Livingstone (2004) proposes that most discussions of new media literacy are characterised by historically unresolved tensions between 'critical' or 'enlightenment' views of literacy - polarised philosophical positions that see literacy as a normative and exclusionary construction on the one hand (the 'critical' view); or as an aid to progress and equality that we should aim to extend to all people on the other (the 'enlightenment' view). In this paper, I begin from a position that critically evaluates and balances these two available approaches. Drawing on cultural and media studies perspectives and methodological concerns, the paper historicises and analyses the emerging patterns of cultural competencies and cultural value that work to construct new media literacy for cultural participation in the Flickr photosharing network

Burgess, Jean

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Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network

Queensland University of Technology ePrints Archive

1Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New MediaLiteracy: Photography and the Flickr NetworkJean BurgessCreative Industries FacultyQueensland University of Technologyhttp://creativitymachine.netje.burgess@qut.edu.auPaper to be presented at AoIR 7.0: Internet Convergences, Brisbane, Australia, 27-30September 2006.This paper is based on one of the major case studies for my doctoral study, which istitled Vernacular Creativity and New Media and which seeks to explore therelationships between everyday creative practice, new media technologies, andcultural citizenship. When I began planning this study in 2003, the topic of amateurcontent creation in new media contexts, while timely, seemed marginal to mainstreamindustry and policy concerns. Even then though, drawing on highly problematic andhyperbolic ‘natural’ evolution discourses, we were hearing about a ‘tidal wave’, or a‘flood’ of ‘user-generated content’ that appeared to emerge transparently as a directresult of more powerful, accessible technologies enabling the innately creative natureof human beings to flower.By now, however, I think it is clear there has genuinely been a participatory turn, notonly across web business models, but also in some sectors of government, publicservice broadcasting and civil society.In some sectors, user-led content creation is seen as a driver of technological take-upby consumer markets; in others, the fragmentation of a common cultural public spheremeans that it is an imperative for governments and public service broadcasters to findways to integrate active community participation as a demonstration of and as ameans to civic engagement, however imperfectly that is actually happening.But if it is true that the figure of the active citizen and the creative consumer are insome sense one and the same thing – that is, that active citizenship and consumer co-creation are no longer separate domains of practice but are caught up in a process ofconvergence - then new media literacy gains a significance that radically exceeds itstraditional remit in the domain of formal education and training. So, proceeding froma fundamental concern with cultural inclusion, what I want to explore here is the wayin which the cultural politics of literacy are bound up with the everyday practice ofuser-led content creation.[slide: theories of new media literacy]I acknowledge that literacy is among the most contested, multivalent and possiblyover-used concepts in our repertoire. Rather than engaging in any depth with those2issues here, I will very briefly make four broad points that indicate my perspective inrelation to the surrounding debates.1. First, Literacy is a social constructionIt is not a ‘thing’ that can be possessed by individual subjects, but a locally andhistorically specific, socially constructed field of negotiation. That said, it is possibleto talk about the competencies of individual users, as I will in this paper.2. Following on from that, there is not one thing called literacy, but multipleliteracies: visual literacies, creative literacies, network literacies, and so on.3. Third, I won’t really be talking about ‘formal’ literacy, instead focusing oninformal, or what I call vernacular literacy.1This concept is especially relevant atmoments of media transition such as the present one because conventions and normstend to be constructed and stabilised in informal learning contexts long before theyare adopted and instrumentalised by the institutions of formal education, as we haveseen in the case of blogging, for example.4. Finally, I take a position on technology that, without being technologicallydeterministic, holds that technologies at least to some extent teach us what they arefor, and it’s this techno-social construction of literacy that I will focus on most in thispaper.One of the most important dynamics of this is the tension between what I call‘usability and hackability’ – what I mean by that will hopefully become clear as I goalong. In the process of technological stabilisation and mass adoption, I would argue,it is always the case that some balance between usability and hackability is reachedand becomes stabilised.We can see how this played out historically in the case of the domestication ofphotography, beginning with the so-called ‘Kodak moment’.[slide: 1stKodak camera ad]1Just as it is possible to speak of ‘vernacular creativity’ as a field of cultural production thatis structurally outside of, but nevertheless references and is referenced by the artworlds andcommercial media, it is also possible to talk about ‘vernacular literacy’. There are two levelsto this concept which follow from the duality of literacy as both a field of contestation and asite of practice, and which I outlined above in the more general discussion of the culturalpolitics of new media literacy.First, it is possible to talk about ‘vernacular literacies’ as part of the practice of everydaycontent creation. That is, the range of everyday competencies that constitute what people canalready ‘do’ creatively, and the local, social contexts in which those practices are embedded.Secondly, these sites of vernacular creativity are also the location for vernacular theories (cf.McLaughlin) of literacy – where transpositions of ‘official’ debates around literacy areworked through at a local level, especially at moments of perceived technological ‘newness’,such as with digital culture.3Eastman’s flexible film technologies, introduced in 1888, made easy-to-use camerasavailable to a huge market - a market which Eastman deliberately set out to create,not only supplying photographic film and cameras, but also establishing a network ofdeveloping centres, thereby gaining a near monopoly over almost the entireproduction process of photographic images. It was at this point that Kodak’s slogan,‘You press the button, we do the rest’ came to define vernacular photography. Thecamera itself became a black box, and the art and science of developing and printingbecame a mystery to the majority of users.Photography itself was transformed from an expert, inaccessible system to anacessible but externally controlled one: photography as a technology was usable, butnot hackable.