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.

Readers may be interested to follow up the YouTube video/talk Lessig takes as his inspiration in the middle section of his talk: The video in question was created by Julian Sanchez, who works at ‘libertarian’ think tank The Cato Institute, and is embedded here:

This is hardly headline news, but the focus on UGC is a really productive way of addressing lots of issues in digital cultures research – although as it turns out the term itself is disputed and (by some at least, Mandy Rose !) despised. I hadn’t quite taken on how the term itself is uncomfortable for lots of us; a technocratic rationalisation of ‘people’ expressing themselves through connected mediations. What was UGC called before ? Just ‘content’, amateur, access, or ‘community’ ?

I’m not going to go into commentary and comment on individual papers, I’m hoping that  over the next two weeks we can gather all the papers here and then we can comment individually if you like. My headlines from the day go something like this.

One of the implications from the journalism panel and others was that ‘Professional’ media workers have to become more like ‘curators’, ‘enablers’, ‘linkers’. These themes were strongly echoed by Sandra Gaudenzi and Mandy Rose who both talked about producers setting up the constraints, or rules of the game, then shaping the content that emerged.  This is all in the spirit of Beryl Graham’s insight in a 1995 essay that the skills of being a good interactive artist might turn out to be closer to the those of the good party host than those of the traditional studio bound artist. Setting up the conditions for participation.

But for this new curatorial role to become possible trust is an essential feature of the system. Journalists for instance need to trust contributors and vice versa – human sympathy seems to be an important part of the process; the publish then filter has to generate trust which needs human leadership. But Kellner’s ‘Big Media’ aren’t going away – we’re just seeing a different disposition of their agency; the big trees in the media jungle are having to find new ways of exploiting the symbiosis they have always had with the creatures on the forest floor formerly known as the audience.

Why does (some) UGC move me ?  Why does UGC often  make me feel thrilled, inspired, choked, inspired, proud ? I’m thinking here about Jessica Crombie’s refugee blog news site from Kenya and the brilliant Ushahidi network, of the Main Street project from MAP,  Tony Dowmunts midnight ramblings from Sierra Leone,  and even weird individual moments of crazed joy like the Numa Numa guy. Seeing these various examples and experiencing this set of feelings over and over through the day made me reflect on this affective quality. This has two immediate consequences. One is to revisit the work I did in Freakshow on the place of emotion in the public sphere: however whilst that was concerned with the impacts of speaking as ‘I’ in the public sphere of a disembodied and bourgeois ‘we’ this affective quality has more in common with a feeling from and for the collective. This is complex and tricky stuff – but the way in which the individual experiences in for instance Video Nation were always held in a productive relationship to the polity through their framing as “Nation”  is similar to the role of social networking in  ‘inspiring’ UGC. Burgess & Green in their You Tube study stress time and again that it’s the social networking aspect of this work that’s new and interesting. But maybe the affectively driven social networking functionality actually really does replace – directly – the rhetorics of a public sphere based on rational communication. We are emotionally driven by belonging and connecting. This  affect is reproduced in certain kinds of UGC experience that connect us to something human, or perhaps tribal.

The other consequence of thinking more about affect, and pleasure, is to resolve, or at least perhaps reframe, the debate between narrative and fragmentation that re surfaced during the discussion of Sandra Gaudenzi’s presentation. Our fragmented navigations of online media spaces and social networks is driven not by  somebody else’s news agenda,  about what it is imagined we ought to know but purely by own emotionally driven grazing; turns out for a lot of us the latest inanity from Perez Hilton is more compelling than banking reform; the photos uploaded by your class mates more interesting by far than anything else available today. The non narrative experience of distracted surfing is more emotionally satisfying by far since every click is driven by desire. Our navigations follow courses charted in the emotional connectivity of the social network. When we’re stranded alone on a cold railway platform at night waiting for a connection why do we reach for the phone ? Because the little strokes of emotional warmth  from a loved one’s pinged back text offers us a tiny bit of haptic connectivity. Participation and connection may be more important than content for the mediatized subject.

