No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage
Abstract
The culture of mashups examined by the contributions collected in this volume is a symptom of a wider paradigm shift in our
engagement with information — a term that should be understood here in its broadest sense, ranging from factual material to
creative works. It is a shift that has been a long time coming and has had many precedents, from the collage art of the Dadaists
in the 1920’s to the music mixtapes of the 70’s and 80’s, and finally to the explosion of mashup-style practices that was
enabled by modern computing technologies.
... Axel Bruns developed the concept of produsage to describe a new arising reality "emerging from the intersection of Web 2.0 user-generated content, and social media since the early years of the new millennium" [10], realizing that the conventional ...
... Life. sense of production no longer applied to "massively distributed collaborations [...] constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one" and in which the participants easily shift users to producers and vice versa, originating a hybrid role in between [10]. He defines the concept of distributed creativity as "projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend upon an existing pool of artistic material" [10]. ...
... Life. sense of production no longer applied to "massively distributed collaborations [...] constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one" and in which the participants easily shift users to producers and vice versa, originating a hybrid role in between [10]. He defines the concept of distributed creativity as "projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend upon an existing pool of artistic material" [10]. This can also be seen in online creative sharing communities based on the dissemination of visual output, from Flickr pile-ups to Creative Commons collages, such as DeviantART fan art. ...
This article is a reflection on the Kromosomer project, a storytell-ing performance held in the physical world and implemented through digital, virtual and social media. The motto was the traditional Norwegian legend characters that represent "the other", the not "normal". They were illustrated as avatars in the metaverse, where they were also distributed as unfinished arte-facts, open to mutation. We will describe and analyze the main work method used on this project, a shared creative process of collective and distributed creativity. We will also focus on how metaphors constitute them-selves as paramount to our way of working.
... The term distributed authorship was coined by British artist and theorist Roy Ascott in 1986 to describe the interactive and remote authoring project La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale (LPDT), which had been created in 1983, long before the existence of virtual worlds (Ascott, 2005). Recently the term has been used by New Media and Creative Industries researcher Axel Bruns (2010) to refer to a creative process that has been intensified by the Internet's affordances. We are talking about projects in which a large number of participants contribute to a common pool of artistic material. ...
... This type of creation is community-based, i.e. a large group and not a team. With fluid roles, produsers can participate in different ways throughout the process, alternating between producers and users (Bruns, 2010). ...
This chapter discusses the Meta_Body participatory art project. Initiated in a collaborative virtual environment and in a “real life” art exhibition, it now continues in the metaverse creative flux.
Meta_Body focuses on two aspects: first, the avatar as body/language, open to experimentation and potency; second, avatar building as a shared creative process and as aesthetical experience.
Through the practice of avatar creation, distribution, embodiment and transformation, the artists aim to understand the processes of virtual corporeality constitution: to question the role of the body in virtual environment, its importance in engaging with the world and in self-expression, and explore its metaphorical aspects.
The method used to implement this project is a shared creative process, in which multiple subjects come to be authors along different phases of the project. Through the embodiment and transformation of avatars, the artwork’s aesthetical experience becomes a creative process.
http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/metabody/132423
... Autoria distribuída foi um termo cunhado Roy Ascott em 1986 para descrever a autoria interativa e remota do projeto La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale 10/29/2015 Sousa http://impactum-journals.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/rt/printerFriendly/2217/1698 8/12 (LPDT) (Ascott 2005) e mais tarde usado por Axel Bruns para referir fluxos criativos capazes de aproveitar a criatividade de um vasto leque de participantes, que contribuem para expandir um conjunto determinado de material artístico (Bruns 2010, 1). Este autor desenvolveu também o conceito de produtilização para reconhecer a nova realidade emergente da Web 2.0 do conteúdo gerado pelos utilizadores (Bruns e Schmidt 2010, 3). ...
... 8/12 (LPDT) (Ascott 2005) e mais tarde usado por Axel Bruns para referir fluxos criativos capazes de aproveitar a criatividade de um vasto leque de participantes, que contribuem para expandir um conjunto determinado de material artístico (Bruns 2010, 1). Este autor desenvolveu também o conceito de produtilização para reconhecer a nova realidade emergente da Web 2.0 do conteúdo gerado pelos utilizadores (Bruns e Schmidt 2010, 3). Este termo define um modo de criação de conteúdos que é liderado pelos utilizadores, ou que pelo menos os envolve enquanto produtores de maneira fundamental (Bruns 2007, 45). ...
This chapter discusses the Meta_Body participatory art project. Initiated in a collaborative virtual environment and in a “real life” art exhibition, it now continues in the metaverse creative flux. Meta_Body focuses on two aspects: first, the avatar as body/language, open to experimentation and potency; second, avatar building as a shared creative process and as aesthetical experience. Through the practice of avatar creation, distribution, embodiment and transformation, the artists aim to understand the processes of virtual corporeality constitution: to question the role of the body in virtual environment, its importance in engaging with the world and in self-expression, and explore its metaphorical aspects. The method used to implement this project is a shared creative process, in which multiple subjects come to be authors along different phases of the project. Through the embodiment and transformation of avatars, the artwork's aesthetical experience becomes a creative process.
