Week 9 [Reading Notes] - The Practice of Everyday Media Life
Reading 1:
Manovich, Lev (2008) 'The practice of everyday (media) life', in Lovink, Geert and Niederer Sabine (eds) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 33-44.
From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production
Today ‘social media’ is often discussed in relation to another term ‘Web 2.0’ (coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004). While Web 2.0 refers to a number of different technical, economical, and social developments, most of them are directly relevant to our question: besides social media, other important concepts are user-generated content, long tail, network as platform, folkson- omy, syndication, and mass collaboration.
p. 33
if the Web was mostly a publishing medium in the ‘90s, since the year 2000 it has increasingly become a communication medium. Communication between users, including con- versations around user-generated content, take place through a variety of forms besides email: posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and tokens, votes, links, badges, photo, and video.
p. 33
According to 2007 statis- tics, only between 0.5 – 1.5 percent of the users of most popular social media sites (Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia) contributed their own content. Others remained consumers of the content produced by this small group. Does this imply that professionally produced content continues to dominate as the primary source from which people get their news and media? If by ‘content’ we mean typical twentieth century mass media - news, TV shows, narrative films and videos, computer games, literature, and music – then the answer is often in the affirmative.
p. 35
Today ‘social media’ is often discussed in relation to another term ‘Web 2.0’ (coined by Tim O’Reilly in 2004). While Web 2.0 refers to a number of different technical, economical, and social developments, most of them are directly relevant to our question: besides social media, other important concepts are user-generated content, long tail, network as platform, folkson- omy, syndication, and mass collaboration.
p. 33
if the Web was mostly a publishing medium in the ‘90s, since the year 2000 it has increasingly become a communication medium. Communication between users, including con- versations around user-generated content, take place through a variety of forms besides email: posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and tokens, votes, links, badges, photo, and video.
p. 33
According to 2007 statis- tics, only between 0.5 – 1.5 percent of the users of most popular social media sites (Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia) contributed their own content. Others remained consumers of the content produced by this small group. Does this imply that professionally produced content continues to dominate as the primary source from which people get their news and media? If by ‘content’ we mean typical twentieth century mass media - news, TV shows, narrative films and videos, computer games, literature, and music – then the answer is often in the affirmative.
p. 35
The Practice of Everyday Media Life: Tactics as Strategies
For different reasons, media, businesses, consumer electronics and web industries, and academics converge in celebrating content created and exchanged by users. In academic discussions, in particular, the disproportional attention given to certain genres such as ‘youth media’, ‘activist media’, ‘political mash-ups’ – which are indeed important but do not repre- sent the more typical usage of hundreds of millions of people.
p. 35
Indeed, if the twentieth century subjects were simply consuming the products of culture industry, 21st century prosumers and ‘pro-ams’ are passionately imitating it. That is, they now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.
p. 36
To help us analyse AMV culture, let’s put to work the categories set up by Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life. 14 De Certeau makes a distinction between ‘strategies’ used by institutions and power structures and ‘tactics’ used by modern subjects in their everyday life. The tactics are the ways in which individuals negotiate strategies that were set for them. For instance, to take one example discussed by de Certeau, a city’s lay- out, signage, driving and parking rules and official maps are strategies created by govern- mental and corporate interests. The ways an individual is moving through the city, taking shortcuts, wondering aimlessly, navigating through favourite routes and adopting others are tactics. In other words, an individual can’t physically reorganise the city but she can adopt itself to her needs by choosing how she moves through it. A tactic ‘expects to have to work on things in order to make them its own, or to make them ‘habitable’’. 15
p. 36/7
For different reasons, media, businesses, consumer electronics and web industries, and academics converge in celebrating content created and exchanged by users. In academic discussions, in particular, the disproportional attention given to certain genres such as ‘youth media’, ‘activist media’, ‘political mash-ups’ – which are indeed important but do not repre- sent the more typical usage of hundreds of millions of people.