Whilst the memory of the ideological critique embedded in the history of UGC was still present in Emma Agusita’s account of the aims of her practice in community media and informal education it is equally clear from Dan Ashton and Martin Thayne that UGC is also a gigantic market opportunity. Here we were drawn to the reasons why UGC is such a distasteful term for  some of us – it’s a good example of modern newspeak in that the content in UGC is – in the Web 2.0 discourse – irrelevant. Its our activity, participating, posting, liking, sharing, rating and recommending that undertakes the massive global labour of attention aggregation.

All to play for then. More as I have to time to reflect on individual papers. Thanks to all for what I found a richly nourishing day.

“Convivial tools”, wrote the radical philosopher Ivan Illich in 1973, “ are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.” This presentation employs Ilich’s concept of “convivial tools” as a framework for thinking about participatory and “user-generated” documentary content. The presentation will draw on examples, of practice that I’ve been part of – BBC’s Video Nation (access TV), Capture Wales (digital storytelling), My Science Fiction Life (collaborative cultural history), and work in the emerging field of collaborative online documentary – The Message and Mapping Main Street.

This framework of “conviviality” highlights ethics and social value, and encourages connections to be identified with historical practices -  Mass Observation, the “shared anthropology” of Jean Rouch – and with wider contemporary cultural practice – DIY culture, relational art and craftivism.

Previously, the two main types of media could be differentiated between very easily; Broadcast media and communications media.  Broadcast media included radio, television, newspapers etc which were centrally produced and then distributed widely.  Communications media such as the telephone could be seen as a tube reaching from one person to another. The technological differences between these two different types of media could be seen as arbitrary, but there was a very big difference between broadcasting and conversing.  However, as telecommunications writer Clay Shirky notes, “now that our communications technology is changing, the distinctions among those patterns of communication are evaporating; once was a sharp break between two styles of communicating is becoming a smooth transition” (Shirky, 208; 87).

User generated content refers to content created online by internet users.  This could incorporate many types of content including a simple ‘how are you’ to a friend over a social networking site, to a ten minute animation piece distributed on YouTube. In reference to historically previous methods of media, institutions such as the BBC still operate a centralized method of production when it comes to their online media; however, their website acts a site for interactivity as users are encouraged to voice their own opinions in the form of comments on articles posted by journalists.

In terms of the idea of gate-keeping, there is an identifiable shift within online media compared to previous media forms.  Referring to traditional forms of media, Shirky writes: “since the basic economics of publishing puts a cap on the overall volume of content, it also forces every publisher or producer to filter the material in advance” (2008; 98).  This method of production required the use of gate-keepers in order to filter the material before production.  However, now due to the online environment and user generated content, this method is not functional because the technology needed to produce content has become mass media, therefore massive amounts of content in all different forms is being created.  Shirky coins a phrase which I believe to be an effective way of understanding contemporary online processes:

“filter then publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past.  The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish then filter” (Shirky, 2008: 98). 

This idea of publishing mass content then filtering it applies directly to the online media environment whereby, due to amateurization, so much content is produced that professional gate-keepers could not keep up with the demands of filtering.  New methods of gate-keeping must be found whereby the filtering process occurs after the publication of content.

Shirky, C. 2008 “Here comes everybody“, London: Penguin.

The phrase ‘gate-keeper’ was coined in 1947 by Kurt Lewin as a metaphor of someone literally standing at the gate and deciding who or what passed through it.  Lewin originally used the phrase to describe patterns of grocery purchasing and how it could affect social change.  He used a mathematical system and graphic model to attempt to portray various different channels and forces, which influenced the consumption of food from purchase to physical consumption on the dinner table, although he stated later in his career that “this situation holds not only for food channels but also for the traveling of a news item through certain communications channels in a group, for movement of goods, and the social locomotion of individuals in many organizations’” (Lewin, 1951: 187) His theory was first adapted for use within the media by his colleague David Manning-White while studying communication at the University of Iowa.  Manning-White used the theory of the gate-keeper within a research project whereby he persuaded an editor of a local newspaper to keep track of all the wire copy which came to his office, and note why he had decided to use/not use each piece.  White was then able to use this information to understand complex value systems which affected society and cultural trends.

