Liveblogging first panel from DIY 24-7: DIY Tools and platforms. Panelists are Joi Ito, man about the world, Chairman of Creative Commons; Marc Davis, Yahoo’s social media guru; Dean Jansen, outreach coordinator for Participatory Culture Foundation; Angela Wilson Gyetvan, Revver VP.

Angela starts out, appropriately, by showing a toe-tapping video about revver. Notes that Revver shares revenue. Revver focused on producing web shows from the start.

Dean — nonprofit developer with open source platform — Miro, supported by foundations. About 3500 channels — like a combo of a DVR and RSS. Small team of moderators filters out porn and outright copyright violations. “As tv moves on, it can be in a closed fashion, or it can be as open as possible. We have blip.tv, revver, youtube, yahoo — you can add websites as guides. We’re trying to create an open ecosystem that makes patchwork quilt of video on the Internet available through easy interface. You can search and subscribe to, for example, George Bush mashups.” Check it out at getmiro.com.

Marc Davis — I’ve been waiting 20 years for 2008, in which production of video is a daily thing around the planet, in which people create as well as consume. Revolution now happening is that the device you carry with you all the time. Put platforms in place that captures in place that what happens when you make media — place, time, descriptions. Thousands of people are uploading — 63,000 geotagged photos in LA. Tagmaps: Web 2.0 meets DIY Completely automated collective construction of what matters in the world and sharing it. Making it possible for all of us to tell the story of the world together. Building and making accessible collective archive of human activity, and doing it at the point your device is making the media and sharing it with the rest of the planet.

Joi Ito — no single platform. Innovation happens at the edge and startups. Yahoo is a great platform. A lot of people break the law not because they want to, but because they don’t know what is freely available and usable and what is not. Automating access to usable material is essential. Right now it is difficult to attribute Creative Commons licensed material — it ought to be uploaded from your camera phone (building on Marc Davis). Norms are important — although you are allowed to do something, legally, it might be nice to add attribution. While it’s OK to do political satire, maybe it’s not nice to show people in a demeaning way. The normative stuff — what is OK to do, and in what country what is OK –is something we need to have a conversation about.

Dean — both important and inevitable that there be multiple platforms. We are working on ways for people to advertise over their RSS feeds. We don’t think it should be required of everyone, but adding the option is important.

Pixelodeon — From the Computer Screen to the Big Screen is taking place at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles on June 9th and 10th. Over 300 Videos from independent, online creators to be screened over 2 days. 4 keynote speakers including:

-Fred Seibert, founder of channelfrederator.com
-Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab from acceptable.tv
-Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine from askaninja.com
-Jon Phillips from creativecommons.org

Tickets on sale now.

Schedule of Events and Screenings

More about Pixelodeon

Pixelodeon is an annual independent video festival recognizing innovation, inspiration, and community in global online video. This is our inaugural year! Over 300 videos, four keynote speakers, two dozen curators, and several hundred people interested in independent media will get together in one weekend to celebrate the diversity and talent of online video content. If you want to see what’s happening online and meet the people who are making it happen, this is the place to be.

Bar identified three modes of appropriation in general, which he and his colleagues have observed specifically in regard to mobile telephone use around the world:

• Baroque infiltration,
• Creolization, and
• Cannibalism

European cathedral builders in the Americas left blank spaces around the specified iconography of the churches’ facades, and encouraged native craftsmen to fill it in with references to their own culture, such as this cherub with a feather headdress and tropical fruit:

In regard to mobile telephones, the covers and attachments that people in many parts of the world use to personalize their phones are an example of technological baroque infiltration:

This boatman creolizes his appropriation of the mobile phone, which he rents out to passengers, by building a traditional phone booth on his boat:

Another example of creolization that Bar discussed was the use of Internet kiosks by small farmers and agricultural commodity traders in Africa to set up accounts and arrange for current market prices to be sent to their phones as SMS messages:

In a paper to be presented in Buenos Aires next week at “Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina,”, Bar and his co-authors Pisani and Weber say this of cannibalistic appropriation and their observations of this mode in the field:

This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device. Their goal is to destroy, subvert, defeat the device or service as offered. They represent a direct and explicit confrontation with the provider. We should acknowledge from the start that we found fewer examples for this last appropriation mode than we did for the two previous ones. This was to be expected since these kinds of practices have obviously not been encouraged by those in control of the technology. Yet, we do identify a number of examples that fit here.

In a first category are cases where users hack the technology itself in ways that are meant to defeat the provider’s control and come in direct conflict with the provider’s interests.