p. 35
Indeed, if the twentieth century subjects were simply consuming the products of culture industry, 21st century prosumers and ‘pro-ams’ are passionately imitating it. That is, they now make their own cultural products that follow the templates established by the professionals and/or rely on professional content.
p. 36
To help us analyse AMV culture, let’s put to work the categories set up by Michel de Certeau in his 1980 book The Practice of Everyday Life. 14 De Certeau makes a distinction between ‘strategies’ used by institutions and power structures and ‘tactics’ used by modern subjects in their everyday life. The tactics are the ways in which individuals negotiate strategies that were set for them. For instance, to take one example discussed by de Certeau, a city’s lay- out, signage, driving and parking rules and official maps are strategies created by govern- mental and corporate interests. The ways an individual is moving through the city, taking shortcuts, wondering aimlessly, navigating through favourite routes and adopting others are tactics. In other words, an individual can’t physically reorganise the city but she can adopt itself to her needs by choosing how she moves through it. A tactic ‘expects to have to work on things in order to make them its own, or to make them ‘habitable’’. 15
p. 36/7
As De Certeau points out, in modern societies most of the objects which people use in their
everyday life are mass produced goods; these goods are the expressions of the strategies of
designers, producers, and marketers. People build their worlds and identities out of these
readily available objects by using different tactics: bricolage, assembly, customisation, and to use the term which was not a part of De Certeau’s vocabulary but which has become
important today – remix. For instance, people rarely wear every piece from one designer as
they appear in fashion shows: they usually mix and match different pieces from different
sources. They also wear clothing pieces in different ways than they were intended, and they
customise the clothes themselves through buttons, belts, and other accessories. The same
goes for the ways in which people decorate their living spaces, prepare meals, and in general
construct their lifestyles.
p. 37
p. 37
The Web 2.0 paradigm represents the most dramatic reconfiguration of the strategies/tactics
relationship to date. According to De Certeau’s original analysis, tactics do not necessary
result in objects or anything stable or permanent; ‘Unlike the strategy, it [the tactic] lacks the
centralised structure and permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a competitor
to some other entity... it renders its own activities an ‘unmappable’ form of subversion.’ 18
Since the 1980s, however, consumer and culture industries have started to systematically
turn every subculture (particularly every youth subculture) into a product. In short, the cultural tactics evolved by people were turned into strategies now sold to them. If you want
to ‘oppose the mainstream’, you now had plenty of lifestyles available with every subcutural aspect, from music and visual styles to clothes and slang - available for purchase.
p. 38
p. 38
What before was ephemeral, transient, umappable, and invisible become permanent, map-
pable, and viewable. Social media platforms give users unlimited space for storage and
plenty of tools to organize, promote, and broadcast their thoughts, opinions, behaviour, and
media to others. You can already directly stream video using your laptop or mobile phone,
and it is only a matter of time before constant broadcasting of one’s life becomes as common
as email.
p. 38
According to De Certeau 1980 analysis, strategy ‘is engaged in the work of systematizing, of imposing order... its ways are set. It cannot be expected to be capable of breaking up and regrouping easily, something which a tactical model does naturally.’ The strategies used by social media companies today, however, are the exact opposite: they are focused on flexibility and constant chance. Of course, all businesses in the age of globalisation had to become adaptable, mobile, flexible, and ready to break up and regroup – but they rarely achieve the flexibility of web companies and developers. 20
p. 39
p. 38
According to De Certeau 1980 analysis, strategy ‘is engaged in the work of systematizing, of imposing order... its ways are set. It cannot be expected to be capable of breaking up and regrouping easily, something which a tactical model does naturally.’ The strategies used by social media companies today, however, are the exact opposite: they are focused on flexibility and constant chance. Of course, all businesses in the age of globalisation had to become adaptable, mobile, flexible, and ready to break up and regroup – but they rarely achieve the flexibility of web companies and developers. 20
p. 39
Media Conversations
Often ‘content’, ‘news’ or ‘media’ become tokens used to initiate or maintain a conversation. Their original meaning is less important than their function as such tokens. I am thinking here of people posting pictures on each other’s pages on MySpace, or exchanging gifts on Facebook. What kind of gift you get is less important than the act of getting a gift, or posting a comment or a picture. Although it may appear that such conversation simply foreground Roman Jakobson’s emotive and/or phatic communication functions 24 described already in 1960, it is also possible that a detailed analysis will show them as being a genuinely new phenomenon.
