Excerpt
In many aspects, the participatory culture constitutes new formations of cultural production. The intertwined dynamics of design and appropriation in the cultural industries are one of it. The present research has argued that the emerging media practice and the discourse on information technologies harbor a promise for social progress. In fact, the affordances to fulfill such a promise can be inscribed into technological design, which, in return can also stimulate appropriation. While traditional distinctions such as of user-producer and audience-sender begin to get blurry, the increasing participation of users in the production of media texts and the appropriation of consumer goods and technology need to be analyzed in a way that differentiates the various ways in which the so-called participatory culture takes shape. And while diffusion of information technology in general, and the personal computer, software, and the Internet in particular, have resulted in the far-reaching availability of technological knowledge in society, the implications of technological choices for the functioning of participation are hardly brought to the fore in discourses on participatory culture.
This research has analyzed participatory culture as a dispositif. It analyzed our perception of the unfolding media practice as constituted of discourses imagining or claiming participation, as well as the technologies and their specific qualities, and furthermore people, companies and organizations in various roles. Tracing the various constituents of this dispositif, reveals dynamic actor-networks transforming the meaning of technologies, affecting discourses, and shaping media practice. Furthermore, laying bare these actor-networks through the various cases studies resulted in suggesting the need for a shift in understanding participatory culture. The user can no longer be presented simply as a consumer that has turned into producer, but needs to be analyzed by taking into account the actual social context and its relation to the overarching production apparatus with its power relations, legal administration and sociopolitical framing, as well as to an underlying structure of assemblages of various corporate interests, software design, and social relations among the actors involved, which are difficult to bring to the surface. In analyzing the socalled Web 2.0 applications, this study has tried to make visible the emerging socio-technical ecosystems, that can consist of numerous different actornetworks, but also be part of an actor-network itself. Those constellations of large numbers of users and opaque technologies can be better approached when they are conceived of as environments consisting of unknown variables and complex and dynamic interactions. They constitute an emergence of complexity in different aspects: interaction between users can already be established below the threshold of the formation of a community, or even reciprocal communication. Although communities can be, and often are part of socio-technical ecosystems, the community as a driving force for social interaction and production of, for instance, user generated content is not preconditioned. Furthermore the individual contribution does not matter much in socio-technical ecosystems, but the sheer quantity of contributions provided by a large number of users most certainly. Socio-technical ecosystems present therefore a different quality of participatory culture. They show that software design can automatize interaction and production and also channel user activities. Even though they do indeed facilitate user participation, this happens in a different way than proponents of the romanticized ideal of communitybased participation could imagine.
Participatory culture therefore has to be understood as an extension of the culture industry into the realm of users. In contrast to the romanticized narratives spread in popular discourses, the participatory culture is very heterogeneous and characterized by a plurality of different configurations that are affected by many, often contradictory interests. It is also not helpful to glorify the Davids battling the industrial Goliaths, or to hastily embrace a pseudo-participation of users on corporate Web 2.0 platforms. Despite the many examples for active user participation in design processes, the MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other Web 2.0 applications rather bear witness to the emergence of a new form of media consumption and the constitution of audiences, as well as the rise of powerful corporations shaping and controlling cultural production and its preconditions.
Schäfer, Mirko Tobias.
Bastard Culture! User Participation and the Extension of Cultural Industries.
Dissertation, Universiteit Utrecht, 2008.
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