jenny weight, RMIT

:: Personal identity and online community ::

How do we express and develop our sense of self through engagement with online communities? Lecture looks at the idea of the prosumer.

An emerging professional paradigm is that you don’t make finished media objects, you make spaces for prosumers to play in. What is a prosumer? What is the relationship between professional media makers and prosumers? Should we be threatened?

We consider whether replacing the idea of audience with the idea of community has ramifications for media making.

Housekeeping

* It seems I’ve got myself a bit behind the lectures in the dossier, so I’ll be combining the themes and the readings a little bit differently than they are in the dossier for the next few weeks.
other questions?
* extensions because computers were down for a week?
* should there be more links from my blog? ( for trackbacking & comments )

Dossier

* Giaccardi, Elisa (2005). ‘Metadesign as an emergent design culture’, Leonardo, volume 38, number 4, pages 343-349.

Online

* Garrett, Jesse James (August 4, 2005). “An Interview with Flickr’s Eric Costello.” Adaptive path
* PictureM
* Audioblogger
* Lifehacker, ‘Subscribe to free, del.icio.us video in iTunes’

Prosumers

The term ‘prosumer’, originally a marketing term to describe the professional consumer, now enjoys a broad use as a descriptor for creative individuals constantly collaborating with apparatuses to make and disseminate media and communication, usually for nonprofessional reasons. Mark Deuze (2003, p. 213) defines prosumers as ‘active instead of passive media consumers … interactivity [is] … the characteristic of the internet which facilitates association, enabling people not only to receive information … but also to disseminate it…’. The prosumer’s ‘success’ is mainly judged by peers. Blogging (weblogging) is a commonly cited example.

As a teacher, I am also a prosumer. This technosocial position is often community-based. My students and I form communities of interest; we publish (text, image, audio and video) on topics of common interest on the Web (most commonly to our blogs). We refer to each other’s work by hypertextually linking them together, an activity that is promoted by the built-in affordances of blogging software. We might publish work elsewhere on the Web, using different software, then link those publications back into our blogging presence.

Prosumers are making identity into the explicit theme of their publications. A famous recent example is Geriatric1927 (2006) who posted a video about himself to YouTube, a networked video sharing website. In that video, Geriatric1927 announces he wishes to ‘bitch and grumble about life in general from the perspective of an old person whose been there and done that and hopefully you will respond in some way by your comments and then I might be able to do other videos to follow up your comments, I do hope so’.

According to Goldsmith (2006), Geriatric1927 received a half million viewers in the first week. His success is an example of a strong prosuming impetus to make your identity public and therefore perhaps convert life itself into a work of art (Bauman 2000, p. 82). Perhaps, as Zygmunt Bauman continues, for prosumers, camcording your life actually makes it real (p. 84). Indeed, if ‘the search for identity is the ongoing struggle to arrest or slow down the flow, to solidify the fluid, to give form to the formless’ (p. 82), our may blogs faultily grasp towards this essentially elusive goal. However, I will develop a different perspective. I will argue that our technosocial engagements are about manipulating fluid identities and multiple realities, and any hope that prosumers have about making a permanent archive of the self tends to quickly recede. this is a postmodern thematic in which positionality becomes the end-point of media making; the concomittant is that it may reduce all other thematics to a rather onanistic expression of self.

Prosumer culture threatens to elide traditional cultural boundaries between hobbyists and professionals. One example is the semi-professional service, the Tsunami Video Hosting Initiative (Media Bloggers Association, 2005) which ‘was launched in response to concerns over bandwidth issues facing bloggers doing a tremendous public service by providing video of the tsunami to the world’. Another example is Now Public (2005) whose by-line is ‘don’t like the news? Then change it. The news is now public’. As whole prosumer ‘genres’ such as machinima receive critical acclaim and mass attention in work such as Red vs. Blue, even media corporations such as News Corp (Murdoch 2005) and the BBC (Sherwin 2006) are hitching their star to the prosumer bandwagon.

Prosumer culture also threatens cultural distinctions between hobbyists and the avant-garde. The prosumer does not necessarily engage in pushing artistic boundaries in the manner that Bourdieu (1993, pp. 62-63) or Lyotard (1984, p. 75) suggests, however some prosumer media nevertheless finds a niche community, in a way reminiscent of avant-garde communities. Technosocial networks support niche prosumer media. Social software such as Flickr reveals the large range of publication position-takings that the network now allows, from advertising of professional photography to more intimate communities of interest represented by family photo galleries.