[slide: Other Kodak ads]At the same time, through its advertising and ‘how-to’ manuals, it is no exaggerationto say that Kodak largely came to dominate the very definition of vernacularphotography, and therefore vernacular photographic literacy for the United States andbeyond. Kodak taught us not only that anyone could and should take photographs,but also where and when and how to take photographs, in relation to shiftingideological constructions of modernity, leisure, domesticity and of course, the family.[slide: Flickr homepage]If amateur photography in the twentieth century was defined by Kodak’s slogan, ‘Youpush the button, we do the rest’, then the slogan of Web 2.0 models of amateurcreativity such as Flickr’s might be, ‘Here are the buttons, you do the rest.’ Where theKodak system disciplined photography, Flickr is characterized by soft controls anddeep structures that allow an enormous amount of freedom, and the social andaesthetic conventions of practice are softly shaped, rather than overtly ‘taught’ by thearchitecture.At the same time, the affordances of Flickr need to be discovered and mastered byindividual users. So, at the front end, and to some extent the back end as well, Flickris hackable, but to what extent and for whom is it usable? I would argue that in termsof network literacies, the collective practices of Flickr users work to construct normsthat are absolutely not obvious to novice users, precisely because they are not ‘taught’top-down. Rather, they are learned through everyday practice and become intuitive.[slide: Pizzodesevo example]Pizzodesevo’, now resettled in Italy but who had been resident in Australia in the1950s and 1960s, began posting scans of slides taken in 1959-1960 to the Brisbanitesgroup2. One Brisbane-based member of the Brisbanite group began going outspecifically to capture images of the same locations as in the old slides, and uploadingthem to his own Flickr photostreams. ‘Pizzodesevo’ then combined some of thesenew images side by side with the old ones in a series of diptyches that reveal the often2See http://www.flickr.com/photos/globetrotter1937/1953041374dramatic changes to the Brisbane cityscape, which in turn led to more discussionabout the ways in which the city has changed, blended with nostalgia for a past thatmany of the discussants had never encountered themselves.This is a deliberately unspectacular and routine example of some of the ways in whicha rich engagement with the affordances of Flickr has unintended consequences that Iwould argue constitute the practice of everyday cultural citizenship. But what isnecessary in order to make this happen?• At a bare minimum, how to scan photographs or operate a camera to take newones – in this, most of us are already very well schooled by the consumerelectronics market.• Awareness of the existence of Flickr and at least some of its possible uses.• How to sign up and upload images• Tagging• Finding appropriate groups• Commenting and responding to comments• The assumption of the value of ‘speaking’ to the imagined community ofinterest, to an imagined world ‘out there’.• An understanding of the network as a conversation – the image as socialobject.• Understanding of CC licensing and the ethics of merging two photographs,one of which is not your own.• On behalf of the contemporary Brisbane user – the idea of collaboration andplayfulness behind going out to take that image.[slide: emerging norms]Norms of new media literacy indistinguishable from emerging norms of everydaycreative and social practice:• Continuous, active participation in content creation• Networked individualism, as a normative mode of social organisation &the network as conversation, as a normative mode of creative practice• Iterative, accretive media use• Pro-active discovery, tweaking and control – in other words, hacking.Who are the users most likely to master the competencies associated with thesenorms, and so to contribute to the collaborative construction of new media literacy inthe context of Flickr, and by extension, other emerging sites of cultural participation?The following table is a demographic summary of the seven Brisbane-based Flickrusers with whom I chose to undertake extended field interviews for this project,following on from two and a half years of ‘online’ participant observation andattendance at offline ‘meetups’.[slide: table]5Table 1Name Gender Age Location Education OccupationCyron M 30 Suburban Tertiary (incomplete) Online customersupportDavid M 32 Semi-rural Tertiary (incomplete) IT network securityLouise F 44 Suburban Tertiary (BachelorsDegree)Nursing, medicalresearchMelanie F 47 OutersuburbanSecondary(incomplete)Web design (self-employed)Mr MagooICUM 26 Suburban Secondary(incomplete)Computer systemsengineerShanrosen F 55 Suburban Tertiary (BachelorsDegree)Part-time studentYinyang M 39 Suburban Tertiary (incomplete) IT contractorThe interviewees had not all been particularly interested or skilled in photographywhen they joined Flickr, but with the exception of Louise who learned to use acomputer when she returned to formal study after having children, all had beenextremely active computer and internet users for most of their lives.[slide: Dave’s family computer room]Of course, what I am leaving out here is the whole range of aesthetic andphotographic literacies in play. As an aside, an engagement with those literacies isactually entirely optional for active participation in Flickr, but I have found in myresearch that they often become increasingly compelling factors in ongoingintegration of Flickr with their everyday lives – that is, people become increasinglyinterested in ‘better photography’ as they become more deeply engaged with thevarious layers of possible participation.The participants I interviewed for this project talked a lot about how they learned orwere learning photography, describing flickr as both a showcase and a learning spacefor photography, but spoke very little about how they learned to participate effectivelyin online social networks, saying things like “as I went along, I started getting moreinto groups”, or talking about “stumbling” on or being introduced to various websitesand online communities back in the 1990s, or simply shrugging the question off. So,the competencies of network literacy that are necessary for deep participation innetworks like Flickr over time become part of the habitus of the most prolific andpersistent early adopters and expert users: a group of people not necessarily high in6traditional cultural or educational capital but schooled to the point of naturalisation inthe technical and cultural competencies that allow them to participate in each ‘nextbig thing’ that comes along in internet culture.And so, in conclusion, if we are interested in the extension of new media literacy inthe interests of cultural participation, where does this leave us? It is not immediatelyclear how the ‘user-led content revolution’ on the web serves the interests andconcerns of those who have compelling stories to tell but whose cultural andtechnological competencies are a mismatch with these emerging norms of new medialiteracy.

Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network

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