... Thus, we have essentially an argument in favour of the social utility of connectedness -meeting students where they are at (Kift, Nelson, & Clarke, 2010;Nelson & Clarke, 2014;Smith, 2017), developing digital literacy (Seaman & Tinti-Kane, 2013) and critical thinking skills (Barnett, 2015;Bruns, 2010), and engaging students (Kumar Sharma, Joshi, & Sharma, 2016) through new pedagogical approaches designed to leverage the affordances of social media (Trowbridge, Waterbury, & Sudbury, 2017). ...
... If we agree with the primacy of graduate employability, then the question becomes whether it is possible to design learning opportunities that are going to effectively integrate social media into learning activities and assessments in ways that are authentic, for example, in ways in which social media would be used in the workplace (Kek & Huijser, 2017). The acid test is whether a student who has engaged with social media, and who is a confident "produser" (Bruns, 2010) of social media, would be more employable than a student who has not. If the answer is no, then one would have to ask why we would put time and effort into it, rather than adopting a hands-off approach. ...
The integration of social media into higher education is having a significant impact on learning and teaching. As they become enmeshed in the fabric of academia, they are also becoming a site of contestation, especially in relation to teaching and learning. This research paper explores the key issues dominating current debates about the use of social media in higher education in Australasia. By exploring themes emerging from a debate around the use of social media in higher education in Australasia, it integrates additional comments from the collective wisdom of experienced colleagues from around the globe, as captured in the debate’s Twitter feed and live Periscope streaming. These comments highlight points of sensitivity in the adoption of social media in higher education in Australasia. This paper presents the findings and some key ideas that emerged from the debate.
... The appearance of Internet memes as political propaganda in periods of political or military conflict is a growing area of research. It is grounded in media studies literature around ideas of participatory media ( Jenkins, 2006;Bruns, 2010) and viral, spreadable media (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013). The Internet is a technology fundamentally based on a protocol of making copies ( Kelly, 2008), and Internet memes are emerging as the native language of Internet social media. ...
... The appearance of Internet memes as political propaganda in periods of political or military conflict is a growing area of research. It is grounded in media studies literature around ideas of participatory media ( Jenkins, 2006;Bruns, 2010), as well as viral and spreadable media objects (Jenkins, Ford and Green, 2013). Conceptually, the Internet can be described as a "copy machine" space based on a protocol of memetic replication ( Kelly, 2008), and Internet memes are indeed emerging as the native language of Internet social media. ...
This paper aims to develop a systemic perspective of the mechanics of an online memetic warfare campaign. The paper uses as its case study the #DraftOurDaughters campaign, a viral memetic campaign conducted in October 2016 as part of the US presidential election campaign. #DraftOurDaughters was organised and produced by anonymous members of the Internet board 4chan, and then deployed to wider audiences on platforms such as Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. This process is documented from inception to completion, capturing the swarm like topology of 4chan's /pol/ forum, and the logistics of the swarm's rapid prototyping, coordination, production, and dissemination of content. Through examining these phenomena, this paper also provides perspective on the manifestation of collaborative design practice in online participatory spaces.
... Agregações deliberadas de múltiplas ligações constituem cenários de criatividade e autoria distribuída, convergindo em direção ao conceito de produtilização, de Axel Bruns (2007). Este conceito emerge de uma interseção entre redes sociais e conteúdo gerado pelo utilizador (21), caracterizando projetos que mobilizam a criatividade de um grande leque de participantes para ampliar e construir sobre um manancial de material artístico (21). A produtilização é prevalente nas comunidades criativas online, onde corpos de trabalho massivamente distribuídos emergem de processos em que os participantes alternam entre produtores e utilizadores, originando papéis híbridos (22). ...
... Agregações deliberadas de múltiplas ligações constituem cenários de criatividade e autoria distribuída, convergindo em direção ao conceito de produtilização, de Axel Bruns (2007). Este conceito emerge de uma interseção entre redes sociais e conteúdo gerado pelo utilizador (21), caracterizando projetos que mobilizam a criatividade de um grande leque de participantes para ampliar e construir sobre um manancial de material artístico (21). A produtilização é prevalente nas comunidades criativas online, onde corpos de trabalho massivamente distribuídos emergem de processos em que os participantes alternam entre produtores e utilizadores, originando papéis híbridos (22). ...
Os mundos virtuais são um meio de crescente relevância. Oferecem possibilidades únicas para criação e interação, sendo por isso objeto de utilização e investigação em numerosas áreas. Este artigo estuda a prática artística em mundos virtuais. Através da discussão de projetos artísticos selecionados pela sua abrangência e pertinência, são definidas tipologias de arte em mundos virtuais. Estas tipologias identificam um conjunto de funcionalidades indispensáveis à realização desses projetos, que no seu conjunto, evidenciam as três affordances fundamentais para o conceito de Ambiente Virtual Colaborativo Criativo: criação, colaboração e distribuição. Definindo as fundações necessárias a uma plataforma criativa, aberta à colaboração e partilha, este estudo contribui para o futuro de mundos virtuais enquanto local para a co-criação de conteúdo e significado, por comunidades artísticas e pelo público geral.
