Quick Summary: CATaC 2006 Day Two

Tartu
We're now in the preliminary summary session for the second day at CATaC 2006. By the way, in the meantime the CATaC wiki has also been revived, with some additional materials on the presentations also posted up there. In terms of the session I chaired, I found the combination of theory and practice, and of development and definition of collaborative, productive online environments particularly interesting - the direct practical engagement of researchers in the tools and communities they study appears to have a number of benefits. Other session chairs right now seem to present more of a summary of their sessions - but for example, Laurel Dyson points once again to the importance of alternatives to traditional forms of copyright, as well as to the associated traditional view of content producers as individuals: perhaps there is a need for computer technology which also provides for multiple participants, similar to the way computer games already do. Anne Hewling notes the shift in e-learning from a technological to a cultural focus, and a recognition of learning environments as culturally complex and in need of further study.

Herbert Hrachovec adds that there is also a German blog of the CATaC 2006 conference currently in progress (to which I'll add my own sometime soon, once the server is up again). He also questions why we do the research we do: because we are social scientists, or because we want to make the world a better place (and how do these relate)? He also feels that the role of power is less prominent at the current conference than in earlier iterations, and that this may be a problem - but perhaps the reason for this is the subtitle for this conference, focussing on 'diverse cultural, ethnic, gender and economic environments' rather than the global village and commodification. But other commentators suggest that issues of power and resistance were implicit in many of the presentations which we have seen - so perhaps this observation hides some of what is going on further in the background. There is also the question of the power relationships between researchers and their objects and communities of study which needs to be thought through a little further.

This is also especially the case in many collaborative online environments, which are all too often accepted uncritically by their participatory environments - and the same applies also for e-learning environments, of course, which can be seen as a specific example of such systems. The motives behind such power structures (perhaps especially at university) need to be further examined - and there issues of trust here as well as of power, while at the same time these are of course also directly interlinked.

There is also a suggestion that the idea of produsage which I have talked about here harks back directly to some very traditional notions of academic freedom and the engagement with others' ideas which happened for centuries (standing on the shoulders of giants) - and I would fully agree with such a reading. It is only in the last few hundred years that the rise of copyright and patents, as well as the increasing commercial exploitation and enforcement of such rights, which has derailed these practices. Sites such as the Wikipedia return to these older models of an open engagement between ideas as a default, and this is also the project of Creative Commons, GNU, and open source licencing developments, of course - but this cannot simply roll back capitalism and commercialism. The crucial question will be how to manage the balance between commercial, industrial production models and the more open forms of produsage which are now becoming more mainstream.

Finally, Charles Ess notes, there also remains a question of what happens to those on the wrong site of the digital divide - and of whether the very technologies which offer a liberatory potential will also lead to more forms of commercial or other enslavement that may not even be so visible or noticeable to their participants.