Propagating Media

Today we received an open letter from Frank Rijavec, who works in central Australia in Indigenous community broadcasting, addressed to the Australian Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Sen. Helen Coonan.

It coincides with what ought to be a red-letter day – the launch of Australia’s third national broadcasting network (to add to the ABC and SBS), i.e. the National Indigenous Television network (NITV), which is happening today as the culmination of NAIDOC Week.

The only trouble is that in order to give NITV spectrum on the satellite, they will be switching off the existing, bottom-up network of community television stations: ICTV.

It is a shame this has been done in such a ‘business as usual’ style – setting different Indigenous enterprises against each other; supplanting bottom-up with top-down solutions; failing to see the potential in what remains one of Australia’s great pioneering efforts in broadcasting; failing to grab the opportunity to promote the creative industries as a viable means towards employment and direction in Indigenous communities.

Frank’s letter goes through the details, but I’d like to add a comment. With all the current hoo-ha about the conditions of Indigenous communities in remote areas, there ought to be a major investment in Indigenous creative expression through contemporary media as well as traditional arts – music, radio, TV, online. Indigenous broadcasting has already shown what can be done to link individual creative expression, training and education, broadcasting, tourism and enterprise-formation, not only via ICTV but also on radio, via NIRS (the National Indigenous Radio Service), using Aboriginal languages as well as English. Ventures such as these are essentially self-made media for self-representation by Aboriginal and Islander groups, communities and entrepreneurs. They could be among the strongest performers in an Indigenous economy – something that needs serious attention if welfare dependency and family insecurity are to be tackled.

It is a pity that NITV – a fantastic idea – needs to be launched over the dead body of its existing ‘proof-of-concept’ pilot. More importantly, it is a pity that no-one in government seems to be ‘joining the dots’ in relation to Aboriginal creativity. NITV, ICTV, NIRS – and other initiatives – need investment and strategic direction if they are to become what they claim to be – a ‘national’ resource with both economic and representational clout for an emergent Indigenous polity.

Read the open letter in pdf format.

Sometimes, as this week, when a visiting delegation from China stopped by, people ask: ‘what are the creative industries?’ Here’s an attempt to answer that question.

First though, here’s why the question is asked: We launched the world’s first Creative Industries Faculty at QUT in 2001, and also I edited a book that collects international research perspectives on the topic: Creative Industries (Blackwell 2005) — which has just been translated into Chinese. So we have an educational investment in the term, not to mention QUT’s financial investment in the Creative Industries Precinct, which brings together creative companies and venues along with teaching, research and performance facilities.

OK — having declared an interest, here’s an answer to the question: ‘what are the creative industries?’

The idea itself is dynamic and changing. It has rippled out from its early industry-focus, to extend across three domains (which may be co-present):

• Industry: ‘creative clusters’ – firms with creative outputs
• Economy: ‘creative services’ – the economic value of creative inputs (e.g. design);
• Culture: ‘creative citizens’ – creative human capital in the workforce and among citizen-consumers.

The first phase is characterized by the work of the DCMS in the UK (1997-2001). The second phase is where we are now. The third phase is yet to be fully implemented: it is the domain of user-generated content and self-made media.

The ‘value proposition’ of the creative industries has evolved too, from the value of expert talent, to the value of a social network market, and on to the (currently unrealised) value of a creative population, associated with the growth of knowledge.

This latest phase will change creative industries from a supply-led or provider model to a demand-led or ‘navigator’ model, with major implications for creative ideas in science and journalism as well as self-expression, communication and works of the imagination.

Here are the three phases set out in slide form:

This slide (above) captures the term as it gained currency in the context of Britain’s ‘third way’ policies of the 1990s. It went with the notion of the new economy (e.g. Charlie Leadbeater’s Living on Thin Air). It applied to a cluster of industries with creative outputs, as listed in the slide. These included publishing, media, design and software production. What was new and fresh about the idea of the creative industries at this stage was that it brought creative arts into contact with both ICTs and commercial enterprise: it was useful for shifting individual talent away from the subsidised arts towards wealth-creating enterprise.

