grappling with cultural citizenship
6 06 2006I have hit the books again, and I’m alternately working out ideas and culling stuff from my draft, so no more word counts for a while. When they do return they’ll just show how many words I’ve written that day, too, no more of this mythical ‘total’ word count business.
Like much of my writing, this sentence needs to be turned into at least 6 sentences, but at least it’s neater than my notes pages on cultural citizenship:
I use the concept of ‘vernacular creativity’ to describe the everyday practices of material and digital creativity that serve cultural citizenship, where cultural citizenship is understood, not as the static possession (or dispossession) of rights or obligations, but as a variegated continuum of participation in the cultural public sphere.
I’m using or arguing with (in no particular order) Murdock, Rosaldo, Miller, McGuigan, Stevenson, Uricchio, Hartley, Couldry, Hermes - feel free to shout out “you should read…” if something closely connected to that list comes to mind.
And here’s another sentence I wrote today:
Questioning the widespread idea that the availability of tools and platforms for participatory media somehow in itself enables universal cultural enfranchisement, I go on to examine the often implicit constraints on participation in digital culture, paying especially close attention to the socio-technical construction of literacies and ‘user’ subjectivities in specific contexts.
I’m not so sure abot how comments works on flickr… so I comment here to answer your question (so you’ll surely notice it). That picture was a created starting from the related tags of flickr. You explore flickr using the tags feature (eg you ask for Europe), then you take all the “related tags” and ask for each of them. So you’ll get a first connected round of concept (blu in my picture) and a secondary connected group of concepts (yellow). Later you can sort the concept in more intellegible groups (green cards). The method is more or less the same that you can read here http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/2005/02/.
After the counting phase I’ve also analysed the concept with a sw for network analysis… the results is incredibly similar to the pic I’ve posted.
hope it helps
First quote seems as though it can’t bring itself to say the word “fun”. If it’s about participating in cultural participatory life, and it doesn’t entail rights or responsibilities then it’s… enjoyment?
Luca - thanks! I’m still daunted…I’m trying to find a way to map the social relationships between both users and images, but it’s hard for a non-maths person.
Funlub - I didn’t mean that cultural citizenship doesn’t entail rights and responsibilities - it does of course. What I meant was that in order to mobilise the concept in a useful way, I conceive of it as a lived practice rather than a ‘thing’ you can possess or not possess. And you’re right in the sense that I’m talking about affective practices and relationships, rather than reducing everything that’s valuable about citizenship to rational debate. Pleasure is certainly a big part of that, and yes, fun too!
Jean,
Marshall (in “Class, Citizenship, and Social Development”) splits citizenship between Civil (equality before the law), Political (the practical access to the Civil), and the Social (’universal’ economic and social rights). Chris Rojek (in “Decentring Leisure”) talks about the disjunction between the first two, citing Stonehenge as an example of dispute over access and rights. I raise this disjuncture because I wonder how much ‘affective practices’ can lie outside possession? Will you post on this in more detail?
“mythical ‘total’ word count business”
made me laugh out loud. sounds sensible
david has charmingly volunteered me to present a paper at a research seminar at Sussex in the autumn. i know it’s nothing big but it still scares me. your thesis is really starting to sound interesting (ok that sounds like it didn’t before, which isn’t quite what i meant to say, but I;m sure you get what I mean…)