In the literature, information pools are recognized as “online information goods comprising combined inputs that can be accessed by a large number of individuals…contemporary examples of information pools include…a wide array of discussion groups, forums, and online communities” (Flanagin, Hocevar, & Samahito, 2013, p. 1). The authors suggest that an information community serves as an example of an information pool but their definition only references the information itself and not the culture of practice that contributes to its amalgamation. Durrance and Fisher’s characterization of an information community refers to the participants through its depiction of information users and information providers as well as behaviors that implicitly register the agency of individuals as essential to the function of the community including exploitation of technology, elision of geographical boundaries, and collaboration among members (Durrance & Fisher, 2003). What is missing then from Durrance and Fisher’s conception of an information community as demonstrated by the real world behaviors and practices we observed within the communities we researched?
For me, that question is answered through the introduction of Henry Jenkins’s idea of participatory culture.
Participation doesn’t just mean being active, it is also about being part of a shared practice and culture. Many technology-centric uses of the term implicitly define participation through the use of a platform, or a site, rather than a shared practice or culture…participation…refers to properties of the culture, where groups collectively and individually make decision that have an impact on their shared experiences. (Jenkins, Ito, & boyd, 2016, p. 11-12)
In their dialogue on participatory culture in the 21st century, media scholars Henry Jenkins, danah boyd, and Mizuko Ito explore the benefits, tensions, and conflicts that arise in participatory culture. Culture, in this case, includes rituals, dialects, ethics, and social hierarchies that are recognized and collectively enforced by the community; the participants don’t just consistently exchange information, they engage in behaviors that reaffirm the culture as a culture. I think as we become increasingly dependent on Web 2.0 resources for information and information behavior, the move from information community as a collection of people organized around an information need to participatory culture in which all of our networked interaction manifests as the practices of a community is all but inevitable so I want to look at how this new model of sharing information is both valuable and problematic as well as how information professionals can benefit the transition.
The value of participatory culture is similar to the value of Web 2.0 in that information is now accessible to an unprecedented degree. In participatory culture, everyone is both an information user and information provider. Further, the ways of searching and sharing information are streamlined through the expertise and collective resources of the community. Jenkins suggests that participatory culture is bound up in two key concepts: diversity and democracy. Participatory culture necessitates a diversity of resources and relatedly, expanding the scope of what qualifies a resource creates space for democratized participation. Access is no longer limited to hegemonic institutions of information and the potential for an equally informed public is greater than it’s ever been. To the extent that participatory culture also evinces the ideas introduced by Durrance and Fisher on information communities including that participation fosters motivation to connect writ large, widespread engagement and investment in sharing information likely increases through the mainstreaming of participatory culture made possible by the Internet.
There are discernible tensions present in the discourse on participatory culture though primarily relating to the producer-consumer binary in a capitalist economy. Fandom is a kind of participatory culture that evidences a gift economy. Much has been written on how fan communities make use of the gift economy in distinguishing between value and worth (Hellekson, 2015). Because of the omnipresence of capitalism, even participatory culture functions through a top-down power structure. In Jenkins et al’s conversation, they suggest that democratized participation is shifting that power balance in that consumers are now producing their own content and have methods of disseminating their productions that previously weren’t available to them but there are two concerns inherent to this move: 1) does shifting the power balance between producer and consumer just reaffirm a capitalist information economy and 2) does fitting information behavior into a capitalist economic model implicitly suggest that some information behaviors need to be legitimatized to be acknowledged as valuable and subsequently, limit what qualifies legitimacy through its relationship to capitalism. That is, if participatory culture is intended to democratize information and information behavior and prove a means of cultural resistance, are we inadvertently strengthening the dominant institutions by talking about its power through the premise of said institutions i.e. patriarchy, capitalism, sociopolitical hegemony, etc.
