The Digital Local: Crowdfunding, Rhetoric, and Community
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THE DIGITAL LOCAL: CROWDFUNDING, RHETORIC, AND COMMUNITY By JACOB EVAN FRIEDMAN A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English MAY 2016 ©Copyright by JACOB EVAN FRIEDMAN, 2016 All Rights Reserved ©Copyright by JACOB EVAN FRIEDMAN, 2016 All Rights Reserved To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of JACOB EVAN FRIEDMAN find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. Kristin Arola, Ph.D., Chair Michael Edwards, Ph.D. Roger Whitson, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT To my committee at Washington State University, Kristin Arola, Mike Edwards, and Roger Whitson, thank you for your insight, expertise, and patience with me and my nomadic writing process. I would also like to thank Nancy Bell and Elizabeth Siler, who have offered me excellent advice and personal help throughout my education at WSU. To my friends and classmates, thank you for helping me survive that education with my sanity mostly intact. To my friends from Miami, thank you for being a community that I can always return to, no matter where in the world we find ourselves. To my family; my parents, my brother Joey, Tina and Joe, and my best friend Evan, thank you for helping me in more ways than I can ever put on paper. Mom and Dad, your love and support have been the source of my strength, both in this process and throughout my life. I did all of this to live up to the image of the person that you taught me I can be. To my beloved partner Jennie Wellman, thank you for being my home and my hearth. And finally, a special thanks to a cat named Kickstand for inspiring this whole mess. I hope you’re healthy and happy wherever your new local may be. iii THE DIGITAL LOCAL: CROWDFUNDING, RHETORIC, AND COMMUNITY Abstract by Jacob Evan Friedman, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2016 Chair: Kristin Arola Crowdfunding services such as Kickstarter.com, Indigogo, Gofundme, and several others have, in recent years, been drawing increasing attention and funding from both small-scale creative projects and larger-scale personalities alike. Crowdfunding is a type of crowdsourced work where the creators of projects ranging from community restoration to creative publications reach out to the online community, asking for donations in order to fund their projects. Crowdfunding has gained mainstream attention recently with the success of projects like the Oculus Rift, the Pebble Watch, and several niche and indie video games, and has raised questions not only about the changing face of economics, grants, and community-based funding online, but also about the nature of digital collaboration as a whole. A great deal of recent scholarship in various fields has attempted to document what elements of language, culture, geography, and technology contribute to the success or failure of a crowdfunded project. What has not been discussed, however, is how the communities of “backers”, people who donate to projects that catch their interest, form around these projects, and what these gatherings of intrinsically motivated participants can tell us about community and persuasion online. This project will seek to explore the ways in which authors – those who create projects using the crowdfunding site Kickstarter.com – barter social capital for monetary capital, and what this process of exchange between author and audience suggests about the role of persuasion in online communities. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ............................................................................................................................. iii ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................ iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: A Cat Named Kickstand ............................................................................................................... 1 Follow the Money? ................................................................................................................... 11 The Value of Values .................................................................................................................. 16 Chapter Breakdown .................................................................................................................. 21 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: The Digital Local ........................................................................................................................ 28 The Authorship of Authority ..................................................................................................... 38 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 46 3. GENRE ANALYSIS: Prototypical Potato Salad ......................................................................................................... 49 Technical Artifacts ..................................................................................................................... 55 Interactive Media ...................................................................................................................... 70 Publications ............................................................................................................................... 88 Civic Projects ........................................................................................................................... 103 The Genres of Generosity: Conclusion ................................................................................... 115 4. META-GENRE ANALYSIS: The Potato Salad Incident ....................................................................................................... 128 Community by the Numbers ................................................................................................... 134 Language Patterns .................................................................................................................. 136 Affordances ............................................................................................................................. 140 RED ASHes to Ashes: The Tragic Hubris of Keiji Inafune ......................................................... 144 Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 154 5. TEACHING WITH CROWDFUNDING What is this Assignment Worth? ............................................................................................ 158 Risks and Rewards: Teaching as Crowdfunding ...................................................................... 162 Best(ish) Practices: Using Crowdfunding in the Writing Classroom ....................................... 169 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 176 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................................... 181 v CHAPTER ONE A Cat Named Kickstand In the winter of 2013, a couple in Miami, Florida found a kitten lying on the sidewalk outside of their home. It had been badly injured, the .22 bullet lodged in its side having splintered into fragments when it had been shot. The couple rushed the small kitten to the nearest veterinary clinic, where, after the kitten had been stabilized, they were told that complicated – and expensive – surgery was going to be needed if the bullet fragments were to be removed. With their first child on the way, they were unable to easily pay for the surgery by themselves. So, they posted a simple pitch on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.com asking for some money for the kitten’s operation, passing the word along through the networks of friends, loved ones, and colleagues within south Florida’s growing but tightly- knit craft beer industry. The money was raised well before the Kickstarter’s time limit was up. The operation succeeded in saving the kitten’s life but not its back right leg, and after recovery, the small kitten was given to a good home. The kitten’s new owners named the limping but happy cat Kickstand. Kleemann et al. define crowdsourcing as something that “takes place when a profit oriented firm outsources specific tasks essential for the making or sale of its product to the general public (the crowd) in the form of an open call over the internet, with the intention of animating individuals to make a contribution to the firm's production process for free or for significantly less than that contribution to the firm's production process for free or for significantly less than that contribution is worth to the firm” (6) and a later article by Belleflamme et al. builds on this definition to specifically characterize crowdfunding: “Crowdfunding involves an open call, mostly through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for the future product or some form of reward and/or voting rights” (7). While the earlier definition locates crowdfunding in profit-driven firms, the latter decentralizes it, allowing for individuals or small non-profits to participate. What both 1 definitions share, however, is the use of the internet to put out an “open call” for funding of a project, the success of which is dependent upon the enthusiasm