Post reproduced from the Digital Cultures Research Centre blog
On July 4 2010 Flickr listed 37,332 lolcat images. On the same date the number of images tagged as ‘human rights’ was 156,455. Just over four images pertaining to human rights for every lolcat. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.
As we know, discussions round UGC have a tendency to polarise between the ‘end of civilisation as we know it’ and ‘the dawning of the age of aquarius’, but both of these totalising positions don’t take account of the crazed heterogeneity of content that is out there, or begin to differentiate in the ways the last post started to. In this post I want to argue that our use of media through online UGC is obviously ‘empowering’ as a form of literacy; people want to write media because they understand that they live in societies where mediated knowledge, information and experience are sites of enormous power and wealth. Politics, reputation, consumption, pleasure, and identities are all produced through the attention traffic of media systems. Why wouldn’t ‘people’ want to participate in those systems ? If they’re good enough for generations of Oxbridge graduates (like me) then why wouldn’t everyone else want a piece of the action given a chance?
Previously progressive and public service arguments around the politics of representation centred on the idea the media should represent everyone; our multitudes should be represented in the electronic public sphere. Nation should speak unto nation; class to class, region to region to region. Around 20 years ago I was a researcher on documentary called ‘Remote Control’ that Tony Dowmunt made for Channel Four and I’ve always remembered the words of a London University Professor of Education called Brian Groombridge who once wrote a book called ‘Television and People’; in our film he argues that people need to see themselves or their people on TV, ‘ ‘If you or your tribe are not represented you are diminished by that.’ Your life chances and experience are adversely effected if you remain invisible. Attention creates power.
Now some of this idea about plurality of representation continues and resurfaces in discussion of participation. Our participation in the media is empowering because media is a system that produces power. We can feel empowered culturally, politically, or educationally. In the Play and Display zone of culture our deep play with social media offers a sense of agency in the mediasphere. Our photos, graphics, videos, podcasts and blogs share everyday feelings, pleasures, pains, and enthusiasms; these sharings obviously create community. Following the Play Theories of Donald Winnicott, having creative agency in your life derives from play and is essential for psychic health. As creatures we appear to need to play and to create shared symbolic experiences through our play. Our lip syncs, mash ups, swedeings, collabs, animations, parodies, look book fashion stylings and video blogs are new shared symbolic experiences often based on acting out in the already enclosed forms of mainstream media. I defy any viewer to see a selection of the best of this work and not be affected by the compelling experience of human creativity, ingenuity, joy and empowerment that they convey.
Our everyday media practices can become politically empowering in at least two ways. The first is where the phone cams and handycams of everyday life become the witness to oppression thus providing evidence for political intervention. This is a contextually determined form of counter propaganda in which the urgent political context presses the everyday tools of vernacular media production into activism. Whilst a history of key moments would have to track back through the access and radical media movements of 1968 – 1980 there are many clear instances from the history of camcorder culture: In Burma in 1988 activists remixed their riot footage with popular music and TV footage and sold the results on VHS in the markets; in 1991 George Halliday caught Rodney King subjected to a racist beating that indirectly led to the Los Angeles uprising of 1992; trophy photos from Abu Ghraib prison uncover US Army torture techniques and in 2009 the death of Neda Agha-Soltanin by Iranian police was captured on mobile phone and travelled round the world in hours. In these conditions the panopticon becomes subject to counter surveillance; the guards might be watching us but they now never know when one of us will have a camera pointed at them. This is perfectly illustrated by actions at UK Climate Change protests where activists from the FITWatch have a video unit recording the police surveillance units.
The second, and less dramatic, way our everyday media becomes political is through activism. It has never been more possible to use media as a tool for political campaigning. This a continuation of the tradition of propaganda, education and solidarity work that begins with the translation of the Bible into English and continues through the 19th Century underground presses. Raymond Williams’ work in ‘The Long Revolution’ as long ago as 1961 still offers a useful reminder of relationships between the political demand for certain kinds of information for particular kinds of political action in specific modes of social organisation. From the adoption of of social networking campaigning by major western political parties through to the innumerable Facebook campaigns it is clear that all kinds of political groups use social networking to to enhance their agency. The question of what these processes actually mean politically is answered by those instances where something materially changes in our shared world as result of social network solidarity. Shirky’s example of Nisha Susan’s ‘Consortium of Loose Forward and Pub Going Women’ successfully organised online to oppose Hindu fundamentalist attacks on women in bars in Bangalore. In the specific context of moving image and UGC there are more activist videos circulating online now that any time in moving image history. A YouTube search for videos tagged ‘anti racism‘ flags just over five thousand clips, many with tens of thousands of views. In 1985 when I researched independent video distribution, selling 500 VHS cassettes of a title in a year would have made you wildly successful. But what possible ‘difference’ has this made? Is the world any less racist now than it was back then? In that reductionist sense political media never have ‘made a difference’. However we can begin to understand this process if we rephrase the question by asking what the politics of our world would be like if we did not have scrutiny and critique of power available at every level from the journalists of the Fourth Estate (long may they earn a living) through to the citizen journalist. The whistleblower, the video activist, and campaigners of all kinds use video as part of their attention production. Without these activities we would inhabit a totalitarian political culture. We would be North Koreans. Power produces and is measured by resistance. Resistance, far from being futile, is inevitable. It is a constitutive part of our political system. The more of us that are enabled to contribute to this process the healthier this system will be. (See Pew Internet research for suggestions that the digital native generation are likely to be more politically engaged.
Finally (phew) UGC is empowering educationally. Collective intelligence is making all kinds of everyday knowledge widely available to anyone with a broadband connection. Informal education has been immeasurably enhanced by the information and experiences that non educators and ordinary enthusiasts upload. From recipes to software use to mechanics to music tuition and hair and beauty there is almost no subject amenable to demonstration that cannot be found on YouTube – indeed these kinds of demonstration videos have become one the surprise hits of online video. The explosion of sites devoted to user driven accounts of health problems and disorders is perhaps the most powerful example of how everyday subjective experience is turned into useful knowledge. This sense of the ready to hand nature of collective intelligence online is the everyday ‘shadow’ of research showing that online is already the domain of college and university educated elites.
