Comments for Part.Public.Part.Lab http://recursivepublic.net in the nature of participation Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:26:02 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Comment on Publications by Interprete » Birds of a Feather for Academics (aka how to study digital media) http://recursivepublic.net/publications/#comment-89 Interprete » Birds of a Feather for Academics (aka how to study digital media) Sun, 18 Sep 2011 15:26:02 +0000 http://recursivepublic.net/#comment-89 [...] problem is summed up rather nicely by a bunch of folks who published an article by the name of Birds of the Internet that every scholar interested in digital media should [...] [...] problem is summed up rather nicely by a bunch of folks who published an article by the name of Birds of the Internet that every scholar interested in digital media should [...]

]]> Comment on Three or Four Theories of Networked Activism by ckelty http://recursivepublic.net/2011/07/three-or-four-theories-of-networked-activism/#comment-72 ckelty Tue, 05 Jul 2011 15:59:04 +0000 http://recursivepublic.net/?p=241#comment-72 I'm not convinced. By the book that is, not your post. Sounds to me like little more than the proliferation of more typological categories rather than useful distinctions. To the extent that there is distinction-making going on here, it is in attempting to distinguish different "types of networks": of users, self-organized of users, institution-driven of users, and of institutions. You are right that this does look like what we call FSEs and OPs, but only if we reduce what we did to the proposing of typological categories. Remember that the point was to insist that the entities of interest to us are "FSE-OP dyads" FSEs alone devolved into corporations, where OPs alone devolve into social movements, or other informal groupings. It's when there is a relationship between the two that we begin our investigations: so a corporation and its consumers are implicitly an FSE-OP dyad just as much as MoveOn.org and its legions or Blizzard and its WoW Hordes. Further, the point of that "dyad"-ification was to temporalize the process--to ask how these dyads form and change and how that is related to other questions: what kinds of resources do they produce and for whom, how is related technically and politically to the enabling technologies etc. Sounds to me like this book simply can't do that because it's aim is to be a handbook ("Here is the first ever roadmap to victory!" it says on the Amazon site.) not a serious investigation of the political economy of journalism. But alas... I’m not convinced. By the book that is, not your post. Sounds to me like little more than the proliferation of more typological categories rather than useful distinctions. To the extent that there is distinction-making going on here, it is in attempting to distinguish different “types of networks”: of users, self-organized of users, institution-driven of users, and of institutions. You are right that this does look like what we call FSEs and OPs, but only if we reduce what we did to the proposing of typological categories.

Remember that the point was to insist that the entities of interest to us are “FSE-OP dyads” FSEs alone devolved into corporations, where OPs alone devolve into social movements, or other informal groupings. It’s when there is a relationship between the two that we begin our investigations: so a corporation and its consumers are implicitly an FSE-OP dyad just as much as MoveOn.org and its legions or Blizzard and its WoW Hordes.

Further, the point of that “dyad”-ification was to temporalize the process–to ask how these dyads form and change and how that is related to other questions: what kinds of resources do they produce and for whom, how is related technically and politically to the enabling technologies etc.

Sounds to me like this book simply can’t do that because it’s aim is to be a handbook (“Here is the first ever roadmap to victory!” it says on the Amazon site.) not a serious investigation of the political economy of journalism. But alas…

