Making Free Culture: Making Technology and Visual Media in the Domain of Digital Commons
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(draft) Preliminary title: Making Free Culture: making technology and visual media in the domain of digital commons An ethnographic study of digital media commons production within free software graphics communities Julia Velkova July 28, 2015 Contents 1 Introduction1 1.1 Aim . .5 1.2 Object of Research . .6 1.3 Background: Blender and Synfig . 13 1.4 The structure of this study . 16 2 History and theoretical argument 19 2.1 Technologies of media production: introducing infrastructure . 19 2.1.1 Infrastructure . 20 2.2 Technological transparency as visibility of algorithm . 22 2.2.1 The two competing aesthetics . 23 2.3 Technological transparency as opacity of algorithm . 27 2.4 The ambivalence of the technical apparatus and its politics . 30 2.5 A redefinition of creativity through the “broadcasting” of software . 32 2.6 Producers of digital media commons as recursive publics . 38 2.7 Research questions . 41 3 Method 43 3.1 Making as acts of meaning . 43 3.2 Research cases . 44 3.3 Locating the field of practice . 45 3.4 Multi-sited ethnography . 46 3.5 Moving between invisible contexts . 48 3.5.1 Getting access to Morevna . 48 3.5.2 Site A: Skype – a communicative and work space . 49 3.5.3 Site B: Udemy.com . 51 3.5.4 Site C: Libre Graphics Meeting 2014: going offline . 51 i ii Contents 3.6 Getting access to Gooseberry . 52 3.6.1 Sites D and E: Participant observation in Amsterdam and on IRC: the challenges of observing cognitive work and communication . 52 3.6.2 Observing cognitive work . 54 3.6.3 IRC as a site . 55 3.7 Participant observation as shadowing in Gorno-Altaysk . 58 3.8 Symmetric fieldwork, reciprocity and the researcher as a co-creator of value. 62 3.9 Interviews, focus groups and other analysis . 66 3.10 Conclusion, claims and reflexivity . 66 4 Articles 69 5 Preliminary Conclusions 73 Bibliography 75 Contents iii CHAPTER 1 Introduction This study is about the cultural significance of techno-artistic practices centered on building independent media production infrastructures and content in the domain of digital media commons. It is also an attempt to expand the ways in which media production could be theorized within the field of media and communication studies by adding perspectives and ideas on technology from the domains of Science and Technology Studies (STS), cultural studies, software studies, and philosophy of technology. Media production within media and communication studies has traditionally been regarded as the study of the production and circulation of media texts, not of the production and circulation also of technology that is developed because of and through the production of these media texts, and the significance of the latter for the general field of cultural production. Stemming from the traditions of communications and mass media research, media production has been concerned predominantly either with the industries producing and circulating media texts (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2010; Hesmondhalgh, 2009; Mark Deuze, 2007; Du Gay, 1997) or with the audiences that consume these texts. The rapid spread of computers, mobile telephony and Internet connectivity in the last two decades and across many parts of the world has created the need to rethink some of these traditional conceptions about media production. A large number of scholars have done so by making important contributions to the understanding of the changing roles of audiences in the production of media texts. Many have pointed out how producers who have formerly been considered as passive audiences can now enter to a greater extent in different production capacities enabled by these new technologies, reviving older hopes from the 1980s about the inclusive and emancipatory potential of new technologies. New terms and language have been coined to describe the novelty and participatory potential brought by technological change. These range from ideas about how media consumers can now build 1 2 1 Introduction their own “networks of mass self-communication, thus empowering themselves” (Castells, 2009, p. 421), through suggesting innovative models of organising media production based on mechanisms for self-governance (Bruns, 2008a; Fuster Morell, 2010; Noveck, 2009; Tapscott and A. D. Williams, 2008) that ultimately represent new modes of cultural end economic production. The latter are described with new terms such as “social production”, “commons-based peer production” (Benkler, 2006); produsage (Bruns, 2008b); collective intelligence (Lévy, 1997), creative audiences (Castells, 2009) and the power of the dispersed online “crowds” (Howe, 2009). Many have concluded that the emergence of these new forms of media production allow to speak of a rise of “cultures of participation” (Couldry and Jenkins, 2014; Jenkins, 2008; Kelty, 2013), and of digital gift-cultures (Skågeby, 2008; Terranova, 2004), largely enabled by new communication technologies. The increase of multiplicity of actors who produce media texts is also seen by some as carrying a political potential for destroying long lasting media monopolies(Hardt and Negri, 2009). Thus, more recent technological developments are attributed capacities of bringing audiences closer to cultural and democratic goals of inclusiveness, participation and open knowledge (Hess and Ostrom, 2011; Lievrouw, 2011). Those who have been more critical have instead emphasized the continuing dominance and control over media texts production by the industries. In his exhaustive review over the creative industries media scholar David Hesmondhalgh (2009) argues that the media industries have adapted to the Internet by reconfiguring their models of managing labor. Instead of thinking of the emergence of new types of media producers, the pool of contributors to industry-made media texts has expanded with audiences being increasingly “laboured upon” (Andrejevic, 2008; Dijck, 2009) by the industry. The way this happens is by involving audiences in acts of co-creation in which they contribute with free labor, content and data, that are subsequently appropriated by the industry as a single owner of the products of this labor (Andrejevic, 2008; Arvidsson, 2008; Barbrook, 2005; Cova, Dalli, and Zwick, 2011; Fast, 2012; Firer-Blaess and Fuchs, 2014; Roig et al., 2014; Terranova, 2004). These debates have additionally intensified in recent years by raising concerns about industry practices of surveillance, data collection and monitoring of online activity that aim at targeting even better at the consumers of industry produced media texts, recreating and strenghtening media monopolies (Andrejevic, Hearn, and Kennedy, 2015; Jansson and Christensen, 2014). While these debates have made important contributions to the contemporary understand- ing of media production, they have tended to perceive media production infrastructure, such as hardware and software as something that exists apriori, that forms part of “the given preconditions for media productions” (Löwgren and Reimer, 2013, p. 18), and that 3 are a matter of learning how to use to best advantage in order to create media texts. In this, the materiality that constitutes and enables media production, as well as the politics of its creation and distribution have largely been ignored in favour of studies of production of symbolic content. However, as Gillespie, Boczkowski, and Foot (2014, p. 3) have recently argued, doing so enacts a rather deterministic and instrumental view on technology that regards it either as an intervening variable that explains a measurable change, or as a historical catalyst of social change, or as a tool that enables passive audiences to finally succumb to or resist mass culture. Yet, technologies are never neutral, and as Turkle (2005, p. 9) reminded a decade ago, computational objects are carriers of ideas, specific ways of thinking and seeing the world, as well as intellectual values. Over one decade, namely the 1980-1990 the computer moved from a culturally invisible technology to the “new engine of culture” (Manovich, 2013, p. 21) forming a culture in which media production, distribution and reception are to a large extent mediated by software (39). Software is regarded as responsible for extending, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the role that technology plays in the everyday practices that make up modern life (Rieder and Schäfer, 2008). In the same time, technology affords not one but multiple ways of revealing being. As Rieder and Schäfer (2008) argue, “the way we create technical artifacts – and software most importantly – heavily influences the cultural role they will play”. Technologies also standardize both people and machines by imposing different ways of knowing and seeing through different approaches to structure and represent data (Star and Bowker, 2004; Gillespie, 2014, p. 187). Continuing this line of argument, more recently Lievrouw (2014), as well as Löwgren and Reimer (2013) suggested that it is no longer possible to regard media production as detached from processes of designing infrastructure and making media production technology for two reasons. First, because the moments of infrastructure design, media text production and media text consumption are neither linear nor separated from each other, and secondly because digital media infrastructures can not only be learnt or used by media users but they can also be designed by them: Not only can people produce media texts, they also can take part in the design of the infrastructure – the programs, software components, and web services that can be used for media production.