New online technologies have brought with them Bastard Culture! a great promise of freedom. The computer and media particularly the Internet have been represented matters media as enabling technologies, turning consumers into Bastard Culture! users and users into producers. Furthermore, lay people and amateurs have been enthusiastically How User Participation Transforms greeted as heroes of the digital era. Cultural Production matters Schäfer’s groundbreaking research into hacking, fan communities and Web 2.0 applications de- monstrates how the dynamic of innovation, con- trol and interaction have shifted the boundaries of the traditional culture industry into the user domain. The media industry undergoes a shift from creating content to providing platforms for user-driven social interactions and user-generated content. In this extended culture industry, partici- mirko tobias schäfer pation unfolds not only in the co-creation of media content and software-based products, but also in the development and defense of distinctive media practices that represent a socio-political understanding of new technologies. Mirko Tobias Schäfer lectures in digital culture at Utrecht University. ‘Profound and meticulously researched work, which has expanded my worldview.’ Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs. The Next Social Revolution ‘Invited or not, the brilliant and not-so-brilliant members of our digital culture are actively participating. We’re not just using but changing, repurposing, and re-inventing the technologies set before us. Bastard or not, the reality we are creating together is an odd and often unconscious collaboration between people, corporations, and techno- logy itself. Schäfer has patiently, deliberately, and quite engagingly exposed this hidden landscape of cultural pro- www.aup.nl duction, and shown us what we might do to direct it to- ISBN 978-90-896-4256-1 ward positive, even evolutionary ends.’ Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed. Ten Commands for a Digital Age 9 7 8 9 0 8 9 6 4 2 5 6 1 amsterdam university press amsterdam university press mirko tobias schäfer Bastard Culture! Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production Mirko Tobias Schäfer Amsterdam University Press MediaMatters is a series published by Amsterdam University Press on current de­ bates about media technology and practices. International scholars critically anal­ yse and theorize the materiality and performativity, as well as spatial practices of screen media in contributions that engage with today’s digital media culture. For more information about the series, please visit: www.aup.nl The open-access-publication of this book is made possible by a grant from the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC). The research is made possible by the Department of Media and Culture Studies (MCW) and the Research Institute for History and Culture (OGC) at Utrecht University. Cover illustration: Axel Swoboda Cover design: Suzan Beijer, Amersfoort Lay out: Philos, Almere isbn 978 90 8964 256 1 e-isbn 978 90 4851 315 4 nur 670 M.T. Schäfer / Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2011 This text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share, copy, dis­ tribute, transmit the work. http://creativecommons.org/licensees/by-nc-nd/3.0 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Chapter 1 - Promoting Utopia/Selling Technology 25 1.1 Cisco Systems: empowering the Internet generation 31 1.2 Web 2.0: celebrating collaboration 35 Chapter 2 - Claiming Participation 41 2.1 New media, new participation? 41 2.2 Domains of user participation 46 2.3 Explicit and implicit participation 51 Chapter 3 - Enabling/Repressing Participation 55 3.1 The computer 57 3.2 Software 63 3.3 The Internet 71 Chapter 4 - Bastard Culture 77 4.1 Participation as explicit media practice 79 4.2 Participation as implicit media practice 105 Chapter 5 - The Extension of Cultural Industries 125 5.1 Confrontation: fighting participation 127 5.2 Implementation: controlling participation 146 5.3 Integration: embracing participation 157 Chapter 6 - Participatory Culture 167 Notes 175 Resources 215 Literature 217 Appendix A - Abbreviations 232 Appendix B - Glossary 234 Index 239 6 Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people who in one way or another contributed to realizing this work. I must pay tribute to the people at the Department for Media Studies (MCW), and at the Research Institute for Culture and History (OGC) at Utrecht University for supporting not only my research, but also for providing me with an open-minded, friendly, and intellectually stimulating environment. I want to thank my colleagues at the New Media & Digital Culture (NMDC). At countless occasions I benefited from their knowledge and wisdom. I thank Frank Kessler and Joost Raessens for their efforts in overseeing this venture and guiding my often unorganised thoughts into direction of a more solid argument. I am also very grateful for the helpful comments and remarks I have received numerous times from Marianne van den Boomen, Bernhard Rieder, William Uricchio, and Imar