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.

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…)

Every year, John Brockman asks a question of a widespread community of thinkers and publishes it on Edge.org. I reproduce here my answer to this year’s question — “What are you optimistic about?” — in its entirety:

The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs — a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today’s youth — the “digital natives” for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water — have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.

The eager adoption of web publishing, digital video production and online video distribution, social networking services, instant messaging, multiplayer role-playing games, online communities, virtual worlds, and other Internet-based media by millions of young people around the world demonstrates the strength of their desire — unprompted by adults — to learn digital production and communication skills. Whatever else might be said of teenage bloggers, dorm-room video producers, or the millions who maintain pages on social network services like MySpace and Facebook, it cannot be said that they are passive media consumers. They seek, adopt, appropriate, and invent ways to participate in cultural production. While moral panics concentrate the attention of oldsters on lurid fantasies of sexual predation, young people are creating and mobilizing politically active publics online when circumstances arouse them to action. 25,000 Los Angeles high school students used MySpace to organize a walk-out from classes to join street demonstrations protesting proposed immigration legislation. Other young people have learned how to use the sophisticated graphic rendering engines of video games as tools for creating their own narratives; in France, disaffected youth, the ones whose riots are televised around the world, but whose voices are rarely heard, used this emerging “machinima” medium to create their own version of the events that triggered their anger (search for “The French Democracy” on video hosting sites). Not every popular YouTube video is a teenage girl in her room (or a bogus teenage girl in her room); increasingly, do-it-yourself video has been used to capture and broadcast police misconduct or express political opinions. Many of the activists who use Indymedia — ad-hoc alternative media organized around political demonstrations — are young.

My optimism about the potential of the generation of digital natives is neither technological determinism nor naive utopianism. Many-to-many communication enables but does not compel or guarantee widespread civic engagement by populations who never before had a chance to express their public voices. And while the grimmest lesson of the twentieth century is to mistrust absolutist utopians, I perceive the problem to be in the absolutism more than the utopia. Those who argued for the abolition of the age-old practice of human slavery were utopians.

This photo by Ross Mayfield was taken at a different event, but it portrays danah, Mimi, and Justin evocatively:

At the November 14 DIY Media seminar, danah boyd (who presented in tandem with Justin Hall), spoke about “Creating Culture Through Collective Identity Performance.” boyd is a Graduate Student Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication, a PhD Candidate in School of Information at University of California-Berkeley, and a Social Media Researcher at Yahoo!

boyd pointed out that the personal profiles in social networking services provide “moments of representation of identity and digital body.” What makes SNSs unique, boyd asserted, are features around friends and networks of friendship that articulate and make visible aspects of interpersonal relationships and social networks that have always existed, but not so visibly. The SNS feature enabling participants to create, display, and edit lists of friends online (e.g., “Top 8″ in MySpace, friends lists in Facebook, Friendster, et. al.) presents young people with an opportunity to present their networks of social connections visibly to the world. “In MySpace,” boyd noted, “”top 8″ is like a high school drama — who you tell the world your best friend is will get you in horrible trouble offline or online. Who do I put in the top left slot”? MySpace management realized that this feature attracted attention, so they sold as a premium what had been a misfeature in their original design, charging to have more than 8 friends.

Comments on Friendster evolved beyond Friendster-like testimonials. “It became a way of speaking to and about someone and about yourself in the process. Making sure everyone else knows that they are in your list of friends solicits reciprocity. ”

This identity-play and social experimentation is a form of DIY media, boyd pointed out, because in social network services, social rituals and norms are signalled by online representations like graphical backgrounds and friend lists, displays of cultural consumption (playlists and fashions) and cultural production (photos, photostreams, and videos).

As has been the case with previous media that young people appropriated for their own uses (SMS, notably), groups of people in the early days of MySpace figured out that they could put html on their MySpace pages; other people used the ability to view html source code for a page to initiate a copy and paste culture. The people who were pimping out their profiles cared that they could modify pages, not about code.

“When you join, you see your friends’ profiles — those profiles teach you the norms of representation,” boyd explained. The norms of a group became networked, creating a visible context that informs the group about acceptable ways to behave and express themselves. “You get socialized into a culture by learning how to behave in different social situations” so viewing the social source code by inspecting your friends’ profiles is an analog to the creation of pages by copying and pasting html source.

“Networked publics have four important characteristics that non-mediated social networks — the face-to-face kind — don’t have: persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Until the Web, only celebrities had to deal with persistence and invisible audiences, ” and nobody dealt with replicability and searchability the way digital networks have made possible.

As an example of the way different media can change the ability to represent oneself, sometimes causing conflicts, boyd used the case of civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who gave speeches to different publics in the 1960s, and addressed white politicians differently than he did black congregations. “But in 1968, he had to take his speeches to television and radio. He had to make a decision about how to represent himself. Youth are faced with a similar situation. Networked publics make youth norms visible.”

danah was called by a college admissions officer who knew she had been studying SNSs. The admissions officer was puzzled by the gang references on the MySpace page of a scholastically outstanding applicant. danah explained that this young man had to face his peers everyday in school. Contexts and how you behave in them can be vitally important.

MySpace banned YouTube, but the community reacted so fiercely that Tom — everybody’s friend — apologized for banning it. People put their YouTube videos up on MySpace. This mixing of sites is consistent with the social norms of digitally-literate youth: “copypaste culture makes many old boundaries irrelevant.”

boyd’s article on “Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites” has been published by First Monday.