The second phase is where we are now. There is a great deal more creative work adding value to the economy than that which is counted in industries with creative outputs. Many industries work with creative inputs — design, media, software, writing. The UK minister Tessa Jowell announced in 2005 that the creative industries ought to be a blueprint for traditional industries; the idea was to extend the notion of creativity across the entire economy.

We have moved from ‘creative clusters’ to ‘creative services’ and creative networks.

Even more broadly, there are creative citizens — the ‘human resource’ that is also the source of all creativity. This is where consumer-generated content, user-led innovation, self-made media and DIY culture grow.

The idea that the creative industries have evolved from industry to economy to culture is significant, but it is still a supply-side, ‘trickle-down’ or ‘ripple-out’ model. It prioritises the publisher/provider. To do justice to what is happening, there needs to be a model that recognises that the source of creativity lies among individual humans. We need a ‘demand-led’ model:

Seeing the creative industries as a dynamic process rather than as a definitional problem leads to some new propositions about where value arises:

In the slide above I have introduced a thought from Karl Popper about the ‘levels’ of language. He posits four levels: self-expression and communication (subjective, psychological); and description and argumentation (objective, scientific). It suggests that the first phase of creative industries, based on the outputs of creative (artistic) talent, is focused on self-expression. In the second phase, where creative inputs add value to networks and services, the emphasis is on communication. That leads to the intriguing possibility that the creative industries may yet have potential to develop the ‘higher’ levels of language - description and argumentation. This is indeed what happened when print literacy was widely established: among its ‘consequences’ were the Enlightenment, the novel, science and journalism. What might the consequences of creative and digital literacy be for the growth of knowledge? In other words, the ‘value proposition’ of the creative industries has evolved from the value of expert talent, via that of social network markets, to the growth of knowledge.

This phase will change creative industries from a supply-led or provider model to a demand-led or ‘navigator’ model, with major implications for creative ideas in science and journalism as well as self-expression, communication and works of the imagination.

Globalisation needs to mean more than simply trading across international borders. It should include the emancipation of a wider section of humanity into individual intellectual freedom and communicative agency, using distributed learning and open innovation networks as well as formal education to spread the word. How might the creative industries contribute to such an endeavour?

We all love the Zimmers’ video, which was released a little while back now. It was all over the media for a while there, but just in case you missed it:

One of the participants in the video is Peter Oakley, known on YouTube as geriatric1927. He’s been a consistently high-profile celebrity there since August 2006, when his first videoblog post - a brief and tentative experiment with a webcam and Windows Moviemaker humbly titled ‘First Try’, exploded into the ‘most viewed’ page of YouTube’s popularity rankings (largely because of the novelty, at the time, of his age):

As of this moment, that video has received 2,626,135 views, 12191 comments, and no less than 164 video responses. These days Peter is a regular and very engaged member of the YouTube community, posting on topics such as the ethics of online behaviour (and YouTube ‘haters’).

As well as making the leap to bona fide celebrity status with the Zimmers, he is using his YouTube presence to reflect on and develop his own creative and technological competencies - moving from basic straight-to-camera vlogs using Windows Moviemaker to the integration of photos with overlaid titles, and more careful editing.

He’s also become something of an evangelist. In this video, for example, Peter records himself carrying on a conversation over video chat with “a group of elderly residents living in sheltered accommodation who are receiving instruction into basic computer techniques”.

Although we can only hear one side of the conversation, Peter is clearly reassuring and encouraging them to have a go, using his own process of self-education as an example. He advises them to “just click around” or “play a simple card game” to get the hang of the mouse until it’s “almost like a third hand”, after which “all sorts of amazing things will happen” and not to worry, because “you really can’t break a computer”. In fact, he says “you must be prepared to be a child again”, and just to “play around”.

