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Information, Communication & Society
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Telling the story of the stories:
online content curation and digital
engagement
Aristea Fotopouloua & Nick Couldrya
a Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College,
University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW, UK
Published online: 07 Oct 2014.
To cite this article: Aristea Fotopoulou & Nick Couldry (2014): Telling the story of the stories:
online content curation and digital engagement, Information, Communication & Society
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.952317
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Telling the story of the stories: online content curation and digital
engagement
Aristea Fotopoulou*
,†
and Nick Couldry
Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London
SE14 6NW, UK
(Received 24 February 2014; accepted 4 August 2014)
This article explores tensions between the imaginaries and material hindrances that accompany
the development of digital infrastructures for narrative exchange and public engagement.
Digital infrastructures allow civil society organizations to become narrators of their
community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition. Often full development and
implementation of such infrastructures result in drastic changes to an organization’s mode of
operation. Drawing from empirical material collected during an action research project with
an organization of community reporters in the North of England, here we examine the
visions of ‘telling the story of the stories’that motivated such changes, the experiments in
web analytics and content curation that in practice realized these visions and the socio-
economic contexts that constrained them. We attend to the wider social imaginaries about
the digital as they help us understand better how social actors construct the worlds they
want to inhabit within information society through mundane everyday practices. Examining
how perceptions of digital engagement translate into such concrete practices is necessary in
order to gain insight into the ways in which material infrastructures, such as resources and
technologies, intertwine with social and cultural expectations about how life should be with
digital technologies.
Keywords: content curation; digital infrastructure; web analytics; social imaginary; data
literacy
Introduction
Digital technologies present civil society organizations with new opportunities and challenges for
public engagement and participatory politics. A wide range of digital media and strategic plans
aimed to connect organizations with their audiences (website development, advanced social net-
working, off-the-shelf plug-ins and tools for web analytics, tailor-made platforms and various
open access systems) compose the bigger picture of digital engagement. Undoubtedly, the
implementation of such solutions benefits civil society organizations immensely as it helps
them realize their critical objectives. There are, however, important variations that derive from
media practices already established within an organization, and the social purposes these serve.
Here, we are interested in such qualitative variations and what constitutes successful
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author. Email: a.fotopoulou@lancaster.ac.uk
†
Current Address: Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4YN, UK
Information, Communication & Society, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.952317
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incorporation of digital technologies. Instead of providing an instrumental analysis, we focus on
the productive tension between imagining and materializing infrastructural change.
The expectations linked to the potential of digital technologies for social change are a mobi-
lizing force for various social organizations. Taking into account how practical and material con-
strains often obstruct the realization of this potential, and the seamless embedding of digital
technologies into existing arrangements, in this article we present a detailed case study of
Citizen Media (hereafter, ‘C-Media’), a civil society organization of community reporters (here-
after, CRs) based in the North of England. We focus on the efforts of community media journalists
to implement certain digital technologies in their everyday practices, and we analyse the ways in
which imaginaries and material limitations coexist in the shaping of a digital infrastructure. Our
analysis is situated within a wider project, Storycircle,
1
in which we focused on the social pro-
cesses and digital resources that support narrative exchange (Couldry et al., 2014b). As Star
and Ruhleder (1996) note in their work on systems development, although infrastructural technol-
ogies are often considered to be transparent tools, in fact they have a dual character. Following
this work, we understand ‘digital infrastructure’not simply as a set of technical tools; it is con-
stituted within social arrangements and has the potential to contribute to broader civic culture
(Couldry et al., 2014a). Our interest in the visions, imaginaries and stories, rather than just the
technical capacity, allows us to approach the development of a digital infrastructure as a socio-
technical process, and to identify how existing social relations are being reconfigured in this
process.
In what follows, first, we outline how, as researchers, we supported C-Media to meet its
primary social aim of connecting communities of reporters and their stories by developing a
redesign of the website and experiments on content curation and ‘community tagging’. The devel-
opment of a digital infrastructure was envisioned by the organization to enable a long-term
process: to give voice to shared concerns in the local area in the North of England, and to
sustain existing social bonds between particular communities (to name a few, patients, residents
of local council housing, CRs, students and activist). In the words of one manager at C-Media,
this was a process of ‘telling the story of the stories’. Second, we describe how these visions facili-
tated our interventions of setting up the digital infrastructure. Third, we refer to how such visions
were constrained by the socio-economic contexts in which these actors operated, and by the time-
frame available for development, at least within the ambit of our funded research process. In these
three ways, we explore the interplay between material contexts of digital resource and broader
imaginaries, and suggest that both need to be considered as conditions for sustaining voice
(Couldry, 2010).
