Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
Mirko Tobias Schäfer / Assistant Professor
University of Utrecht Department for Media and Culture Studies
In the summer of 1999 a little cat awakened the monolithic music industry that was sleeping its way into the digital age. The cat wore headphones and was the logo of a small application called Napster crawling over the Internet. Millions of people used the application to search music files and to download them on their computer. Developed by a 19-year-old university student, the Napster software did nothing more than index music files stored on a user’s computer and share this information with other users in the network.
Napster changed the logic for the distribution of digitized artifacts for good as peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technologies enabled the global distribution of digital information at negligibly low costs. But first and foremost Napster is remarkable because it represents an effective concept of global distribution of artifacts neither developed nor controlled by those industries that have built their business models and economical power on the control of distribution. Napster and its successors tell a well-known tale of computer technology and the Internet, a story of media use as battle royal between consumers and producers. Distribution through peer-to-peer systems was soon recognized as subverting the established cultural industries. It also fostered the legend of enthusiast amateurs producing artifacts of a quality that can meet or even beat industrial products.
Due to these and other developments, new media have gained the imago of being enabling technologies that could turn the former consumer of corporate media content from dupe into hero, mastering the new means of production and actively participating in the creation and distribution of – mostly digital – artifacts. And indeed, the new technologies have led to an emerging media practice where users participate significantly in the production and distribution of the cultural industry’s goods (Bruns 2008; Jenkins 2002, 2006a, 2006b; Jenkins et al. 2006; Jenkins, Thoburn 2004:12; Schaefer 2005, 2006). Recently, popular discourse is embracing the phenomenon of producing users, labeling them Generation C (c for content),[1] anticipating a revolution of Pro-Ams, professional amateurs (Leadbeater, Miller 2004), and describing their production logic as Wikinomics (Tapscott, Williams 2006). With reference to Pierre Lévy, the aspect of a plurality of users collectively producing content and creating artifacts online has been understood as collective intelligence (Jenkins 2001). Metaphors such as the wisdom of crowds (Surowiecki 2005) or the wealth of networks (Benkler 2006) show collective interactions to be an ‘invisible hand’ in creating prosperity. To Henry Jenkins, the emerging media practice constitutes a converging of different participants and old and new media practices into a field where the distinctions between user and producer is increasingly blurred (Jenkins 2006). Axel Bruns has coined the term produsage for the newly emerging practices and labels participants in production communities as both, users and producers (Bruns 2008).
The second coming of the World Wide Web – Web 2.0 – thrives on the imminent promise of user participation in social interactions, and the collective generation and sharing of content. In 2006, Time magazine put a face to this promise when it nominated the generic user (‘YOU’) Person of the Year.[2] By claiming that YOU, the user, has risen to become the hero of the Information Age, the perception of consumers as dupes seems to have been abandoned for good and we seem to have finally become a participatory culture (Jenkins 2006a).
However, as the examples above have indicated, this take on new media culture often leads to simplified and rather romanticized interpretation, in popular culture as well as media theory. Only a critical analysis of the term and its connotations can help to understand the underlying mechanisms and the intertwined dynamic of the various participants.
According to Jenkins, the criteria defining participatory culture are 'low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,' 'strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations with others,' and 'informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices,' as well as the belief 'that their contributions matter' and that 'members feel some degree of social connection with one another' (Jenkins et al. 2006:7). Participation is here formulated as a community-based activity determined by a high degree of social interaction and mutual understanding among its participants.
In culture studies the term participation describes audiences engaging in culture by receiving, interpreting, and deconstructing media texts, and most recently through acts of appropriation and creation. This perception is highly influenced by ideological connotations (Jenkins et al. 2006, Benkler 2006) that identify participation as a process of explicit and conscious, often intrinsically motivated activities of users claiming their cultural freedom from the culture industries.[3] Along with the explicit participation described by Jenkins and others, the emergence of the so-called Web 2.0 shows an implicit participation where user activities are channeled and directed through software design. Recent research has demonstrated how media industries have implemented those activities in their business models, questioning the romanticized understanding of participation (Van Dijck, Nieborg 2007; Scholz 2008, Zimmer 2008).
The mechanisms shaping explicit and implicit participation however are far more complex and a thorough analysis of the dynamic interaction between users, corporate companies, artifacts, and socio-technical ecosystems is lacking. Another aspect that deserves more attention is the dynamic interplay constituting aspects of collectivism and collaboration. Bruns has recently pointed out that the community and the collective are misleading metaphors in describing the social interaction on the internet (Bruns 2008:327). This chapter tries to design a new concept that appropriately describes and analyzes the phenomenon of massive user interactions.
