Media Practices and Participatory Culture
Av Pernilla Severson, 01 June 2010, 20:03
This is a paper for the Working Group for Media Production Research of the International Association for Media and Communication Research, 2010
Please, comments, views, other – thank’s!
Title: Media practices and Participatory culture
Studying how social media influence daily work practices
This paper is a bit playful outline of a study of how social media influence daily work practices. I approach this from the themes of media practices and participatory culture.
With social media I mean Twitter, Facebook and such. A more academic definition points to the fact that social media are social networks sites:
We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site. (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html)
What I try to do in this study is to give examples of social connections and social ties that are expressed in the micro blog tool Twitter.
In this study, I am interested in media as practice, in the sense of what Nick Couldry (2004) suggests and what Mark Deuze (2009) leans on: “to see how media in fact are used and appropriated in the organization of everyday life” (Deuze, 2009:469). I see participatory culture as in the sense that a more participatory culture is emerging, what Jenkins (1992, 2006, 2009) and Deuze (2006) are proposing.
What I study and show in this work in progress, takes a somewhat different (or narrower) road. Jenkins goes from fandom (1992) to convergence (2006) to learning (2009). Deuze takes the route of discussing participatory aspects and approaches linked to journalism (2006) and media as practice (2008). Both Jenkins and Deuze discusses and analyses participatory culture using producer and consumer roles for revealing changes is media practices and roles.
My interest is how social media influence daily work practices for different producers within new media. My boundaryblurring flux is among the producers, be it new media entrepreneurs, journalists or mass media executives. My suggested blurring, or intertwining as I want to describe it, is among the professional producers of media. Studying social media and its influences on daily work practices show how media professionals, co-create and network.
What I try to do is to study participatory culture in social media, where social media is seen as a meeting place between different types of new media professionals. I do this because of the context I am in.
Contextualizing a sphere of blurring boundaries between academy and industry
To be able to understand and make meaning of this paper, there is a need for acknowledging the study taking place in blurring boundaries between academy and industry. Or put in other words… an important epistemological underpinning in this paper, is that of situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988). I challenge ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ (Haraway, 1991:189), by revealing from where I see certain things.
Knowledge is specific to a particular situation. I, as a producer of this media text, become answerable for how I see and produce and influence things. The institutionalized knowledge production in this paper takes place at Medea Collaborative Media Initiative and School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University, and co-financed by the European Union.
My work as a researcher is formally placed at a research center called Medea Collaborative Media Initiative. This center started January 1 2009, and focus new media built on co-production between academic researchers and other actors outside the university: companies, organizations, institutions and individuals.
In my contract half of my time I am a senior lecturer in Media and Communication Science at the School of Arts and Communication. The school has mostly practice-based educations, ranging from Interaction Design, to Stage Production, Experimental Media Production, Graphic Design, Media and Communication, Literature Science etc.
Both mileues are heavily influenced by the possibility of letting artistic approaches influence more critical analytical ones, and the people doing this are mostly the same at both places. Both are also part of Malmö University, a little more than 10 year old University, with a profile of playing a central role in the transformation of Malmö from industrial town to centre of learning, oriented towards multidisciplinarity and activity-based pedagogy.
The study in this paper is part of my research project: understanding local media actors participatory innovation practices. It as a 3 year EU financed project on innovation and innovative mileues, with the goal of creating a media cluster, called Media Evolution. My part is about Research & Development, enhancing understanding of local media actors participatory innovation practices. Of specific importance is: what kind of interests in and motives for co-production activities exist and why and how is that relevant for Living Lab-projects?
One part of the project is about concept exploration. How is it possible to understand the meaning of participatory innovation practices? Another part of the project is to deal with direction-finding activities. What kind of participatory innovation activities are desirable and what is needed for these activities to take place.
This means studying following aspects:
- Local innovation infrastructure
- Daily work practices
- Challenges
- Practices for dealing with challenges
- Collaborative strategies and practices
The method is case based and comparative. To understand participatory innovation practices, several empirical cases are studied:
- A literary study of research on innovation and new media.
- An ethnographic study of industry events on innovation and new media
- Interviews with local innovation infrastructure actors involved in Media Evolution
- Mapping local media companies
- A workshop with local media companies and university members for developing a new media program.
