Convergence Culture

While I’ve always been somewhat skeptical about the direction our media generation is heading, I have to admit that what Jenkin’s terms our ‘participatory culture’ is a much more natural manifestation of how I believe people like to share knowledge.  Old media forces us into an information hierarchy, closed to debate and commentary, praise or criticism. As media is now able to flow across many different platforms and freely into our lives, technology has thus influenced the way we perceive other people, cultures, places, work, leisure and ourselves.  Convergence has many positive effects, however I hate to think of instances where economic imperatives have been the dominant cause for ‘old media’ being phased out.  My main gripe is with the introduction of Kindle – a sad day for literature. How any one can possible read a novel on their iPhone is beyond me…

Anyway, the topic of convergence culture has interesting implications for my report - which looks at the ways social media alters socio-political space - so I thought I’d do a little more research into convergence culture and politics.  While the ‘everything at your finger tips’ notion makes it sound like information is only one click away, there is a disturbing trend for what Professor Harsin terms the ‘rumour bomb’. This refers to an instance when someone accidentally (but more often than not deliberately) posts misinformation on the Internet, which generates enough traffic that it ultimately influences the production of content in other media forms such as TV or radio.   The thing that makes the Internet great is also its greatest weakness – and people’s incomprehensible ability to believe almost anything poses many challenges, especially when people are now being hired to start these kind of rumours… it’s a new age for public relations.   

Rip, mix and burn.

The copyright topic raises a lot of grey-area questions… and while there is still much head scratching to be done, this week’s readings leave little doubt in my mind that our current copyright and patent laws are outdated, and as such are what Lessig might call ‘culture strangling’.  It’s a rather romantic notion to say that these laws exist exclusively for the benefit of artists, musicians, programmers, etc. when you consider that the bulk of creative folk are managed by a handful much larger companies.  These “agents” – what some might call copyright hoarders - are still cashing in on royalties 70 years after the artist who was signed to them passes away.

John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, comments poignantly that “kid’s down own their own culture”. This statement is given a tangible quality in the face of Lessig’s Walt Disney example.  Lessig says in his own blog that Walt’s style was “rip, mix and burn”, but if Walt was around today, none of that would have been possible. In fact Lessig guesses ironically at the consequences of applying the same rip, mix and burn ideology to one of Disney Inc.’s current releases.  

While unfettered file sharing practices – my own included – can’t be heralded as great bringers of culture (and does cost an already struggling Australian arts economy greatly), it’s the use of these files by artists like GirlTalk that should be allowed to continue freely. The mashups, spinoffs, and interpretations of other people’s work enrich the artistic landscape, so I can’t help feel that our copyright laws speak more to the economic profit of large corporations than to the protection of “the fruits of invention and creativity”. The Free Culture Movement has the right idea....

Politics, Power and Social Media

Since I missed my blog for week one, I thought I'd use this catch up blog to explore some issues around social media. These concepts will be relevant to my research project that I’m doing with Ben Anderson, but may also be of interest to other groups as well.

Firstly, here is blog by Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, a book that Teodor said might be useful to our topic.  Morozov explores the effect new technologies and the internet have on democratisation and politics in general.  Within this framework he discusses things like the impact of Wikileaks and the role the internet plays in social and civil revolutions, however he also says that the internet can also be used as a tool for control.

Another writer worth looking at is Clay Shirky, a professor of New Media at New York University that studies the effects of the internet on society. Shirky argues that social media enables people to challenge their governments by giving them tools mobilise themselves and organise large-scale protests, as discussed in this article.

Malcolm Gladwell provides a contrasting and controversial view in this article.  He critiques many people’s view that Twitter and Facebook are tools for activism, for example that they played a critical role in the revolutions in Moldova or Iran. His arguments emerge from broader theoretical considerations about the nature of activism and revolution, the structure of which he claims are antithetical to the relationships created by social media.

The ideas from these articles and blogs have given me a good starting point for our research project, however they are also worthwhile reading as they provide a good deal of insight into issues surrounding digital networks in general.