Many prosumers have become members of a technosocial club predicated on access to technology rather than upon pushing artistic boundaries or achieving mainstream success. Much of the resulting media is peculiarly and even proudly naïve, as one need only examine the superficial ramblings of most Friendster or MySpace entries and what Vilèm Flusser (2005, pp. 57-8) would call the redundancy of most of the photos in Flickr to discover. Most prosumers would fail the criteria for avant-garde membership, characterized by Bourdieu as ‘no place for naïfs’ (1993, pp. 60). However, the prosumer position depends on a similar peer recognition value system. Indeed, to outsiders, prosumer content can be quite disconcerting. It tends to be only meaningful to other prosumers in the same community.

An interesting experiment is to compare the behaviour that arises out of different social software such as Friendster and MySpace (according to Jenkins (2006) the latter has more than one million Australian users). Friendster encourages personal, informal, unstructured and even intimate writing. It is rarely used in professional contexts, but rather is used to form new friendships or maintain old ones. Built into the Friendster software is a mechanism to encourage you to make more friends. The result may well be quantity over quality of friendships with little real content, however that may be to miss the point of what Friendster and MySpace promote: the exploration and publication of self-identity. The different affordances of different social software encourage different types of human behaviour, human values, and different types of prosumer media-making.

Despite this apparent media democracy, prosuming is still a cultural tactic for relatively wealthy, relatively educated people. Prosumer media is often about place, friends and the quotidian. Prosumers employ technology to surmount or even make a virtue of transience—travelling, going out. Indeed, prosumer culture seems peculiarly concerned with ‘not being at home’—physically, but perhaps also emotionally. Perhaps we have all become tourists, even in our own back yards. How do we maintain a sense of self when we are not at home? How do we transform not being home into an enriching experience? Perhaps by publishing it.

A technosocial analysis engages economics, aesthetics, cultural knowledge, technical access and skill, all articulated in the languages which oil the connections between apparatus and human. In this sense, identity becomes more anchored to your ability to communicate by manipulating media and media flows. Prosumer behaviour privileges practice, process and community over received ideas of content, aesthetics, and completion. This is not to say that technosocial nexus does not promote or lead to formal sophistication. However for a lot of prosumers, aesthetics seem to have become of secondary import to the phenomenon of engagement with community and identity generation per se.

The intensity of technosocial engagement with digital media is often expressed through the concept of immersion. Immersion—its limits, successes, failures and consequences—is a theme that periodically arises in technosocial contexts. As an outsider, viewing prosumer media tends to fail the immersion test: you are usually aware of the way it is technologically framed, and embedded within another layer of reality. Indeed, immersion and transparency are probably not a necessary prelude to telepresence and ‘virtual community’ as Downes (2005, p. 84) suggests. Production and dissemination is a collaborative activity, and no prosumer is really interested in obscuring the technology that enables it. However, when you are making such work, immersion runs deep.

Identity data is spread across and recombined by the Internet. Search for me and you will find my blog, my artistic work, my Friendster account, my LinkedIn (2003-2006) profile. Networked prosumer identities have been described as ‘identity mashups’ by Jake Shapiro (2006). Shapiro asks what happens when you mash all this identity data together? The result may include risks, possibilities and unconventional behaviours. Maybe the apparatus synthesizes an identity you didn’t entirely intend. identity is no longer so clearly tied to ideas of consistency, integration, objective facts. It is fluid, context-dependent and openly evolving.

Metadesign and participatory design

Metadesign is an attitude and a process that responds to the interests of prosumers. It’s about facilitation, rather than dictation. About community rather than audience. The challenge for media producers who are still working within the traditional paradigm of media and art creation–the idea that you are making finished content for an audience, who only job is interpretation–is deeply challenged by the audience as creator. The response of some forward-thinking media ‘professionals’ (that is a word that you need to use carefully because I suggest that many of these people may not be making much money, but they are definitely professional) is that what is needed is the creation of environments in which prosumers can ‘play’.

