Med122 participatory culture

Participatory culture#med122robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk

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Overview

1. Traditional forms of collaboration2. New forms of participation 3. Case study 1: IBM and Linux4. Case study 2: Encyclopaedia

Britannica and Wikipedia

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1: Traditional forms of collaborative action

• 20th century• Large scale projects• Typically hierarchical• Top-down model• Typically state or

market led – (see Shirky, 2008)

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Government steering group

Project lead(eg IBM)

Passports HMRC NIDVLA NHS

Medical records

Consultants

Database design

Consultants

Tax records

Consultants

Employment history

ConsultantsConsultants

Database design

Tech roll out Tech roll outTech roll outTech roll out Tech roll out

Test TestTestTestTest

Feedback | Modify | Retest | Roll out

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Common elements

• Hierarchal networks function in a top-down manner

• Stakeholders come together in temporary networks to work towards the projects completion, before separating

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2: Participatory culture is

• “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another”– Jenkins, 2006

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2: Participatory culture

• In tension with consumer culture• The public may well be consumers, but

are increasingly producers of media

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2: Participatory culture

• ‘Prosumers’ (Alvin Toffler, 1980)• Proactive consumers• Producer consumer• Blurring of roles• Mass customisation

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2: Participatory culture

• ‘Produsage’ (Axel Bruns, 1980)1. Open participation and communal

evaluation2. Fluid heterarchy through ad hoc

meritocracies3. Palimpsestic unfinished artifacts in

a continuing process4. Common property and individual

rewards

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2: Participatory culture

• Challenges established power relations– ‘Popular culture is one of the sites where …

struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured’• Stuart Hall cited in Samuel, 1981: 239

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2: Participatory culture

• Shifting the focus of popular culture from passivity to activity

• Fan culture web 2.0

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New forms of collaboration

• 21st century• Mass collaboration• Democratic participation

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Wisdom of crowds?

• Crowds better at decision making than small groups of experts– Francis Galton– Plymouth, 1906–Weight of oxen– Crowd more accurate taken as a

whole than individual experts

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We-think?

• Sharing of information via Internet– improves creativity– improves ideas– improves innovation– improves democracy– http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=qiP79vYsfbo

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Crowdsourcing?

• Outsourcing of ideas to a large undefined group– open calls for help– the hive mind– collective problem solving– cheap!

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Wikinomics?

• Peer production improves business– openess– peering– sharing– acting globally

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Organising without organisations

• New social tools reconfigured behaviour:– costs shrink – participation increases– ‘groups that operate with a

birthday party’s informality and a multinational’s scope’ • (Shirky, 2008: 48)

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3: Case study 1 - IBM and Linux

• 1991: Linus Torvalds

• Inspired by Richard Stallman and the GNU free software movement

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• ‘Over time an informal organization emerged to manage ongoing development of the software that continues to harness inputs from thousands of volunteer programmers. Because it was reliable and free, Linux became a useful operating system for computers hosting Web servers, and ultimately databases, and today many companies consider Linux an enterprise software keystone’ – Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 24

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• 1998: IBM join open source community

• Harness the power of the crowd at a fraction of the cost

• Opened up their propriety code to the community

• Inspected, hacked, modded, developed

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The power of the crowd?

• IBM spends about $100 million per year on Linux development.

• If the Linux community puts in $1 billion of effort and even half of that is useful to IBM customers, the company gets $500 million of software development for their initial investment – Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 83

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Popular open source software

See http://sourceforge.net/

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4: Case study 2 - Wikipedia

• 2000: Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger founded Nupedia– High quality online encyclopaedia–Managed, written & reviewed by experts– Voluntary basis– 7 stage review process– 1 year in: $120000 spent; only 24

articles

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• Added ‘wiki’ software to Nupedia site

• Invented by Ward Cunningham in 1995

• Much faster to post and edit articles

• Nupedia advisory board rejected it

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Wikipedia in figures

• 2001: 15,000 articles• 2013: 22 million articles (4.1m in English)

• 1 million+ registered users• 100,000 users posted 10+

articles• 77,000 regular editors• 5,000 hardcore maintain site• 5 paid staffers (35?)

See Tapscott & Williams, 2008: 72; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Wikipedia

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Why collaborate?

• “Why do people play softball? It’s fun, it’s a social activity … We are gathering together to build this resource that will be made available to all the people of the world for free. That’s a goal people can get behind.” – Jimmy Wales cited in Tapscott &

Williams, 2008: 72

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Criticisms?

• Reliability?• Tragedy of the commons?

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Examples of collective production

• BitTorrent swarms• Second Life• Distributed computing• Google search• Facebook• Couchsurfing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBz1YMWftBQ

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Conclusion

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• 21st century is the era of mass collaboration

• Collaboration benefits business and culture alike

• The crowd is a resource?• Democratising force?

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Questions

1. What are the key barriers to participatory culture and how might they exacerbate the digital divide?

2. Is the future one of mass collaboration or is it a fad?

3. Do the benefits of crowdsourcing outweigh the problems?

4. What kind of ethical challenges does a participatory culture pose?

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Sources and reading• Jeff Howe, 2008, Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving

the Future of Business, London: Random House Business Books.• Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Confronting the Challenges of Participatory

Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, 5-7, 19-20, 3-4.

• Andrew Keen, 2008, The Cult of the Amateur: How today’s Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy, London: Nicholas Brearly Publishing

• Charles Leadbetter 2008, We-Think: Mass innovation, not mass-production, London: Profile Books Ltd.

• Clay Shirky, 2008: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, London: Allen Lane.

• James Surowiecki, 2005, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few, London: Abacus.

• Don Tapsoctt & Anthony D. Williams, 2008, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, London: Atlantic Books