Everything to everything.

“In a poetic sense the prime goal of the new economy is to undo – company by company, industry by industry – the industrial economy..” K. Kelly

The goal of the Internet may very well have been a cyberutopia, but the relatively recent development of our information economy is having profound changes on our social and cultural organisation.  In his article, New Rules for the New Economy, Kelly speaks reverently about our currently trajectory toward universal connection, where even inanimate objects will be able to communication with each other.  I, on the other hand, am more inclined to consider both the positive and negative effects of unfettered digital network growth.   Looking further into Kelly’s work, I discovered that other authors have also critiqued his ideas about the merging of the realms of nature and human construction. Kelly’s future world encompasses open, decentralized systems and cooperation among all elements.

While I agree that the information economy exists in a very big way, I find Kelly’s ideas very Western-centric.  Statistics taken from this website reveal that even today only 30% of people worldwide have access to the internet, the highest proportion of these people are in (surprise, surprise) Europe, North America and Oceania. If the network economy is founded on technology, how can we even begin to fathom a universal connection when almost a quarter of the population still live below the poverty line? The term ‘digital divide’ is often used to describe this phenomenon, however it is a simplistic expression and doesn’t adequately capture the complexity of the situation.       

“Pippa Norris's The Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty & the Internet Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2001) suggests that there are at least three major divides:

• a global divide between the developed and undeveloped worlds
• a social divide between the information rich and the information poor
• a democratic divide between those who do and those who do not use the new technologies to further political participation”

More information about this can be found here

Back to Kelly’s theories, he discusses the positive effects of a decentralised system.  The Internet is the most pervasive example of this. The lack of control and authority means that certain technologies are being utilised beyond their originally intended purposes. In many cases, changes to the way these networks are used are a productive and meaningful growth.  A compelling example is the way Facebook and Twitter have been used in North Africa during the pro-democracy uprisings. Amnesty says “social media sites are increasingly challenging state authorities in the Middle East and North Africa who have sought to maintain control over the flow of information in their countries.”  I find the effect the Internet is having on political process very interesting and hope to explore it further in the research project.

Week 2

Having missed the first lecture I was anxious to find out what Digital Networks was all about, and why I had to create a Twitter account (which I vowed never to do). As Teo stressed in the lecture, the development of the communication networks we have access to now, and the ones that have become obsolete, didn’t develop in a planned, successive way, but exploded randomly onto the technological playing field. Today, while we use all these technologies concurrently, they all seem to be available in the one place: on our computers, transmitting data via the Internet. We can stream radio, television and music online, use Skype like a telephone, write emails, follow people on twitter etc…  It’s easy to forget how many networks we are connected to, and how many people are connected to us.

As a web designer that uses Wordpress, I was particularly interested in Stalder’s examination of Open Source networks. The Internet serves to facilitate a form of collectivist action that isn’t commonly found in Western, capitalist societies. Open Source developers provide any individual with the Internet free access to valuable, quality software and information. Rather than commercial gain, the developers are motivated by the network that they themselves have cultivated.  Stalder directs his discussion into an area that I had never considered before. He talks about the way our “commodity culture” and corporations’ unfettered drive for profits have choked the creative element of culture and steered it toward conservatism because there is a formulaic recipe for success and no room to take big risks.  When you consider this phenomenon within the context of the Open Source network, the non-for-profit, collectivist mentality of the community fosters an environment of experimentation and innovation.  I also find there are parallels between the nature of Open Source networks and Peer-to-peer sharing networks in that the energy or workload of the operation is broken down into smaller tasks and distributed amongst a wide range of people.

There are quite a number of people out there discussing the nature of Open Source networks. Some go into even more detail about the implication of this phenomenon has on society on a larger scale. One author “believes that they way in which masses of people who own the means of production work voluntarily, without compensation, to reach a common goal and share their products in common is not far from the concept of socialism” (wired.com, link below), and has the potential to influence the political sphere and advance socialism... an example of networks contributing to the growth of other networks. 

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all