Prosumer needs and interests have encouraged development of prosumer environments for publication, distribution, and making friends. This ‘social software’ has often developed out of a commitment to participatory or metadesign, an approach to design which was reappropriated by the 1980’s emergent IT industry ‘as both a theoretical issue and an operational methodology’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343). Originally conceptualised by Gene Youngblood (1986) as ‘a strategy for instigating a revolution in the communication world and overcoming the broadcasting style of mass culture’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343), metadesign promotes critical and reflexive thinking about the boundaries and scope of design ‘aimed at coping with the complexity of natural human interaction made tangible by technology’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343). Thus, ‘Metadesign seeks to transform this complexity into an opportunity for new forms of creativity and sociability’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343). It deals with the creation of context rather than content, ‘in which people may cultivate ‘creative conversations’ and take control of their cultural and aesthetic production’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343).

Derrick De Kerckhove (1995) explored the usefulness of metadesign on the Web as ‘…a kind of design that puts the tools rather than the object of design in the user’s hands, and defines the conditions for the process of interaction rather than the process itself’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.343). This enables ‘a critical and creative investigation into the possibilities of transformation of human beings and culture’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.344). Metadesign principles include:

• new forms of creativity and sociability (Giaccardi p.343)
• overcoming the broadcast sytle of mass media (Giaccardi p.343)
• the creation of context rather than content (Giaccardi p.343)
• is specifically found on the web (Giaccardi p.343)
• is particularly relevant to malleable computational environments (Giaccardi p.344-345)
• questions passive consumption (the ‘audience’ model)
• however, the seed of the design stays in the designer’s hand (Giaccardi p.345)
• the idea that information is not content ‘but … an environment in which user’s perceptual and cognitive capabilities can be expanded’ (Giaccardi p.346)
• ‘how to create new media and environments that allow users, when needed and desired, to act as designers and be creative’ (Giaccardi p.346)

The BBC and NewsCorp seem to be trying to implement a semi-metadesign approach. Can you be half metadesign and half traditonal braodcast media? I don’t know….

NewsCorp’s MySpace

The features that metadesign approaches share:

• ‘focus on the design of general structures and processes, rather than on fixed objects and contents’
• the need for methods and techniques that are fluid, rather than prescriptive
• the call for environments that can evolve
• ‘the necessity of relational settings that allow systems to be based on a mutual and proven process of affecting and being affected’ (Giaccardi p.346).
• thoughtful reflection on issues of anticipation, participation and emergence (Giaccardi p.346)
• engagement in problem-solving (Giaccardi p.346)

Metadesigners become the ‘seeders’ of a collaborative creative process which is ‘able to generate endless variations recognisable as belonging to the same idea but open to change by the client’ (Giarccardi 2005, p.345). The result is an open-ended system with infinite variation (Giarccardi 2005, p.348). Metadesign and the related school of participatory design are ways in which designers are responding to a environments in which prosuming is an ubiquitous emergent behaviour.

Consider figure 6 in Giaccardi (in the dossier)

Flickr as metadesign

Flickr is an example of metadesign principles at work. Flickr was launched in February of 2004 as a Flash application for chat about photos, but user feedback encouraged its evolution into a photo sharing application. The Flickr team sought to build community through functionality. One example is their implementation of tagging:

EC: Tags were not in the initial version of Flickr. Stewart Butterfield wanted to add them. He liked the way they worked on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking application. We added very simple tagging functionality, so you could tag your photos, and then look at all your photos with a particular tag, or any one person’s photos with a particular tag.
Soon thereafter, users started telling us that what was really interesting about tagging was not just how you’ve tagged your photos, but how the whole Flickr community has been tagging photos. So we started seeing a lot of requests from users to be able to see a global view of the tagscape.
Garrett

This emergent group behaviour suggests that the way we understand software and computers is changing. O’Reilly explores this. We’ll get to what he says in a minute.

One of the interactive principles that Löwgren and Stolterman (2004) identify is “playability”. The Flickr team intuitively picked up on the importance of playability both for their own work practices and their prosumer users:

EC: … Our team, led by Stewart, is very playful. We are always having a good time, whatever we’re doing. We let that carry through into the way we describe things on the site, the way we talk to our users. It’s all very playful, and that’s intentional. We want it to be a playful place.
…. People who come to Flickr want an audience. We’re all about facilitating sharing however you want, whereas the other sites are more about uploading your photos to a place where you can easily print them. They’re not as much about exploring and sharing with the masses.
Garrett

We may be heading towards a game culture in more ways than the narrow sense of computer games. There are many ways to play. Compare playability as a principle to the idea of audience. Audiences don’t play; they consume, perhaps they interpret. Communities, on the other hand, can play.