- Interviews with 20 media companies, sampled from dimensions large/small, traditional media/new media, different line of business. Interviews conducted at different levels within the company.
- Using social media for understanding discourses on challenges for media industry.
Main part of the project is the interview study of media companies, which will be carried out during 2010. For this paper, empirical base is mostly number 6 and 7.
As you see the blurring boundaries between academy and industry consists of a certain view on knowledge production for new media. In academic publications this is talked about and discussed in different ways.
Epistemological discussions are found in Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott and Michael Gibbons Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (2001). They also have a chapter in Carayannis and Campbells book from 2006, Knowledge Creation, Diffusion, and Use in Innovation Networks and Knowledge Clusters, the approach is the one of knowledge society, needs knowledge economy, innovation through creation, diffusion and use of knowledge. Methodological discussions are found in participatory action research, where William F. Whyte’s article from 1989, Advancing scientific knowledge through participatory action research, is important. This has reached a more prominent position in the movement of open innovation, as in Eric von Hippels Democratizing innovation, where the participatory aspect concerns bottom up-knowledge creation for both democratic and business reasons.
Social Media is Studying Media Practices as reflection in practices
After this contextualizing of the study, it will come to no surprise to you that I find that dealing with media production analysis in new media, makes it more urgent for a meta reflection on the researcher as media practitioner and co-producing knowledge and development.
This starts with my standpoint of situated knowledge, is linked to the thoughts of Manuel Castells in his latest book Communication Power and linked to the empirical fact that I as a researcher take active part as a (more or less powerful) node in different kinds of networks:
Therefore, rather than looking for territorial boundaries, we need to identify the sociospatial networks of power (local, national, global) that, in their intersection, configure societies […] to use Beck’s characterization, we have to start from networks to understand institutions (see Beck, 2005). (Castells, 2009:18)
What I mean is that I see a certain value of studying and taking part of the learned elite in social media, treating it as creating cultural communities around media development. You can see the link to Bourdieus social capital. It’s about social structures and networks. One argument of social capital is that social networks are the foundation (Lin, Cook and Burt, 2006).
What I am into is mostly Twitter. This is because of what boyd and Ellison (2007) states:
What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. (boyd and Ellison (2007)
[…]
On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily ”networking” or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network. (ibid)
I see Twitter as articulating this.
I am also using Twitter myself: twitterpersona @pernillaseverso. This means that studying Twitter then is studying media practices as reflection in practices; ie seeing research practice as part of the media practice studied, where reflection on practices moves into reflection in practices.
Here I would like to present how this makes sense, acknowledging what can be called ‘the learning link’.
The learning link
With the learning link, I mean that it is possible to draw together knowledge of media production both from and to education and research. Media production researchers are moving into a more action oriented approach, and there is an emphasis for students in media production to learn by doing.
The learning link draws our attention to the fact that I am both a researcher and a teacher – most of us are. Both practices involve understanding and navigate in a responsible way in participatory culture and media practices.
Schön (1983) suggests that we can engage in reflection in one of two ways; either by ‘reflecting on action’, after the experience, or by ‘reflecting in action’. This is in line with thoughts in ‘participatory action research’ and ‘learning by doing’.
I have mentioned Henry Jenkins before. Let’s take hin as an example. Jenkins was very clear with his reflection in practices, with the focus on academic being a fan and doing research on this, and now more and more moving this into education. Let us also take Mark Deuze as an example, that I have also mentioned. Deuze is very happy, quoting the following review of his book Media Work, on his blog:
”There are very few training programmes, academic or otherwise, that can adequately prepare people for work in the convergence culture described by Deuze, making his book all the more valuable.” (http://deuze.blogspot.com/ 2010-05-31)
In education, teaching media production, involves often producing media content; media-making. Students are offered key readings like Deuze’s book Media Work, and Hesmondhalgh (2006) Media Production. A key reading for both students and scholars is Chris Patersons and David Domingos Making Online News, from the perspective of “news production sociology”. The book is described as “A toolbox for professionals, scholars and students” (http://www.makingonlinenews.net/the-book/). And the participatory aspect is also present, see for example Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen’s Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation.