de Vries. I am also indebted to my research students Lisette van Blokland, Jaap Kok, Vlad Micu, Pascal Rancuret, and Javier Sancho Rodriguez for numerous interviews with members from the homebrew and console gaming scene, as well as for their hands-on investigation of homebrew software and modded game consoles. My thanks also to Steph Harmon for her careful editing and the staff at Amsterdam University Press, especially Inge van der Bijl for smoothly managing this project, and Jeroen Sondervan for his indefatigable support and prospective view on copy­ rights and publishing in the digital age. Many people have been important, at one stage or the other by giving feedback and commenting on concepts and/or unfinished chapters and half-baked ideas: Aibopet, Florian Cramer, Andreas Leo Findeisen, Frank Hartmann, Patrick Kranzlmüller, Franz Lehner, Koen Leurs, Geert Lovink, Dennis Jaromil Rojo, Douglas Rushkoff, Tanja Sihvonen, Kim de Vries. I also thank Jesse Darlin, Ralf Futselaar, Pepita Hesselberth, Jim Hurley, Boris May, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Audrey Samson, Peter Steinberger, Axel Swoboda, Nanna Verhoeff, and Florian Waldvogel, and of course my family for their support. Finally my gratitude goes to Eva Stegeman. 7 Introduction!! Yet Another Media Revolution The desktop revolution has brought the tools that only professionals have had into the hands of the public. God knows what will happen now (Marvin Minsky, Time 1983). In 1983, Time magazine nominated the PC as the ‘Machine of the Year’. The edition’s title, ‘The Computer Moves In’, announced the Information Age’s entry into our living rooms. On the cover, a man sits alienated in front of his new roommate. What he plans to do with the computer or what the machine might do to him is not quite clear. In January 2007, a computer was again displayed on the Time cover, but this time the computer screen is a mirror reflecting the ‘Person of the Year’: ‘Yes, You. You Control the Information Age. Welcome to Your World’. The cover is a symbol of the emancipation of the computer user from the alienated user of 1983 to the ‘hero of the Information Age’ in 2007. The attention devoted to the computer in 1983 marks an important milestone in the emergence of what has become known as the ‘information society’. What started as a secret technology for military research – an accounting machine in scientific laboratories and corporate companies, advanced technology initially unthinkable as a mass-produced consumer good – suddenly entered the lives and homes of common users as the microcomputer. With this microcomputer, users had a high-tech device at their disposal, a ma­ chine which was able to execute every task provided in a symbolic language the machine can understand. Over the past two decades, the computer has developed into an everyday medium. Due to easy-to-use interfaces and the Internet, which has increased the reach and use of computers globally, computer use has become common everyday practice. The 24-year interval between the two editions of Time magazine bridges the gap between the introduction of the computer into the con­ sumer sphere and the emergence of a new global cultural practice. Several trends during this time span ultimately shaped the contemporary cultural practice of computer use: 1. The computer developed into a medium for work, leisure and entertainment 2. The Internet became the primary means to connect computers, thereby constituting a world-wide information infrastructure 3. The emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW) which, with its graphical user interfaces and hypertext structures, made networked computers a useful tool for common users and consequently became a mass medium by 1995 4. Most recently, in concert with the above, broad-band Internet connections 9 and related services enabled users to publish, organize and share large quantities of data online. The result we are witnessing today, emphasized in the above-mentioned edition of Time magazine, is referred to as ‘participatory culture’, which describes the new role users have assumed in the context of cultural production.1 But the new media practice didn’t immediately manifest itself on such a large scale. Despite the atten­ tion the microcomputer received in the 1980s, it remained a tool used primarily in offices or as a gadget for enthusiastic early adopters often referred to as ‘nerds’, who developed an understanding of the computer and its applications that very much shaped the way personal computers are perceived today. The machine initial­ ly developed for solving complex and repetitive arithmetic problems thus developed into a common office device, and subsequently into an everyday medium for con­ sumers who can use it for practically anything that can be formulated as an algo­ rithmic process, from filing tax returns to organizing holiday pictures. The Internet and its successful application, the World Wide Web (WWW), have been crucial in this development.2 The WWW has enabled large media audiences to recognize the computer as a handy tool for communication, entertainment and leisure activities.