Key concepts: digital engagement and social imaginary
Governmental actors describe digital engagement as any form of civic engagement and political
participation that involve digital technologies, such as online consultations (Government Digital
Service, 2014). As noted elsewhere (Fotopoulou, 2014), digital engagement can be approached as
a democratic aspiration, from within framings of participatory culture (Bruns, 2008; Schäfer,
2010), but it also forms a significant aspect of projects for digital inclusion and digital literacy
(Helsper, 2008; Rheingold, 2008). The latter focuses more on advancing the employability of citi-
zens, rather than their capacity to participate in democratic processes at the national and European
levels. Government and European Commission interventions which aim to enable web access and
participation for minors and socially disadvantaged groups (age group 65–74, low income, unem-
ployed, less educated and people with disabilities) largely see the development of digital infra-
structure as a means to an end (EC, 2010). However, quite independently of such legislative
ambitions, civil society actors set up digital infrastructures and use digital media to meet their
2A. Fotopoulou and N. Couldry
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own community needs –which are in many cases different from employability or basic web
access or other needs prescribed by directives. In the process, these actors make their own
working definitions of ‘digital engagement’. It is important to attend to these alternative defi-
nitions, and to how engagement and participation in the digital world are understood by particular
social actors on the ground, and across a range of organizational and digital literacy levels because
they give valuable insights into the ways in which the implementation of informational infrastruc-
ture actually works.
By examining how these perceptions of digital engagement further translate into material
digital practices, we can understand how material infrastructures (resources and technologies)
intertwine with social and cultural expectations about how life should be with digital technol-
ogies. We must attend to the ‘social imaginaries’(Taylor, 2004) about the digital, since imagin-
aries are a key process in understanding how social actors construct the worlds they want to
inhabit. In her recent analysis of how the communication systems that mediate our lives have
evolved in the Internet Age, Mansell (2013) employs Charles Taylor’s concept to examine the
notions, images and visions of those engaged with the development of information society
(p. 6). In this article, our primary interest is the collective practices, ideas and language of lay
people, rather than those of engineers and scientists; therefore, the concept of ‘social imaginary’
is useful to our analysis. We are also informed by Mansell’s(2013) understanding of how social
imaginaries of information are shared by large groups of people and emerge out of everyday inter-
actions: it is through particular ‘configurations’(Suchman, 2012) of digital resource that those
broader imaginaries get materialized. As we explain next, C-Media reimagined their role as a
social enterprise through the redesign of a web platform and, in the process, began to develop
a new shared sense of their own legitimacy as an organization.
In order to meet their social goals and foster a sense of belonging in a community of citizen
journalists, C-Media sought inventive uses of information and communication technologies. Our
interventions were targeted specifically at meeting these aims; however, we took into account the
organization’s expressed preferences for experiments in online content curation, ‘community
tagging’and content rating. Wenger’s(1998) conceptualization of ‘communities of practice’
helps us understand such experimentation. Communities of practice are ‘practices of social com-
munities and constructing identities in relation to these communities’(Wenger, 1998, p. 4). One
could assume that when organizations adopt new technology this adoption will, with minimum
disturbance, sustain the dynamics of an existing ‘community of practice’. Experiments with
digital infrastructures can be central for re-enforcing social bonds between members of a commu-
nity, especially if we think of ‘communities of practice’as shared practices oriented towards
common practical and imaginative goals, rather than just the pursuit of shared interests.
Through active membership in C-Media’s community, CRs developed a common language
which was used to describe the imaginary of a movement of community journalists operating
across digital platforms. We understand this language, and the experiments and visions that
accommodated it, as a ‘shared repertoire of communal resources’(Wenger, 1998, p. 229).
By exploring the three distinct axes of this process –website redesign, metadata management
and online content curation –alongside the broader hopes or resistances underpinning these pro-
cesses, we unveil a rich reflexive process and not just an instrumental and technical one. We pay
special attention to the agency of social actors, and we account for the constraints and opportu-
nities for voice and digital storytelling for social organizations with limited funding. A consider-
ation of our active role as researchers in the reimagining of internet technologies allows an
understanding of how an approach informed by critical humanities and cultural studies can
enhance social science approaches to computer-mediated communication. While our fieldwork
was with a small media organization, it offers, we hope, a model also useful for research with
other, larger organizations.
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Methodological background
During our fieldwork between April 2011 and March 2013, and for all four principal case studies
in the Storycircle project, we were interested to explore the wider social processes and digital plat-
forms that connect the narrative activity of institutional settings with broader networks of
exchange. This approach was informed, both ethically and politically, by the principle of
valuing narrative (Ricoeur, 1992) and narrative exchange (Couldry, 2010), and their potential
to generate mutual recognition (Honneth, 2007). Situated within scholarly work on digital story-
telling (Hartley & McWilliam, 2009; Lambert, 2006; Lundby, 2008), the notion of Storycircle can
take the form of not only physical spaces, such as workshops, but also digital spaces, where
people produce narratives and ‘give an account of themselves’(Butler, 2005; Cavarero, 2000).
The complexity of digital resources demanded a collaborative approach with particular partners,
and we therefore worked in a variety of institutional settings.