... A disseminação das tecnologias digitais de informação e comunicação (doravante TDICs), especialmente a partir da fase histórica que se convencionou chamar de Web 2.0, está imbricada em um conjunto mais amplo de mudanças culturais identifi cadas pelo conceito de convergência (Jenkins, 2009), em que se destaca a generalização da interoperabilidade técnica das mídias, acompanhada por novas posturas epistemológicas (Manovich, 1999) e éticas (Lankshear e Knobel, 2007) associadas à produção e consumo de conteúdos midiáticos (Bruns, 2008(Bruns, , 2010. São mudanças que têm afetado profundamente a paisagem semiótica (Kress e Van Leeuwen, 1996;Kress, 2005) do capitalismo globalizado, e que, portanto, exercem forte infl uência nas práticas discursivas dos cidadãos brasileiros, especialmente os mais jovens. ...
... Por seu caráter eminentemente coletivo e colaborativo, os empreendimentos de produsagem, paraBruns (2008Bruns ( , 2010, caracterizam-se pela proporção que tomam e por seu alcance, aspectos em que se rivalizam com os das produções tradicionais -da maneira como a Wikipédia, por exemplo, tornou-se tão conhecida e utilizada quanto as enciclopédias produzidas por especialistas (ou até mais que estas). ...
Motivado pelo processo que tem sido chamado de convergência das mídias, este trabalho apresenta a figura do fã do seriado televisivo Glee (veiculado no Brasil no canal TV Fox desde 2009) como “produsuário”, isto é, como sujeito da cultura digital cujas práticas discursivas põem em xeque a distinção tradicional entre os papéis de produtor e consumidor (ou usuário) midiático. As práticas estudadas são caracterizadas pela exploração intensiva da hipermodalidade, entendida como associação produtiva entre multimodalidade, multimidialidade e hipertextualidade, apoiada em tecnologias digitais de informação e comunicação. Utilizamos como corpus produções textuais publicadas por dois fãs de Glee na plataforma de blogagem Tumblr entre dezembro de 2011 e fevereiro de 2012. Mapeamos o processo semiótico que resultou nos referidos posts desde cenas pertinentes originalmente veiculadas na TV e os analisamos utilizando princípios e métodos da Semiótica Social, bem como insights da Teoria Ator-Rede incorporados por semioticistas por meio do conceito de ressemiotização. Os resultados evidenciaram que os sujeitos, ao manipular os elementos trazidos dos episódios originais, não só construíram mudanças orientacionais, representacionais e organizacionais que desviaram os sentidos implicados na narrativa, como também sustentaram, a partir da reflexão sobre sua própria prática, representações identitárias coletivas que os distinguem de espectadores “comuns” e os motivam a interpelar conteúdos oficiais com uma atitude investigativa. Discute-se, em conclusão, a possibilidade de exploração das práticas de fãs no fomento a letramentos críticos na educação formal.
Palavras-chave: convergência midiática, ressemiotização, letramentos críticos.
... Bloggers receive kudos for their labours to make accessible what is often obscure content, that is difficult to get hold of in the material world. They are seen by some as performing the activity of archiving and enriching the public domain (Bruns 2010). Filesharing sites popular with bloggers and aggregators, such as RapidShare, FileServe or Hotfile, operate premium services and both music and software blogs as well as the filesharing sites often host quite aggressive online advertising. ...
Some argue that neoliberalism can be seen as having negated its negation, namely socialism and communism, and become unquestionable and common sense. However, many practices from below resist, reject or at least disrupt the stringent property rights regime and the primacy of the market, two core elements of neoliberal ideology. Some of these practices of resistance are in the form of a disruption to or rejection of the commodity exchange model. In this article we address three modes of sharing in a digital context, embedded in a cultural exchange model - sharing code, sharing content and sharing access. These different practices of giving and sharing are analysed according to the way in which reciprocity is articulated, the extent to which they disrupt the capitalist model of commodity exchange, and the ways in which they interact or not with it. We conclude that all forms of digital sharing involve degrees of reciprocity, and that all sharing in digital contexts is gradually appropriated by capitalist logics, mainly through the creation of auxiliary revenues. Many sharing practices do not intend to reject or disrupt, so, while some sharing practices might constitute a (partial) disruption to the commodity exchange model, they may not necessarily result in its negation. Recent attempts by states and parts of the entertainment industry to discipline or coerce the revivified participatory culture and its cultural exchange ethic to fit the commodity exchange model raise serious concerns.
... Business service providers will more and more have to become familiar with the thought that market research is no longer sufficient to meet customers' expectations. With the increasing availability and accessibility of symmetrical media technologies such as the internet, all stakeholders have now the possibility to participate in the conversation about business services (Bruns 2010). Customers do expect to have their opinion heard in an equitable way, be treated with respect by the provider, and play a more active role in the co-creation of business services. ...
Co-creation between customers and providers has recently gained more attention by business service providers as a promising endeavour. The different perspectives of co-creation - innovation, sourcing and marketing - are well deployed. From a provider’s point of view, the question of how to manage business services with respect to co-creation is vitally important. However, service engineering and service lifecycle management typically take a mostly internal, closed-loop approach, although a logical implication of acknowledging the value co-creation perspective on “service” would be to leverage customer and other stakeholder competences to the full extent. This paper aims at reconciling the perspectives of co-creation and makes a contribution by analysing where and how co-creation can be effectively utilised throughout the various stages of a generic business service lifecycle. The result will be a framework guiding companies in using co-creation when managing their business services.
