A Participatory Media Systems Perspective on Digital Media

The second speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is William Moner, whose focus is on participatory media systems analysis, especially in relation to the political economy of communication. This is inspired by Vincent Mosco’s call for a bridge between political economics, communication studies, and cultural studies, as well as related fields.

Much of this has to do with how power is configured in certain spaces, and how control flows from such configurations. William points to a number of case studies from the area of digital storytelling across YouTube, blogs, and other platforms; these are variously major commercial, NGO-backed, or start-up endeavours that take differing approaches to what they do.

He approaches these through situational analysis, engaging in a close study of how these efforts are positioned and supported, and of what human and technological actors they involve. This requires deep engagement with the objects of study, and William now works through Life in a Day as an example.

This 2010 YouTube project asked users from around the world to capture their lives in one day; it posed a number of operative questions and collated the responses into a movie that was shown at a number of festivals, as well as an online collection of the many individual responses received.

YouTube, relatively freshly bought by Google, used this as a promotional tool, and also attracted advertising from LG for this initiative, as a relatively early advertising tie-in for the YouTube platform; LG and the advertising agency it used in turn promoted this especially with reference to the participation metrics it achieved. But this highly quantified, capitalist approach clashed openly with some of the content submitted, which was far more critical of capitalism and also showed poor, disenfranchised people.

The technological systems underlying these efforts clearly matter; they affect how the projects are presented – but human systems matter even more, and political economic approaches can help us understand what effects they have on such projects. Commodification, spatialisation, structuration all affect these efforts, and a participatory media systems analysis contributes further perspectives by examining audience, content, corporate, data and document, and human ‘objects’ as distinct units within the overall system.

A further addition here are the dynamics of these systems: socialisation, construction, pesmission, labour, orchestration, cooperation, accumulation processes all shape what is going on here. Labour, in particular, is a process through which commodification takes place; hegemony is a process of negotiation power relations; and structuration is negotiated between the different stakeholders.