C-Media, a network of CRs well established in the British community media landscape,
provided a good research context for our study. They described themselves as a not-for-
profit community development organization, whose aims were to ‘support people to have a
voice, challenge perceptions and describe their own reality’; and ‘encourage people to
connect, share their experiences and successes with each other and so contribute to raising
community and individual aspiration’. During our fieldwork, we worked with C-Media in
order to identify the key challenges that CRs were faced up with for meeting their aims.
The development of an efficient technical infrastructure (software, hardware, training and
storage space) and continuous updates were perceived by C-Media to be essential preconditions
for visibility to wider audiences, and more substantially, for interactive engagement with the
content produced by CRs.
Our methodological approach to collaborative action research (Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991;
Somekh, 2006) adopted a feedback loop that links the processes of planning, acting, observing
and reflecting. Although in principle these happen in successive iterations, they are organic
and intertwined. This engaged approach allowed us to attend to both organizational and technical
developments, and to move beyond the digital storytelling produced within face-to-face work-
shops. We were able to identify emergent practices and obstacles, as well as hopes and visions
underpinning the development of a digital infrastructure.
A key part of our collaboration with C-Media was to follow the collection of metadata (or web
analytics), as well as the administrative work of logging formal training and individual skills
development. Although we do not account for the organizational aspects of our study here,
2
we also provided support with logging local group interactions in the context of informal
‘meet-ups’, and networking, as a means for sustaining these interactions. In addition, C-Media
provided training and networking to local groups of CR. What is more, C-Media hoped to
serve as a model for many other organizations faced with similar challenges. Hence, given that
our interventions were applied on multiple layers and took a diversity of formats, our collabora-
tive action research sought to understand how digital infrastructure could contribute to an entire
repurposing of C-Media’s organizational processes.
During the initial stages of the project, we approached these aims with the use of web analytic
tools, but later ‘action’phases of the research initiated a series of creative experiments in collec-
tive modes of content production and circulation. In a novel framework which we call ‘social ana-
lytics’(Couldry, Fotopoulou & Dickens, in press), we sought to explore how the management of
metadata can potentially function as a reflexive, rather than automated or strictly technical,way
for social actors to claim control of their own online presence. As explained in detail as follows,
measurements (for example, of dominant themes, visitor traffic and location) helped C-Media get
a sense of the different constituencies and publics emerging around the website. Subsequently, we
4A. Fotopoulou and N. Couldry
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invited C-Media to reflect on the analytics and on the forms of engagement enabled by their
website, within the context of C-Media’s community-oriented goals.
As researchers, our intellectual interests were with how digital technologies can be a means
for cultivating spaces of mutual support, recognition and discussion. Methodologically and prac-
tically this translated into working closely with CRs at every stage of the process, and being
respectful of how the organization preferred to meet their social goals. As we note in the Con-
straints and limitations section, our action research activity met key limitations, such as lack
of time and resources.
Reimagining the website
As an organization, C-Media had a variety of goals (to support and give voice to the local com-
munity; to strengthen CR networks beyond the North of England; to become a leading voice in
civic media and to enable community voices to participate in public debate) and our role was to
identify how the web redesign could best accommodate these goals, as they were prioritized by
the organization at different stages of their development. Since the development and launch of the
first instantiation of the website early in 2011, visitors to C-Media’s website were mainly CRs
who were located near its head offices in the North of England. C-Media wished to review
their digital presence, and use analytics more productively in meeting their social and civic
goals. Thus, the digital infrastructure and the website redesign were conceived to complement
a wider plan of maintaining sustained interaction between CRs, and to potentially provide
further training for various new media skills necessary for digital engagement. Sustained inter-
action could enable C-Media to do more than maintain ‘dispersed face-to-face networks’and
‘socio-spatial enclaves’(Calhoun, 1998, pp. 383–384) between citizen journalists: it could
enable them to connect communities, beyond instrumental uses of network connectivity, which
predominately pertain the individual user.
For us, finding ways so that C-Media could use digital resources effectively in order to meet
their broader goals of amplifying community voice guided the website development. Modules of
‘community tagging’, a visual map of the network and ‘content curation’as integral elements of
the new website were introduced to serve such purposes. To accommodate interaction between
readers, local community groups and national news media, the website needed to become a plat-
form for discussion and interaction, in ways that allowed readers to further cultivate dialogue and
narrative exchange.
While reimagining the website as an emergent space for democratic dialogue might seem in
itself an ambitious enough vision, during our fieldwork C-Media progressively reassessed their
leadership potential. As the manager noted:
we’ve been needing to transition from being a delivery organization to a network management
organization and we’re not quite there yet, and we still keep getting bogged down in having to
do these very time consuming jobs that aren’t necessarily fulfilling the greater vision, which is creat-
ing and sustaining a movement of community reporters, so that’s where we know we want to be.
