Jul 27 2008
Week 2: Participatory Culture 101
Your core readings for this seminar are:
[X] Henry Jenkins, "Interactive Audiences?: The ‘Collective Intelligence’ of Media Fans" in Dan Harries (ed.), The New Media Book, (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 157-170.
[X] Tim O’Reilly. ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, O’Reilly Network, 30 September 2005.
[X] J.D. Lasica, "Darknet mini-book: Introduction", "’Darknet’ foreword" (by Howard Rhinegold), and "The teenage filmmakers" in Darknet: Hollywood’s War against the Digital Generation. John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
The article by Henry Jenkins looks at interactivity and audience agency, giving a sense of where culture has been in terms of participation and ownership, and then looks to how culture is shifting facilitated, in part, by digital communication. Tim O’Reilly’s article famously introduces the idea of ‘Web 2.0’ which has widely been adopted to describe the shift toward online cultures built for and by users. Finally, the excerpts from J.D. Lasica’s Darknet look at what immediate changes and battles are happening in the Western cultural context due to immediate challenges made by digital communication and interaction tools.
While this seminar is meant as a general overview, keep these questions in mind when doing you reading:
[1] Is participatory culture a brand new idea, or does is have historical precedents?
[2] How are the terms ‘ownership’, ‘community’ and ‘culture’ actually used in these readings (and are these stable terms, or do they mean something different for each author)?
[3] How is the shorthand ‘web 2.0’ deployed by O’Reilly and how accurate do you think it is?
[4] How open and accessible is cultural production in the twenty-first century? What are the trends, and where do you think things are headed?
(Remember, after our face to face conversation in the seminar, your thoughts and reflections on the topic should be posted as a comment on this post.)
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9 Responses to “Week 2: Participatory Culture 101”
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Agh the pressure of being the first blogger! I’m not quite sure where to start. Thinking about this topic of participatory culture feels like using the net: it’s like every time I almost settle on some kind of point it shifts, and I’ve linked up to something related. And then it all gets really big and confusing. Probably because I’m still getting my head around it all. So I guess I’ll start really basic.
The old line of communication of producers and consumers, via advertisers, is being pulled apart as entry points increase and users/consumers create their own data to send back out into the ether. Participation replaces consumption. Although it is happening gradually in my experience (so that by taking small steps into this new culture I find it all seems normal pretty quickly, if that makes sense), I’m seeing this in the way people around me use the internet. Friends make short videos on the weekend, just for fun, and post them on the web. I receive an email with a link to a comic on another webpage. Facebook becomes a magnet for event organising + entertainment + conversations + photo sharing and almost any other kind of sharing. I check out a band on MySpace music, and follow links to their friends to discover similar music I might like, which I might then buy/download. And while I’m checking out music online I might find some merchandise and buy that too. Or read their blog. Comment on it. Follow another link and watch a video. Admittedly, there’s not so much ‘giving’ as ‘taking’ in the kinds of interactions someone like myself has with the net. My participation is relatively limited; but the opportunity is there. I have the option to put up my work, whether it is written or filmic, original or some kind of mash up, amateur or professional.
So it seems to me that the quality of information & entertainment available has become hugely varied. Anyone can put anything out into this massive, decentralised network. This seems to dislocate authority, somewhat. Conventional authorities of what information matters have transferred to new media – such as newspapers going online – but it seems more voices are heard now, whether ordinary or expert. Maybe there really is the opportunity for evening the distribution of power in creative industries. Maybe, I don’t know yet… This is starting to blow-out in my mind, and I’m not sure exactly what I think of it.
Thoughts?
So about that point you made with quality Kiri, I started thinking about it on Monday and now with your prompting I have continued in this manner – this is just me musing at the moment, but still.
I think that this opens a bit of a channel for breaking down previously existing measurements of quality. I think your sentence about authority was relating to it in a…not-creative sense, as in more relating to legal matters. But putting it next to your comments on creative industries got me thinking in this line, that the “authorities” of what is good in terms of artistic or cultural merit would begin to lose their voice, so to speak, with cultural information produced by its own audience. To use my example from Monday, I don’t particularly care about someone’s night out, but the people that made it probably do. So my criteria for judging the worth of this fragment of culture are pretty well null and void, and presumably so are those of the committee for the Cannes Film festival. But this doesn’t detract from the audience’s enjoyment of the weekend film, nor does it stop them from making it.