... After the avatars' distribution, however, a new stage of shared creativity begins. For Axel Bruns, distributed creativity occurs in "projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend an existing pool of artistic material" [6]. In this case, the set of avatars and all the artefacts related to them. ...
Meta_Body is a project first held in online virtual environment and in a “real life” art exhibition, and now carrying on in the metaverse creative flux. The project addresses two aspects — the constitution of virtual corporality and the shared creative process of avatar building, sharing, transformation and embodiment.
... Once the avatars were distributed they became avatars of others, inhabited by different identities that could take them literally as the legends' avatars or radically transform them and use them to perform entirely new stories. This process relates to Axel Bruns' concept of produsage, as a conventional sense of production no longer applies to "massively distributed collaborations [...] constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one" and in which the participants easily shift users to producers and vice-versa, originating a hybrid role in between (Bruns, 2010). ...
Kromosomer is a storytelling performance that interacted with digital, virtual and social media, using characters from Norwegian legends as a motto to raise questions on alterety: the "other, the not normal, the one that looks "different", which we want to distance ourselves from. The abject, something outside the subject and object, prior to the subconscious, something primitive that has not yet manifested itself symbolically.
... This is a concept developed by Bruns to describe a new arising reality "emerging from the intersection of Web 2.0 user-generated content, and social media since the early years of the new millennium" (Bruns & Schmidt, 2011, p. 3), realizing that the conventional sense of production no longer applied to "massively distributed collaborations [...] constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one" and in which the participants easily shift users to produsers and vice versa, originating a hybrid role in between (Bruns & Schmidt, 2011, p. 3). This author defines the concept of distributed creativity as "projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend upon an existing pool of artistic material" (Bruns, 2010). ...
This article is a reflection on the Kromosomer project, a storytelling performance held in both
physical and virtual worlds, which was implemented and disseminated through digital, virtual and social
media. The aim of the whole project was to search for an expression that could combine physical
experience with virtual world. The project was also looking at how to deal with social inclusion. The
motto for this enterprise was the traditional Norwegian legend characters who represent “the other,” the
“not-normal,” as a pretext to address the question of alterity. These legends’ characters were re-created
as avatars in the metaverse, where they were also freely distributed in virtual installations as unfinished
artifacts, open to mutation. In the Second Life virtual world, participants could pick up avatars and
create their own stories through snapshots, machinima, etc. The physical performance later used these
participants/produsers’ interpretations and narratives of the avatars in stage design and in the storytelling
performance itself. We describe and analyse the main work method used for this project — a shared
creative process of collective and distributed creativity. The project encompasses different forms of
expression therefore we will also focus on how metaphors constitute themselves as paramount to our
way of working.
... The term was coined by the digital art pioneer Roy Ascott in 1986, to describe the interactive and remote authoring project La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale (LPDT), created in 1983. For Axel Bruns, distributed creativity occurs in " projects which harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend an existing pool of artistic material " [21]. In this case, the set of avatars and all the artefacts related to them. ...
This paper will describe the ongoing Meta_Body project, first held in an online virtual environment and in a “real life” art exhibition, now carrying on in the metaverse creative flux. The focus will be on two aspects of this project — the constitution of virtual corporality and the shared creative process of avatar building, sharing, transformation and embodiment. We will explore the metaphorical aspects of virtual corporality and embodiment and we will approach the possibility of a creative process as an aesthetical experience.
... Moreover, some activities raise questions about the boundaries between artists and their audiences. For example, Internet users who participate in 'bootleg' (unauthorised recording) online communities are motivated by their loyalty and enthusiasm for the content they share and by the voluntary and altruistic ethos that characterises virtual communities (Berdou, 2011;Bruns, 2010), despite the fact that these activities infringe on artists' performance rights and copyrights (Cammaerts, 2011). We discuss the rights holders' perspectives below. ...
The proportionality of the UK Digital Economy Act 2010 which aims to curtail illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing is examined in this paper in the light of changes in online norms and culture. Based on an analysis of recent studies and a critical reflection on the nature of changes in digital media production and file-sharing behaviour, we conclude that the Digital Economy Act introduces disproportionate social costs for UK Internet users, with uncertain prospects for improving creative industry revenues. The wider implications of these developments for the emerging online culture are also considered.
... It is a process of participatory media production where media consumers become producers to generate new meaning from existing media pieces, or even create a whole new storyline (Sonvilla-Weiss, 2010). In the digital age, widespread personal computers and amateur media editing software provide Internet "produsers" (Bruns, 2010) with unprecedented opportunities to generate media products for their personal goal. The flourish of mashup and other media re-appropriation techniques challenge the hegemony of professional media institutions and was deemed as a "constructive rupture… that shows possibilities for new forms of cultural production" (Navas, 2010, p. 157). ...
The COVID-19 outbreak has challenged the effectiveness of China’s state apparatus and accumulated much social discontent in the first half of 2020. Aided by the creative adaptation of an Internet meme, a group of Chinese feminists initiated a short-term movement in the Chinese Internet against the introduction of two virtual representative of the Chinese Communist Youth League – Jiangshanjiao and Hongqiman. This movement delivered a powerful counterpublic discourse of women sufferings in modern China, which is widely resonated with its participants. Adapting Shifman’s (2014) cultural perspective of Internet memes, this study closely examined how a once apolitical mashup video became viral and political Internet memes. Three strategies were revealed: 1) apply subversive reading of the protagonist; 2) use shared experiences to connect with the audience; 3) channel anger to call for actions. By studying the politicization of Internet memes, this article argues that the participatory mashup culture popular among youth has the critical potential to articulate counterpublic discourses that are more nuanced and relatable to its audience.
