The Early Culture Wars Were about Media, but Not in the Way You Think

Since the 1991 publication of James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars, historians have argued that America’s contemporary cultural conflicts have been rooted in tensions between the religious right and secular left. But consider the following ad, which appeared in Jerry Falwell’s Fundamentalist Journal in 1984. “Be honest,” it read. “Does our computer-driven society intimidate you?” If it did, said the ad, the answer was to take up “Word Processing. No, not the kind that requires programming a computer. We believe in Word Processing of a different sort – through the input of God’s Word into the human heart.”

As the ad suggests, the culture wars exploded into view at a moment of intense media-technological change. This talk returns to the late 1970s and early 1980s to explore the ways then-new media such as home video and desktop computing shaped the terms on which the early culture wars were fought. It focuses particularly on the left and on the epicenter of its experimentation with new media technologies and political forms, the New York art world. Drawing on extensive archival research, it shows how artists such as Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger embraced an aesthetics rooted in mid-century information theory. It then tracks the routes through which images and theories they developed became models for new kinds of personhood and citizenship, particularly for feminists and gay rights activists. The talk then returns to Jerry Falwell and other Christian leaders and shows how they too modeled their vision of citizenship on a medium, the book.

In the early 1980s, it concludes, the experience of religious and secular conflict was anchored in the conflicting affordances of different media technologies. As such, the early culture wars offer a powerful historical case with which to understand media’s effects on cultural change more generally.