User:Amy Suo Wu/ made by users

Made by Users, by Mirko Schaefer, 30 Mar 2004

Software and Software based products in a network society are, more than other cultural artefacts, suitable to get modified and redesigned. He refers to de Certeau's notion of tactics in Practice of everyday life (1984).

Argues that an interdisciplinary action between social sciences and computer sciences will be necessary to understand the cultural practices in the digital age.

Due to the abundance of sharing and distributing in our ICT cultural practice simultaneously with 'producer's culture rooted in the ICT communities from the 80's, meritocratic cultre of universities, and a technology with inherits the determination of the new cultural practice,' icausing many of the privacy and copyright protection problems we are facing today. Which is why politicians and companies would rather take the easier option to abolish freedom of speech and the right for privacy than 'accept the challenge of digital culture'- one solution is to review and re-appropriate existing models.

The collaboration of the community of users can be described as a form of collective intelligence constituting a new cultural practice in the digital age. Similar to the printing phenomenon in the 16th Century, we can describe networks of developers, users, fans and active citizens as emerging new communication systems. Not only because we have collectively created it, but because networks are made up of the collective, thus we are in the position to better understand and analyse it.

Because computer technology (hardware and software) is open to modification, the personal computer becomes the space of cultural production and reception and provides the platform for cultural discourse. 'The reception of cultural products in not only reviewing then, but also revising them.'

--> One example that comes to mind is from my bachelor thesis (Dimensions of Censorship). I refer to one case in which Chinese bloggers re-appropriate the cultural product of (Chinese) language to elude censorship strategies. The malleability of the Chinese (Han) language lends itself to social actors, facilitating the innovation of critical commentary on the frustration of political censorship without being detected by virtual cops. As the Han language is a tonal language reliant on its complex system of phonology, one word can mean something else when pronounced with a different emphasis. Ingenious homonyms were adopted replacing ‘subversive’ content with seemingly absurd and unrelated words, thereby bypassing the surveillance of virtual cops and consequently censorship and the following procedure of prosecution.

The invention of a software-based product is actually a process, which enters a second stage of development, in the very moment of publication. The continual response and feedback mechanisms serve to improve and evolve the current modes.

--> This makes me think of how pharmaceutical companies/health industries always have to invent stronger antibiotics to compete with increasing antibody resistance. This example may be in fact counter-productive in terms of ethics and sustainability, but nonetheless shows how our biological bodies (users of these drugs) always develops more immunity, when over exposed to the familiar.

In breaking up the hierarchic production process of electronic consumer goods, users are reclaiming cultural freedom, innovating products and bridging the digital divide.

I like that uses the phrase '..provoke a social transformation...' rather than stating it factually or worst - absolute forecast of social transformations of societies by technology (networks).

There is a kind of gray market emerging for services as DVD region code removing or implementing a mod chip as a console. Unfortunately if the software or hardware modifications harm the business model of the inventor, the only way keep the gray market is criminalizing business opportunities coming out of the demand for customised products. Therefore...innovation is often pushed into the fringes of legality. As distribution in the digital age means reproduction, a necessary consequence would be the revision or our copyright laws. But of course this would mean that they would have to choose the road not taken and accept the 'challenge'.

To open up for a collaborative process which involves consumers/citizens would mean a healthy competition between the two to bear (more)fruit.

The ubiquity of Internet culture is only a problem to those who prospered well under the old regime. The DMCA is an attempt to transpose the understanding of copyright from industrial into the digital age by ignoring the technological nature and culture of the latter. Freedom of the Internet and the digital culture, the advantages of a free flow in information, of transparency, of creativity of collective intelligence is now threatened by attemps to excessively regulate