(Vicky)
The restructuring of the website was perceived by C-Media to be fundamental in enabling the
organization to manage others with similar aims, and to even mobilize a social movement. Shared
between members of the organization, the social imaginary (Taylor) of connecting communities
and ‘telling the story of the stories’was enabled by the implementation of digital technologies,
making certain practices necessary and giving C-Media a sense of legitimacy as a social media
enterprise. It was certainly necessary for the organization to focus primarily on the implications
Information, Communication & Society 5
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that the adoption of data management and new tools for analytics had for its internal restructuring,
before modelling this process for other civil society organizations.
C-Media hoped that internet technology would enable them to be more efficient internally as
an organization (building capacity and skills), and concurrently to face outwards (provide high-
quality services to the wider community of civil media organizations). This combination of intern-
ally and outward-facing practical aims was supported by commonplace actions (for example, the
necessary upgrading of the open source operating system Drupal), and our role was to continu-
ously track this process. Beyond the obvious expectation that practical and strategic solutions
would help the web redesign, these actions were underpinned by the hope that C-Media could
reconfigure its existing relationships with other media organizations and situate itself as a
mediator between citizens. Thus a distinct vision, consistent with C-Media’s wider social
vision, shaped the breadth and depth of undertaking the website redesign, and indeed the
process of reimagining its potential benefits. C-Media themselves recognized that, under the con-
strained conditions they operated, such a vision (or imaginary) was necessary for implementation:
You only get bogged down in the doing the day-to-day work, you do want to keep focussed on there is
a point and purpose to what we do, and that social movement, the vision of that is very alive. (Vicky)
Beyond the wider vision of the social movement however, C-Media’s idea of their role as an
organization for the wider community of social media providers and CRs shifted many times
during our study. The business model that they eventually adopted emerged from various trans-
formations, which mainly entailed comparisons with traditional and mainstream modes of
journalism, such as the ‘hyper-local’model (Howley, 2009; Picard, 2003,2008). Although
hyper-local media have been theorized as hybrids of civic, community news which, in addition
to alternative broadcasting, incorporate web 2.0 in their practices (Metzgar, David, & Karen,
2011), C-Media ultimately appropriated this model to a service model that was oriented
towards empowering community voices. As the chief executive noted:
I think the beauty of hyperlocal is being able to tell the stories that bigger media players will ignore or
overlook. [ …]Soit’s being able to tell those real grassroots stories in a professional way (Harry).
Devising an online interactive geographical map of CRs thus not only legitimized C-Media as
the connecting node between CRs, but it also materialized its vision to become a provider of
hyper-local media.
In practical term, this online interactive map displayed a pin for each reporter, provided infor-
mation about their interests and aimed to practically depict (and imaginatively represent) a
network of citizen journalists not only in the UK, but also around Europe:
[…] what we’ll get instead is meaningful data, so you’ll be able to click through to somebody’s
profile, you’ll be able to see what they’re interested in, [ …] and you’ll be able to contact them via
the [website]. (Vicky)
Though nowadays ordinary in the online world, the interactive map and online discussion
forum were both crucial elements that materialized C-Media’svision to become the enabler of
a network of CRs, and even to ignite a transnational social movement. Although the online inter-
active map essentially enabled better connectivity, rather than the creation of a social movement, it
nevertheless permitted the organization to imagine its wider impact, and was therefore motiva-
tional. We may consider these activities (and the underpinning vision) in the context of work
that focuses mainly on identity formation and social capital in relation to online visibility
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(Barnard-Wills & Ashenden, 2010; Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2011). However, it is more
useful here to pay attention to the wider social imaginaries that motivate social actors in the
first place. The process of planning for a digital infrastructure, the imagined benefits and chal-
lenges, prepares a vital ground from which a new community of practice (in this case of CRs)
can emerge.
Using web analytics
Data analytics are conceived to be indispensable for businesses; however, increasingly they are
adopted by organizations and educational institutions. The starting point for C-Media’s use of
web analytics was the systematic, iterative collection, visualization and analysis of datasets.
These datasets logged interactions with the content which was generated by CRs and published
on the website. A period of reflecting on how the use of web analytics could serve their social
goals was necessary before C-Media could start experimenting with content curation and ‘com-
munity tagging’.
Pursuing our wider approach of ‘social analytics’(Couldry et al., in press) involved following
in detail C-Media’s particular employment of web analytics, and their reflections upon them. It is
from mundane, everyday interactions such as the collection of statistical data that imaginaries of
digital engagement in practice emerge and are enacted. This section follows this emergence in
detail.
