Bastard Culture

BASTARD CULTURE! - MIRKO TOBIAS SCHAFER
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INTRODUCTION

Computer went from being lonely man staring at a screen to leader of information age

Users have assumed a new role and created participatory culture. At first only nerds and arithmetic problems as solutions. The internet and its successful application ‘the world wide web’ were crucial role in enlarging the scale -> tool for communication, entertainment and leisure activities

Web 2.0 – user generated content – a set of web technologies

User activism gets higher in numbers but underlying power structures are not reconfigured. New enterprises are emerge and gain control over cultural production. Therefore there is no revolution of users. These enterprises provided access and opportunities to users to take part in. this promised social progress through technological advancement these new technologies were just as promotional material, capable of letting people participate around the globe.

software is a flexible product – can be changed and extended, used in different contexts. Has qualities encouraging modification and distribution. Technical side of digital has social values and stimulates/represses media practices.

User activities are explicit and implicit. Participation meet online and engage in software developed projects. This creates collision with old business models versus new practices. New practices thrive on explicit participation, business models struggle. Users create value. This regulation and legalization shapes the societies perception of these technologies. The media industry is undergoing a shift from creating content to providing platforms for users driven social interactions and user generated content.

 don’t believe the hype

participation is part of a discourse that advocates social progress through technological development as well as aims to create expectations and understanding for technology. The promise of social progress and a reconfiguration of power through participation is embedded in technological development and postulated a new with each ‘media rev.’ many accounts of user participation romanticize user activities and overestimate the users capacity of action.

Blind spot for transformation media corporations for own content producers to platform providers. Though it cannot function on user activity alone. Technology on the other hand cannot be treated as one thing either. The participatory culture is actually a complex discourse of the following factors: social progress through technological advancement, critique demanding the reconfiguration of power relations, the qualities of related technologies, used for designs and user appropriation, the (socio-political) systems related to using the technologies.

 analyzing participatory cultures

media and media practices are rated according to their alleged potential of empowering consumers and enabling political activism. Technology has to be acknowledged as something which represents the ongoing discourse on participation. Participation is an actual media practice and as a design solution that either stimulates and even channels certain users on represses various practices. Participatory in terms of ‘media dispotives’ means that aspects would be related to each other by power structures. These dispotives refer to the ‘said as much as the unsaid’ – faucault, on formations of participants. This idea has further developed with deleuze – dynamic set of interacting connections, Peeteces and Charlien – a concept of ‘in-between’

looking at participation in its various forms in the domain of digital media in light of the dispotif means to describe a variety of formations of different relations between 3 domains, discourses, technology and people and social use.

Discourses technological and social use are all interrelated and transform the meaning of participation in itself. Discourses, technological and social use reciprocally affect each other. When zooming in on the dispotive of participation, the macro level reveals a set of relations and interactions that can be understood as actor-networks. An assumed stable factor explaining online cultural phenomenon is the metaphor of the community, which is often used as the equalivant for the social constellation of family, friends or neighborhood communities in real life in order to describe social interactions and the construction of meaning in virtual life.

This is researched by method of ANT another aspect form this is the consideration of non-human actors and their agency as active contributors to the constitution of participatory culture. This actor network consists of variety of actors. ANT assumes culture and technology have an increasingly evanescent distinction, which affirms the heterogeneity of our ‘lebenswelt’, and the hybrid alliances established within that world. ANT tries to flesh out their relations by monitoring their ‘traces’

Relations labeled as networks.

ANT = Actor–network theory

A larger scope of social interactions and collective production unfolds in sociotechnical ecosystems, where users also interact with software design and the underlying structure of databases and information management systems. Socio-technical ecosystems describe an environment based on information technology. That facilitate and cultivates the performance of a great number of users. Line actor-networks, socio-technical ecosystems are also subject to the overall dispotive of participation ‘the technique of starting with the thing to be discover and working back, step by step, as on an assembly line, to the point at which it is necessary to start in order to reach the desired object’ – mcluhan

Technologies have a function as well as a meaning, and if the meaning is lacking, the technological is liable to become inoperable as well. Affordance, design and appropriation shape technologies. Affordance – material character and design choices. Design – formalized of material aspects and channeled consumer/user actions. Appropriation – response to material

 tracing participation
the various actors explored in each case are subject to the general formations of discourses, individual people, communities, and technology as outlined in the dispotive. Conventional media and cultural studies analyze media texts such as film, television, radio, comic books, music and the like in order to formulate a critique of media production or inherent ideology, or to describe consumer culture. Students of the internet also focus on all digital media textst such as audio etc, which define the configuration and regulation of information infrastructures that can be analysed and interpreted, such as convential media texts.

End user license agreements or terms of service documents, found in most online services and software based products, make up important aspects of the quality, definition and legal regulation of current media objects, and they regulate the further use, compensation, and liability of involved parties. The API’s were developed to be powerful gatekeepers of information flow and regulation to a large extent how open a system is and what data and functions can be embedded or shared. All of these different texts reFer to the process of designing and appropiating software and software based products.

CHAPTER ONE - PROMOTING UTOPIA/SELLING TECHNOLOGY

Legends, myths and narratives accompany a new technology while it is still in development and announce it to a broader audience in society, to its potential users. There is an attempt to bring technology to perfection and create a utopia, it is an important agent of change. In view of participation a negative utopia manifests itself as the dark side of the tempting promise for social progress, as the potential abuse of technology for repression. Popular discourse is positive utopia new media, personal computer etc with the promise of a brighter future. MCluhan described our limitation for perceiving the future only in terms of post developments, as if we looked at the present through a rear-view mirror. The framing of new technologies occurs in two types of discourse: a popular discourse, amed at a broad audience, which introduces and promotes new technologies on a large scale, and a scholarly discourse, which examines their social use. Promoting the internet revolution while still in progress required the creation of a suitable language, a rhetoric that made an internet future comprehensible to a large audience, and that mediated things that seem so natural today. Along with the popularization of info technology in special interest and mainstream media, politicans already saw the implementation of an information infrastructure on their horizon and stated to conceive regulations accordingly.

As political concepts are framed and put forward in societies discourses, so technology is framed in various ways and becomes a part of the discusses agenda. Many different actors play a part in the framing of technology.

Early metaphors affecting the perception of mei include the computational metaphor, which is linguistic and semantic transformations from the concept of human accountant to an electronic calculator. Cyberspace denotes a blend of cybernetics and space which identifies that element of space which creates information, machines and communication feedback. Perceiving information technology as a new space promotes of this metaphor to portray users as citizens cultivating, inhabiting and developing it. Cyberspace proved to be a powerful metaphor in promising a new space in which to realize utopian concepts.

‘a magna charta of the knowledge age’ – about metaphors

the way media and technologies have been presented reveal an expection of socio-political progress through technological development.

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