In general, participatory culture unfolds in three domains described hereafter as accumulation, archiving, and construction. These three domains are not mutually exclusive and overlap to a certain extent. The logic of electronic distribution and copying of files applies to all three of them. As will be described later, recent software design for information management systems channels these user activities and proposes interfaces and functions that stimulate and regulate them.
Accumulation describes all activities evolving around texts originally produced within the established media industries. This content is collected, altered, further developed or remixed by users and dedicated fans. Examples are the large Star Wars fan community producing their own Star Wars movies on websites such as TheForce.net or the so-called slash fiction communities, Jenkins has described (1991). These communities alter traditional media texts, for example by developing homosexual narratives involving popular media characters like Harry Potter.
Archiving refers to the organization, maintenance and distribution of digital artifacts. This ranges from providing public-domain books in digital formats, such as Project Gutenberg does, to hosting the productions of specific cultural niches like demos or music files from the demoscene – a subculture developing animated realtime graphics – or the independent music production and free distribution of the so-called netlabel scene. The Internet Archive (Archive.org) is probably the most well known example for storing and preserving data online. This important resource archives material provided by common users as well as established institutions and professionals and is maintained by a foundation. Although archiving tends to be more institutionalized than accumulating, both areas overlap, for instance in fan archives and the often sophisticated strategies users employ to allocate and share licensed content like movies, audio files, and computer games. In general, the sector of archiving describes all means of indexing, storing, and structuring data for access and easy information retrieval.
Construction describes forms of production that take place outside the established production and distribution channels. Prime examples are open-source software, the demo scene, and the netlabel scene. The domain of construction overlaps with accumulation insofar as users alter software-based products and build new applications for devices initially programmed by commercial vendors. It shows overlaps with archiving in all areas where infrastructures for storing, organizing, and maintaining information are built and knowledge systems are created, such as online software repositories (e.g. Sourceforge.net), and collectively created open-access encyclopedias such as Wikipedia.
These three user activities extend the established culture industries and form a new and complex set of relations between producers and consumers (Figure 1). Instead of replacing them, these new modes complement older modes of production, distribution, and consumption, and can therefore be described as establishing an extended culture industry. The extended culture industries are characterized by the dynamic interaction of all participating parties. Production processes are not only extended into the domain of users – where the (old) culture industry’s media texts and products are appropriated – but also happen completely independent of established production and distribution channels. In conclusion we can state that this present culture is constituted by new design and appropriation of existing content, unfolding along the lines of accumulation, construction, and archiving from the culture industries to its fringes and beyond.
The agency of technology in enabling or averting certain media practices has only recently been acknowledged in media theoretical analysis (Rieder, Schaefer 2008; Schaefer 2006; Hughes, Lang 2006). Due to their technological make-up, some digital artifacts can easier be reused, modified, and developed than others. Hughes and Lang describe this quality as transmutability (2006). In general, all software-based artifacts are transmutable because computer components and software are open to modification. There is a relatively superficial level, like enthusiast fans who photoshop their favorite TV characters or remix their personal hit songs, but in fact every commercial software-based product or digitized artifact can enter a second stage of development and rigorous transmutations yield surprising results. A Microsoft Xbox becomes a Linux computer, Nintendo’s Gameboy is turned into a musical instrument, Sony’s robot dog Aibo learns how to dance, and the robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba attracts skilled programmers who use the affordable device for experiments in artificial intelligence and robotics.[4] The modifications of these products are rooted in the basic affordances of computer technology, software, and the Internet. Affordances are specific qualities of material and artifacts and affect design and use to a great degree (Norman 1998:9). To be more precise, the affordance of electronic computers to copy files without loss is crucial to an application like Napster and the new logic of distribution. This logic is inherent to electronic computers; for the execution of any given task they need to copy files from memory to a central processing unit. As such, computers can be described as universal machines that can execute basically every task formulated in a language the machine understands. Software constitutes the many different applications that can be executed by any computer (Turing 1948). Despite the fact that software is bound to a material data carrier, it shows parallels with language in its structure, while in its effect it is similar to machinery (Rieder, Schaefer 2008:163). Software is a means of production organized and structured as (programming) language. Like language, it is also modular and parts of one software-application can be used for a completely different one. Such pre-programmed modules are available with a framework for software development. Programming software therefore implies the reuse of previously written software. Taken together, all available software constitutes a reservoir, a cultural resource, that programmers use and to which they contribute at the same time. Software as cultural resource is distributed and made available through the Internet that forms a global infrastructure and connects all users. It is due to this hybrid constellation of technological qualities that the Internet has become today’s primary medium for collaboration and communication, and a universal archive for all kinds of information.