Especially interesting to use, with my preference of participatory culture, media practices and the learning link, is to explore the aspects presented by Henry Jenkins and his group on digital media and learning (http://newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf). I mean that their work can illustrate concrete aspects of participatory culture that both new media producers and journalists deal with today on a daily basis. It reveals key areas for research oriented towards knowledge as learning processes in media development. Adapted to this study the questions I will deal with are:
o What kind of affiliations exists?
o What kind of expressions are being produced?
o What kind of collaborative problem-solving are being used?
o What kind of flows of media are produced and used?
All this leads up to a participatory collaborative approach on new media practices.
Analytical result discussion
This analytical discussion of results is in the making. What you see here is the first tentative results of a what can be described as a qualitative content analysis of Twitter-talk. This means that I conduct some form of qualitative text analysis of my Twitter flow, guided by some rules conducted in a systematic fashion. I do this in an ethnographic approach, which online can be described as netnographic approach: doing ethnography online.
The experiences I have of the studied phenomena, Twitter talk, are documented in using a research diary, making certain Twitter searches for certain issues and persons. The persons I follow are chosen by first identifying local media actors, then expanding to national twitter persons that many of these local media actors follow. After that I every Friday get suggestions for more people to follow, the so called “follow Friday”, with hashtag #ff and #ffs (the “s” for Sweden). Today, June 1st, at 19.47, I follow 222 people and I am being followed by 223 people, among my followers are some of the main characters in Swedish media industry.
The period from October 2009 until as today, June 2010, I have asked and talked about: what is happening in media, what are you doing, this is what I am doing, what do you think?
For this paper I have made a guided reading and searching using the themes from Jenkin’s group:
o What kind of affiliations exists?
o What kind of expressions are being produced?
o What kind of collaborative problem-solving are being used?
o What kind of flows of media are produced and used?
In this analytical result discussion I will give you an overview of what I can see and think. For every aspect you can go to my blog where I give you the examples so far and will keep on building a bank of empirical examples. In my presentation I will give you a glimpse of my Twitter flow, where we can discuss what you can see.
An overview show that:
- Different kinds of affiliations exist: Affiliations are often work-related, in being co-workers. They can also be friends from IRL. Affiliations can also be interest-related: technology/sports/music/education. Many people use Twitter for being able to get in contact with different kind of expertise.
- Different kinds of expressions exist: Expressions that are being produced are gratefulness, pride, selfrighteousness, advice, insight from different areas. Values and norms are about transparency, sharing ideas, being positive. Overall it is a magnificent conversation about making “old” media understand “new” media.
- The kind of collaborative problem-solving that is being used is discussion, debate and advice. It can be about issues about laws (copyright). It can also be about technology. A third aspect is about finding the right person for problem-solving.
- The flows of media that are produced and used are written text, photos, videos, sound/music. Sharing is caring, and this goes for all media forms.
Being a part of my Twitter flow, there are extreme examples of an increasing intertwined media world where both new media professionals and journalists take on a role of making sense of media development, and also leading how this development should be done. Almost all persons have a blog and tweet about their view on new applications, new directions from media companies, news about legal matters on digital media.
Social media can function as a professional meeting point for a public conversation between journalists with an interest in digital media and new media technology professionals going public with their thoughts on new media development.
They share some and differ some in values and ideals and established editorial norms such as objectivity and expertise. One divider is transparency and whether making payment walls for digital content, and the view on how new media is good for society.
Critical voices are seldom heard at Twitter. Twitter is the safe haven for all the discussions on that “social media is good and do good”. All are in favor of Google and Google things. Mac is preferred towards PC. Hacker ideology prevails.
Affiliations are made because of similar ideology and different experiences and competences that can be traded. Journalists get inside information, “correct information”, on the possibilites of digital media, new media professionals get a discussion and arguments for consequences of new media and journalism, and society, and democracy.
There has also been discussions on what is the difference between a journalist writing on new media in the newspaper, and a new media professional writing about new media in blogs. Books are written together, anthologies bringing together, making the affiliations, the produced expressions and collaborative problem-solving on digital media an even more established form in “the book”.
My last comment in this paper (it is now 19.50 June 1st) is that differences are bigger between users and media practitioners, than between media practitioners. And I am a media practitioner, yes I am.
References
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