I think two good examples that demonstrate this concern are explored through the experience of Fifty Shades of Grey and a recent discussion on one of my favorite culture podcasts, Still Processing.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a series of novels that were originally posted online under a different title as Twilight fan fiction. The fic was quite popular within the fandom and the author became fairly well known as a member of the fandom. When it was revealed that she had engaged with fandom as a way to gauge the appeal of her writing and was now publishing the fan fic as original fiction in print, this behavior was viewed as a violation of the gift culture that determines a fandom’s standard of ethics. However, it also inspired a wave of what came to be known as the pull-to-publish phenomenon in the Twilight fan fiction community wherein a number of popular stories were removed by their authors from their open-access platforms so that they could be repurposed as original fiction and published as print and/or e-books. It’s important to note that to the extent this work qualifies as labor, the female producer has a right to monetize it. Women’s labor is too often dismissed as not having recognizable worth and in some ways, this move demonstrates the shift from consumer to producer that Jenkins et al argue is a benefit of participatory culture. But Hellekson raises the question that by women fan fiction authors moving their work from a gift economy to a capitalist economy, are they reinforcing the inequitable production model that led them to first publish their work on the Internet for free? Further, does this move suggest that these women’s productions must be legitimized as labor and that that legitimacy is only found when they enter into the process of professional print for monetary compensation? Is that the only way we recognize the value and/or worth in user-generated content and if so, can we ever expect genuine, equitable democracy within participatory culture?
Somewhat related, Still Processing hosts Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris, recently discussed the show and California community, Silicon Valley, on their weekly podcast. They problematized the satire of the show as reinforcing the real life tropes of Silicon Valley culture (Morris & Wortham, 2017). Further, they raised the issue that because we are so dependent on Web 2.0 and such a tech-happy society, we run the risk of reading any technological development as positive *and* the people responsible as forces for good in society. If we think of the Internet primarily as potential for diversity and democracy, we tend to unwittingly ascribe those values to the people advancing the Internet’s capabilities and this is deeply problematic as evidenced by myriad tech CEOs’ real life behavior. Further, Silicon Valley, for all its progressive approaches to how we use and share information and services, is locked in two of the oldest power dynamics – patriarchy and capitalism. That said, I’m reluctant to accept Nicholas Carr’s premise of the Internet as inherently harmful or that we’re going to be overtaken by the Internet because it eliminates our ability to think and act critically (Carr, 2011). While I believe it’s incredibly important to continue to interrogate how power is recognized and enacted in participatory culture, I see its more immediate benefits through the potential for information literacy and media literacy and information professionals are the very best-equipped to advocate, teach, and model these literacy practices.
Carr does make the important point that we have always adapted to new information technologies in large part because neuroplasticity allows for an evolution in the way we think and process. If we learn to engage critically with digital information early on, we’ll develop the cognitive schema necessary to repeat that process with each new information source we encounter. Information professionals are key in creating environments in which literacy is demonstrated and encouraged. In Participatory Culture… (Jenkins, Ito, & boyd, 2016), the authors refer to an instructor using Wikipedia to teach her students how information is generated, organized, and verified through an exercise in which they had to write a Wikipedia entry and then defend what they included in it and why. Another information professional who teaches Information Literacy courses to college kids uses Twitter hashtags to introduce the concepts of controlled vocabulary, subject headings, and folksonomies to her students. Information communities and participatory culture facilitate how information and media literacy can be taught through their incorporation of many and diverse resources. Toward demonstrating the significance of information literacy, information professionals should “challenge the canon” as it were, in their provision of materials on various topics – that is, community-based resources on a subject can be just as (if not more) informative and useful in one’s research and further, the existence of said resources makes the case for the importance and benefit of information communities and participatory culture in our ever-expanding information sphere.
References:
Carr, N. (2011). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Fisher, K., & Durrance, J. (2003). Information communities. In K. Christensen, & D. Levinson (Eds.), Encyclopedia of community: From the village to the virtual world. (pp. 658-661). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.
Flanagin, A. J., Hocevar, K., & Samahito, S. (2014). Connecting with the user-generated web: How group identification impacts online information sharing and evaluation. Information, Communication & Society, 17(6), 683-694.
Hellekson, Karen. (2015). Making use of: The gift, commerce, and fans. Cinema Journal, 54(3), 125-131. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2015.0017
Jenkins, H., Ito, M., and boyd, d. (2016). Participatory culture in a networked era. Malden, MA: Polity Press
Morris, W. and Wortham, J. (2017, May 4). Still Processing. [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/magazine/from-uber-to-feud-how-ruthlessness-rules-the-day.html
[Originally published 05/16/17 @ SJSU iSchool blog, Heteroglossia]
Emily Moss - Electronic Portfolio 