An application like Napster is profoundly related to the affordances of computer technology, software and the Internet, and the way users deal with these technologies. While Napster is nothing more than a bricolage of a file-transport protocol combined with a chat program and a graphical user interface for convenient use, it satisfied the technological requirements of the digital age: Napster’s design perfectly fitted the qualities of the internet. While the music industry was unaware of the looming digital revolution, the logic of distributing media texts electronically through computer networks developed through the appropriation of a set of existing technologies, as the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the MPEG format for compressed audio and movie files (e.g. MP3 and DivX), music player applications as WinAmp, and programs for automated indexing, retrieval and distribution of files.
The history of Napster teaches us that the availability of technologies plus the knowledge how to generate, use, and recombine them, create potentiality. William Gibson’s well-known line 'the street finds its own uses for things' (2003:199) obviously applies to the virtual landscape of the Internet and its users. Napster also demonstrates that participation and collective collaboration can take place on a very basic level and that the user-collective can improve the infrastructure for retrieving files and information. It worked like this: after downloading the Napster application, the user contributed to the overall file sharing network by allowing a part of her hard drive to function as a server for file exchange, and by uploading files to the network. The Napster application indexed the files a user shared and made those data available for search requests. P2P file-sharing clients such as Napster have revealed that file sharing has much less to do with explicit participation and community-driven objectives than enthusiast commentators anticipated. Actually – and by technological design – participation became an automated process, completely unrelated to community values, social interaction or communication in general. Although those activities are optional in many software applications, they are far from necessary for sharing files.
In an attempt to limit the damage caused by digital distribution through P2P networks the music industry started appropriating the technology itself by setting up networks of fake users, so-called bot networks, that flooded the file-sharing systems with corrupted song files. Old business models and new media practice collided at the level of popular discourse, where fans promoted piracy as an appropriate activity in view of the music and movie industries’ tight control over how music is consumed; a debate also reflected by the design of P2P networks and the attempts of the industry to protect their products through copy-protection systems and Digital Rights Management (DRM). Triggering a reciprocal competition, the protective move of the established industries stimulated the improvement of file-sharing protocols like eDonkey and BitTorrent, as each new copy-protection system was countered by a more advanced cracking technology.[5] This combat not only charged technology emotionally. The harsh reaction of the media giants and their representative associations also revealed another aspect of technologies’ social use: due to its affordances, its development is very much driven by users’ appropriation and its resulting formalization in new design solutions.
The interplay of technological design and appropriation analysed here using the example of Napster, sheds a different light on participation. Participation cannot only be assigned to users who get involved with media and 'oppose' a dominant vendor. The original producer and other commercial units - who are either actively involved in the process of modifying the original design or benefit from its outcome – are also part of participatory culture. Implementing user labor in the development of design by commercial vendors is a usually neglected aspect in enthusiasts’ descriptive texts on participatory culture (e.g. Jenkins 2006b; Benkler 2006). The most recent Microsoft game console for example, features many aspects developed by the so-called homebrew scene. As unlicensed users of the Microsoft Xbox Development Kit (XDK), these hackers designed many useful applications for the Xbox. Their work was distributed within user networks and, due to its unlicensed status, not commercially exploitable. Microsoft however learned from this experience and integrated many features into the next Xbox 360, also providing an Integrated Development Kit (IDK) that can be used to create software and distribute it through the Xbox network. Microsoft achieved technological closure by consequently implementing user activities and appropriation into the design and legal regulation of the successive Xbox model.
It is claimed that user activities revolve around explicit participation, which thrives on intrinsic motivation, and often take place in teams or ad-hoc and team-like collectives (e.g. Bruns 2008 on Wikipedia; Jenkins 2006 on fans of the television program Survivor; Raessens 2005 on game modifications; Schaefer 2005 on the modification of the Xbox). On the other hand, implicit participation takes place. Implicit participation can be part of the software design as the sharing of a part of the user's hard drive in the P2P file sharing. It is automated and delegated to an information system, not requiring any intrinsic motivation, community feeling or collaborative effort. Implementing participation into software design entails formalizing and channeling user activities. It is no coincidence that Tim O’Reilly has dubbed this design step architecture of participation. In his programmatic text 'What Is Web 2.0' he describes basic configurations of channeling user participation for commercial ends (2005). User activities are thus employed for the improvement of information systems and the generation of content, which either extends the content of the commercial provider or constitutes its main potential.
The explicit participation of user communities in developing technology is implemented into new design decisions, but Web 2.0 applications show that next to explicit participation, implicit participation can be employed to improve existing information systems and to build new business models of cultural production.