Which then makes me ask what these prior concepts of “good creation” carry, if they can be ignored by the producers of content so flippantly. I keep looking for phrases to describe what I’m thinking and, things like “institutions smashed” and “authority gets decentralised” and these sound like phrases thrown around revolutions, so I guess like we’ve been being told the internet is indeed revolutionary. Um, yeah, apologies if this isn’t very structured, like I said it’s basically me musing for an amount of words.
Recently, I have observed a very interesting cycle that emerges from participatory culture. Participatory culture, in my own opinion, is all about internet users, including fans, producing as well as receiving through the internet at the same time. The fans that we talked about during the seminar were fans of films, singers, celebrities, etc, but how about fans of other internet users? Celebrities are of course internet users, but what I am talking about is the people who become famous because of the internet, i.e. they uploaded their media products to the internet, and get popular because of these products. For example, blogger who writes about her family life get a chance to publish two books about her family and her kids, another blogger who posts recipes on her blog also get a chance to publish a cook book full of her own recipes. Their products, both online (blogs) and offline (books), are being widely discussed in forums and blogs. This participatory culture is actually generating itself eventually.
And talking about quality, these people may draw beautiful pictures, cook delicious (or good looking) food, but they are not professionals. However they are still being invited to have their picture books or recipes published. There is a shift from the participatory culture to consumer culture, from own ‘grassroot’ productions to professional ones. In my opinion they are the ‘elites’ among the amateurs, and of course, with market values. Therefore, participatory culture not only is generating itself, but also generating the consumer culture as well.
An interesting point by Shemila with regards to internet celebrity – there is quite clearly something dialogic happening between the ominous entity dubbed ‘Big Media’ by Lasica and cute, fluffy, empowered us, the users of Web 2.0.
Rather than picturing said media as a rather large and hideous troll with an equally large, scary-looking club (copyright and anti-piracy laws) perhaps it is more useful to see big media as a set of more complex entities, ones equally subject to the laws that they sometimes judiciously employ to squash others.
To me this celebritizing (if you will) of internet somebodies and their integration back into consumer culture represents an example of big business celebrating or at least making cash of the back of the creativity of individual content creators whose creations have been chosen democratically as some of the best the web has to offer.
This guy, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsom99Ds43U is probably used to market Ritalin.
I think that if so called ‘big media’ is to survive it will do so not by busting the heads of every kid who illegally downloads a music file but by using their massive resources to collaborate with some of the hugely talented and sometimes just plain interesting people that have a habit of being uncovered every so often amid the mass of try-hards and poor imitators on the web. I think this was a point we discussed in class.
Did that sound too optimistic?
I think that sounded a little too optimistic, Lawrence. I would love to think that the internet is a place full of resources (be it legal or not) but it seems like the ‘big media’ is acting like a surveillance to whatever we are doing. The hands of authority still likes with the ‘big media. Participatory culture evokes creativity amongst people. It is this creativity that creates a culture on the internet. And since the internet has managed to connect people from a national to an international level, participatory culture will only continue to expand and not cease to exist. A little community (or perhaps numerous, countless communities) has been formed on the internet, thanks to participatory culture. If one were to say that we are revolutionising, then why is there a question of whether we want to be consumers or producers? As discussed in class, we might be allowed to vote between 2 endings for a show. However, those 2 endings are no produced by us but by the media. What meaning does participatory culture really holds?
About the point made my Shemila about participatory culture generally itself eventually. I think it has been going on since the days when participatory culture was done through snail mail and pen and paper from. It’s just that with internet, the amount of resources has tenfold and the rate of which these resources are being transmitted have also increased exponentially.
Well, to end things, I guess we will always be the consumers and never the producers.
Thoughts???
I’m not sure I grasp your point, Joanne, about revolutionising, where you asked why there is still a question of being consumers or producers?…(But maybe I’m just a little dense
)
To continue thinking about authority and resources, I notice that both in my head and in the kinds of discourses that surround these topics, there’s an overt dichotomy of the media conglomerates with their legal eagles and the ordinary person in front of their computer screen. I wonder how true this actually is. The points made by Lawrence and Jo are almost representative of this and I’m not sure that I don’t sit in between. But Lawrence’s statement that big media may be a set of more complex entities could be a reminder that things are not as simple as ‘big’ and ’small’. Although at the same time, in the vein of Joanne’s words, the global media companies still have the kinds of resources that enable them to act on laws (albeit the same laws that govern each of us) if they choose.