p. 40
Often ‘content’, ‘news’ or ‘media’ become tokens used to initiate or maintain a conversation. Their original meaning is less important than their function as such tokens. I am thinking here of people posting pictures on each other’s pages on MySpace, or exchanging gifts on Facebook. What kind of gift you get is less important than the act of getting a gift, or posting a comment or a picture. Although it may appear that such conversation simply foreground Roman Jakobson’s emotive and/or phatic communication functions 24 described already in 1960, it is also possible that a detailed analysis will show them as being a genuinely new phenomenon.
p. 40
Consider another very interesting new communication situation: a conversation around a
piece of media – for instance comments added by users below somebody’s Flickr photo or
YouTube video which do not only respond to the media object but also to each other. 26 The
same is often true to comments, reviews and discussions on the web in general – the object
in question can be software, a film, a previous post, and so on. Of course, such conversation
structures are also common in real life: think of a typical discussion in a graduate film studies class, for instance. However, web infrastructure and software allow such conversations
to become distributed in space and time – people can respond to each other regardless of
their location and the conversation can in theory go on indefinitely. The web is, in effect,
millions of such conversations taking place at the same time. These conversations are quite
common: according to the 2007 report by Pew internet & American Life Project, among U.S.
teens who post photos online, 89 percent reported that people comment on these photos at
least some of the time.
p. 41
p. 41
Is Art After Web 2.0 still possible?
Have professional artists (including video and media artists) benefited from the explosion of media content being produced online by regular users? Have they benefited from the easily availability of media publishing platforms? Does the fact that we now have platforms on which anybody can publish their videos and gain revenue from the downloads mean that artists have a new distribution channel for their works? Or is the world of social media – hundreds of millions of people daily uploading and downloading video, audio, and photographs; media objects produced by unknown authors being downloaded millions of times; media objects fluently and rapidly moving between users, devices, contexts, and networks – making professional art irrelevant? In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratisation of media production and access?
p. 42
Have professional artists (including video and media artists) benefited from the explosion of media content being produced online by regular users? Have they benefited from the easily availability of media publishing platforms? Does the fact that we now have platforms on which anybody can publish their videos and gain revenue from the downloads mean that artists have a new distribution channel for their works? Or is the world of social media – hundreds of millions of people daily uploading and downloading video, audio, and photographs; media objects produced by unknown authors being downloaded millions of times; media objects fluently and rapidly moving between users, devices, contexts, and networks – making professional art irrelevant? In short, while modern artists have so far successfully met the challenges of each generation of media technologies, can professional art survive extreme democratisation of media production and access?
p. 42
In my observations, while some of these projects do come
from prototypical ‘amateurs’, ‘prosumers’ and ‘pro-ams’, most are done by young professionals, or professionals in training. The emergence of the Web as the new standard communication medium in the 1990s means that today in most cultural fields, every professional
or company, regardless of its size and geographical location, has a web presence and posts
new works online. Perhaps most importantly, young design students can now put their works
before a global audience, see what others are doing, and together develop new tools (a good
example being the processing.org community).
p. 43
perhaps the most conceptual innovation has been occurring in the development of the Web 2.0 medium itself. I am thinking about all the new creative software tools - web mash- ups, Firefox plug-ins, Facebook applications, etc. – coming out from both large companies such as Google and from individual developers. Therefore, the true challenge posed to art by social media may not be all the excellent cultural works produced by students and non- professionals which are now easily available online – although I do think these are also important. The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.
p. 43
___________________________________________________________
Reading 2:
Burgess, Jean (2008) 'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?' Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. In: UNSPECIFIED, (ed) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101- 109.