Culture industries witness a shift from creating content to providing platforms for user-driven activities. On these platforms the users create content or alter existing content from the proprietary resources of the cultural industries according to their regulations. The Star Wars MashUp editor for example, aims at fans who accumulate media texts relating to their favorite subject and alter them or create new ones. The fansite TheForce.net has become a popular platform for creating, promoting, and hosting fan movies. Featuring tutorials on how to make fan movies or create computer-generated imagery for space ships and special effects, it has earned a reputation as the best Star Wars website out there. The copyright holder – Lucasfilm – acknowledged the need for fans to play with the media texts, but controls this play through a corporate web platform. The Star Wars MashUp editor offers fans the opportunity to exercise their creativity and equips them with the means to do so. It does so, however, with strict restrictions, trapping the fans on the Death Star so to speak as they are bound to the corporation’s design and legal regulations. The MashUp editor prevents downloads of any content to users’ hard drives, and editing of content is possible only in the web-based editor Lucasfilm provides. Using other editing programs is prohibited as well, as are certain forms of representation. Nudity for instance is recognized and filtered through the Eyespot editing software, avoiding displays of naked persons in user-created remixes.[6] Furthermore, fans’ creations may be published by the corporate platform only, and any distribution through YouTube or other services is forbidden. Finally, Lucasfilm requires that users grant to Lucasfilm, 'its licensees, successors and affiliates a perpetual and irrevocable, exclusive, royalty free, worldwide license in all rights, titles and interests of every kind and nature...' to their self-created content.[7] This practice of extending the value of a proprietary resource through fans while at the same time denying these fans any form of authorial compensation and even freedom of creativity, is highly questionable (Lessig 2007).
Increasingly user creations are subject to the software design and legal administration of corporate platforms that implement user activities into their services. The so-called Web 2.0 applications O’Reilly refers to, take participation to another level by implementing it into software design for the purpose of channeling user activities implicitly. On the photo platform Flickr users might not even notice how publishing their personal photos, adding a title to them, or even placing them on a map is extending the Flickr information system. By simply uploading a photo, users contribute data on camera model, date and time of picture, camera settings, etc. The Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) data are metadata generally attached to pictures taken by standard digital cameras. By adding tags, keywords, to the pictures, users compensate the information systems’ lack of semantic information retrieval. The machine cannot read a picture, but it can read the meta-information provided either by the camera through the EFIX data or by users who add title, location, and certain keywords. By using it, users extend the overall information system and contribute to an improved information management. By providing valuable meta-information in tags of uploaded photos, users improve the information retrieval of Flickr owner Yahoo’s search engine. Yahoo, thanks to Flickr’s tagging system, is able to compensate the inability of search engines to recognize a picture’s content. User-generated meta-information teaches the machine to answer complex search requests.
In contrast to earlier accounts of participation, I have shown that systems that thrive on the implementation of user activities are not depending on or encouraging community activities. There are Flickr groups, which might be considered communities because they share objectives, rules, regular communication, and recurring patterns of social interaction as well as offline gatherings. But these activities are an optional function in the system’s design and not a precondition for the cultural production it generates. Despite the fact that users are participating in the creation of an information system and collectively building a resource of stored data and metadata for efficient information retrieval, they do not necessarily share a common goal, or social interaction. Adding photos to Flickr can involve different uses and gratifications and therefore is not limited to explicit participation as commonly understood. The idealizing connotations of participation as in general critical, communal and social activity has to be revisited in the light of software design that operationalizes user activities as implicit participation.
Affordances of digital media enabled large groups of users to actively participate in cultural production, and the high amount of user-generated content in different domains of cultural production has led to the assumption that the promise of participation has been delivered. But software design employing these user activities as implicit participation calls for critically revisiting the way technology is designed, used, and appropriated. Large user numbers providing valuable personal data through the interfaces of platforms such as social-networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Hyves, LinkedIn, etc.), giving ratings through media sites such as YouTube, and affecting search results in Yahoo through the provision of metadata to Flickr, once again posits the audience as a source for market research and target for advertising. This clearly contrasts the utopian ideal of a user-controlled participatory culture. Figure 2 shows a number of applications that successfully employ user activities from the domains of accumulation, archiving, and construction, and implement them into corporate-controlled platforms.
The interaction of large numbers of users, user activities channeling interfaces, and intelligent information systems show participatory culture to be a hybrid, a socio-technical ecosystem. The many possible motivations for using these systems, as well as the plurality of social interaction, shows heterogeneous participation that can hardly be described with the ideological connotations of earlier enthusiast accounts. It will be necessary instead to critically analyze how software design affects user behavior and how power structures are reestablished through implementing participation into information systems.
Acknowledgments:
I am indebted to Bernhard Rieder, Tanja Sihvonen and Kim de Vries for their comments and helpful remarks.
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Date December 2008 Category Publications
Participation Inside? User Activities between Design and Appropriation. In Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, Mirko Tobias Schaefer: Digital Material. Tracing New Media in Everday Life and Technology, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 147-158.