Produsers and Produsage

Sydney.
The next session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with my paper, co-authored with Rachel Cobcroft, Jude Smith, and Stephen Towers (PDF available here, Powerpoint here).

Kathleen Cumiskey is the next speaker. She notes that there is significant research on the actual use of mobile phones, but less on the meanings users themselves ascribe to such use; her research focusses on such use stories, instead. The use of mobile phones during face-to-face interaction renders remote others present, while denying the presence of those physically present. This is related to the psychological idea of 'mattering': in the process of mobile phone use, remote participants are identified as mattering, while physically present participants are shown to matter less.

Brisbane.
I'm back in the country (and off to the Mobile Media conference in Sydney tomorrow), and I'm continuing to work through my produsage book, whose working title may have shifted again - we're looking at Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: The Shift from Production to Produsage as an option now.

In the book, I'm working with a number of graphs to clarify the concepts I'm using. For one of them, I'm coming up against the limits of my design skills, so in true produsage style, I'm wondering if anybody reading this may be able to offer their talents? I'll acknowledge your contribution in the book, of course! Below is the passage in question, and my first sketch for the graph. What it should show is the tall peak and soft slope I'm talking about - basically a version of the classic 'long tail' graph turned 360 degrees around its vertical axis, perhaps with an overlaid texture that indicates the location of interest community clusters clusters on the soft slope. Any takers? Email me... (The image will need to be hi-res, and work in black & white print on paper, of course...)

Washington, D.C.
We're in the last session for today already, and Stefan Schutt makes a start. He's in the process of building Small Histories, a Website for users to upload and compare their life stories. Stefan begins by sharing his own very interesting life story (his family originates from Pomerania, and is now spread across the world including relatives in Germany, France, and Israel). Inspired by such family history, Stefan has built a Website for uploading and sharing this and similar stories; this enables users to compare perspectives on events and times in history through sharing their own small histories, putting them out into the public domain without the need for turning them into something else first.

There's been a certain amount of publicity recently for Andrew Keen's book The Cult of the Amateur, which roundly criticises citizen journalism, Wikipedia, and pretty much anything else associated with 'Web 2.0' and user-led content creation for 'killing our culture'. Looks like it's striking all the right chords with the usual moral panic crowd who find it hard to accept that anyone but themselves could be in charge of determining what's good and worthy - or indeed, that users themselves, as the participants in culture, might want to have a say in such decisions.

Keen's one-man cultural crusade is reminiscent of the Discovery Institute's 'Teach the Controversy' campaign against the science of evolution, which similarly relies on clever marketing to disguise the fundamental flaws of its 'scientific theory' of intelligent design; or in a related comparison, he's establishing himself as the media industry equivalent of a climate change denialist, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to discredit his overgeneralised hyperbole. Some industrial journalists, of course, love anything which attempts to take the shine off their citizen counterparts. So, I was reasonably concerned what I saw Keen pop up in the weeknightly podcast of the BBC's NewsNight programme - but thankfully, they had Charles Leadbeater at hand to inject some reason into the debate:

[NewsNight video at the BBC - what, no embeddable version?]

Boston.
OK. 11.5 days of writing (I started on 23 May), for 14 hours straight on some days - all up I've been writing for about 143 hours so far, Word tells me (that's 12.5 hours per day, on average). 363 pages. 156,000 words. That's 1090 words per hour, but includes quotes, of course. 12 chapters written so far, and four more to go. If I haven't blogged for a while, it's because I've used up my allocation of words for the day.

So, writing the produsage book is going OK, but it will need some editing - the final book is supposed to be only 300 pages, or 135,000 words. (Hey, I could stop right now...) Just as well, though, because it's not quite right in a few places yet, and I'm throwing in altogether too many quotes at times. That's always been an issue for me - lots of research, lots of interesting quotes from the research, and I'd love to use them all, but I can't let them overwhelm what I'm actually trying to say. So, I'm learning to throw out more than I'm using. Slowly.

Boston.
We're now in the last plenary here at MiT5 - a summary session drawing together the many threads of research and practice explored at this conference. Suzanne de Castell is the first contributor to this panel, and she notes the increasing fluidity of previously more solid cultural forms. We have moved beyond text as our primary mode of representation in multiple ways, and have left behind the cultural logics of print; this is challenging especially for the educational environment. Remix, in particular, with its various aspects of plagiarism, reappropriation, adaptation, and inspiration, is a particularly important issue for education to address; we must move far beyond cut'n'paste in our embrace of remix approaches, and education is going to be instrumental in this context. We must also pay particular attention to what is being held on to, and what is being left behind - Suzanne notes that much of the input into what are seen as valuable remix projects is still highly gendered and canonical, ignoring a significant number of other sources. The concept of remix itself must be adjusted by looking at the remixing practices and approaches in cultures other than the male-dominated Anglo 'high' culture. Knowledge is always situated, always accountable to its communities, and always under ongoing construction.

Boston.
(I'm afraid I accidentally deleted a couple of comments here last night - please repost them if you can!)

It's the last day of MiT5, and we're in the first session of the day. Mary Madden from the Pew Center is the first speaker, on Socially-Driven Music Sharing and the Adoption of Participatory Media Applications. She notes that the term Web2.0 is imperfect but convenient for summarising many of the current developments in the online world. Tom O'Reilly defines Web2.0 as harnessing social effects; it may not be a revolution, but there have been important changes. We now need to think critically about how and why it emerged as a major force in the first place.

Boston.
There's a whole panel on Battlestar Galactica here at MiT5 - how could I resist? Melanie E. S. Kohnen is the first speaker, presenting on Battlestar Galactica and the Reimagination of Contemporary American History. She begins by noting the connections between the BSG story of a surprise attack on the twelve colonies, and the 9/11 attacks (although strictly speaking, in a full analogy, it would have been only the people within the Twin Towers who had survived). Different from the black-and-white positioning of the U.S. adminstration, however, the question of who is on which side is problematised strongly within BSG; it is almost impossible to determine who is human and who is Cylon in the BSG story. Melanie now describes the BSG scenario after settlement on New Caprica, where humans under Cylon rule are caught between collaboration and resistance (through suicide bombings and other oppositional actions) - this is personified in the opposition between Baltar and Roslin in the show.

Boston.
The next session here at MiT5 is another plenary, on Copyright, Fair Use and the Cultural Commons. It is introduced by William Uricchio, who begins by noting the historical development of the concept of copyright, and the initial argument for copyright as promoting the rights of authors but also ensuring public access to knowledge after the termination of the initial 14-year period of copyright protection. Today, of course, copyright has been almost infinitely extended, paradoxically at a time when the circulation of information has become faster than ever before.

Boston.
The next panel here at MiT5 is a smaller affair, and is started by Sam Smiley, presenting on Claude Shannon Remixed. She begins with a couple of video collages based on image searches on a narrow range of terms in Altavista (the video is also on YouTube). These videos use original music, but copyrighted images and videos, and Sam recently received a message through YouTube messaging from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking her to take down one of the videos - but without any specific information about what aspects of the collage are owned by CBC.