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.
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Mimi’s contextualization of the current DIY practices as an extention of formerly ghettoized amateur cultural production, things like home cooking, music recitals and personal letters, is a good reminder that historical context is a crucial factor in understanding DIY media and the changing relation between production and consumption.
During she and Howard’s talk there started to be some backchannel chatter about historical context of the media current environment, for example, the use of new tools to document, highlight, circulate, old practices– handmade signs waved at street protests, the circulation of online petition, and so on. Sasha sent us to Video Bomb as an example of old meeting new.
Last March Salon.com posted both Sony’s bouncing ball ad and Snoken’s parody bouncing soldiers video on their videoblog Video Dog. Comments from viewers offer a compelling look a few peoples’ responses to the videos. Comments about both focus mostly on how they were made (are the balls real? how do they make the soldiers bounce?). In the case of the bouncing soldiers, a few people commented on the videos political meaning, raising a question (even if they didn’t mean to or know it) that I think underlines a lot our DIY conversations. What are the social and political implications of the DIY movement? What is the relationship between overtly political and more entertainment-focused DIY media? There seems to be two (and probably more) levels of politics to DIY–the agency gained from making stuff rather than relying on other to do so, and the use of DIY tools and networks to create overtly political media products aimed at influencing the larger public sphere.
This was a fascinating lecture. Two things seemed to stand out:
1) Mimi Ito proposing that Japanese anime/manga companies take a tolerant view of amateur production using professionally-generated source material.
2) Cory Doctorow observing that since US media companies seem so antagonistic to remix culture, a number of people are proposing to treat DRM and copyright law as broken and routing around them. Hence the political “Pirate Parties” beginning to form in Northern Europe.
The “can’t we all get along” approach seems more appealing. The methods of the anime fans, the cooperation between them and the large companies providing the source material - perhaps that can provide some inspiration for Hollywood and their paid legislators.
Ultimately we live in a media/content ecosystem so it’s silly to intimidate the grass roots or aim to eliminate the professionals. Should be a fruitful semester! Hopefully we can get some local mega-media corporation bigwigs in here to drink the Annenberg DIY Media kool-aid.
One of the participants commented that he had some understanding of the recording industry, that it is “all about money” and that DIY artists should expect the worst in respect to legal attacks on remix culture IP rights. That prompted Cory to point out that the recording industry could have legitimated the digital file-sharing paradigm for music distribution by making some kind of deal with Napster, which was centralized and offered a way of identifying participants. After Napster was litigated to death, the file-sharing networks became decentralized and anonymized, making if difficult if not impossible to make a transition to a legitimate p2p economy. Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, raises the possibility that another faction within the mainstream culture industry clearly sees the advantages of working with fans. I’d like to see at least some discussion about whether it is too late for any accomodation on the IP front. Annenberg is indeed positioned uniquely to offer a place where the opposing sides in this conflict can try to talk about issues. I’d like to at least hold out the possibility that this forum could provide an opening. Although a little voice tells me that Cory is probably right, what’s the harm in trying?
One of the more provocative suggestions that came out of the seminar was John Seely Brown suggesting that our assumptions about leisure & entertainment might need to shift (or be in the process of shifting by virtue of these new production practices.) I found this remark profound, largely because it felt empowering. In the face of behemoth entertainment enterprises (take your pick — Disney, Starwood Resorts, Apple..) that set the terms for what counts as leisure & entertainment, how do you successfully participate in the production of entertainment culture when you’re a smaller, ad-hoc social formation that may run afoul of industrial strength rules of behavior?
The implication that entertainment & leisure might be changed (or are changing) because of the proliferation of DIY media feels much more promising than battling big entertainment in the courts, or even accomodating in a Jenkins style “we’ll teach Hollywood the upside of fan-based participation in the creative process.”
I probably share some of Cory’s pessimism when I am considering how things are going in the US with commercial music and movies. But I also don’t see these forms of commercial culture as the the dominant paradigm in the future.
I think in the past decade or so we’re seeing a shift in the kinds of media people are engaging with, that prioritizes more activist forms of engagement. I’ve looked at this in the case of children’s media, in the contrast between Disney content and Pokemon for example. The latter assumes much greater agency on the part of the player/viewer, and assumes that content will be remixed and personalized. Although content like machinima and anime are still marginal compared to hollywood fare, I think that these alternative formats are getting much more play and will continue to do so. So the challenge to the prior models of commercial media are much more fundamental than IP policy or DRM. This involves a foundatonal set of changes in culture and communication and how we engage with, as JSB has suggested, leisure and the imagination.
The energy surrounding televison fandoms (as jenkins documents) and the growing industry strength of gaming attests to these shifts in our standards of common culture. As Adrienne says its not so much that these are “new” forms of cultural engagements, but rather that certain industries have become able to tap into our existing practices for sharind knowledge and culture. Gaming, collection, and gossip are all reslient social practices that are being plugged into new kinds of media apparatuses.