I think we’ve already seen examples of that: the Lucasfilms example that Tama quoted in class – where the power of choice lay with the film company – and the stories that Shemila has referred to. A new method of ‘talent spotting’, even career growing, is emerging, where those in media production roles are adapting. But the single line of communication is certainly behind us. Celebrities of a kind have been created purely on the internet, out of communities where their celebrity may never transpose into the physical world. It’s a giant network, I guess.
And whether it really is a battle between ‘us’ and ‘them’, I think the media entities will (already are perhaps) adapt to participate somewhat in this new way of creating and consuming culture.
I don’t think I agree with Joanne’s comment that ‘we will always be the consumers and never the producers’.
I think that we’ll end up/already are a combination of consumers and producers – I don’t believe that we are merely consumers any more (which can be seen by influence that the ‘audience’ or consumers have on getting television shows put back on the air that have been cancelled, we now partly decide what we will be viewing on commercial television, which I think is a great indicator of how seriously participatory culture is being taken by the producers – and now my bracket section is longer than the rest of my sentence, opps!), and this is highlighted by the ease at which consumers of media can become producers simply by posting a video on youtube or creating a blog.
And in terms of being the ‘producers’ of media and culture, I think that producers have never been just producers, they are of course still consumers of the cultures and media they create.
While we might not make as big impact as people who produce culture/media professionally, I think that our contribution is just as important.
By viewing a video on youtube, an individual increase the views, making it more likely to be viewed in future, further cementing its place in our culture and as a piece of culture.
Where is everyone else with the whole consumer or producer issue?
In regards to the subject on consumers and producers, I don’t agree that consumers would never be producers, but I have doubts in how influential and consequential these amateur producers would be.
We can, of course, always look at the optimistic side of this issue. Internet creates a showground for cultural products with easier and greater access to anybody who owns a computer and a modem. Therefore, some of them are now eager to upload what they have done and open the creations for ‘public viewing’. As I have said in the previous comment, these products might get popular or even being published/debuted/whatever. These amateur producers become internet celebrities. Their creations are somewhat reinforcement or reflection of their own culture. They become significant within the community.
But the pessimistic side (which is quite true, tragically) is, these creations by amateur producers would never get really big. It can be really famous, and with great impact within the community, but that’s it. How many of these can truly get international? They would never be as competitive as the productions by big media corps, at least for now. With better marketing strategy and huge financial support, these ‘professional’ creations are dominating the market. It is merely business even if amateur creations are being introduced into merchandises. And I guess, somehow, how innovative these amateur producers can really be? Sometimes it seems to me that they square themselves with the pre-existing concept of what is ‘trendy’ in their mind (which comes from commercialized creations). So they are probably not going to get out of the square and really stun the world. As what Kiri has mentioned, they are purely on internet, or within the community. Big things would still be done by big corps, the ‘professionals’.
What do you think?
Ha ha! Looks like I will have close to the last word. And allow me to once more shamelessly plug the optimistic viewpoint. People have the ability now, in most developed countries, to access the internet a lot. This has allowed for a new kind of celebrity, the unknown, one or multiple hit internet celebrity to flourish. I think the success of psychotic German kid and others is a clear example of this. These people are literally famous, without the backing of any kind of global media conglomerate.
Except the site that hosts them. In some cases this is their own site (zefrank.com, askaninja.com) in some cases it is youtube, flickr or even *shudder* facebook. So in this way, a way we haven’t really talked about, everyone who blogs or posts videos or whatever on the internet is somewhat controlled by some kind of huge, lumbering international company, as that company either controls the site (youtube et al) or the software used in the site (flash, divx etc.).
However, opensource projects turn this kind of power dynamic on its head and then more or less throw it out the window, with power once again returning to the people.
I do agree with Kiri that with all that financial backing the ‘big media’ has the power to shut down small operations that borrow their ideas. But they also have the power to do good, as shown by Industrial Light and Magic taking in the guy who made ‘Troops ‘.
Shemila’s complaint that internet producers tend to follow the mainstream (read ‘big media’) herd is an interesting one. Having read the material for next week I think that it is positive, an example of how people are taking these monolithic cultural creations and making them their own through remix…but that’s a point for next week.