Speaking of playing around, it seems that the Bribie Island Retirement Village (just outside Brisbane) has introduced a Wii Bowling League. Check it out in this clip from ABC2’s Good Game:

Junglist visits Bribie Island Retirement Village in North Queensland to accept a Wii Bowling Roffle Cup Challenge from one of the residents, Marion Lancaster. We also hear from staff at the Village about the benefits of introducing video games to the community. Will Junglist get pwned by a senior citizen?!

Yep, totally pwned.

Back in March we participated in the Digital Literacy and Creative Innovation in a Knowledge Economy research symposium. The symposium was a collaboration between the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and the ARC Cultural Research Network. It featured 33 speakers, including Sir Ken Robinson.

Video of our session, The Uses of Multimedia, is now available online. Here are the individual presentations:

John Hartley (on The Uses of Multimedia).

Kelly McWilliam (on Digital Storytelling).

Jean Burgess (on Flickr).

John Banks (on games).

My current research involves working with Auran Games on the online social networks forming around their forthcoming MMOG Fury. A competitive, player versus player (PVP) focussed design, Fury is currently in pre-beta testing. The Auran team know that the commercial success of Fury very much depends on their success with building and supporting the gamer social networks that form around the game (fan sites, blogs, guilds and clans). The participation of existing high-profile gamer guilds in testing Fury, for example, will attract other gamers and guilds to invest time in testing and eventually to buy the game. Building buzz through blogs, forum posts, game replay videos – in short, social networking effects – all contribute to the success of a game like Fury. This is not rocket-science or a particularly new revelation. Any developer of MMOGs knows that success is not just about product design and development; if you’re in the MMOG business then you’re now, more than anything, a service provider. In a recent meeting with Fury’s community and development teams, the view was expressed that “the community”, particularly support for guilds and clans, is an integral part of the overall Fury game experience; it is not just an extra. But can a company with its development, web and community relations teams, with its technical skills, resources and marketing strategies, actually build a social network?

The choices we make depend on the choices of others. This is the logic expressed in the idea of social networks. So in the case of Fury, gamers’ decisions to participate in the beta testing process and to eventually buy the game, are significantly influenced by the choices of others, expressed through forum posts, online chats, etc. But this social mutual dependence or social influence brings with it a lot of uncertainty for companies like Auran. Can you make a gamer or influential and high profile guild say favourable things about your game? Is the very logic of “making”, “building”, or “trying to influence”, counter-productive to encouraging positive social network effects? These are the challenging questions that Auran’s community relations team grapple with. And such challenges can make predicting the success of products like Fury very unpredictable.

I participated in a Fury community relations team meeting a few weeks back, developing plans, designs and identifying resource requirements to implement the support needed for the Fury online community. The team expressly identified the problem and task of “propagating” the Fury social network. The different skills, disciplines and knowledge backgrounds (interaction design, community relations, marketing and business systems, etc.) all brought different perspectives to this task. There were exchanges about to what extent you can control or implement social networking. We discussed the need to identify potential “propagators”, “consumer advocates”, “influencers”. We argued about the appropriate processes to identify these propagators. We considered how to incentivise, reward and motivate participation in the Fury social network. Various design and technical proposals were put forward. In the end a consensus was reached that this was certainly not a case of “marketing at” the Fury gamers. The gamers and guilds must be engaged in a dialogue as co-creators. Their feedback, input and participation must have a direct influence on the implementation of the community support infrastructure and processes. The Auran community relations team is developing quite innovative approaches to this challenge of propagating social networks. They are already collaborating closely with gamer guilds. I’ll post more about this in the future as the designs, tools and processes are implemented. In fact, the community team already includes these gamer perspectives as one of the community relations representatives recently recruited by Auran, has skills and knowledge developed by running a high profile MMOG fan site.

