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.
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Summary of conversation after the presentations:
A person identified in my notes as Pierre asked me “What outcomes would you like to see and what would you like to avoid?
I replied:”Widening rather than narrowing of the production of culture” and mentioned the attempts to enclose the nascent DIY media commons through intellectual property laws, DRM, breaking net neutrality, baking controls into operating systems and chips via trusted computing.
Cory Doctorow wondered allowed whether the DIY culture and the incumbent culture industries are reconcilable paths. Do we need to change the church or can it just be reformed? Do we need to declare war on entertainment industry or can we just solve it? He made the analogy between the pre-Reformation church — the cathedral — that mediated all access to scriptures, and the Protestant ideology of home Bible reading and the “wee kirk,” which was facilitated by printing technology.
Mimi Ito notes that her struggle is to legitimize certain forms of cultural expression and finds it useful to look at practices that have grown out of less stringent copyright regimes — like machinama.
Cory: “Isn’t this beyond whose content you get to remix but rather about if it is going to become impossible to remix at all? Will platforms be taken out.”
Francois Bar proposed that it would be useful to try to pin down how big DIY culture really is. “Lots of people have facebook pages but not a whole lot else. Is this a mass movement? To me that’s a very interesting question.”
Mimi: More common than you would think. Most girls draw comics…
Sasha: In Francois’s class we’re reading Benkler… what makes peer production efficient… modularity and granularity. What does this mean in terms of film and video production? What would it take to produce cinema the way open source software and Wikipedia are produced?
One thing that I regret I didn’t say in response to Francois’ comment was that I think it is actually very important that there is a spectrum between more lightweight and intensive forms of diy authorship. Professional production is often black-boxed so it is hard to see the trajectory of learning from beginners to more expert forms of creation. One of the reasons why networked diy culture has interesting potential as a learning ecology is that there is a wide base of activities for people to engage with and emulate. Networked DIY culture can create an aspirational trajectory to move from beginner to expert modes of production.
After thinking a bit more about tools that would help organize each step in motion picture producing according to a degree of open (or closed) decisionmaking decided on by project initiators, we’ve set up a wiki hosted by the IML called FilmForge to explore the issue further. Check it out: http://imlportfolio.usc.edu/filmforge/wiki/.
I want to thank Howard to raise the Literacy of participatory media (or shared spaces). I think this form of media, and specially shared spaces like wiki, change the way we evaluate and examine it. The literacy problem is even strengthening because the scientific community and the professional community didn’t develop, yet, enough methods and metrics to evaluate those spaces. I think we need to formulate the methods, metrics and ways to understand participatory Media and then educate other. We can start by examine parameters as: style, number and rate of participants and more.
Maybe we talk about DIT (Do It Together) media rather DIY media. Shared spaces or participatory media require cooperation and community. My image of DIY is a self build some woodworking inside his garage. Maybe it related to culture differences?