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.

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…)

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.

Applying the principles of open source to cinema — using open source tools and methods (source material available to everyone to use as they wish) — combines DIY media with commons-based peer production. The producers of Elephant’s Dream claim it is the first “open movie”:

Elephants Dream is the world’s first open movie, made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.

The short film was created by the Orange Open Movie Project studio in Amsterdam during 2005/2006, bringing together a diverse team of artists and developers from all over the world.

Dubbed “digital natives” or the “thumb generation,” young people today are quick to adopt new technologies and to adapt them as they like. Exactly what they’re doing and why is research gold for anyone interested in the future.

Take the way kids create languages to facilitate text messaging. (In case you’re older than 26 here’s a shorthand decoder). Yesterday, at a presentation to launch his new book, Mobile Communication and Society, co-authored by Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol, Jack Linchuan Qiu and Araba Sey, Manuel Castells detailed how mobile phone use in countries around the world is signaling the end of corporate and governmental control over communication. Read the book’s introduction here.

How might corporations respond in the future? Maybe the same way they are in the present. A New York Times article on parents befuddled by “text-message teenspeak” reports that Cingular Wireless, the largest carrier in the US, is holding a series of “texting bees” to teach parents how to send text messages— including not only the ins and outs of text slang but also the context in which texting is the best approach, more appropriate than email or face-to-face conversation. Cristy Swink, the executive director for text messaging at Cingular told the Times “It’s about, ‘Do you realize this is how your kids communicate with their friends?’”

If its consumption habits and information savvy are any guide, the thumb generation will likely recast relations between corporations and individuals, creating a whole new variety of tensions. We can only hope Cingular will offer classes on that, and if they do, that they get someone like Castells to teach them!

“My time is being squandered online because I’m not getting experience points,” Justin Hall declared, introducing the subject of his Masters project at the USC Annenberg Center. He was speaking at the November 16 seminar on DIY Media.

I could see from long acquaintance with his proclivities that Hall had decided to find a way to combine his long-time personal obsessions with gaming, chatting online, radical self-surveillance, self-publishing, and self disclosure: the New York Times magazine called Hall “the founding father of personal blogging” until he retired in 2005, after more than a decade, at the age of thirty.

Justin has fun online, works online, studies and loves and plays online — and on his phone and his Playstation. Why can’t the whole thing be a game — a social game and a knowledge game? While he goes about his day’s surfing, blogging, chatting, tagging, gaming, posting, uploading, downloading, Justin wants to experience the same visible sense of goal-oriented progress he gets in World of Warcraft when he looks at his screens and sees exactly what level his activities have earned him. What if you could get points of various kinds for various activities, and compete with your friends? What if you and your friends and their friends could constitute a sufficiently large population to add collaborative filtering to the mix — making recommendations for things to learn, see, hear play, do? What if you could add social media for p2p and many to many communication, add your location-aware mobile telephone to the mix, and add a productivity function that generates and displays to-do lists? We’re already being surveilled by police and marketers. Why not surveill each other and make a game of it? (”I reserve the right to fit the entire Internet in there,” Hall said, during the discussion following his presentation.)

Hall calls the notion “Passively Multiplayer Online Games,” and describes it as ” a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online. Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.”

Here is a mockup of how a PMOG might look on a mobile phone screen, via Jyri Engstrom’s Jaiku app:

In Helsinki in the summer of 2006, Hall described PMOG’s: Quicktime video.

Questions or suggestions, critiques, plaudits, brickbats for Justin? Want to push the design or question its premises? Post here and I’ll prod Justin to respond.

Feedburner offers this RSS Feed of DIY Media Tools

Welcome to the DIY Media Tools collection - a list of useful internet-based tools for the creation of your own blogs, vlogs, web pages, newsletters, videos, cartoons, music and more. Create and share!

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I want to
Posted: 2006-09-11 11:54
How to do the things you want to do with Web 2.0. Now listing over 350 applications!

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Self Publishing Blog
Posted: 2006-09-11 11:49
101 Resources for Self Published Writers. A grab-bag of tips and ideas for creating your own written works.

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PubSub
Posted: 2006-09-04 13:41
Searches over a million blogs & streams, identifying items using your keywords. View them in your RSS aggregator or at PubSub.

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OneTrueMedia
Posted: 2006-08-08 01:27
Create a slideshow, montage, or photo book, in addition to uploading and sharing your favorite videos. Options are fairly strict but interface is very simple to use. Montages work best with audio-driven media, like creating a video to go with a song.

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VMix
Posted: 2006-08-08 00:21
Another video sharing network. This one also allows you to create video slideshows from your PJ180 slideshow maker.