Keywords: digital activism, meme culture, participatory culture, feminist movement
... Bloggers receive kudos for their labours to make accessible what is often obscure content that is difficult to get hold of in the material world. They are seen by some as performing the activity of archiving and enriching the public domain (Bruns 2010). File-sharing sites popular with bloggers and aggregators, such as RapidShare, FileServe or Hotfile, operate premium services and both music and software blogs as well as the filesharing sites often host quite aggressive online advertising. ...
The web log or blog is a recent and relatively popular phenomenon which is often deemed to have the potential to promote citizen participation in the media, and in particular in the production of (critical) media content by ‘netizens'. This paper considers whether this is in fact the case.
... We 'steer' ourselves online in much the same way we that we steer a car; picking our direction of travel according to our own desired endpoint (even if we often get lost along the way). This is related to a conception of the internet as something like a 'symmetrical media technolog[y]' (Bruns, 2010: 24) -insofar as we might feel that there is a parity of contribution being made by both the content-deliverer and the end-user which is not the case in other media. ...
Recent theoretical work by Internet and social media scholars promises to offer valuable clarity to a concept which has been historically rather muddy: the affordance. Connections and shared themes within this recent literature have been thus far rather under-developed, and therefore the first contribution of this article is to strengthen those connections. It argues for a nascent conceptualisation of affordances as ‘sites of contestation’, improving on unsatisfactory applications of affordance theory to date by focusing on the specificity of user-groups, on social media’s status as both textual and material, and on power imbalances between users and platforms. The second contribution of this article is an empirical application of this analytical tool. Drawing on ethnographic work in a do-it-yourself (‘DIY’) music scene in Leeds, it considers what is ‘afforded’ to these practitioners by the Facebook Pages platform. Three key affordances are outlined – ‘digging’, ‘rallying’ and ‘surveilling’ – which shed light on the complexity and variety of contestations enacted between platforms and users.
... It was claimed that these circulatory capacities would bring about substantial democratisation -and a democratisation of culture, in particular (Rosen, 2006). Web 2.0 was seen as allowing for (or even assuring) several significant upheavals in the realm of culture, including: a muchreduced division between producers and audiences via the obsoletion of intermediaries and gatekeepers; greater (and less economically-determined) access to cultural goods; a larger proportion of cultural goods coming under public (rather than corporate) ownership and control, and a beneficial blurring of distinctions between the production and consumption of culture (Bruns, 2010; Sinnreich, 2010;Valtysson, 2010). ...
This article employs Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ to show how, in the mid-2000s, a loose coalition of tech activists and commentators worked to position mashup music as ‘the sound of the Internet’. Key aesthetic characteristics of mashups were utilized to present Web 2.0 as a specific kind of democratic, participatory media environment – one that had the power to dethrone old social institutions, and to render various kinds of borders and boundaries redundant. This short-lived articulation between mashup and the Internet has had significant benefits for contemporary platforms that have made their fortune on user participation; it has been less beneficial for the longevity of mashup as a genre. Thus, this article inverts the standard presentation of mashup music and network technologies. Generally presented as a musical culture that needed the Internet, mashup can be more fruitfully understood as a music culture that the Internet needed. This reformulation provides cause to question our contemporary relationship to ‘digital optimism’ more generally.
... These have been concomitant with a much more general debate concerning the changing media environment and the participatory potential of contemporary culture (e.g. Jenkins 1992;Bruns 2010). Within this discussion, the issue of authorship has been, from the outset, linked to questions of copyright and changing legal practices around the world (Lessig 2001(Lessig , 2008Gehlen 2011), with many, such as Lessig, advocating the opportunities and stressing the importance of creative commons. ...
Mash-ups very much describe and inform the participatory culture of today, feeding off countless memes and intermedial relations in social media networks, user-targeted interfaces, and websites. But the mash-up also plays an important role in the classroom: not as an attempt to catch the studying 'prosumers' at their own 'hip' game, nor in order to diminish literary studies to a nerdy joke. On the contrary, mash-ups are an ideal classroom object that can be used to re-emphasise the value of literature as a useful explanatory model for everyday phenomena, even phenomena of our so-called "convergence culture" in which "consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content" (Jenkins 2006, 3). Conversely, the mash-up assembles and reconfigures questions of authorship, originality, modes of canonisation, copyright, etc. that are significant in literary studies.
The following two projects illustrate our attempts to explore and utilise the relationships between participatory culture and the literary classroom as sketched above. Our first venture, "POP: Perspectives on Poetry", was tailored for the Sciencity Düsseldorf 2013 – an academic open-house event where we tried to bridge the gap between the classroom and 'the world out there'. The idea was to re-read classical poetics as a theory of the popular and vice-versa: that is, to 'mash up' perspectives on the contemporary media landscape and the literary canon in ways that demonstrate how our work need not rely on separating them in the first place. The second project, "Mapping the Mash-Up", was a graduate course at Heinrich-Heine University in 2016. Here too, we connected traditional and non-traditional approaches to literary studies. By emphasising the mash-up's characteristic trait of also being a "literary remix" (Voigts 2015, 150) we wished to provide a tool to introduce theories of adaptation and appropriation. Focussing on three contemporary examples of literary mash-ups allowed us to propose a simple typology of adaptation for the classroom: 'empowerment', 'resistance', and 'recontexualisation'.
