Black Rock Desert of Northwest Nevada, a temporary city is erected, colossal effigies and sculptures are constructed. Thousands of free spirited, artists, intellectuals, spiritual gurus, students, and individuals from all walks of life make the pilgrimage to live there for a brief period. The attendees practice a set of main principles centered around experiments in community and art, these range from self-expression, community cooperation, civic responsibility, de-commodification, radical inclusion, and self-reliance. The event? Burning Man Festival.

The event began as a much smaller and intimate gathering on a beach near San Francisco in 1986, growing exponentially year after year. At its current evolved state it sees upwards of 70,000 attendees a year, and with a ticket price of close to $400 dollars, the organizers of the event: Burning Man Project, a non profit organization see upwards of $25 million dollars in expenditure. The organization uses this money to fund grants given to the artists who create the gigantic and impressive installations, dolling out $850,000 in 2013. The recent rise in popularity of crowdsourcing has also made a definitive impact on funding, as installation artist Matt Schultz claims: “Crowdsourcing effectively removes the power from large money groups to decide what gets made and what doesn���t, it enables the power of individuals to decide. It allows us to find the resources we need to make something amazing. It Democratizes the act of production.”. Crowdsourcing reflects the festivals virtues of selflessness and giving, enabling artists to create pieces that not only participate in the funding of a project but in many cases the construction as well, culminating in the creation of a “collective reward”, a piece that is free to see and free to interact with. 

I believe the festivals virtues regarding economics, de-commodification, and its recent interactions with crowdsourcing make it all the more pertinent to communication studies, and in our case the examination of the role of the audience as well. As John L. Sullivan points out in our textbook: Media Audiences Effects, Users, Institutions, and Power, Audiences can be understood through two differing scholarly views, the information-based view, and the meaning-based view. In the case of Burning Man I believe the meaning-based view to be more correlational in an understanding of it’s audience. Sullivan describes the meaning-based view as an ongoing process of interaction between the sender and receiver, in which the message of the sender is deemphasized over the meaning interpreted by the receiver. Furthermore, the meaning-based view holds the meaning making activities of the receiver in higher regards than the senders transmission of the message. As well, Sullivan describes theories of Constructionism in relation to audience studies, in which the audience is understood as a signifier and subject position rather than an autonomous referent. With regards to the relation between the meaning-based view, Constructionism theory and the festival I believe the interplay between the inherent virtues and values as well as the common collective reward of the artwork highlights the uniqueness of it’s audience. The importance of the meaning making process of each individual audience member represents the autonomous nature of their role at the festival, furthermore bringing attention to the individuals free agency. A free agency to choose not only to attend the festival and be involved in its collective reward but to choose which artwork to fund as well, and in what manner to interpret and make meaning of each piece of art they encounter. 

With regards to the audience of Burning Man and notions of power, I believe attendees to be in a unique position, as what each individual does by attending the festival, whether conscious of it or not, is to subvert both capitalism and institutional notions of power. Sullivan makes note of British sociologist Anthony Gidden’s structuration theory, in which the concepts of structure and agency are bound through a fluctuating tension with one another through which the actions of individuals both reproduce and alter existing social structures. The free-spirited nature and economic peculiarities of Burning Man allows it to adhere to Gidden’s “duality of structure” in which structures enable specific behaviors and social outcomes, the de-commodification of the event allows its attendees a certain freedom in their behavior, actions, and thinking. Actions as maintained by Giddens: “Should be conceived as a continuous flow of interventions in the world which are initiated by autonomous agents”. The reflexivity of each free agent of the audience allows for an awareness of environment and an engagement with that environment as well as an accumulation of knowledge that will shape the individual’s future decisions and actions. As Sullivan notes the individuals willing participation in the structures of power allows that structure or institution to exist and remain, which in the case of Burning Man, allows for a continued subversion of the hegemonic institutionalized power of capitalism. In concluding chapter 1 Sullivan makes apparent sociologist Steven Lukes’s definition of power, in which it is identified through the decision making of individual agents, as well as through the passive non-choices of those individuals, and through the institutions ability to shape those individual’s decisions without them being conscious of it. Thus, Lukes’s definition allows us to see the immense meaning making, individual agency, and power each audience member of Burning Man beholds while in attendance.

Overall we can see how the festivals adherence to a set of principles based around sharing and de-commodification as well as the individuals agency and ability to participate and interact with the festivals artwork, correlates to both an exposition and subversion of power structures.

Sources:

Sullivan, J. L. (2013). Media audiences: effects, users, institutions, and power. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/the-wonderful-weird-economics-of-burning-man/376108/

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n14/emily-witt/diary

https://burningman.org/network/about-us/press-media/media_mecca/

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/reverend-dr-malcolm-clemens-young/burning-man_b_4081162.html

https://burningman.org/culture/stories/media-coverage/01-05-08-media_coverage/