Digital Research and Publishing Presentation

Week 5Digital Environments

Deuze, Mark, ‘Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principle Components of a Digital Culture’, The Information Society, 22(1), 2006, pp.63-75.

Unit: ARIN 6912-2

Lecturer: Amit Kelkar

Paradigm shifts

Print Print

Linear and hierarchical Linear and hierarchical

OnlineOnline

Multivocal networks of Multivocal networks of meaningmeaning

“The problem with email is that it makes you write more (as opposed to instant messaging). And when you finish you wait and wait and wait for a reply but don’t realise that the other person has logged off. So in the end you log off as well while the other person logs on again. That person then replies to you but you’re logged off so there’s more waiting.”

Lilia, age 10

Culture

A set of values, norms, practices and expectations that is shared and constantly renegotiated by a group of people.

Digital Culture

1. set of values that regular users create (netiquette)

2. social phenomenon that is observable online and offline

Epistemological questions

What can we know?How can we know it?Why do we know some things, but not others?How do we acquire knowledge?Is knowledge possible?Can knowledge be certain?How can we differentiate truth from falsehood?Why do we believe certain claims and not others?

Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulation

identifies three types of simulacra (=used to describe a representation of another thing) and identifies each with a historical period

Simulacra First order (pre-modern period)

Second order (Industrial Revolution)

Third order (postmodern age)

Image is clearly an artificial Image is clearly an artificial placemarker for the real itemplacemarker for the real item

Distinctions between image and Distinctions between image and reality break down due to the reality break down due to the proliferation of mass-produced proliferation of mass-produced copies. The item's ability to imitate copies. The item's ability to imitate reality threatens to replace the reality threatens to replace the original versionoriginal version

The simulacrum precedes the The simulacrum precedes the original and the distinction original and the distinction between reality and representation between reality and representation breaks down. There is only the breaks down. There is only the simulacrum.simulacrum.

‘ ‘Endless recycling and quoting of past media content, artistic styles and forms became the new ‘international style’ and the new cultural logic of modern society. Rather than assembling more media recordings or reality, culture is now busy reworking, recombining, and analyzing already accumulated media material.’

Jussi Parikka, ‘Copy’, 2008

Key assumptions

Methodology

Primary sources

Principal components

Assumptions1. All aspects of everyday life – at least in

highly industrialised societies - are influenced or implicated by computerisation.

2. The spaces that are opened up by communication technologies are not new forms of culture in themselves. Rather, we express ourselves in this culture and this is done as members of an increasingly individualised society in a globalised world

Principal components of culture

are those values and practices that people need to create an identity and participate in identity politics

Principle components of a digital culture

Participation Remediation Bricolage

What functions and devices enable and extend our ability to communicate?

How do we use those devices?

What social arrangements are formed around them?

IndymediaJournalistic genre

Adheres to practices and ideals of ‘open’ publishing ‘collaborative, nonhierarchical storytelling’ (Deuze)

Anyone can post and upload files

No formal editorial moderation or filtering process

Group weblog?

Connect local communities and their issues with global ones

Usually oppositional or function outside the mainstream media corporations

Global/local and producer/consumer distinctions are becoming meaningless.

Traditional journalistic functions

GatekeepingGatekeeping– Journalist is the filter Journalist is the filter

of what is newsof what is news– Quality controlQuality control

FramingFraming– Using certain Using certain

narrative techniquesnarrative techniques– Are there any Are there any

underlying underlying messages?messages?

In the proliferation and saturation of screen-based, networked, and digital media that saturate our lives, our

reconstitution is expressed as:

Active agents in the process of meaning-making we become participants

We adopt but at the same time modify, manipulate, and thus reform consensual ways of understanding reality

we engage in remediation

We reflexively assemble our own particular versions of such reality

we are bricleurs

Participation►Contemporary understanding of

participation: ‘hypersociability’

encourages the involvement of media consumers in a story through social interaction

networked individualism participants ‘rebuild structures of sociability from

the bottom up’.

►Traditional social capital shrinking?

Political repercussions

passive and “informational”

citizenry

rights-based, monetorial and voluntarist citizenry

Remediation

constant remix of older media forms by newer ones and vice versa

an expression of a distinctly private enactment of human

agency in the face of omnipresent computer-mediated reality.’

‘All mediation is remediation. We are not claiming this as an a priori truth, but rather

arguing that at this extended historical moment, all current media function as remediators and that remediation offers us a means of interpreting the work of earlier media as well. Our culture conceives of each medium or constellation of media as it responds to, redeploys, competes with, and reforms other media. In the first instance, we may think of something like a historical progression, of newer media remediating older ones and in particular of digital media remediating their predecessors. But ours is a genealogy of affiliations, not a linear history, and in this genealogy, older media can also remediate newer ones.’

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media.Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p.55. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p.55.

Distantiation

Deuze: Remediation always involves an element of ‘distantiation’:

►manipulation of a dominant way of doing things in order to juxtapose, challenge and/or subvert the mainstream as a consequence of the extreme fragmentation of society .

Newspapers/Newscasts

► traditionally traditionally functionfunction on the on the

basis of selectivity basis of selectivity and linearity and linearity

Blogs

► arranged arranged chronologicallychronologically

► more similar to the more similar to the way we think and way we think and actact

► adds value to the adds value to the content that is content that is produced by the produced by the mainstream?mainstream?

Bricolage

►legitimises and attributes quality to people’s actions online

►incorporates borrowing, hybridity, mixture and plagiarism

►used to create new insights or meanings

Summary of paradigm shifts

Professional detached observation

Access based on expertise claimed on the basis of institutional authority Top-down delivering of messages

Preferring the personal experiential account

Heralding openness for all

Attributing more weight to providing a bottom-up platform for individual voices

Bibliography► Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The precession of Simulacra’ in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp.1-43.► Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The implosion of meaning in the media’ in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 2006,

pp.79-86.► Baudrillard, Jean, ‘On Nihilism’ in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, 2006, pp.159-168.► Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, p.55.► Browner, S.P., R.Sears, et al., ‘Literature and the internet: some theoretical considerations’ in Literature and the internet: a guide

for students, teachers, and scholars, New York: Garland, 2000, pp.115-127.► Deuze, Mark, 2003, ‘The Web and its journalisms: Considering the consequences of different types of media online’, New Media

& Society, 5(2), pp.203-230.► Lessig, Lawrence, Free culture: the nature and future of creativity, New York, Penguin Press, 2005. ► Jayaram, Mahalakshmi, ‘News in the age of instant communication’ in Practising journalism – values, constraints, implications,

Nalini Rajan (ed.), Sage Publications, New Dehli, 2005, pp 285-303.► Jensen, Michael J., Danziger, James N. and Venkatesh, Alladi, ‘Civil society and Cyber society: The role of the Internet in

Community Associations and Democratic Politics’, The Information Society, 23(1), pp.39-50.► Parikka, J., ‘Copy’ in Fuller, M., Software studies: a lexicaon, Camebridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp.125-129.► Putnam, Robert, ‘A decline of social capital? – The German case’ in Democracies in flux: The evolution of social capital in

contemporary society, Oxford, OUP, 2004, pp. 189-244.► Putnam, Robert, ‘Australia – making the lucky country’ in Democracies in flux: The evolution of social capital in contemporary

society, Oxford, OUP, 2004, pp. 333-358.► Websites► http://www.bloggersblog.com/► http://www.indymedia.com/mc/index.php► ‘State of the Blogosphere 2008’ accessed 21/08/2009 on http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-

blogosphere/