Examples include the installation of applications that would deprive the carrier of revenues. On the milder side, an illustration of that kind of cannibalism can be found in the current tussle over the conditions under which end users might be able to install skype on mobile devices, thus appropriating the hardware for a purpose diametrically antagonistic to the purposes of the carrier (Anderson, 2007). Increasingly more antagonistic cannibalism practices include phone unlocking (to defeat the contractual restrictions associated to device subsidies), and phone cloning (to redirect all charges to another, unsuspected device). One of the more extreme is the rebuilding of cellphones into detonators that let terrorists trigger explosions from a distance with a simple phone call.

If appropriation is the process by which people adopt and repurpose technologies (and media) to their own needs, then cannibalization is the root-source of cultural appropriation. So claimed Francois Bar on April 12, when he presented his current research at the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication . Bar, with Francis Pisani and Matthew Weber, has been studying in particular the way people in Latin America have found their own uses for mobile phone technologies.

“In recent years, mobile phone penetration has increased dramatically throughout Latin America,” Bar noted, adding, “But rising penetration numbers only tell part of the story. To fully grasp the social, economic and political impact of mobile telephony, we need to understand appropriation: the process through which mobile phone users go beyond mere adoption to make the technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process fundamentally is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of the technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. Within the Latin American context, today’s negotiation surrounding mobile technological appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions about the appropriation of cultural objects, people, and ideas from abroad.”

Before introducing his research on mobile phone practices in Brazil, Bar noted that the arrival of Bishop Sardinha from Portugal in 1556 could be seen as the founding event of Brazilian culture as an appropriative culture — Sardinha was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast. The locals, impressed with the Bishop’s power, appropriated it by eating him. In 1928, Bar added, the Manifesto Antrofago claimed that these cannibals were the real founders of Brazil, calling upon Brazilians to appropriate from many cultures to grow their own.

In the 1960s, Caetano Veloso and Gilbert Gil led the tropicalismo movement, a globally appropriative cultural and political wave that was repressed by subsequent regimes, but resprouted in the 21st century when Gil, now Brazil’s Minister of Culture, founded the Cultura Viva movement of taking from abroad, remixing, adding Brazilian flavors, and making something new — a cultural stance that is powerfully augmented by DIY media production and distribution tools.

With this context in mind, Bar talked about the ways “innovation becomes embedded over a technology evolution cycle” that begins with adoption, moves to appropriation, which in turn leads to a reconfiguration of the technology. For example, the economically poorest users of mobile phones in Africa succeeded in creating a kind of mobile funds transfer system that large corporations in Asia and Scandinavia had been struggling to do. Because the most affordable way to use a mobile phone in Africa is to buy prepaid minutes, users have figured out that they can send each other the recharge codes they receive for prepaid minutes, substituting for small amounts of cash. If your recipient doesn’t own a phone, you can send it to a local public telephone service in which an entrepreneur rents out minutes on a mobile phone, and the entrepreneur will pay your friend. The re-appropriation/reconfiguration part of the innovation cycle began when mobile operators set up systems like Sambaza and Wizzit.

(To be continued…)

At today’s ACC DIY speaker series, Laura Robinson and François Bar presented research on the ways people integrate technologies with their lives, negotiating power and cultural dynamics in the process. Laura’s paper, “Parallel Systems and Cultural Difference in Art Auctions,” underlined the way cultural characteristics (or stereotypes) manifest in French and American approaches to eBay. Americans, for example, when compared to French eBay users, appear free flowing and effusive in their praise for fellow eBay transacters. The French seem miserly with praise by comparison. Americans also appear to spend lots of money and don’t mind trading with foreigners. The French trade in cheaper reproductions and steer clear of les etrangers.

You can read the rest of Laura’s findings here.

What does this suggest about DIY culture? To me it’s a reminder of the strength of offline dominant cultures and power dynamics. Although the opportunities to re-appropriate media tools and products and to invent our own relationships to technology and to one another can seem limitless in the world of the digital network, the heavy realities of national cultural identity, of the socio-economic, historical and political facts of our lives are at this point still doing a lot of the stage directing that matters.

Check back soon for Howard’s comments on François’s talk on re-appropriation and mobile phone use in Latin America.

Aram Sinnreich succinctly astonished those who attended the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on March 22. The two mandalic powerpoint slides above were fractal crystallizations of his thesis in progress. In a little more than fifteen minutes, Sinnreich deployed an array of theoretical and empirical tools in pursuit of an issue first posed by Plato when he claimed “Musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State, and ought to be prohibited….When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” (On the same slide, Sinnreich quoted The Lord Mayor from Yellow Submarine right below Plato: “The Meanies captured everything that maketh music.”)