I spent much of last weekend, participating in the pre-beta testing of Fury. These testing sessions will continue throughout the ramp-up to the release of the game, as Auran expands the player testing pool to hunt down bugs, refine interface design and control systems, and rigorously check game balance issues. In chats with players I discovered some were committing amazing amounts of time to the weekend test. One tester commented that he had so far clocked up 26 hours. He was disappointed that the servers were coming down soon and was eagerly looking forward to “getting back into it” the following weekend. He discussed with me his ideas on features that were “polished” and others that in his opinion still needed work. I also noted that he made an extensive and thoughtful post to the private testers forum, offering his carefully considered feedback to the Auran development team. He identified a few game-play problems and other testers then joined in the thread, offering their views and opinions. Some disagreed with his assessment. Others were just joining the testing for a quick play session to check out if Fury is worth investing time in. Should they recommend it to fellow guild-members? This week the development team have been carefully poring over and analysing the data collected from the test, while the community team have been collating feedback from the players. Decisions have already been made to modify some features of the game in response to this feedback. Bugs have been identified that will be fixed. Further rounds of testing, including over the coming weekend, will assist the team to polish and refine many of the game systems and features. But in all of this, the social networking effects are crucial.

In chats with the Fury community team over the past few days they regularly focused on whether the players’ response to last weekend’s testing will attract other guild-members and guilds to sign on for future testing rounds. Will testers make positive posts to their guild forums about their experience of playing Fury? What will they be saying about Fury over chat and instant messaging to fellow gamers? How should the team respond if negative comments are circulating? During the week they were quite excited to discover that the following screenshot was circulating among MMOG PvP gamers.

The screenshot’s significance isn’t that it shows-off the quality of Fury’s graphics. It is the fact that the players in the shot are all identified as members of a reasonably high-profile guild (”Mostly Harmless”). If they are getting into Fury and investing time with it, well perhaps other guilds will too. It certainly gets gamers talking about Fury. I should disclose at this point that one of Auran’s community relations representatives is a member of Mostly Harmless, which adds another dimension to the challenge of propagating social networks.  Another tester posted videos captured of his game experience with Fury. Links to the videos were then posted to a MMOG fan forum by Hades, the leader of a high-profile guild (LOTD), participating in testing Fury. This will also generate discussion in forums about the forthcoming game. The social network propagation begins. These players’ choices to participate in the test, to post screenshots, to make forum posts and videos, all influence the choices of other gamers. At least that’s the theory. Here we are seeing an emerging social network market through which decisions to participate – to consume and produce – are coordinated in open, complex and adaptive systems. More on social network markets in a future post.

The questions I’m interested in exploring include, if we adopt this evolutionary economics grounded approach to social network markets then what are the implications of this for our understanding of the choosing agent or agencies? How are these choices constituted, circulated, culturally shaped and embedded? As a starting point, we’re certainly not talking about the old fashioned rational economic calculating subject. The very capacity or ability to choose, to participate, is itself distributed through and enabled by the network. As a starting point, it involves our “plugging-into” various tools, online information sources, data flows, etc. that compose or constitute us as competent, choosing agents. Here I’m borrowing extensively from Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social, in which he observes that our competencies no longer come in the form of complete intentional humans, making rational calculations. Instead they are composed from layers of plug-ins. As he puts it, “to transform yourself into an active and understanding consumer, you also need to be equipped with an ability to calculate and to choose” (209). But this certainly isn’t simply a case of something like an economic infrastructure, a market force, determining and limiting the gamer consumer, as we’re talking about the exercise of an agency that is itself shaping emerging markets. The relationships between agent and network here are quite dynamic. So how are these competencies circulating, how do we plug-into and navigate these emerging choice networks? And in the context of something like Fury, what is the relation between the individual gamer agent and their collective identities as members of teams and guilds. As one of the guild leaders commented in chat, responding to my question about skills I should practice to become a competent PvPer, “well the really important thing isn’t so much your individual skills, it is getting into a good group and playing lots together, learning together”.