Viral marketing‘, for example, is the attempt to exploit the network effects of word-of-mouth and Internet communication in order to induce a massive number of users to pass on marketing messages‘ and brand information voluntarily‘.
p. 101
The contested field of memetics‘ is the best-known, but by no means only, strand of this kind of thinking, which began with Richard Dawkins‘ proposal in The Selfish Gene of the meme‘ as the corresponding cultural unit to the biological gene. Similar to the scientific usage in meaning if not analytical precision, in contemporary popular usage an internet meme‘ is a faddish joke or practice (like a humorous way of captioning cat pictures) that becomes widely imitated. In this popular understanding, internet memes‘ do appear to spread and replicate virally‘ – that is, they appear to spread and mutate via distributed networks in ways that the original producers cannot determine and control.
p. 101
Dan Ackerman Greenberg runs an astroturfing‘ company, employing covert strategies to turn apparently authentic (but actually commercial) videos viral‘. In his now-notorious post on the technology business weblog Techrunch, Greenberg defines viral videos as videos that have travelled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views‘.
p. 102
In considering what these new social dynamics of engagement with media might mean for thinking about cultural production and consumption, Henry Jenkins argues that value is primarily generated via spreadability‘. Through reuse, reworking and redistribution, spreadable media content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values.‘ By this logic any particular video produces cultural value to the extent that it acts as a hub for further creative activity by a wide range of participants in this social network – that is, the extent to which it contributes to what Jonathan Zittrain might call YouTube‘s generative‘ qualities.
p. 102
Burgess and Green‘s recent content survey of YouTube drew on a sample of 4,300 highly popular videos to compare user-created and traditional media content across four measures of popularity. 9 From this data it is possible to distil a super popular top ten‘10 – videos with all-time views in the millions (even the tens of millions), and comments and video responses in the thousands.
p. 103
Successful viral‘ videos have textual hooks or key signifiers, which cannot be identified in advance (even, or especially, by their authors) but only after the fact, when they have been become prominent via being selected a number of times for repetition. After becoming recognisable via this process of repetition, these key signifiers are then available for plugging into other forms, texts and intertexts—they become part of the available cultural repertoire of vernacular video. Because they produce new possibilities, even apparently pointless, nihilistic and playful forms of creativity are contributions to knowledge. This is true even if (as in the case of the Chocolate Rain‘ example) they work mostly to make a joke out of someone.
p. 105/6
In contrast, internet 'meme‘ based viral videos rely on inside jokes that are spoiled by going mainstream, and therefore quickly reach a tipping point and tend to have relatively short shelf lives. A good example is the Rickrolling‘ phenomenon. Rickrolling – posting a misleading link that leads to Rick Astley‘s 1988 hit music video ‗Never Gonna Give You Up‘, ‗forcing‘ the unsuspecting viewer to set through yet another viewing of the irritating one-hit wonder – gained particular prominence online and in the popular press throughout 2008. And it was widely reported by those in the know that once the Rickrolling meme had made the pages of the mainstream press, it was over.
p. 108
Without stretching an overstretched metaphor too far then, the dynamics of viral video could be understood as involving the spread of replicable ideas (expressed in performances and practices), via the processes of vernacular creativity, among communities connected through social networks. Rethinking viral video‘ in this way may contribute to a better understanding of how the cultures emerging around usercreated video – imitative, playful and often ordinary – are shaping the dynamics of contemporary popular culture.
p. 108
p. 43
perhaps the most conceptual innovation has been occurring in the development of the Web 2.0 medium itself. I am thinking about all the new creative software tools - web mash- ups, Firefox plug-ins, Facebook applications, etc. – coming out from both large companies such as Google and from individual developers. Therefore, the true challenge posed to art by social media may not be all the excellent cultural works produced by students and non- professionals which are now easily available online – although I do think these are also important. The real challenge may lie in the dynamics of Web 2.0 culture – its constant innovation, its energy, and its unpredictability.
p. 43
___________________________________________________________
Reading 2:
Burgess, Jean (2008) 'All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?' Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture. In: UNSPECIFIED, (ed) Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, pp. 101- 109.