When looking at the process of gate-keeping, one of Lewin’s notions was the idea that “forces determine whether an item passes through a gate” (Lewin, 1951: 86).  He believed there were forces working “for and against selection which also influence the processing of items” (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009: 14).  These forces could be any number of influencing factors, some examples being economic, ideological and institutional.  These forces all influence the final outcome (for example; a published magazine) and are incredibly significant within the initial audience reading and also affect wider social connotations.

Some references

Lewin, K. (1951) Field theory in social science; selected theoretical papers. D. Cartwright (ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Shoemaker, P & Vos, T. (2009) Gatekeeping Theory, London: Routledge.

Tony Dowmunt, Goldsmiths

In the offered promise of both access to television by outsiders and ‘non-professionals’ – and of less mediated, more authentic versions of themselves and their lives made by these outsiders, the video diary form was arguably the most important ‘genre’. Almost two decades later (the Big Brother Diary room having come and almost gone), the video diary, with its intimate confessions to camera, has become so familiar a convention that it is as easily parodied as previously valorised documentary techniques for capturing the ‘authentically real’.

So in what ways (if any) is the video diary form now still viable? Using a range of examples from my own and others work, this presentation will attempt to show how the (often reflexive) relationship of diarist to camera keeps alive an effective balancing act between mediation and ‘authenticity’, and so has continuing relevance.

In the preparation of materials for this symposium Sam Kinsley & I realised that we were working from quite different interpretations of the term ‘user generated content’. Given our different perspectives (ageing media academic & young ‘digital’ geographer) this is hardly surprising but prompted an interesting genealogical exchange. What follows is a first pass at recording the genealogies of user generated content (UGC).

First, there is the popular effluvia of UGC, from Leadbetter and Shirky to Tapscott & Williams (on Wikinomics), which is reflected in style columns, in the likes of Radio Four “In Business’ and, indeed, in the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto. The Big Society apes and reflects the libertarian roots of the DIY society we are all (again – for others have done so before) enjoined to build, now in the circumstances of a global economy only just out of recession, a national economy still close to recession, and many calls fora post-CDO, low-carbon austerity.

Second, there is ‘crowd-sourcing’: the institutions of journalism using the material of non-professionals (or semi-professionals) to illustrate stories that the paid camera crews didn’t get. YouTube defines this through its ‘Eye Witness’ category. Amazon’s Mechancial Turk perhaps goes further by offering this as a method of crowd-sourcing any form of labour.

The implication of crowd-sourcing for UGC overlaps with a much more diffuse application of UGC to YouTube in general – again, the amateur, non- or semi- professional ‘prosumer’ creating content that demands attention. However the attention demanded, according to some rare research with users themselves, is mostly understood as the attention of one’s immediate friends: your class, year group or peers, as well as the broader attention of the ‘whole world’. This is, in a sense, local communication figured in a form of broadcast to, or sharing with, the world at large in the hope that it might just go viral. Its also worth remembering that in Burgess & Green’s analysis of their YouTube sample they estimate that as much as 40% of its content is mainstream media cut up into clips that are recycled and repurposed. Of the rest (of the UGC) there is an inestimable percentage of karaoke-style mashup media. These are lip syncs and swede-ings that say as much about the continuing colonization of user consciousness by popular culture as they do about human creative or participatory potential.

These two versions of course overlap and feed into broader debates about the mediated public sphere – as both a political and cultural assemblage – and how access to public(s) is mediated. For example we can look to Andrew Keen’s arguments around ‘dumbing down’ on the one hand, and Henry Jenkins’ celebrations of user-generated content on the other.

