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…)

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…)

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.

DIY video goes to war. ABC News quotes Ana Marie Cox on “the YouTube War:”

From the frontlines of the war in Iraq to the political battleground of the 2006 midterm elections, the surge of online video has changed the dynamic. In both campaigns, a piece of tape can be quickly uploaded, and seen by tens of thousands of viewers in a matter of hours.

The war in Iraq “is the YouTube war,” said Ana Marie Cox, Washington editor of Time.com. “It’s a war where communication is instantaneous.”

Soldiers in Iraq aren’t just shooting weapons, they are shooting videos. Whether mounted on vehicles or carried to gather intelligence, cameras are rolling, and tape or digital images can easily be edited and uploaded from laptop computers.

On several Web sites, including YouTube, IFilm, Liveleak.com and Military.com, GreenMarines.com, videos shot (and sometimes edited) by soldiers or their friends and family back home are being downloaded over and over. Both the soldiers and the people who monitor the Web sites say that the videos offer a raw, first-hand view of the war.

‘Here’s What’s Going On’

“It’s not a perspective you usually get when you’re watching the nightly news,” said Marine Cpl. Scott Lyon, who spent seven months in Iraq stationed in Ramadi. He and many members of his platoon carried cameras when they went out on missions.

Much of what was shot shows the routine of daily life. But some of it is much more graphic, like an improvised explosive device detonating on a routine patrol. “It doesn’t capture exactly what it feels like to go through that, but it’s pretty close,” said Lyon, who is now back home in Iowa.

“War is horrendous, and I think that it is important for us to see that,” said Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine.com and an associate professor at City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. “The danger is that we’re going to become addicted to scenes of horror, and I don’t think we can bear that, but we also can’t hide from it.”

Some might question whether soldiers should be shooting and uploading video, but Torie Clarke, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and one of the architects of Pentagon policy embedding reporters on the frontlines, believes it is a positive development. And she says soldiers are just doing what thousands of other people in the country are: using the Internet as a tool of expression.

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.”

Jennifer Urban and Cory Doctorow spoke in tandem at the December 14 DIY Media seminar. I will post separate entries, although their presentations were closely related.

“DRM is broken,” Urban declared, at the beginning of her talk about “Bits will never get harder to copy: the limits of copyright online.” (Apparently, according to a separate report, Bill Gates agrees) The problem, as the graphic below illustrates, is that until DRM started building legal restrictions on the use of cultural products into the hardware used to access those products, the relationship between technological capabilities, laws, and social changes was flexible enough to allow copyright laws to evolve with the times. When radio came along and enabled the broadcast of music that had previously been accessed through live performance or sheet music, the legal remedy of compulsory licensing enabled rights owners to be compensated and for a new medium for musical performance to grow. DRM, together with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which criminalizes circumvention of DRM measures, puts an end to that flexibility by instantiating in technology a social agreement that used to be mediated by courts: “DRM stops the change process” that been evolving since the establishment of copyright laws.

“Fair use,” fundamental to education, scholarship, and the arts, is broken because the rights holder, not a legal process, determines the boundaries, and “DMCA makes breaking DRM to enable fair use illegal.”

In addition to the social damage caused by cutting the legal system out of the process of determining the limits of licenses for cultural products, Urban pointed out that DRM leads to disasters like the Sony rootkit fiasco, in which hundreds of thousands of Sony CDs were distributed with DRM protections that installed malware on the computers of people who simply wanted to listen to music — compounded later by the exploitation of the malware by hackers.

Jennifer Urban is a Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and a Clinical Associate Professor of Law at USC. She teaches Intellectual Property and classes related to Technology Law and Policy. She also is the Director of the USC Intellectual Property Clinic, where students learn intellectual property law through hands-on work with cutting-edge, real-world projects. She is a faculty member of the USC Center for Communication Law and Policy.