Sinnreich is a graduate fellow and the co-founder and managing partner of Radar Research, a Los Angeles-based media and technology consultancy. He is also a Doctoral Fellow and Lecturer at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. His thesis involves extensive interviews; analysis of that material is still in progress. The theoretical foundation Sinnreich swiftly sketched, however, added more dimensions to what we’ve heard from Henry Jenkins and others about a culture in which everyone has the tools to create music and other cultural content, and access to the Web as a global distribution medium. What does it mean, in terms of power, institutions, regulation, resistance, that people can sample, remix and distribute bits peer to peer? Sinnreich uses Plato’s ancient claim as a lens for looking at the sites of regulation and resistance to contemporary changes in music. And Sinnreich switched to other lenses, from cognitive psychology to social network analysis to show how “levels of meaning emerge from levels of meaning. We are all filters for cultural information,” and our biological, psychological, social systems change the meaning of cultural products like music when we experience them. Music, in this context, Sinnreich claims, is “cognitive-affective capital.”

Again looking back in order to look forward, Sinnreich mentioned the “Follies of 1830,” when Hector Berlioz claimed Beethoven to be a genius, while most others dismissed romanticism. By the time Berlioz wrote his memoirs, his view of Beethoven was prevalent. And around that time, according to Simmreich, “the modern framework, based on six binaries” came to dominate thinking about cultural production:

Art versus craft (one is high and rare, the other vulgar and common), artist versus audience (the one gifted creator and the many who can only listen), the original (of great value) versus the copy (of little value), performance versus composition, figure versus ground, material versus tools (”and associated concepts such as genius, uniqueness, aura, intellectual property, etc.”) constitute the modern framework These binaries that are widely understood are concrete examples of what Sinnreich is getting at when he says “the ontological framework supports and is supported by social institutions.”

“But sometimes, social or environmental change can undermine a framework’s foundations. Enter configurability, ” emergently. “For the first time, communication is instantaneous, global, multisenory, archival, hackable, editable, networked, interoperable, and customizable.” Configurability is more than remix culture, which is only an early manifestation of a larger change, “not continuous with traditional practices, not limited to media and communication, not simply democratizing production or increasing consumer choice.” Like Berlioz, who perceived the musical cosmos in a new way because of Beethoven, and his generation of musicians who came to dominate European musical culture, Sinnreich points out that “today’s generations are steeped in configurable cultural practices.”

“Was Plato right? Yes.” But exactly how, in what way, and how much? That’s where the empirical research in progress comes in. Sinnreich’s research, comprising more than 60 hours of interviews with sample-based musicians, music industry executives, and intellectual property attorneys is probing the dimensions of these changes by asking each of these actors where they draw the line between the old binaries and whether these binaries even exist any more.

Are much bigger changes afoot, beyond the conflicts over file-sharing and sampling? Sinnreich joins Taplin, Richmond, and Rheingold in pointing out how today’s weak signals might foreshadow broader change.

(Via Bruce Sterling’s Wired blog)

Tom Sherman on vernacular video:

Video as a technology is forty years old. It is an offshoot of television, developed in the 1930s and a technology that has been in our homes for nearly sixty years. Television began as a centralized, one-to-many broadcast medium. Television’s centrality was splintered as cable and satellite distribution systems and vertical, specialized programming sources fragmented television’s audience.

As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralization. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power. Video gear is portable, increasingly impressive in its performance, and it still packs the wallop of instant replay. As Marshall McLuhan said, the instant replay was the greatest invention of the twentieth century.

Video in 2007 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists–it is the peoples’ medium. The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age.

Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era–it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity. There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North America.

Jenkins noted that the success of Youtube as a business owes as much to amateur contributors like the Chinese Backstreet Boys as it does to the founders — the value of a user-generated content business depends precisely on the popularity, if not the production quality, of content generated by users, and the willingness of these prosumers to alert their social networks to new cultural discoveries.

Then he moved on to “the basic premises of convergence culture.”

1. “Convergence culture is a cultural rather than a technological process.”

The flow of stories, ideas, information, communities, brands, intellectual properties across media platforms has created new forms of “transmedia entertainment.” For example, to get all the clues and puzzle pieces to see the whole story and undergo the full Matrix experience, you need to see the Matrix movies, play the game, participate in the online discussions, read the comics.

It is not the “digital revolution” in the sense of a withering away of the mass media regime in the face of grassroots, peer to peer, vernacular media. The concentration of ownership of large media companies is as great as ever. But the media environment has changed radically from the days when mass media was the only choice. Top-down and bottom-up media co-exist in corporate boardrooms and teenagers’ bedrooms. Convergence culture, as Jenkins sees it, is “an ever more complex ecology of media cultures.” Mass media is still the biggest organism, but it is no longer the only species, and as digital media make new forms of cultural production, appropriation, re-interpretation possible, the properties of the system become as interesting as the properties of the biggest organism.

