Since I’m summarizing myself, I’ve taken the liberty of writing out a slightly longer version of a summary of the presentation I made at the first seminar, two weeks ago:

Two phenomena drew my attention to Internet literacy issues more than ten years ago:

Critical reading skills had become necessary in the era of the search engine, and

An education-based rather than a regulatory-based response to the moral panics that break out over young people online is badly needed.

My daughter started writing research papers at the same time that Altavista became available in the mid 1990s. When she started using search for research, I talked with her about about the way the Internet had changed certainty about authority. Unlike the vast majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine, there is no guarantee that what you will find is accurate or even vaguely true. The locus of responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts shifted from the publisher to the reader when one of the functions of libraries shifted to search engines. That meant my daughter had to learn to ask questions about everything she finds in one of those searches. Who is the author? What do others say about the author? What are the author’s sources? Can any truth claims be tested independently? What sources does the author cite, and what do others say about those sources?

Talking to my daughter about search engines and the necessity for a ten year old to question texts online led me to think that computer literacy programs that left out critical thinking were missing an important point. But I discovered when I talked to teachers in my local schools that “critical thinking” is regarded by some as a plot to incite children to question authority (which indeed it is). At that point, I saw education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – as diverging from schooling. Education, media-literacy-wise, is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn’t looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves. The shift to the kind of pedagogy that participatory media both forces and enables is not the kind of change that takes place quickly or at all in public schools.
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The discussion surrounding DIY seminar talks by Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold last week raised some compelling questions about how to imagine a non-dichotomized architecture for media creation and circulation (as Julian Bleeker put it in his comments below). DIY is not simply an obscure hobby of media activists and enthusiast, or a phenomenon that exists exclusively in opposition to mainstream production practices. DIY, we seem to agree, is an ethos that is increasingly seeping into the mainstream. And as John Seely Brown pointed out, assumptions about leisure and entertainment might be in the process of shifting by virtue of new production practices associated with DIY.

In JSB and Douglas Thomas’s paper The Play of Imagination: Extending the Literary Mind, they describe what happens when leisure and entertainment combine with learning and imagination in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs).

Here is an excerpt:

“While a traditional “game” remains at the core of MMOGs, the rich social fabric that the game produces blurs many of the boundaries that we tend to expect such as the distinction between the physical and the virtual, the difference between player and avatar, and the distinction between work and play. Further, we argue throughout the essay that the learning that happens in MMOGs is tied to practices, but those practices are not solely the practices of game play or even skills such as resource management. They are, instead, the skills of learning how to use one’s imagination to read across boundaries and be able to find points of convergence and divergence between different worlds to understand their relationships to one another.”

This look at the power of imagination in gaming and its potential role in education offers a good model for how to begin to think about (and create) other media genres and modes of production in the context of the shifting consumer/producer relations.

Mimi Ito’s talk is entitled “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.” She is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She is currently co-leading a multi-year project on Digital Kids and Informal Learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this project she is conducting case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

As part of last year’s Networked Publics program at the Annenberg Center, Ito and her research colleagues have been examining the changing relationship between cultural production and consumption. They have looked at the ways that many-to-many distribution, peer-to-peer social organization, and the availability of low-cost digital authoring tools have lowered thresholds to cultural production “manifest in public culture as increased visibility and mobilization of those actors traditionally associated with cultural consumption.” They see three domains “growing in salience with the turn toward networked public culture: 1) amateur and non-market production, 2) networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, 3) niche and special-interest groups, and 4) aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation.”

Ito spoke about the amateur collectives who volunteer to provide subtitles for Japanese anime films (and who withdraw them out of courtesy when English-language versions are introduced), and showed a The Race by Istiv Studios, mashup of hundreds of anime characters. She also showed the combination of coordinated peer production and machinima in this strangely lyrical music video by Snoken Productions, repurposing the multiplayer war game Battlefield 2, a parody on a Sony advertisement that had thousands of balls bouncing down a hill in San Francisco. The production of the machinima version required the coordinated cooperation of dozens of individual players who agreed to hop like bunnies instead of blasting each other away. She pointed to these nascent artforms as examples of how amateur cultural production is being augmented by newly accessible digital video tools and Internet distribution.

If the widespread availability of networked communication media are enabling profound social, economic, political, and cultural changes, as Benkler, Castells, Jenkins and others have claimed, then we are now in the early stages of a technosocial regime change — a brief and protean interval before the new structures of power harden. If understanding the nature of those changes at this early stage can enable us to influence the shape of the emerging regime, then this seminar could contribute to events beyond the academic disciplines involved. By engaging in face-to-face conversation with thinkers and makers in our seminars and extending the discussion to this online forum, we have an opportunity to frame the most important questions we need to ask in order to understand and act.

The first presentation was mine, about “Participatory Media Literacy. The second presentation was by Mizuko Ito on “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.” Video and audio recordings of the presentations and interviews with seminar participants will be available later.

The next two posts summarize each of the two presentations. We invite you to comment, raise issues, suggest key questions, in the comment threads accompanying each post, including this one.