We focus here on how reflexive use of web analytics by social actors fuelled further exper-
imentation with digital media and tangible alterations in the organization’s platform. Reflection
enabled C-Media to meet its most significant aim: to maintain the website as the primary locus
for stories produced by CRs. As C-Media suggested early on in this project, doing this within
the competitive context of social media providers involved innovating how this content was pre-
sented to its audiences (including CRs, the local community and wider audiences they wanted to
attract). In practical terms, a website development primarily demanded research on how the main
website had been used in the period following its launch in 2011, and a consideration of potential
design improvements and platform upgrades. Having identified the systematic measurement of
website posts as a priority, we further hoped to cross-reference these data with other detailed
records about the authors. Data about accreditation level, location and group affiliation, which
were previously held offline to preserve privacy, were able to provide qualitative insights into
the production and exchange of CR stories. At a basic level, such cross-referencing allowed a
useful way to identify who actively contributed content to the website. At a second level, it
allowed C-Media to compare how the resulting patterns (in quality and quantity of content) cor-
related with the regular training it delivered to CRs. Such a dual-layer process could enable an
understanding of the life cycle of the training, and the impact of stories posted on the website.
Measurements enabled the emergence of a meta-narrative about the website and its content.
We agreed with C-Media that analytics would provide a clearer sense of the dominant themes as
these formed not only through the organization-defined categories, but also through the tags used
by CRs themselves. In order for C-Media to enhance levels of active audience engagement, we
proposed assessment of the different constituencies gathering around the website (who their audi-
ence actually was at this point). To achieve this, C-Media needed to concretely track how visitors
found their way to the C-Media site; where web visitors were located upon visiting the site; what
sorts of content they were interested in and how they interacted with content and with each other.
The key data collection tools used here were the modules ‘Views’in the Drupal platform (used to
build the CR site) and Google Analytics (GA), which allowed for the flexible measurement of
website usage and generation of reports, tables and charts, and visualizations of such data, as
well as offer customisable reporting.
3
C-Media were ambivalent about their social network
Information, Communication & Society 7
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presence activity, especially since they largely opposed commercial platforms (e.g. Facebook).
Thus identifying the role of social networks in new forms of news production was important.
One key finding from this monthly captured data, which C-Media needed to take into account
in its assessments, was that the numbers of unique visitors who were not reporters themselves
varied substantially from one month to the next.
4
Metrics also showed that most visits were
direct; in other words, did not involve referrals from links on social media, other sites or mess-
ages. This indicated that most visitors were in fact already acquainted with the website, and
were probably CRs. The collection of statistics about the different search terms that visitors
used upon landing on the website was the first step to observing how to revise the ways in
which their content was categorized and tagged.
Crucial for building social relations and maintaining interactions between CRs was also the
extension of their network in spatial terms. Concretely, the collection of analytics allowed C-
Media to locate its web visitors geographically and hence to evaluate the timeliness and spatial
range of their stories. For example, in July 2012, most visitors accessed the website from the
North of England, and from areas where C-Media’s programme was delivered (see Table 1). It
was also important for C-Media to collect and analyse information not only about the origin
and location of web visitors, but also about how these visitors engaged with the site. Analytics,
by providing C-Media with a sense of both passive and active engagement with the website,
5
enabled the important process of reflection to commence –a process which we had identified
as the basis for further adjustments to the online presence of a social media organization to be
made (Couldry et al., in press).
Implementation
We refer to our work with measurements and analytics with such detail here because it is impor-
tant to stress how such measurements would enable the organization to adjust their online activity
and would help them to translate their social aims into digital media practices. Together, the four
categories of collected data (origin, location, type and quality of interaction) could provide C-
Media with a clear sense of audiences’engagement with the website. If the measurements
were established as regular practice, they could further constitute indicators for the success of
the different experiments in content curation and other alternative formats, which C-Media
wanted to try out. However, such analysis of measurements proved sometimes challenging. Gen-
erally, the task of data analysis and visualization was taken up by a C-Media administrator, who
Table 1. Top 10 locations where visitors came from, unique visitors, percentage of new visits and average
visit duration.
Town/city Unique visitors Visits New visits % New visits Avg. visit duration
Manchester 127 222 100 45.05 00:05:01
London 89 124 72 58.06 00:05:45
Salford 43 182 27 14.84 00:08:30
Bethesda 17 17 17 100.00 00:00:00
Liverpool 16 16 13 81.25 00:03:57
Huddersfield 13 13 11 84.62 00:00:36
Leeds 13 15 10 66.67 00:02:36
Cambridge 11 13 7 53.85 00:02:56
Sale 11 14 9 64.29 00:00:55
Preston 10 13 7 53.85 00:00:59
Total 717 1045 607 58.09 00:04:10
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tried to make sense of what the implications were for the more general strategy of publishing for
the organization. There were two main obstacles to translating measurements into concrete
changes: the lack of a certain form of data literacy, that is, the numerical, statistical and analytical
skills that would help the interpretation of such data, and the lack of time to prioritize data collec-
tion over tasks which largely C-Media perceived to be more directly linked to achieving their
social aims. As we note later in the article, the time needed for the new practice of data collection
and the digital infrastructure to ‘sink into’the existing social practices extended beyond the time-
frame of our study. However, it is the banality of such constraints on which the material reality of
making organizations ‘more digital’is in practice based.