Viral marketing‘, for example, is the attempt to exploit the network effects of word-of-mouth and Internet communication in order to induce a massive number of users to pass on marketing messages‘ and brand information voluntarily‘.
p. 101
The contested field of memetics‘ is the best-known, but by no means only, strand of this kind of thinking, which began with Richard Dawkins‘ proposal in The Selfish Gene of the meme‘ as the corresponding cultural unit to the biological gene. Similar to the scientific usage in meaning if not analytical precision, in contemporary popular usage an internet meme‘ is a faddish joke or practice (like a humorous way of captioning cat pictures) that becomes widely imitated. In this popular understanding, internet memes‘ do appear to spread and replicate virally‘ – that is, they appear to spread and mutate via distributed networks in ways that the original producers cannot determine and control.
p. 101
Dan Ackerman Greenberg runs an astroturfing‘ company, employing covert strategies to turn apparently authentic (but actually commercial) videos viral‘. In his now-notorious post on the technology business weblog Techrunch, Greenberg defines viral videos as videos that have travelled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. – videos with millions and millions of views‘.
p. 102
In considering what these new social dynamics of engagement with media might mean for thinking about cultural production and consumption, Henry Jenkins argues that value is primarily generated via spreadability‘. Through reuse, reworking and redistribution, spreadable media content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values.‘ By this logic any particular video produces cultural value to the extent that it acts as a hub for further creative activity by a wide range of participants in this social network – that is, the extent to which it contributes to what Jonathan Zittrain might call YouTube‘s generative‘ qualities.
p. 102
Burgess and Green‘s recent content survey of YouTube drew on a sample of 4,300 highly popular videos to compare user-created and traditional media content across four measures of popularity. 9 From this data it is possible to distil a super popular top ten‘10 – videos with all-time views in the millions (even the tens of millions), and comments and video responses in the thousands.
p. 103
Successful viral‘ videos have textual hooks or key signifiers, which cannot be identified in advance (even, or especially, by their authors) but only after the fact, when they have been become prominent via being selected a number of times for repetition. After becoming recognisable via this process of repetition, these key signifiers are then available for plugging into other forms, texts and intertexts—they become part of the available cultural repertoire of vernacular video. Because they produce new possibilities, even apparently pointless, nihilistic and playful forms of creativity are contributions to knowledge. This is true even if (as in the case of the Chocolate Rain‘ example) they work mostly to make a joke out of someone.
p. 105/6
In contrast, internet 'meme‘ based viral videos rely on inside jokes that are spoiled by going mainstream, and therefore quickly reach a tipping point and tend to have relatively short shelf lives. A good example is the Rickrolling‘ phenomenon. Rickrolling – posting a misleading link that leads to Rick Astley‘s 1988 hit music video ‗Never Gonna Give You Up‘, ‗forcing‘ the unsuspecting viewer to set through yet another viewing of the irritating one-hit wonder – gained particular prominence online and in the popular press throughout 2008. And it was widely reported by those in the know that once the Rickrolling meme had made the pages of the mainstream press, it was over.
p. 108
Without stretching an overstretched metaphor too far then, the dynamics of viral video could be understood as involving the spread of replicable ideas (expressed in performances and practices), via the processes of vernacular creativity, among communities connected through social networks. Rethinking viral video‘ in this way may contribute to a better understanding of how the cultures emerging around usercreated video – imitative, playful and often ordinary – are shaping the dynamics of contemporary popular culture.
p. 108
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