Well I’m off to plug-into my Fury character for another weekend of “choice gaming” – the challenge is what abilities will I work on unlocking for my avatar in this round of play. What choices will identify me as a competent “healer” who can then contribute to coordinated team play? How can I best put on display my choices? You see the Fury game design opens a certain “choice economy” that the players are in the process of figuring out how to game. Are our choices constituted by the game or do our choices shape the game? I’ll post more on all of this soon - propagating social network markets, evolutionary economics, working with the Auran Fury community relations team, and of course playing Fury.

We’ve been playing around with some work in innovation theory and evolutionary economics lately, thinking about how cultural studies might either supplement or challenge those models. There’s a lot of foreign territory to work through, and lots of questions to be answered about the implications of hooking up with ‘evolutionary’ theories of knowledge, let along evolutionary economics. But already, some of the thought experiments have been really interesting.

One of the key concepts in this area is that of ‘creative destruction’, which comes from Schumpeter who in turn, at least according to the Wikipedia entry, derived it from Nietsche. Viewed through one set of cultural studies glasses, it sounds heartless - all the rich, diverse and meaningful symbolic practices of culture merely as grist for the satanic mill, and once they no longer serve that purpose, into the dustbin of history they go?

But I looked into it a little bit, and realised quite quickly that it’s a misunderstanding to believe that the idea of ‘creative destruction’ simply describes the radical demolition of the old to make way for the revolutionary ‘new’. In fact, this idea is entirely compatible with an ethic of cultural democracy, because creative destruction, according to the theory, is not a consequence of innovation itself, but of its diffusion.

The basic idea seems to be something like this: when an innovation is successful, it is widely propagated, and it is through that propagation that creative destruction occurs. Steve Fuller has a nice line on this, when he talks about intellectual work as the ‘creative destruction of social capital’. To use the example of science as we usually do, the discovery of new knowledge generates social or cultural capital for a few experts within the domain of that expertise (’science’), but if it really has wider societal applications it eventually is appropriated and used by the many and not just the few (e.g. by teaching, applications, or publishing), therefore destroying by very definition the expertise formerly concentrated in those very few hands, and, importantly, their monopoly over the uses and meanings of their invention or innovation.

There’s a bite-sized explanation from Fuller at Spiked:

On the one hand, research emerges from networks of particular scientists, investors and other stakeholders who are tempted to restrict the flow of benefits to themselves. On the other hand, the university’s commitment to education compels that such knowledge be taught to people far removed from this social capital base, who may in turn take what they learn in directions that erase whatever advantage the original network enjoyed. All of this is to the good: It contributes to the overall enlightenment of society, while spurring the formation of new networks of innovation.

The second (and more interesting) point is that the widespread embeddedness and availability – the popularity - of a particular form of knowledge in turn makes possible new techniques, forms, practices. We might think of these as incremental innovations that are made possible by the embeddedness - the ‘taken for granted-ness’ of previous ‘innovations’.

Turning back to cultural studies, this way of understanding ‘creative destruction’ turns on its head the idea of diffusion as the watering down or ‘selling out’ of a cultural form or practice. Of course, the idea that music subcultures in particular ‘emerge’ and then are ‘incorporated’ into the mainstream is almost universally accepted, so its a useful place to start. Plus, I don’t want to talk about science anymore…

Jazz is a well-known example. The story that I’ve internalised through subculture theory and everyday knowledge is this: jazz emerged organically and developed dynamically in a contained (and regulated) vernacular social context, and that its diffusion into the white mainstream (via the swing band) was countered by the development of bebop, with its undanceability and complexity, making it accessible to those with the requisite knowledges and cultural competencies, and forcing audiences to listen and think.