Content curation: telling the story of the stories
Despite limitations of time and resources, the reflection process that started with the collection and
interpretation of metadata helped C-Media to identify a need to enhance how it managed the pro-
duction and circulation of web content. As a result, CRs initiated a series of creative experiments
in online content curation, which, as explained next, helped develop an alternative imaginary of
online interaction and engagement, indeed an overtly ambitious horizon of aspiration, given C-
Media’s current digital infrastructure and the levels of digital literacy of its reporters.
Content curation finds many applications in online culture world today, including projects
about heritage (Boon, 2011; Nilsen, Grey, & Friedman, 2012) and online identity (boyd &
Ellison, 2007, 2008; Cox, Clough, & Marlow, 2008; Durrant, Frohlich, Sellen, & Uzzell, 2011).
As a practice pertaining creative production, content curation has been understood to disrupt hier-
archical modes of production (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000), but there are also more cynical appli-
cations of the concept in the online marketing world. Critical positions have argued that such
practices of collective knowledge production (for instance, crowdsourcing in cultural and
museum projects) potentially feed into ‘communicative capitalism’(Dean, 2009) and ‘inclusive
neoliberalism’(Wickstrom, 2012). We are alert to such critical positions; here, however, we are
interested in how processes of collective content production, such as those led by C-Media,
could enable a reflexive process about both the role of an organization and its modes of engagement
in a digital world. This reflexive process involved the emergence of a meta-narrative, in the words
of C-Media’smanager (Vicky) the ‘telling the story of the stories’, and this was not a reductive or
instrumental process. This is a space of agency neglected, indeed often made hard to see, by
accounts of ‘communicative capitalism’(Andrejevic, 2013; Dean, 2010).
The ambitious vision of ‘telling the story of the stories’had to start with simpler and more
tangible tasks. We identified with C-Media how, as a media practice, content curation involved
finding, categorizing and organizing relevant online content on specific issues. As expected,
the experiments with content curation did not entail the creation of more content, but presented
a way to feature selected content that pre-existed online. For C-Media, the point of curation
was to tell stories not being told, or to tell existing stories in a different way. An example, dis-
cussed in one website development meeting during our fieldwork, was to retell a news story
about homeless people being driven out of London, which was covered in The Guardian but
received little attention due to the US elections happening at the same time. C-Media appreciated
that curated content could take many forms: a wiki, a Storify or a blog post; it could contain
videos or photos and it could connect directly the C-Media platform with social media. In this
way, content curation presented an opportunity for C-Media to establish links with new audiences
and to strengthen existing social bonds with the local community. C-Media aimed to work closely
with patients on their experiences with local hospital services and residents on their experiences of
local housing providers, and to hear from pupils for example. They did so by engaging in outreach
work and by bringing together more than 30 organizations in 10 countries, including universities,
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non-governmental organizations, local authorities and service user-led groups. The website
design was an essential element of this networking and outreach effort. As the manager noted,
the organization aimed at
raising the profile of the content, give people reasons to keep coming back, and then hopefully within
twelve months it will be a really different place where people are using the forum, they are commu-
nicating with each other, they are finding that it meets their needs and that it’s stimulating them to be
involved and they’re getting feedback on the content, so they’ve got reason to come. (Vicky)
C-Media negotiated, appropriated and often resisted the marketing aspects of content cura-
tion. As the Chief executive noted:
There’s us curating the content, there’s us responding to a story and the third is other people are cur-
ating the content for us as a mass collaboration. But there’s lots of issues around that like who do we
give authority to [create] content (Hugh).
So for C-Media the introduction of content curation was a key mechanism in their overall
civic project of generating authoritative voice for a particular community.
Community tagging as knowledge production
In technical and practical terms, apart from, obviously, the selective foregrounding of timely, rel-
evant content, the practice of content curation involved the incorporation of several modules.
‘Community tags’is a user-generated tagging system that uses a module available in Drupal
(the open source platform employed by C-Media), which allowed CRs to tag content. Its
implementation was envisioned to bring together the practice of curating content (and the intended
outcome of reaching wider audiences) and that of enhancing public and user engagement with CR
content. This was an important intervention: in information-saturated spaces, where organizations
such as C-Media run the danger of sinking beneath the weight of more content, tags and other data,
the visual display of a community tag cloud on the front webpage begins potentially a process of
recognition (Honneth, 2007); that is, recognition of CRs as producers of knowledge, indeed knowl-
edge about knowledge. CRs, by tagging content which was not their own, valued and foregrounded
stories that were written by other members of the community, and in this process also recognized
others as knowledge producers. Thus, although tag clouds are today becoming a banal phenom-
enon that appears in most webpages, this specific experiment of community tagging, unlike crowd-
sourcing exercises, and because it was contained within a small connected group of people, created
a temporary space for practising mutual recognition. Extending the relationship between CRs
beyond plainly reading, the experiment, if repeated and sustained, could establish new habits of
knowledge-making amongst news media producers. Community tags in this case reflect a wider
process of collective reimagining and began to embody a bigger vision:
A lot of what we’ve been talking about is about building community. It isn’t just cold, hard content. It
is about that sense of community and that’s really one of the things that we’re trying to develop and
achieve with this. (Vicky)
This democratic aspect of content curation and community tagging is of key importance,
potentially, to organizations such as C-Media. It presents an area of agency that avoids the reduc-
tive ‘choice’between an emergent self-organizing system where ‘learning’algorithmic machines
take precedence over human values, and ‘an information commons in which a new elite makes
our choices for us’(Mansell, 2013, p. 193).
