deuxlits

so i just got back from ICA, which was in san francisco this year, and had a whopping good time. never mind the good vibes i got just from being back on home turf and seeing old friends, but overall i met great people, had great conversations, and ate good food. being at the conference, there were definitely some strong themes running through the conference, one of which was “participatory culture” and everybody’s favorite buzzword web 2.0. i find it especially interesting to here debates on these topics from in the communications and media disciplines, as they carry absolutely different tones than in the data-information-ese, with strong social theoretical (one of my faves) and philosophical framings.

as partipation and participatory culture becomes increasingly latched on to, it was interesting to hear people finally begin to move away from the uber-utopian visions (read: technological deterministic. boo!) and begin to consider the possible drawbacks and barriers on the horizon. there were ample discussions on IP and copyright and i was quite pleased to hear several discussions on media literacy and education in this new space. fred turner from stanford had raised some really interesting points about disjuctions of participation and free labor while companies (like an unnamed search company) “participate” their way to wall street. i recently pointed out to a friend of mine that for most of these web 2.0 sites, when you upload content, you inadvertently have uploaded your property rights as well [aside: boo to that i say. but yet that doens't stop me from doing it. hmmmm.]. anyhow, so amidst this flurry of talk of participation and engagement, particularly in relation to literacy, this really got me thinking about just how little we know and understanding about the creative processes of *producing* culture.

when we start talking about remix and cultural adaptation, a lot of this is predicated on the reproducibility of content. this idea is not new, so i won’t belabor it. but it’s important to start from here, only because it’s really uncomfortable to really have discussions about information and media consumtion AND production as separate processes. and if i recall correctly, a lot of our previous theoretical understandings of culture and media is predicated on a distinction between these two, as fully separate processes. axel bruns has coined terms like “produsers” and “produsage” where describes the intertwining of production and consumption in a participatory framework. some of my previous postings on tagging touch upon this issue. but i strongly feel that users produce new meaning by reframing, providing new readings of digital text and content, and thus creating new cultural forms. in the example of tags, the act of tagging alone is a meaning-making process. in the example of suggested tags, it’s interesting to think about the individual and the collective intersect.

however, in the current stage of internet development, we have this kind of hyperreproducability, that while Baudrillard and Francfort School assailed, i really believe that the new rhetoric around participation and participatory culture and the kinds of things we see happening require use to reconfigure this whole theoretical space because clearly, we are NOT wholly dominated by the media industries. we are no all cultural lemmings and people do awesome, interesting, quirky things with these communication tools that fundamentally resist and challenge this notion of a monolithic and hegemonic media structure. so how can we explain this, in spite of the continuation, exaggeration, and of reproduction?

i think the answer lies somewhere in an understanding of the processes of creativity. while people at ICA were flirting with this notion, no one seemed to explicitly interested in this, per se. there was a lot of talk of human action that was politically framed, i.e. in terms of resistance primarily, but being a political actor is but one role we play during the course of our everyday. that being said, a focus specifically on creative dimensions of practice accounts for a lot of the agency that i’m always trying to find, but also across the multiple dimensions of our lives, both as public and private individuals. people are creative in their self expression. people are creative in the ways the resist cultural infrastructure. people are creative in their ability to read between the lines of political rhetoric. i think a lot of the discourse on participatory media underscores this notion of creativity, but given the intertwining of publicness and privateness in digital practice, it just seems that so many of our theoretical understandings of agency are really bad at taking into account the fuzziness of this distinction.