... Brand meanings are thus no longer subject to the absolute control of the brand owners alone -"brand co-creation takes place between the brand and consumers and between consumers and consumers" (Shao et al. 2015, p. 417). In the virtual space of the Internet, "prosumers" (Toffler 1980) and "produsers" (Bruns 2010) can sway overall public perception of a person brand through their media artefacts, which are referred to as "brand-related usergenerated content (UGC)" (Arnhold 2010, p. 33). Consequently, this case study is not limited to an analysis of the strategic image representations of the brand owner Madonna, but also concentrates on the co-creative meaning practices as occur in fan's visual artefacts. ...
This article examines the elements and processes involved in the visual construction of person brands, and their personas as key components of those brands, in pursuit of the research question: What pictorial design strategies make person brands succeed? Key findings of the empirical investigation of the iconic artist brand Madonna allow a focus on Madonna’s image and her fans’ co-creative image practice through a visual frame analysis and cultural reading of her self-brand. Madonna has created a complex ‘worldview world’ that is governed by a metanarrative and feeds on the diverse acts of referencing cultural image icons. At the same time, central strategies of her image representations are reflected in the fan artefacts investigated. This article thus focuses not only on the role of the visual in person branding and in a modern-day visual brand culture. It also considers the place and form of such cultural person branding within the persona studies field.
... A conventional creative practice is described as a 'production process that is orchestrated and coordinated from a central office and proceeds in a more or less orderly fashion to its intended conclusion (the completion of a finished product)' (Bruns, 2010, p. 26). Produsage involves projects that harness the creativity of a large range of participants to build on and extend an existing pool of artistic materials (Bruns, 2010). The distributed nature of these projects means they are predicated on unique creative principles which are largely alien to conventional music production practice-and we would add to conventional research into the processes and practices of learning and teaching. ...
Testing creativity in tertiary learning activities is a young field of research, and current assessment methods are difficult to apply within the diverse context of media production education, where disciplines range from journalism through to video game production. However, the concept of remix is common across this wide range of media, and offers practitioners ‘endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique and the like’ (Knobel & Lankshear, 2008, p. 22). The conceptual commonality of remix indicates that the study conclusions will have useful implications across a range of media production disciplines. This study aims to consider new methods for testing creativity in media production learning activities and to provide better assessments for learning design. This study focused upon a learner cohort of music technology students that were undertaking a work-integrated learning programme with a record label. To make the students more work-ready and inspire greater creativity, they remixed tracks recorded by professional music artists as part of a unit assessment. Subsequent self-report surveys (N = 29) found that the process of creating a ‘remix’ enhanced their creativity and provided suggested improvements to the design of the learning experience. Importantly, we found no relationship between the survey responses and objective assessments, indicating that the self-reported improvements in creativity were not simply a measure of how well the students performed the formally assessed tasks. Although more research is needed to establish effective measures of creativity, these findings demonstrate that self-report survey tools can be a powerful tool for measuring creativity and supporting improved iterative learning design.
... Thinking more widely, digitally mediated forms of stranger intimacy or avoidance can be situated within a wider process of boundaryblurring in our contemporary moment taking place between conventional relations of public/private (Koch, 2020;Qian, 2018), and by association between relations such as formal/ informal work (Glucksmann, 2011;Wheeler and Glucksmann, 2014), between producers/ consumers (Bruns, 2010;Ritzler and Jurgenson, 2010) and in terms of social categories such as friend, guest, host or community member. Further, Cockayne et al. (2017) have demonstrated that digital technology can also extend intimacy to the non-or more-thanhuman as people knowingly interact, for example, with robots and algorithms designed to simulate human dialogue in the pursuit of sexual pleasure and fantasy. ...
Digital technologies are profoundly reshaping how people relate to unknown others, yet urban studies and geographies of encounter have yet to adequately incorporate these changes into theory and research. Building on a longstanding concern with stranger encounters in social and urban theory, this paper explores how digital technology brings new possibilities and challenges to urban life. With examples ranging from GPS-enabled apps for sex and dating to sharing economy platforms that facilitate the peer-to-peer exchange of services, new practices mediated by digital technology are making many encounters a matter of choice rather than chance, and they are often private as much as they are public. This paper examines these changes to develop a conceptualisation of stranger intimacy as a potentially generative form of encounter involving conditional relations of openness among the unacquainted, through which affective structures of knowing, providing, befriending or even loving are built. We offer an agenda for researching stranger intimacies to better understand their role in generating new kinds of social and economic opportunity, overcoming constraints of space and place, as well as generating dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, privilege and disadvantage. The paper concludes by considering what critical attention to these encounters can offer geographical scholarship and how an emphasis on digital mediation can push research in productive directions.