]]> Comment on Resources and Partnerships in Participatory Video by ckelty http://recursivepublic.net/2011/05/resources-and-partnerships-in-participatory-video/#comment-61 ckelty Tue, 24 May 2011 22:46:55 +0000 http://recursivepublic.net/?p=207#comment-61 Allow me to try to put the problem more schematically. The reason for talking about resources grew out of a concern with *collaborative* participatory projects, like FOSS or Wikipedia. The sense of collaboration was agnostic with respect to the quality of the experience, but the basic fact was that there was some thing (a "resource") that resulted as the result of *many people working in parallel*. Our description of this resource divided into (1) tasks and goals--what tasks were needed to create the resource and what were the goals that framed and gave meaning to the resource; and (2) the granularity and nature of the task (voluntary/involuntary). So what we probably should have called it was something like "the resource that results from the action of many coordinated people." So what you are describing raises two (at least) distinct questions: 1) resource for whom? This a question that invokes the perspectival aspect. In The Facebook, there are different resources for users vs. advertisers. For users, Facebook the FSE creates an OP through it's platform, and the actions of OP Members create a social graph with rich labels (i.e. status updates and likes and news feeds and so forth). A user finds this valuable because he or she gets it for free and could not have created it on his/her own. For Advertisers, however, the resource is the users, and by implication the OP they constitute with Facebook's help. Facebook essentially programs the possibilities of the social graph to meet the desires of advertisers halfway. Advertisers see eyeballs, users see each other, Facebook sees money. Is "resource" the right word for all three of these things? I don't know. But it is clearer to me now that many collaborative participatory endeavors are producing more than one resource, or even more precisely a resource with more than one mode of valuation. 2) what exactly is the resource in the case of citizen journalism. Or, what is collaboratively produced by the OP with the help/guidance of the FSE? News? Feedback? A public sphere? Eyeballs? I can't tell from the above whether you have decided on this or not... and given the perspectival issue, it probably needs to be pulled apart and more precisely described. That said, the "partnership" issue is indeed not unrelated, but it might confuse things too much to jump directly to that level. What I think we are fumbling for here is a way to describe a kind of "arbitrage aesthetic" at work, especially in heavily capitalized industries like news or social media. The most successful FSE/OP dyads are those that can use an OP to create a resource that is valuable (and free) along one axis (FSE-OP) and valuable and monetized along a separate axis (FSE-Partners/Clients). This however, basically makes it sound like the FSE exploits the OP by selling its labor to another entity. Perhaps. But that simply suggests that all such relationships are unjust, rather than designing a concept that allows us to see and distinguish more/less just relationships. Allow me to try to put the problem more schematically. The reason for talking about resources grew out of a concern with *collaborative* participatory projects, like FOSS or Wikipedia. The sense of collaboration was agnostic with respect to the quality of the experience, but the basic fact was that there was some thing (a “resource”) that resulted as the result of *many people working in parallel*. Our description of this resource divided into (1) tasks and goals–what tasks were needed to create the resource and what were the goals that framed and gave meaning to the resource; and (2) the granularity and nature of the task (voluntary/involuntary). So what we probably should have called it was something like “the resource that results from the action of many coordinated people.”

So what you are describing raises two (at least) distinct questions:

1) resource for whom? This a question that invokes the perspectival aspect. In The Facebook, there are different resources for users vs. advertisers. For users, Facebook the FSE creates an OP through it’s platform, and the actions of OP Members create a social graph with rich labels (i.e. status updates and likes and news feeds and so forth). A user finds this valuable because he or she gets it for free and could not have created it on his/her own. For Advertisers, however, the resource is the users, and by implication the OP they constitute with Facebook’s help. Facebook essentially programs the possibilities of the social graph to meet the desires of advertisers halfway. Advertisers see eyeballs, users see each other, Facebook sees money. Is “resource” the right word for all three of these things? I don’t know. But it is clearer to me now that many collaborative participatory endeavors are producing more than one resource, or even more precisely a resource with more than one mode of valuation.

2) what exactly is the resource in the case of citizen journalism. Or, what is collaboratively produced by the OP with the help/guidance of the FSE? News? Feedback? A public sphere? Eyeballs? I can’t tell from the above whether you have decided on this or not… and given the perspectival issue, it probably needs to be pulled apart and more precisely described.

That said, the “partnership” issue is indeed not unrelated, but it might confuse things too much to jump directly to that level. What I think we are fumbling for here is a way to describe a kind of “arbitrage aesthetic” at work, especially in heavily capitalized industries like news or social media. The most successful FSE/OP dyads are those that can use an OP to create a resource that is valuable (and free) along one axis (FSE-OP) and valuable and monetized along a separate axis (FSE-Partners/Clients). This however, basically makes it sound like the FSE exploits the OP by selling its labor to another entity. Perhaps. But that simply suggests that all such relationships are unjust, rather than designing a concept that allows us to see and distinguish more/less just relationships.

]]>