Jenkins cited Ithiel de Sola Pool as an important foundation for his own ideas about “the perpetual process of convergence and divergence, the dynamic churn of culture.” As examples of convergence coexisting with divergence, Jenkins pointed to the video iPod — “a dramatic shift of how television relates to consumers” — and to the mobilization online of fan communities to protest the cancellation of Stargate by the Sci-Fi channel.

(to be continued…)

Adrienne Russell, Mizuko Ito, Henry Jenkins, Howard Rheingold, at USC Annenberg Center — photo by Justin Hall.

Henry Jenkins was the guest lecturer for the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication on January 17. Jenkins is Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT and the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including a central focus on DIY media as part of the larger flow he calls participatory culture. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture.

The title of Jenkins’ presentation and the theme of the ensuing conversation at ACC was “From YouTube to Youniversity: Learning and Playing in an age of Participative Culture”

Jenkins, whose online autobiography has a comment thread, walks the convergence culture talk he talks; he started his ACC presentation by alluding to the cover stories of Business Week on “The Power of Us,” Newsweek on “Putting the We in the Web,” and Time on “YOU are the person of the year.”

Jenkins then cited the Web 2.0 phenomena as an enabler of participatory media, “a resurgence of new companies and a period of economic churn associated with user-created content,” then mashes up the pop culture references with Yochai Benkler’s remarks on non-market and non-proprietary production: “we do well to complicate our models” of how and why humans organize cultural production. All this led up to his fundamental assertion, that “YouTube is the fullest embodiment of convergence culture.” Jenkins offered the explosion of vernacular digital video online as an example of the strong connection between popular culture media and pedagogical practices he has written about for years.

Two points in particular are evidenced by Youtube’s success: “Amateur content is getting global visibility. And fan communities are not just distribution channels, ” but the seedbeds of cultural creation, Jenkins stated, in a kind of “ecological relationship with blogs and grassroots communities that create cultural material and social networks that distribute it.” Examples: The deaf community using video of american sign language; people invade Walmart, use the equipment on the shelves to create video of Walmart and put it on YouTube; fan communities driving snippets of mass media moments to viral distribution through the online community (Stephen Colbert at the National Press Club dinner, for example); the famous OK Go treadmill video and the world of peer to peer grassroots music videos it represents (reminding Jenkins of vaudeville); lonelygirl15 (which reminds Jenkins of PT Barnum); the blurring of lines between real life and fiction in reality television; the emergence of YouTube as a political space with the tasering of a student at UCLA , George Allen’s racial gaffe, and the Saddam Hussein hanging going viral and effecting public opinion and election outcomes; the grassroots surveillance and sometimes vigilante action that mobile media afford.

(to be continued…)

With this post, David Bollier beat me to the honor of introducing this important new book to the blogosphere. He’s one of the authors, so he deserves the honor. My copy of this important new work just arrived. If you are interested enough in the overarching economic and political changes that both enable and are enabled by DIY media to have read Benkler and Jenkins, you need to read this book. I was reminded of the importance of commons discourse to DIY media when I read this in Bollier’s chapter:

As the Internet and various digital technologies have become pervasive in American life, enabling robust new forms of social communication and collaboration, the cornucopia of t he commons has become a widespread phenomenon. We are migrating from a print culture of scarce supplies of fixed, canonical works to a digital culture of constantly evolving works that can be reproduced and distributed easily at virtually no cost. Our mass-media system of centralized production and one-to-many distribution is being eclipsed by a multimedia network of decentralized production and many-to-many distribution.

Here is a brief excerpt from Bollier’s blog post, introducing the book.

Two leading scholars on the commons, Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, have just published a great anthology of essays, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press). The book brings together some varied perspectives on knowledge as a “shared social-ecological system.” I highly recommend it.

The idea that knowledge is incubated and maintained through social communities is hardly revolutionary, of course. But the rise of the Internet has suddenly made it more imperative to understand the structure and norms of “knowledge communities,” which can vary widely. This book helps sort through this variety with chapters on open access scholarly publishing (Peter Suber), research libraries (Wendy Pradt Lougee), science as a commons (James Boyle), open source software (Charles Schweik), preserving the knowledge commons (Donald J. Waters) and civic engagement and knowledge commons (Peter Levine), among others. I am pleased to be among this illustrious company with a chapter on “The Growth of the Commons Paradigm.”