Produsage Communities

Boston.
We're now in the second plenary session at MiT5, which was opened by Tom Malone who began by introducing the concept of collective intelligence (and MIT is now starting a Center for Collective Intelligence). The first speaker is Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and he notes that one of the key questions in participatory, collective environments is now that of labour - all the many activities performed by the users in such spaces can be described as a form of labour, but in the main such labour contributes particularly to the value of the spaces within which it takes place, not so much to the fortune of those performing that labour. This, Trebor says, is a further move towards the commercialisation of social life - the very few benefit from the work of the very many, in a classic capitalist move.

Jean has posted a YouTube video of a recent interview with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and also links to my recent comments on Habermas's continued refusal to engage meaningfully with the Internet and other networked, decentralised, public many-to-many media and with what they may mean for the future of the public sphere. There's also the start of a little further discussion about how to situate such media within Habermas's theories. I meant to reply directly there, but my response turned out a little lengthy for a blog comment, so I'm posting it here instead.

Leeds.
After my guest lecture at the University of Lincoln the other day, one of the students, David Lawson, sent me an email with a couple of very thoughtful questions. I thought I might as well answer them publicly - further comments are, as always, invited...

After thinking about your lecture and how it may relate to the work that I'm doing, I saw the connection. The new publishing mode that you propose, 'produsage', throws up the question of Does this model better fit today's society, with relation to people's attraction to media that has no set narrative trajectory? If users are finding, contributing to and distributing the news then where is the narrative structure of this medium?

My colleague Justin Brow is next; he's been involved in the development of Sticky.net.au and is a researcher in the QUT Institute for Creative Industries and Innovation (iCi). He begins with a brief introduction to the economic role of the creative industries - some 140,000 people are working directly in the CI in Australia, but the focus of CI analysis is now shifting from the production of creative outputs themselves to creative industries' input into other industries; some 160,000 people in Australia work in creative occupations within other industries. A further 150,000 people work in managerial and administrative roles related to the CI, establishing a 'creative trident' of occupations and contributing some $21billion to Australian GDP (this is set to double in the coming years).

Tartu
In this post-lunch session on the final day at CATaC 2006 we're focussing on mobile technologies, and Andra Siibak is the first presenter. She notes the increased scale and magnitude of social interaction through computer-mediated interaction; this also involves youngsters forming their identities and creating favourable impressions of themselves. Despite the wide range of identity portrayals available to them, women still appear to present themselves in what are thought to be the most favourable formats, as Andra found for the Estonian social networking site Rate (and we're focussing here especially on the site's dating aspects) - here people are able to view photos of others and rate them.

Tartu
The next session is kicked off by Eileen Luebcke, who outlines a research project on intercultural communication in virtual teams. This is a very underresearched area so far, she suggests. CMC research has a variety of weaknesses here: research tends to focus on culturally homogeneous groups even where they are compared with one another, and often takes place in a laboratory environment - and results from student groups are sometimes posited as being representative for general work groups.

There is a need for diversity research, then, which has already taken place in non-CMC contexts. Here, heterogeneous teams appear to produce a greater number of alternative solutions to problems, but can also be a source of conflict; unfortunately, active use of diversity is often backgrounded in favour of an organisational bias towards male Western employees (this may be institutionalised for example through a focus on oral presentations or Western-style brainstorming sessions). Dichotomies between individualistic and collectivistic cultural orientations have various impacts here - communication for expressing own points of view clashes with communication for maintaining group harmony, for example - and individualistic communication patterns tend to dominate in many group interactions, as they enable individuals to place themselves in central positions.

Tartu
The final day of CATaC 2006 is upon us, and we're getting started with a session on gender and identity. Marisa D'Mello is the first speaker, focussing on global software organisations in India. How do these firms create an environment for their employees, and how do the workers create an identity for themselves? But what is global software work? It is a form of knowledge work which is highly volatile and dynamic, very diverse in its staffing, location, and project schedules, and it deals with intangible, heterogeneous and mobile products - this creates highly mobile career trajectories for IT workers. (And Marisa worked as an HR manager for such a company herself.)

Tartu
The next session is kicked off by Jose Abdelnour Nocera, on the politics of technology culture. He notes that information technology has globalised, and has become increasingly affordable to small and medium enterprises. However, this also means that technology produced in one culture may be used in another, leading to a potential for intercultural misunderstandings. Users' cultural frameworks configure their understandings of the systems used, and these are likely to be different from those of the technology producers.

Interpretative flexibility is a key concept in theories of the social construction of technology: the character of technologies is not determined by their technological structure. The usefulness of a system, then, can be described as a social construct - and this is very different from the idea of usefulness as simply indicating (perceived) enhanced performance, or of usefulness as 'practical acceptability' rather than 'social acceptability'. Users 'construct' technology both symbolically in their reading of artefacts as well as literally in the articulation work that is essential before a generic software product can be used as an artefact supporting day-to-day business practices.

The second morning at CATaC 2006 begins with a session I'm chairing, and my own paper is also in this session - so I'll try to blog the other three papers, and to post the slides and text for mine. Chris Newlon and Anthony Faiola are the first presenters, on mega-collaboration. They begin with a focus on Hurricane Katrina, which they describe as exhibiting a pattern of success and failure. The response to the hurricane was a spontaneous gathering and coordination of information resources by private-sector ICT organisations and individuals, but the government failed to effectively make use of this wealth of information. Of course, planning is usually for the expected, but not for the worst imaginable extreme - how, then, to plan for the unexpected? Chaos was the only response in the Katrina case, especially also because of cultural barriers between the different agencies and entities involved in the flood response. At the same time, the use of private ICT resources can be described as a success - socially connected information networks were in clear evidence here, including privately run missing persons databases, as well as blogs, lists, bulletin boards, etc. This builds on a small world principle where most individuals are connected, but where such connection depends on contextual information which points towards the most useful contacts to utilise.

Tartu
Next is Mary Morbey, speaking on the changes to museum representations through information and communication technologies. She focusses on two iconic national museums: the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. This study is framed by concepts of cybercolonialism and cyberglocalism, and involved theoretical exploration as well as on-site observation and interviews. The key approaches to ICTs are the view of cyberculture as a new frontier in an American tradition, and a kind of techno-orientalism in which the Net replaces other objects so inscribed, and the two sites reflect these respective trends.