Metadesigned social software like Flickr are in ‘perpetual beta’: always evolving. Being finished is a thing of the past. This is also the attitude of more forward-thinking professional media makers, such as David Vaidiveloo, the director of the online documentary UsMob, hosted by the ABC (Australia). Users can add media and text to UsMob, so it is never finished. Presaging a prosumer documentary, the ABC is paying for five years of moderation, giving UsMob an evolving lifespan.

Participatory design

Pelle Ehn discusses participatory design, which is related to metadesign. It values

• democracy (legitimate participation)
• “aesthetic experience”, “tacit knowledge” / beyond formalization
• Wittgenstein’s later work (Philosophical investigations) – meaning and use – what a word means is determined by how it is used (eg, Language games; family resemblance)
• Intertwined language games of design
  - design by doing (early 1980’s IT community)
  -Design by playing

Ehn poses participatory questions to designers. Design artefacts should mean different things for different participants. Even better are devices that point towards some sort of new shared orientation. What is participation: we live in communication by making community. How do you become a legitimate participant in a community of practice? What is legitimate participation? Should design facilitate, or even be communication between over-lapping communities of practice?

The software paradigm shift

Tim O’Reilly (2003) talks about the paradigm shift to software and applications on the network. As such, the idea of a stand-alone PC as the centre of our computing or media making universe vanishes. Instead

We’re increasingly using a vast network of computers and the applications that are the killer applications for many people for the past few years are not personal computer applications. They’re internet based applications.

O’Reilly argues that the future lies with ‘people who build products based around the deep involvement of a community’–ie, participatory and metadesign. Projects which succeed in this ‘software paradigm shift’ characterised by the coordination of pervasive networked computers, make meaningful connections between the self-interested actions of individuals. They do so by attracting critical mass of individual involvement to a site.

Now we are in the early stages of a prosumer-led technosocial paradigm shift:

There are a whole new range of applications ahead of us. The line between cell phones and handhelds and laptops and wireless … is going to make computing that is something that surrounds us and that we interact with in our daily lives in completely different ways… When all these devices are connected in the network, it allows a new class of socially conscious software… to be developed and to be exploited.
O’Reilly 2003

Another paradigm shift example related to network computing is P2P: it’s about access to stuff, not owning stuff –ie, really using the network. Network-enabled collaboration is exemplified by the open source movement:

The network is the centre of the computing universe and the heart of the paradigm.

According to Clay Shirky in Listening to Napster (quoted by O’Reilly):

• use of computer architecture to achieve collaboration
• collaborative collective works as a bi-product of individual’s own selfish activity
• eg Google harvests individual activity (via individual linking practices)

References

Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at large. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1993) The field of cultural production: essays on art and literature, Johnson, R. (ed.) Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Deuze, M. (2003) ‘The web and its journalisms: considering the consequences of different types of newsmedia online’, New Media & Society, 5(2): 203-230.

Downes, D. (2005) Interactive realism: the poetics of cyberspace. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

de Kerckhove, Derrick (1995). “Network art and virtual communities. Parallel Gallery and Journal: Network art and virtual communities: (accessed 7 November 2005).

Ehn, Pelle (2006) talk on participatory design, 27/3/06, RMIT

Flusser, V. (2005) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaction Books.

Garrett, Jesse James (August 4, 2005). “An Interview with Flickr’s Eric Costello.” Adaptive path http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000519.php (accessed 7 November 2005).

Gadamer, H.-G. (1977) Philosophical Hermeneutics, D. E. Linge (trans. and ed). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Geriatric1927 (5 August 2006) First try, Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_YMigZmUuk (accessed 16 August 2006).

Giaccardi, Elisa (2005). “Metadesign as an emergent design culture.” Leonardo, volume 38, number 4, pages 343-349.

Goldsmith, B. (14 August 2006) ‘Pensioner a surprise YouTube star’, AustralianIT: http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,20119073%5E15306,00.html (accessed 16 August 2006).

Löwgren, J and Stolterman, E (2004). Thoughtful interaction design. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The postmodern condition: a report on knowledge. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (trans.) Manchester: Manchester University Press.

O’Reilly, Tim (2003). “The software paradigm shift”. IT Conversations http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail50.html (accessed 7 November 2005).

Tutorials

Discussion: self-assessment and peer assessment
Tech skills: podcasting