10 A. Fotopoulou and N. Couldry
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This vision is also directly attached to new digital skills, literacies and capabilities. As was the
case with metadata, new competencies and literacies were a direct implication of content curation
practices.
One of the competencies and new roles that reporters were invited to take up by C-Media was
that of an editor:
I think it’s telling the stories of the stories. [ …]It’s possibly the kind of connecting bit. So there’san
internal assessment of the stories that’s made, in order to then promote the content out to the different
audiences. So that thinking bit, the telling the stories of the stories, is one of kind of exercising our
internal judgement maybe about the impact that we want to have. (Vicky)
Organizations can reimagine their social role and the democratic limits of their practices as
they embark in experiments with transforming their digital presence, in an evidence-based
process of reflection. The ways in which C-Media negotiated the form of their editorial policy,
which resulted from the implementation of a new digital platform, clearly show that digital infra-
structure and data literacies are constituted within social practices and are more than a matter of
technical deployment. What our current analysis adds to existing discussions (Couldry et al.,
in press) is that civil society organizations must have a clear vision of their role, their policies,
the importance of collaboration and networked technologies, and not just a series of technical
instructions. Narratives that enact these visions –through, as C-Media put it, telling the story
of the stories –demonstrate the continuing dialectic between the social and the technical.
Constraints and limitations
We have so far presented the adoption of content curation, data analytics and community tagging
as an important process whereby social imaginaries of information are concretely shared by
members of a community, contributing to a ‘community of practice’, and emerge out of their
everyday interactions. For C-Media, the planning and eventual implementation not only led to
internal organizational and technical changes but also opened up possibilities for refinement.
We would not however wish to understate the constraints and limitations affecting such trans-
formations of digital infrastructure. As with many other similar organizations, C-Media faced
major funding limitations, which impacted directly on the number of personnel employed by
the organization. Seeking inventive ways to meet the basic need for technical updates, including
both software and hardware, was an everyday concern. An important factor for the implemen-
tation of creative experiments with digital media is the technical capacity required for processing,
analysing and visualizing data. Although we recognize that innovative thinking is crucial for the
incorporation of web analytics for instance, employing one person only for the entire redesign of
the website and upgrade of the Drupal system evidently resulted in a slow rhythm of updates. One
resulting practical impediment was how the web profiles for existing CRs were not operational at
the time of the new website launch. C-Media had to develop a system of reciprocal support in
response. As we have noted elsewhere (Couldry et al., 2014a), an operational online discussion
forum was the precondition for such reciprocity, mutual recognition and support to emerge, and
this only slowly began to emerge during the course of our fieldwork collaboration.
Sustainability
What were the conditions of this practice? Throughout our research we were concerned with the
implications for sustainability after our fieldwork was complete. Sustainability can be addressed
in different ways. During planning meetings, our collaborative aim was to create an initially
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feasible and long-term sustainable model for the content curation process. As one of the board
members noted:
To me there are three aspects of [content curation]. One is the technological how you do it, how you
present it; the other is intellectual, how you get the materials together; and the other one is how do you
develop cooperation over it, which is the social aspect of it. (Craig)
Beyond the need for a working digital infrastructure, there was a clear need for someone to
have a designated responsibility in this area which was so closely linked with repurposing of
C-Media’s administrative processes. The sustainable adoption of web analytics and content cura-
tion modules required either a professionally trained data analyst who could additionally lead the
reflexive process of content curation, beyond the experimentation phase, or an alternative based
on CRs themselves, so that they could compensate for the shortages of staff. As already noted,
content curation already invoked some new competencies and digital literacies for CRs. An
alternative approach to the designated professional role (‘content curator’and ‘metadata
analyst’) would involve spreading responsibility for editing and curating content, and for the
use of metadata across CRs, just as responsibility for production of media content had been
spread before. This model of editorial practice would shift responsibility and expertise from
the editor over to a wider network of CRs and would have reflected the social values of
C-Media. Of course during our web planning meetings, the organization negotiated whether
the editorial role should be taken up by one paid editor. However, given restrictions in
funding, collective editing, moderation and curation seemed to be the only available option for
C-Media. Implementing such a distributed solution required a consistent vision across a
number of tasks: data management and ethical standards for their use, and editorial practice
and policies regarding the use of social networking.