Aloha! I’m excited by the prospect of this experiment. As you can see from the first few months of our schedule, we’re lining up some interesting thinkers and doers in the fields of DIY/participatory media. Although only a room full of people in Los Angeles will be able to attend the face to face seminars, we’re hoping to involve people from around the world who share our interest in the technical, social, cultural, political, legal, economic, pedagogical facets of media such as digital video, blogs, wikis, podcasts and other means of many-to-many cultural production.

Here’s the plan: Within 24 hours of the seminar, I will post one or several blog posts about the most recent seminar, and invite participation by one and all by means of the comment threads. Please feel free to use the comments attached to this post to introduce yourselves.

Who am I? You can find out more than you need to know about me at my home website. I also blog at Smartmobs and Cooperation Commons.

As part of the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series, once a month speakers will discuss issues and practices associated with Do-It-Yourself (DIY) media. These DIY Media seminars are open to Annenberg Center fellows and members of the larger USC community and will focus on the shifting relations between cultural producers and consumers and the rise of participatory media cultures across various industry sectors due to the growing prevalence of digital tools and networks.

In line with the participatory ethos, the seminars are meant to be highly interactive. Short presentations will be followed by discussion, and throughout the session there will be a backchannel for text-based chat. If you would like to participate in the backchannel, please attend with your laptop and be sure to have an IRC client that you can use. Our backchannel will be #diymedia on irc.freenode.net.

During the week following the seminar USC Annenberg Center Fellow Howard Rheingold will post blog entries and invite the larger community of people interested in DIY culture to join in an asynchronous discussion here, and to post photos with the Flickr tag “diymedia.” This online space will serve as a resource and networking site for the key players in this emergent area.

Both the seminars and the online forum are a prelude to the Fall 2007 DIY Media Festival, organized by Mimi Ito, Adrienne Russell, and a committee of USC Annenberg Center staff members and researchers.

Talks begin at 11:00am. The following is the Fall semester schedule for the USC Annenberg Center Speaker’s Series/DIY Media seminars:

September 14

Speakers: Mimi Ito and Howard Rheingold

Mimi Ito’s talk is entitled “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.” She is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She is currently co-leading a multi-year project on Digital Kids and Informal Learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this project she is conducting case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

Howard Rheingold’s talk is entitled “Participatory Media Literacy and Civic Engagement.” His 2002 book Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book won Utne Magazine’s Independent award in 2003. In 2005, he taught a course at Stanford University on “A Literacy of Cooperation,” as part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action, undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, and Digital Journalism at Stanford University. He is a Nonresident Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, and a visiting Professor at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

October 19

Speakers: Bob Stein and Todd Richmond

The topic of Bob Stein’s talk is open source academic publishing. He is Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book– a project designed to explore, understand, and influence the shift from the printed book to digital publishing. Stein is currently working on SOPHIE– a new software program that will allow artists, scholars, writers and others create digital documents incorporating audio and visual elements, along with text. The underlying goal of this project is to develop software that allows users to create their publications without having to hire a specialized programmer or learn complicated programming techniques. Upon completion in 2006, SOPHIE will be distributed on an open-source basis via the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The topic of Todd Richmond’s talk is open source courseware. He is currently a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and the Center for Creative Technologies at USC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television. He specializes in basic and applied research in the broad field of digital networked media, social networks, and social software. He is currently working on a Hewlett Foundation-funded research project titled “Viral University Education” which seeks to better understand and facilitate the uptake of freely available open educational content on the Internet by using a variety of social software tools and technologies to create viral learning communities and content.

November 16

Speakers: danah boyd and Justin Hall

danah boyd’s [sic] talk is entitled “Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance: MySpace, Youth, and DIY Publics.” Danah is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Graduate Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center. Funded by the MacArthur Foundation, her dissertation focuses on how youth engage in networked publics like MySpace. In particular, she investigates how youth formulate a presentation of self and negotiate socialization in mediated contexts where the audience is often unknown. Prior to Berkeley, danah received an AB in computer science from Brown University and an MS in sociable media from MIT Media Lab. She has worked as an ethnographer and social media researcher for various corporations, including Intel, Tribe.net, Google and, currently, Yahoo! She also created and managed a large online community for V-Day, a non-profit organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide. She actively blogs about social media at Apophenia ().

Justin Hall will speak about “Passively Multiplayer Online Games.” He is a Graduate Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a graduate student in the USC Interactive Media Division where he explores alternatives to text publishing online. He is currently developing surveillance-based gameplay online and on mobile phones called “Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming.” He has taught classes and workshops at USC School of Cinema-Television encouraging the creation and distribution of short videos online. He started “Justin’s Links from the Underground” in January 1994 eventually writing 4,800 pages of hypertexted personal journalism before stepping back in January 2005. In December, 2004, New York Times Magazine referred to him as “the founding father of personal blogging.”

December 14

Speakers: Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is co-editor for the popular technology blog “Boing Boing.”He is also a Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center, and is currently the first to hold USC’s Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Public Diplomacy. He actively supports liberalizing copyright laws in order to increase the amount of creative work available to share, remix, and develop. A proponent of Creative Commons, his work emphasizes digital rights management, file-sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.

For more information on these talks or speakers, go to www.annenberg.edu or call 213-743-2520.