This paper examines the ways loosely connected online groups and formal science professionals are responding to the potential for collaboration using digital technology platforms and crowdsourcing as a means of generating data in the digital information commons. The preferred approaches of each of these groups to managing information production, circulation and application are examined in the light of the increasingly vast amounts of data that are being generated by participants in the commons. Crowdsourcing projects initiated by groups in the fields of astronomy, environmental science and crisis and emergency response are used to illustrate some of barriers and opportunities for greater collaboration in the management of data sets initially generated for quite different purposes. The paper responds to claims in the literature about the incommensurability of emerging approaches to open information management as practiced by formal science and many loosely connected online groups, especially with respect to authority and the curation of data. Yet, in the wake of technological innovation and diverse applications of crowdsourced data, there are numerous opportunities for collaboration. This paper draws on examples employing different social technologies of authority to generate and manage data in the commons. It suggests several measures that could provide incentives for greater collaboration in the future. It also emphasises the need for a research agenda to examine whether and how changes in social technologies might foster collaboration in the interests of reaping the benefits of increasingly large data resources for both shorter term analysis and longer term accumulation of useful knowledge.
This article offers a critical analysis of the relevance of convergence culture to the field of media audience study, opening up new ways to see audiences as active cultural producers. At the same time, I argue that the enthusiastic embrace of Web 2.0 practices as the new model of audience activity may hinder a full understanding not only of the importance of non-web-based audience practices, especially in non-Western countries, but also of the continuing power of media industries.
The authors propose to define creative collaborative virtual environments (CCVEs) as platforms for collaborative and distributed creation in online communities. This will be established by examining virtual worlds as agents of change towards new creative and collaborative models. CCVEs are grounded on three key elements: creation, collaboration, and distribution. These relate not only to the technical but also to the social layers of virtual online communities. Shared creativity and distributed authorship are approached as examples of specific dynamics rooted upon these three elements. The concept of CCVE is important to the design of emerging virtual worlds, specifically regarding the preservation of affordances for collaborative creativity. Discussion based on these observations demonstrates how collaborative creation of new content and meaning takes place in CCVEs, and how they transform communicative and creative agency in digital communities.
This article focuses on the collaborative work of the artists CapCat Ragu and Meilo Minotaur in Metaverse environments. The aim is to describe and analyse their cooperative creative process from the perspective of one of the artists/authors, walking through three artistic works that were made in the Second Life ® region of Delicatessen: 'de Maria, de Mariana, de Madalena…', 'Petrified' and 'Meta_Body'. These projects reflect two aspects of the artists' work – on the one hand avatar art, and on the other the creation of virtual environments. The text also reflects on the concept of shared creativity, which the artists propose through their avatar creations.
The article raises questions about the use in art education classrooms of social networking sites like Facebook and image sharing sites like YouTube that rely upon the ability of Big Data to aggregate large amounts of data, including data on students. The article also offers suggestions for the responsible use of these sites. Many youth are using these sites as creative platforms and, taking their lead, the author describes his own use of YouTube as a creative tool in his pre-service classroom. The author argues that most art educational literature that relies upon Big Data sites consider only the affordances and not the problematics involved, specifically issues of privacy and having youth effectively working as unpaid labour for global corporations.
The Internet provides social conditions that allow medievalist ideas to continue to evolve in the twenty-first century. It is fertile ground for medievalist humor, and a significant proportion of that humor comes in the form of memes. Memes were first described in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as ‘units of cultural transmission.’ They are analogous to genes, replicating and mutating in response to the culture that hosts them, and passed on socially, rather than biologically. The Internet provides a ready social network and an accessible set of technological tools for memes to flourish. This essay explores the ways in which Internet memes foreground the social relations that structure medievalist humor.
This study combines campaign interviews with secondary analysis of Pew data from the 2010 U.S. election to examine both social media expectations from the campaign side and fulfillment of those expectations from the public side. The results indicate that engagement with a campaign on social media dramatically increases the likelihood of voters’ engagement in key political participation outcomes.
The last two election cycles have seen an exponential rise in the number of political campaigns integrating some form of social media into their communication plans. As candidates and campaigns increase their social media communications, political communication scholars have become increasingly interested in the process through which voters assess political candidates’ credibility through social networking sites. Using experimental data, this study examines the mediating role of attitude homophily in establishing political candidates’ source credibility among Facebook users. A multiple mediation model outlines a process wherein attitude homophily mediates the relationship between political cues and evaluations of source credibility. Theoretical and practical implications of the results for political social media campaigns are discussed.
In today's context of media proliferation and increasing access to diverse media content, it becomes necessary to address young people's motivation to consume information. Researching this age group is relevant given that adolescence is a key period in people's civic socialization. This study explores how 13 to 17 year old Chileans consume news, in a multiple-platform, convergent and mobile media context. There are few studies that focus on the information habits of this particular age group. Using a quantitative self-administered questionnaire applied to 2,273 high school adolescents from four different regions in the country, this paper analyses participants' news consumption habits, their interest in news, their perception about the importance of different topics, and their motivations to being informed. The results show that surveyed teenagers access information mainly via social media like Facebook, to the detriment of traditional media. These adolescents are least interested in traditional politics, but they think this is the most prominent topic in the news. Their motivations to consume news have to do with their wish to be able to defend their points of view and deliver information to others. Also, they think that their portrayal in the news agenda is both inadequate and negative. These findings suggest that the news industry has a pending debt with young audiences.
