Dresden
The next session is on creative commons-related issues; Mark Latonero is the first speaker. He notes that Tim Berners-Lee suggests that the whole added value of the Internet is serendipitous re-use. The creative commons represents an emerging technological and legal mechanism for this re-use, and a significant challenge to the traditional copyright industries. It is a legitimising tool for cultural technologies on the Internet. Mark adminstered a questionnaire to the winners of the recent Wired creative commons remix contest.

They noted spatially distributed collaboration and availability of and access to obscure sources as key benefits of creative commons, as well as the potential for working outside of the traditional oligopolistic context of the mainstream music industry. Creative commons-based music work is likened to a global jam session, where virtual identity is constructed in the process of creative collaboration. There's a strong undertone of democratic empowerment, and creative commons also offers a legitimising impulse for remix cultures - not so much to overturn traditional copyright, but to remove its overly negative and limiting impacts.

But not all artists are using creative commons as a legitimising practice. Instead, it also simply enables the emergence of cottage production outside of the traditional music industry. It adds another directionality of flow - perhaps horizontal - which allows for the greater interchange of content, but does not necessarily lead to the removal of copyright industries: even creative commons users do still see value in protecting their copyrights and may want to move into the mainstream industry.

Wikipedia as a Case Study in Ambiguity

Sorin Matei is back for another paper, this time on Wikipedia. He begins with an overview of the basic principles of the site, stressing the user-generated, open content nature of the site and its Neutral Point of View doctrine. Wikipedia harnesses the multiplicative power of harnessing users' collective intellect, and is therefore self-correcting over time (the 'power of eyeballs' argument). But Sorin suggests that this also means that in addition to the Wikipedia ideology there is a different level, at which the site is not neutral (and cannot be), and is self-correcting with a caveat: 'self-correcting' means only that it corrects towards what is currently and commonly believed to be true about a topic. (But is this true? Wikipedia does not tend to present a unified common view, but usually presents a variety of views that are seen to be commonly held.)

As a result, Wikipedia is the product of ambiguity both at a content and a vision and policy level: articles incorporate multiple meanings, and vision and policy are decided by the accretion of meanings and strategies, rather than through deliberation and univocal decisions. Concepts do not create 'class conflicts' as they did in the past, but instead their meanings melt into ambiguous significance; social conflict is tamed by the individual appropriation of meanings. Similarly, the Wikipedia central charter is fraught with conflict and ambiguity, and the vision-related debates Wikipedia core members engage in usually end up in ambiguity.

Wikipedia is often described as an emergent phenomenon - it remains a non-directed, experimental project in which the content produced by contributors is better than what any one contributor could have created by themselves. Emergence means that the project has evolved in ways which were not foreseen or intended by its initiators. The NPOV doctrine, even if it is a non-negotiable aspect of Wikipedia, is similarly still an emergent phenomenon - for example, questions continue to be debated as to how NPOV can be applied in any one specific case: does it mean that far-right or far-left ideologues should be afforded the same space for their views as more moderate groups, for example? One solution which has been employed is to make the space for the representation of views proportional to the size of the groups who hold these views - so that marginal ideologies receive less space than mainstream ones.

Sorin suggests that this means that meaning in Wikipedia is in fact unenforceable; the site is ruled by squatocracies and adhocracies in which meaning is never settled and continuously under development.

Cultural Convergence in the Creative Industries

Mark Deuze is the next speaker. He begins by discussing the movie The Truman Show, in which the main character's escape from the fictional environment is portrayed as a great victory - but what if Truman had stayed on set? In that case he could have become an influential content producer - a media personality with the power to reach a great number of people. This, perhaps, would have been the far more interesting idea, and a course of action which was a far more radical move than simply fading back into the community of relatively passive consumers and audience members which may be attractive to corporate interests.

It would also be a move which mirrors the current trends in many Western nations - where an increasing amount of time spent with media is now spent in making media. These people in essence are able to be their own Truman, and it is a trend which is unlikely to fade away any time soon. The expectation of these active content creators is for a media environment which provides ever more sophisticated tools for making media, too - and if that is true, then our theories for media consumption and production are increasingly out of date. We must keep in mind that access to this participation remains unevenly distributed, of course, and this does not change, but beyond this, we must now deal with an important shift in role distributions across producers and consumers.

This creates a great deal of trouble for many existing content industries, and the creative professionals operating within them - whether we focus on journalism, advertising, or other industries, all of which must now come to terms with a far more productive consumer (or produser, as I would call it). 'Media work' gains a very different meaning in this environment, then. Some implications of this, then: how do we teach our students to work within this new environment, if the professional identity of media workers is no longer one of production, but of facilitating this combined production and consumption environment - and if fewer professionals are needed in an environment where users are more productive themselves? On the other hand, if there is a greater deal of creativity and expression of creativity, then we must all learn to understand how to operate in this more public environment where we are perhaps all the stars of our own Truman Show, but are never able to leave.

Cross-Cultural User Responses to Features of Organisational Homepages

The final speaker in this session is Heeman Kim. He examines how members of different cultures respond to the design features of organisational homepages (defined here as sites which promote and advertise products and services); such features might include interactive and graphical aspects. Heeman's work looks particularly at a comparison of Western and Asian cultures, with their well-established differences (individualist against collectivist cultures, mono- against polychronic time concepts, low vs high context communication styles, and independent vs. interdependent self-construal). Users' social response to communication technologies may be related to this - ranging from computer-as-source (CAS), where it is an independent and communicative object seen almost as a friend or pet, or computer-as-medium (CAM) for the transmission of information, and as little more than a machine.

The study then analysed users' responses to organisational homepages according to these variables. It found that independent self-construal groups preferred low graphic Websites and took less time to complete tasks in such sites; members of collectivistic cultures tended to a CAM view, while members of individualistic cultures prefered the CAS view, and reacted negatively to highly interactive Websites (which may have had excessive interactive features that put off computer-as-source users). Independent self-contrual groups with a CAS view completed tasks faster only on highly interactive Websites, however. Ultimately, however, there is therefore no consensus on whether the priority lies with technology or culture.

Technorati : ICA2006, Wikipedia, creative commons, media work, organisational homepages, produsage, remix, user-led
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