Organizations such as C-Media can only hope to adopt new technology practices and to rein-
vent their digital infrastructure with minimum disturbance if they are freed up from external dis-
ruptions. In order for our model to be sustainable and operational beyond the research phase, it
needed to align with the social principles of the organization, and to genuinely ‘sink into’its
sociotechnical conditions (Star & Ruhleder, 1996). Often the material realities of day-to-day
work and a constantly changing funding landscape make it difficult for these actors to achieve
the necessary and inevitably complex new processes of reflexive thinking and self-assessment.
However, notwithstanding the limitations in funding and the increased competition in civil
society sector, C-Media, like other organizations, can still reimagine the ways in which they
can participate in a digital world and sustain an effective digital presence.
Conclusions
For C-Media, the point of digital engagement was not specifically for users and participants to
become competent and competitive individuals, but to serve the needs of a particular community.
By setting up a digital infrastructure, the organization made their own definitions of how to engage
in a digital world, according to the values and social aims underpinning the organization’s overall
activity. These values and aims did not always accord with those imagined in governmental pol-
icies of digital inclusion and participation, but entailed a reimagination of their role as an organ-
ization, their limits and the importance of networked connectivity. Our article has focused on how
these understandings, values and visions translate into concrete, material digital practices.
We have shown how C-Media redesigned their online presence and rethought their relation-
ship to digital technology, configuring (Suchman, 2012) an imagined version of digital engage-
ment, and with it the practical reality of what could be achieved. The web redesign, the
12 A. Fotopoulou and N. Couldry
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metadata management and the content curation experiments aimed to enhance interactivity,
secure the visual identity of the organization and simplify the functionality of the website. At
the same time, these elements sought to open up the readership of CR stories, and make the
best of existing content. To meet these aims, CRs invented playful ways, such as community
tagging and collective content rating, which particularly fostered a sense of belonging in a com-
munity of practice (Wenger) that worked towards common goals. What materialized as a digital
infrastructure of narrative exchange, and as shared practices for giving voice, was inevitably
caught up in the realities of limited resources.
The development of the website and the experiments in online content curation, with
modules such as ‘community tagging’and content rating, although not completed during the
period of our fieldwork, helped C-Media to develop a common language for describing what
they hoped to achieve more generally, as a social and civic organization. The language and
reflection involved in an organization’s rethinking of its digital presence must draw upon its
‘repertoire of communal resources’. In mundane, everyday interactions such as the collection
and analysis of statistical data, certain imaginaries of digital engagement emerged. ‘Telling
the story of stories’(C-Media’s own term for what was at stake in this process) is not just a
practical process of editing content and retelling stories by linking or sharing on social media
platforms; it is, more broadly, a narrative reimagination of an organization’capabilities, in
which stories about how social actors come to participate in the digital world circulate
between, and are produced and enacted by, actors themselves. The opportunities for such reim-
agining, and their attendant limitations, cannot for social organizations such as C-Media be sep-
arated from the practical limitations of funding and resources. But it is precisely within such
realistic limitations that the implementation of imaginaries for a transformed digital infrastruc-
ture must be followed in practice.
Notes
1. The research reported here was conducted as part of Storycircle, a core project within the FIRM research
consortium funded by the UKRC Digital Economy Programme: http://www.firm-innovation.net/ and
http://storycircle.co.uk/
2. We developed an Outcomes Framework which would benefit C-Media, its partners in the sector and
other public, third sector and social enterprise organizations, to evaluate the programmes they offer
to CRs, and to establish robust evidence of impact, which it could subsequently use with funding
bodies, and policy-makers. C-Media, during the fieldwork, explicitly articulated five core organizational
outcomes: to develop the personal and technical skills of CRs; to sustain local networks of CRs; to
stimulate the production of positive, community reported content; to increase public engagement
with community reported content and to expand organizational partnerships through the social
licence. The Outcomes Framework documents have been made available online.
3. Alternative options for web analytics were also considered, including the repurposing of third-party
platforms alongside GA to enable more critical and flexible data evaluation. (As ‘critical evaluation
data’tools rather than ‘marketing’tools), or for combining these platforms, sometimes described as
‘auto content circulation’, using tools such as ‘IFTTT’(If this then that).
4. For example, in April 2012, there were 1150 visits; in May 2012 these rose to 1475 and fell to 1193
visits in June 2012.
5. Passive engagement with site content refers here to time spent on different parts of the site, the average
numbers of pages viewed and the bounce rate (the percentage of visits that leave the site again after the
first page).
Notes on contributors
Aristea Fotopoulou works at the intersections of media and cultural studies with science and technology
studies. She is Lecturer of Media in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. Her current
Information, Communication & Society 13
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research explores new practices, types of publics and communities emerging around personal data and self-
tracking. She has published on feminism, critical aspects of digital culture, emerging technologies and social
change. [email: a.fotopoulou@lancaster.ac.uk]
Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media, Communications and Social
Theory and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and
was previously Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the
author or editor of eleven books including Ethics of Media (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), Media, Society,
World (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). [email: n.couldry@lse.ac.uk]
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