I know I used the word accommodation, but I think it would be interesting if we could move towards a model of different forms of co-evolution of different actors in the circuit of media - and away from a zero sum model of producers v. diy/otaku consumers. Sure, there is tension there, and I’ve been interested, for example, in the differences between Bekler and Jenkins on this issue. But I wonder if we can start to shift the terms of the debate so that it is less about jockeying for position within a dichotomized structure of production/consumption, and more about the evolution of the media system overall.
I second Mimi’s call for a non-dichotomized architecture for media circulation. I’m not sure what that looks like (I drew a picture once), but it definitely requires a new set of idioms and descriptors to capture the essence of something non-hierarchical, and without too many assumed priorities over ownership. I like the notion of clusters of cultural production, with some autonomy and self-sufficiency within the cluster, sometimes bumping up against others — almost like weather patterns — creating interactions and sharing/copying creative fodder along the way.
I am fascinated with the new model of co-creating
consumer production models. Although I have a hard time getting to grips with the concept of them being non-hierarchical.
I am a “passionate amateur” and over the last year I have been turned on to Jochai Benkler, barbarasi, Castells, marshall macluhan and various other great thinkers around this subject. The ideas presented by these people and their books are quite something else.
As a result, I have set-up various user generated content, co-creation experience environments. If this is a real theory sorry but I have termed “social production by passionate amatuers” as ” shallow ocean theory”. It really helps me to understand the uncertain nature of the network.
People are beginning to re-align their expectations and reorganise themselves according to new social principles. I know it sounds out there but, there are small hints of marxism in these new models of production. I.e non-market, participatory and gift exchange.
The first experience I had of creating something with someone over the net was amazing. You feel empowered and then mentally autonomous. It breeds confidence in ideas and possibility!
Are there anythinkers out there that propose Social production is a force for the regression of genuine innovation?
In thinking about the overlap of Howard’s and Mimi’s talks, I recalled Howard noting that as educators, we must help students to find causes about which they are passionate. As Mimi showed, DIY productions figure heavily in issues of identity and agency (something I’ve observed both in students as well as my two college student daughters); I can’t help but think that when their rights are threatened via DRM and other copyright interventions preventing remix culture, the affected young people will band together with amazing force, organization, and aplomb, much the way they did for the street protests around draconian immigration laws. I wish I could say otherwise, but while I was always very interested in the subject, it wasn’t until my doctorate was threatened by archiving and copyright issues concerning my all-digital dissertation, that I became utterly passionate about the subject.
I think you might be right Richard about the non hierarchical issue - peer production doesn’t necessarily mean non hierarchical. Will have to think about that one. But there does seem to be different properties to how things are organized. Its one of these areas where we need to start getting precise about our terms.
Re. regression innovation….hmmm. I suppose it depends what you mean by “genuine.” I could imagine that traditional content industries consider what is happening in the amateur space regressive in many ways.
Virginia I’m curious to know how much you see this issue catching on among students. What’s interesting about the new tech is a kind of unconscious activism, where young people can be using disruptive technologies but not for the purposes of being disruptive necessarily (as in the case of P2P filesharing). The event we’re organizing I’m hoping will help raise visibility of these issues among students. I know recently Cory helped launched a free culture chapter here at USC. A lot of what I see is young people just trying to be careful not to get in trouble but not necessarily trying to push back.
Am just catching up on the blog, from afar (the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto). Wanted to bring in a bit of perspective from the work we’ve been doing on online China–users, content, practices, etc.. Given the completely different context for copyright in China, it will be interesting to see how DIY media develops there. It’s not been a focus of our work yet, but we have touched on it a few times. Copyrighted music, in particular, is widely available and one can search for MP3s directly on the toolbar of China’s most popular search engine, Baidu. I do think it’s significant, as well, that the “Backdorm Boys” and “Bus Uncle” became globally popular video clips on mainstream non-Chinese sites like YouTube and Google Video. It’s the first time that we’ve seen amateur Chinese (or Hong Kong, in the case of Bus Uncle) cultural products circulate amongst a global youth audience, overcoming the language barrier that prevents most online Chinese media from making sense.
Films and television shows are another medium that is widely available, and p2p applications are part of the young Chinese person’s toolkit. They are doing the same thing that Mimi mentioned in her talk (which I can glean from the comments)–translating subtitles to popular American TV shows like “Prison Break,” and creating communities of fans online. Also there’s a huge movement called “e’gao” or “spoofing,” which corresponds to “aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation,” and is causing something of a moral panic itself in the Chinese media. It’s very touchy material in a country where a newspaper can be shut down for referring to a beggar’s glasses as “Jiang Zemin-like” (true story). We have a post on our blog, Virtual China, with a rough translation of an article that tries to make sense of spoofing in the Chinese context, at http://www.virtual-china.org/2006/07/egao_culture_.html
Lynn thanks so much for giving us a heads up on your work. I’d love to learn more about what is happening in China because as you say its such an interesting site for looking at different modes of copyright and cultural circulation. I’ve been hungry for more info from that part of the world so I’ll be following your blog with interest.