Understanding the Cultural Intermediary

The next session at AoIR 2015 starts with CCI graduate Jonathon Hutchinson, whose work is on the integration of user participation into the activities of public service media. User participation is not new, but in fact some form of user participation may just be interaction – there is a need to also make sure that participation is relevant, to both users and organisations.

A useful concept to use in this context is the idea of co-creation, bringing together users and organisations as mutual stakeholders in the participatory process. This may also result in a clash of heterarchical community and hierarchical organisational structures – and the organisational staff charged with managing institutional online communities are the ones to negotiate that clash. These community managers serve as cultural intermediaries between the two sides.

Jonathon experienced this first-hand as community manager at ABC Pool, but he also notes that platforms themselves may act as nonhuman cultural intermediaries (for example between users, platform providers, and advertisers). How such intermediaries are positioned is dependent on a range of organisational and community settings – there may be single or multiple intermediaries, for example. The governance models of such different setups need to be studied further.