A parallel inter-related discourse also feeds in here: within the commercial practices of digital media/ web design over the past few years, the terminology of UGC has more particular meanings. The WWW in its first generations spawned a plethora of teenage homepages, long before Facebook (see Daniel Chandler) and indeed, in a broader sense, the whole internet is an example of a user generated system ( for inter alia the dissemination of user generated content). Interactivity has demanded and continues to demand different relationships with users. For example, ‘content management systems’ have ceded to users a significant portion of control of the space and means of production of ‘content’. The emphasis upon ‘relationships’ and the building of ‘community’ became instrumental to the dot-com boom aim to create ‘sticky websites’. Normative understandings of UGC thus grew from a more generalised sense of ‘relationships with users’. This arguably began with users sometimes being allowed to upload content via content management systems controlled elsewhere and has developed into social media, ‘web 2.0’ and ideas of ‘the cloud’.

At the same time, the computer games industry was learning how to exploit the power of its users through the commodification of ‘mods’ (modification of games) and the growth of cultures of ‘modding’. Instrumental to the growth of these forms of user-generated production were ID & Valve were, I would argue, the first holders of I.P to release it in a form that invited ‘users’ – gamers and fans – to legitimately recreate it. (Obvious really when one thinks about the application put into ‘play’ of all kinds – we also ‘play’ music, arguably another veteran at the commodification of user passions.)

The advent of ‘web 2.0’ into the general public conscious, via the likes of Facebook, MySpace, and Wikipedia crystalised the realisation that the metaphorical genie of ‘the user’ was well and truly out of the gatekeepers bottle. Social networking and the production and distribution of UGC through peer-to-peer and user-created knowledge networks started to suggest an unprecedented force for the distributed and widespread production of cultural artefacts, movements and value. However, Tim O’Reilly’s formulation of ‘web 2.0’ clearly illustrates where this energy becomes commodified – for O’Reilly, data was the new ‘Intel inside‘ and by data he means US – our data traces and patterns. So here the user generated content is not simply those intentionally produced cultural artefacts, realised as images, music and text, but the vast quantity of data about ‘life online’ that is captured, which describes in intricate and dispassionate detail all of our digitally mediated activity. The figure of the amorphous ‘cloud’ of data, as a capacity for access, distribution and storage, is not necessarily benign. Various forms of UGC have acquired significant value, which we perhaps have no idea we are generating as casual users of websites and services.

These various and inter-related understandings of user-generated content reveal for us that social and cultural implications of ‘content’ no longer being discrete, easily packaged and controlled artefacts that have been carefully and intentionally produced but which are instead transmutable and promiscuous ‘stuff’ demand further critical scrutiny.

Emerging from a critique of recent celebratory studies of new media (what have been classified as Media Studies 2.0: Tapscott, 2006; Rosen, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Gauntlett, 2007; Merrin, 2008; Bruns, 2008), I incorporate a Deleuzian conceptual framework to demonstrate the economic motivations associated with the encouragement of user generated material. In particular, I examine the Deleuzian notion of ‘control societies’ within the context of how multimedia communication networks may be associated with the ‘re-territorialisation’ of global capitalism.

As computer algorithms increasingly collate personal information, ubiquitous interactive technologies not only suggest, influence and promote, they may also begin to produce and ‘sort’ all aspects of networked culture (Lash, 2006; Beer, 2009). This is not to deny the significance of potential forms of empowerment which are played out in participatory cultures, but it does draw attention to the complex nature of user agency. As Terranova has argued, changes to the relationship between production and consumption are played out within a field that is “always and already capitalism” (2004: 79). Consequently, the social and radically novel aspect of these transformations may be persistently undermined or appropriated by systems of economy. I suggest, with reference to a range of concrete examples, that digital interactivity is being increasingly implemented into the monetization strategies of user-generated platforms. It is highly lucrative for commercial interests to integrate themselves within online communities in order to extract the financial benefits from the practice of social participation, in addition to stimulating the individual user to interact closely with relevant goods and services. I demonstrate a number of ways that personal information transferred within these networks may be utilised in an economic context, as well as exploring the technological infrastructure used to do so.