A SUBTLE DIFFERENCE

From “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” (PDF) by Henry Jenkins for the MacArthur Foundation. Link courtesy of Sivacracy.

Rather than dealing with each technology in isolation, we would do better to take an ecological approach, thinking about the interrelationship among all of these different communication technologies, the cultural communities that grow up around them, and the activities they support. Media systems consist of communication technologies and the social, cultural, legal, political, and economic institutions, practices, and protocols that shape and surround them (Gitelman, 1999).The same task can be performed with a range of different technologies, and the same technology can be deployed toward a variety of different ends. Some tasks may be easier with some technologies than with others, and thus the introduction of a new technology may inspire certain uses. Yet, these activities become widespread only if the culture also supports them, if they fill recurring needs at a particular historical juncture. It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.

That is why we focus in this paper on the concept of participatory cultures rather than on interactive technologies. Interactivity (H. Jenkins, 2006a) is a property of the technology, while participation is a property of culture. Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways. A focus on expanding access to new technologies carries us only so far if we do not also foster the skills and cultural knowledge necessary to deploy those tools toward our own ends.

We are using participation as a term that cuts across educational practices, creative processes, community life, and democratic citizenship.Our goals should be to encourage youth to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical frameworks, and self-confidence needed to be full participants in contemporary culture.

I’m still chugging through the paper, but there seems to be a lot of interesting analysis of various Pew studies. For instance, I learned that girls aged 15-17 are more likely than their male counterparts to participate in online social activities.

But this methodological passage demands commentary. I think the terminology here is appropriate, though perhaps philosophically unsatisfying. Vocabulary aside, I think the terms are misused here, and I’d like to clarify the proper use of these terms to bring to light a central aspect of my own project. I’m sure this is mostly irrelevant to Jenkins’ paper, but I think that in the long run the theoretical framework I present here will be more satisfying overall.

I’d rather not say that participation is a property of culture. Participation defines the relationship between the members of a culture and the ongoing projects within that culture. Take Wikipedia: the contributors, moderators, and editors are all participating in the wiki culture. The culture in turn imposes top-down constraints on the modes of participation from its members, in the form of hard and fast rules, working guidelines, and implicit conventions. In the case of Wikipedia, most of the rules also derive from user consensus, so the top-down constraints themselves are the product of yet another ongoing project within the culture. It is often said that the members of such a project form a community, but the culture is the product of its participants, which may be a proper subset of a larger community. In other words, community membership is not sufficient for being a participant. You must actually contribute to the culture to be a participant. This harmonizes with some of the statistical motivation behind this paper- that 57% of teens who use the internet are ‘media creators’. The rest are surely part of the Internet community, but have not take up the role of participants within that community.

For the sake of whats to come, I’ll define collaboration as the product resulting from two or more participants to the same project within a culture. Two participants in a culture may or may not be collaborating, depending on which projects they are contributing to. Collaboration is a fuzzy term that I won’t try to make more explicit here, but I think its useful for what follows.

Interactivity is not a property of technology. I just ordered Jenkins’ 2006 book to see exactly what he means by this, but at first blush his definition is too neat. Interactivity defines the relationship between two or more participants. It describes the ways that the participants interact with each other. In particular, interactivity describes the resources each participant has for collaboration with other participants, who may or may not have unique interactive resources. I interact with you (the reader) through language, and interaction is more or less successful because your cognitive resources can make use of the language. I interact with my computer by pressing buttons on my keyboard and mouse, which it can likewise interpret in order to respond appropriately. I interact with Wikipedia through its graphical user interface and the wiki architecture, which I use to format my contributions in order to conform with the cultural standards.

Notice that these definitions preserve the distinction between participation and interactivity. Interactivity alone is insufficient for developing a culture, because interactivity alone does nothing to develop any project. Understanding the interactions between myself and another participant does nothing on its own to contribute to any culture. However, the interactive resources must be understood to some degree for any participation or collaboration to occur. Participation, in other words, depends on interactivity. This not only preserves the distinction, but it also maintains the implicit relationship between participation and interaction as Jenkins uses it above.

However, Jenkins describes this distinction in terms of technology, and I think thats unfortunate. If we see this distinction as grounded in the difference between participants in a culture vs interactions with technology, certain consequences immediately follow.

As anyone who reads this blog will have already anticipated, my main objection is that this view forces us to reject the possibility that the technology itself can participate in the culture. More importantly, it moves us toward thinking that the technology is in a certain sense independent of the culture. To repeat from above: “It matters what tools are available to a culture, but it matters more what that culture chooses to do with those tools.” On Jenkins’ view, the tools are somewhat secondary to the real interesting question of participation, since the technology itself underdetermines what can can be done with the technology, and more importantly, a variety of different technologies can perform the same (or very similar) cultural functions.

Of course Jenkins is right about this, and he draws the relatively weak conclusion that the technology should not be the focus of research into participatory culture. But this weak conclusion, to which I have no objections, engenders the stronger terminological distinction that rules out the possibility of machine participation at the outset. I think this swings too far in the opposite direction. I have often claimed that Wikipedia as a system is partly responsible for the resulting culture- that the system itself partly contributes to the overall product. If, as Jenkins would have it, Wikipedia is simply a tool for my own unique (that is, noncollaborative) contributions to the culture, then we have left Wikipedia’s role in the culture unexplained. Wikipedia may not play a determining role in the culture, and so a focus on Wikipedia as an interactive system alone is insufficient for explaining the resulting culture. But Wikipedia does play a role, and so deserves at least some recognition as a social participant. Treating the system as a mere tool does a disservice to its contributions to the resulting cultural phenomenon.

If that’s right, then the distinction Jenkins wants cannot be drawn in terms of technology. Wikipedia the system is surely a piece of technology, but its in virtue of what that technology does with the contributions of others that it comes to play a significant cultural role. If we are to understand these cultural phenomena, we must understand technology as more than just a tool. We must understand it as a participant in our culture.

Now, I imagine this will get lots of objections. One possible objection runs as follows: technology is best understood in terms of its interactivity. Cultural interactions assume some sort of technological mediation, whether it is spoken language or sophisticated systems on the Net. At most, technology is always a collaborator; but that makes the definition redundant. However, genuine (human) participants need not collaborate in order to contribute to the culture; their unique creative expression is facilitated by the technology, but derives from sources independent of it.

This leads into a very old debate I’ve had before, so I’ll close by quoting Squarepusher one more time.

As is commonly percieved, the relationship between a human operator and a machine is such that the machine is a tool, an instrument of the composers desires. Implicit in this, and generally unquestioned until recently, is the sovereignty of the composer. What is now becoming clear is that the composer is as much a tool as the tool itself, or even a tool for the machine to manifest its desires. I do not mean this in the sense that machines are in possesion of a mind capable of subtly directing human behaviour, but in the sense that the attributes of the machine are just as prominent an influence in the resulting artefact as the user is; through his work, a human operator brings as much about the machine to light as he does about himself.