Archive for November, 2004

I’m working up a theoretical model of vernacular creativity in digital culture, so…

Every culture proliferates along its margins. Irruptions take place that are called “creations” in relation to stagnancies. Bubbling out of swamps and bogs, a thousand flashes at once scintillate and are extinguished all over the surface of a society. In the official imaginary, they are noted only as exceptions or marginal events. An ideology of property isolates the “author,” the “creator,” and the “work”. In reality, creation is a disseminated proliferation. It swarms and throbs. A polymorphous carnival infiltrates everywhere, a celebration both in the streets and in the homes for those who are unblinded by the aristocratic and museological model of durable production.

[...]

A typewriter, some paper, and a little leisure: this little world would, for example, circumscribe the site in which art can be born. But housing, clothing, housework, cooking, and an infinite number of rural, urban, family, or amical activities…are also the ground on which creation everywhere blossoms. Daily life is scattered with marvels, a froth on the long rhythms of language and history that is as dazzling as that of writers and artists. (Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, pp.139-42)

It seems a large part of my PhD research has in some way to do with finding and remixing analogs for new media buzzwords, leading me back to fogey-esque, almost premodern, words like “vernacular”, “conviviality” and so on. I’ve yet to completely work out why I like the fogey-esque terms so much, but I’ll let you know when I do. And this post should go some way towards it.

Lately I’ve been seduced by the parallels between traditional vernacular cultural practices like collecting, scrapbooking (thanks to Kris, and the culstud-l listfolk), even at my more esoteric moments cooking and gardening, and their transmuted cousins in digital culture. The creative blog and the illustrated, poetry-filled commonplace book, the blog and the scrapbook, the tinkering home mechanic and the hobbyist hacker are not identical twins but certainly speak to each other across time.

The power of these analogs is in their refusal of the commonsense, mass media-derived metaphors that are so much more familiar and that do not help us to think outside existing media power structures: you know, the blogger as (not-quite-yet)journalist, the photoblogger as (amateur) photographer, the linklogger as editor. Digital culture has mediating functions, but it is leakier, and more imbricated in everyday life, than even television ever managed to be. So media metaphors aren’t enough. And neither are industrial ones (‘production’ and ‘consumption’ aren’t working too well for me, for example).

So here’s a few pieces of related ephemera that I’ve snipped out of the web.

Those wanting to delve into research on scrapbooking would do well to start with this annotated bibliography.

Ephemera from the 1939 world’s fair, including this scrapbook, here
A scrapbook timeline

Watch out/keep out/you could slip and fall/be gruesomely electrocuted: witness
stick figures in peril at flickr.

haiku made from google search strings leading to identity theory. For example:

how do you tell a story from a deaf man’s point of view?
how can i read people’s mannerisms?
teach me how to knit online

[might try this myself!]