Australian film classification relies on assessment of the potential impact of film content on audiences. The capacity to assess impact is becoming increasingly complicated by technological convergence blurring the boundaries between films and computer games. This is exemplified by the interactive features offered on DVDs and, more recently, the potential for game-inspired interactive cinema. As a result of convergence, audiences are afforded more control over how they watch films and offered greater opportunities to interact with content. In light of these developments, the Australian government is currently considering recommendations for amending the National Classification Scheme arising from a recent review conducted by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) that proposes an approach based on platform neutrality, streamlining classification across platforms. This article examines how assessing the impact of film content is problematic, discussing challenges facing the current scheme in reference to convergence, interactivity and related recommendations made by the ALRC.
This article proposes a new framework for analysing how developers structure – and players experience – history and heritage in historical video games. Drawing on the theory of mashups, this article demonstrates how historical games generate ‘technocultural mashups’ by cutting and pasting aspects of cultural heritage into the gameplay experience and then challenging players to further adapt this. ‘Technocultural mashups’, the article suggests, exploit a cultural precedent in the recombination of art, music and video, but also a Web 2.0 precedent that enables alternative modes of production, communication and consumption based on the affordances of new media. Assassin's Creed Odyssey is used as a case study to better understand the relationship between game design and the simulation of cultural heritage. By looking at fan-made trailers, as well as gameplay, paratexts and player-generated content, this article explores how ‘technocultural mashups’ enable players to participate in a networked historical imaginary.
For ten years, Herbert J. Gans spent considerable time in four major television and magazine newsrooms, observing and talking to the journalists who choose the national news stories that inform America about itself. Writing during the golden age of journalism, Gans included such headline events as the War on Poverty, the Vietnam War and the protests against it, urban ghetto disorders, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Watergate. He was interested in the values, professional standards, and the external pressures that shaped journalists' judgments. Deciding What's News has become a classic. A new preface outlines the major changes that have taken place in the news media since Gans first wrote the book, but it also suggests that the basics of news judgment and the structures of news organizations have changed little. Gans's book is still the most comprehensive sociological account of some of the country's most prominent national news media. The book received the 1979 Theatre Library Association Award and the 1980 Book Award of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the first work to be published under the Medill School of Journalism's "Visions of the American Press" imprint, a new journalism history series featuring both original volumes and reprints of important classics.
Introduction Part One: Cultures (Cultures of Our Past Culture of Our Future RO, Extended RW, Revived Cultures Compared) Part Two: Economies (Two Economies: Commercial and Sharing Hybrid Economies Economy Lessons) Part Three: Enabling the Future (Reforming Law Reforming Us Conclusion)
YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.-----
The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural ‘production’ and ‘consumption’.-----
Rich with concrete examples and featuring specially commissioned chapters by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media. It will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.
We - the users turned creators and distributors of content - are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on?
In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what's emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a new genre of user-driven Websites engaged in a novel form of news reporting which has been described as open publishing or open news, in analogy to the open source movement. Utilising state-of-the-art content management systems, these sites combine news, rumours and background information as well as community discussion and commentary on their chosen topic, and frequently serve as a first point of entry for readers interested in learning more about the field. Examples for this genre include Slashdot (http://Slashdot.org/), Openflows News (http://www.openflows.org/), and the Indymedia network (http://www.indymedia.org/).
This book documents an extensive study of open news and related sites around the world, including interviews with staff of key sites in order to analyse their inner workings. It investigates the feasibility and the limitations of user community self-policing methods, and the effectiveness of the gatewatching process. It connects this with more recent developments in related areas, such as Weblogs and the Wiki movement, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative online publishing models. Overall, then, it charts the current state of play in the area of online gatewatching, open news, and participatory journalism, and provides the tools to analyse and classify the various forms of online publishing in this field.
DGM’s Founding Aims and Mission Statement
- Robert Fripp
The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society. London: Demos
- Charles Leadbeater
- Paul Miller
Pirate Bay Loses a Lawsuit; Entertainment Industry Loses an Opportunity
- Mike Masnick
Movie Pirates Funding Terrorists.” Sydney Morning Herald 28
- Eamonn Duff
- Rachel Browne
RIP the Consumer, 1900-1999”. Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet: Economics & Culture, Media & Community, Open Source 1999. 24 Feb
- Clay Shirky
ccMixter: A Memoir, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the RIAA and Love the Unexpected Collaborations of Distributed Creativity During the First Four Years of Running ccMixter
- Victor Stone
Illegal Downloaders’ spend the Most on Music
- Rachel Shields
The Black and White about Grey Tuesday.” Lessig 2.0, 24 Feb
- Lawrence Lessig
Lessig, Lawrence. (2004). " The Black and White about Grey Tuesday. " Lessig 2.0, 24 Feb. 2004.
http://lessig.org/blog/2004/02/the_black_and_white_about_grey.html
———. (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury.
News Produsage in a Pro-Am Mediasphere
- Axel Bruns
- Axel. Bruns
Mainstream Press Waking Up to the News That Musicians Are Making More Money
Apr. 2009. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090417/0129274535.shtml
———. (2009b) " Mainstream Press Waking Up to the News That Musicians Are Making More Money. " Techdirt
16 Nov. 2009. http://techdirt.com/articles/20091114/1835036932.shtml
The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society
- Charles Leadbeater
- Paul Miller
- C. Leadbeater