An alternative or supplementary narrative might come to the conclusion that the mass popularisation of the artform was a major driver of its further development, not a threat to it. First of all, the increasingly esoteric compositional forms and virtuosic techniques of bebop and modern jazz relied on the embeddedness of shared knowledges and techniques, made possible only by a certain level of ‘mass’ adoption among musicians and audiences. Second, understood in this other way, the development of bebop was not just some resistive reaction, but innovation at work - a positive response to the ‘creative destruction’ represented by the mainstreaming of jazz. Meanwhile, in the mythical and much-derided world of the ‘mainstream’, new social contexts and music cultures were made possible by the mass popularisation of jazz, its potential for cross-breeding and its mutability, or as Henry Jenkins might say, its ’spreadability’. Talking about fans’ practices in engaging with media content, Jenkins says:

Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values.

There’s an obvious problem with social authority (agency, maybe) in comparing institutionally-embedded scientists with jazz musicians or media fans that I want to think about a bit more. In general, though, it’s the ‘mainstreaming’ of cultural forms and practices, and how that mainstreaming might ‘propagate’ cultural democracy, that is really my interest here, rather than ‘innovation’ as a good in itself. There’s a lot to say about that in regard to, say, YouTube, but this post is long enough already.

In the meantime, here are Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie being ‘reincorporated’ into the ‘mainstream’:

What’s in a name? More to the point, where did ours come from?

We are John Hartley, Jean Burgess and John Banks, a research team working on an ARC-funded project called The Uses of Multimedia. The main purpose of that project is to explore the extent to which new media allow for wider participation in creative innovation, and thence in the growth of knowledge.

When printing was invented, it served the purposes of those who invested in it – Church, government, business; the usual. But when print-literacy became sufficiently widespread to create a large, anonymous reading public, a step change in the evolution of knowledge became possible; the consequences of print-literacy included modern science, modern journalism and the modern imagination.

Not that these lofty achievements motivated readers at the time: the propagation of print-literacy was effected as much by entertainment and a desire for individual autonomy and pleasure as anything else. In short, popular media – the press, novels, magazines – propagated the most important expansion of knowledge since the invention of writing.

Now it seems to be happening again. New media – digital, interactive, global, cheap – hold out the promise of a further step change in the evolution on knowledge. This time, however, the ‘mode’ of literacy has changed from a ‘read-only’ public being addressed by published experts, to a ‘read-write’ mode in which everyone can transmit and receive, conversation-wise, and even the most private utterances are also publications.

We are researching what is happening, and what needs to happen, to optimise the value of new media for the growth of knowledge. Print-literacy was distributed by massive public investment in institutions of literacy – schooling. Such investment is not in prospect now, certainly not from the tax dollar. So what will it take to propagate new media literacy, use, and thence the growth of knowledge, journalism and imagination across whole populations? That’s what we want to know.

‘The propagation of innovation throughout society has begun.’

This is an idea I picked up from Charlie Leadbeater, who visited QUT in 2004. He did a presentation on the shift from closed expert system to open innovation network.

Not long thereafter, I had to give a presentation to a UN conference on Engaging Communities (August 2005), on a panel about ‘engaged universities.’ Here is where the idea of propagation seemed to belong. This is what I said:

Expertise is migrating out of organizations along with technologies, and organizations are open to external sources of innovation, not least through globalisation, travel and increasing participation in tertiary education. Innovation is myriad-sourced. Consumption is increasingly co-production: it is active not passive, making not just taking, using not behaving. And while learning is a fundamental requirement of innovation it cannot be confined to the elite organization or research centre. Learning becomes a porous, distributed system, and innovation becomes an open network. The propagation of innovation throughout society has begun and consumers are no longer passive, they’re participants.

Full presentation here.

This is why I found the idea of ‘propagation’ exciting. It’s a good gardening metaphor, harking back to the propagation of plants, which is exactly what is meant by ‘cultivation’ and is therefore the root of ‘culture’ (the word and the thing). How to propagate ideas, knowledge – culture itself?

Let’s find out.