Firstness and the Circulation of Culture

• In Event: Communicating Measures

Abstract

We award first finishers with medals and honors; we collectively recognize moments when new firsts are achieved (first black president; first Twitter user to accrue a million followers); we embed ordinal rankings into our technologies, our political and economic structures, and our life narratives. Firstness also frequently carries along with it bragging rights, prestige, and claims to historical import; far from reflecting an absolute chronology, “first” can be retrofitted to construct the past “as it should have been,” in ways that can both recover or further glorify, sometimes unjustly. So what does it mean to be first? Why does being first matter so much? And in a contemporary media environment increasingly driven by the logics of the web—where page views, link backs, likes, and retweets are measures of value that curry cumulative advantage in a variety of ways—how does firstness impact the circulation and preservation of culture?

The goal of this paper is to develop a cultural theory of firstness and to consider its implications for furthering understanding of contemporary cultural circulation. While the merits of being first as they pertain to economics, consumer marketing, and management theory have been thoughtfully debated in both scholarly and popular circles (e.g. Smiley and Ravid 1983; Lieberman and Montgomery 1988; Kerin, Varadarajan, and Petersen 1992; Mellahi and Johnson 2000; Barney 2012 ), there is room to adapt and expand these ideas into a framework applicable to the study of media and culture. In this paper I will explore the origin and relevance of firstness as well as the implications of firstness as a moral frame through which we remember, appraise, and adjudicate experience, the self, and the world.

Author

• Devon Powers, Drexel U