creativity/machine

Let me just frame this by saying that I am at the business end of trying to construct a doctoral thesis on the implications for cultural citizenship of vernacular creativity in “new media” contexts. I use radically mixed methods and my concept maps always start with ‘worms-eye’ views. I try to live up to the ethical ideals of cultural studies, participatory action research and the power of specificity and radical contextualisation.

I’m doing this in an institutional context where I feel fluctuating degrees of pressure to attempt to be not only clever but also useful (good); but where there are competing views of just what I should try be useful for; and in a research context where the speed of innovation is utterly incompatible with any kind of scholarly pace.

Also, I recently got external feedback on a collaborative project that is explicitly designed to mount a grounded, pragmatic critique of some of the ethical implications of “creativity” and “innovation” in particular contexts - something that almost nobody who might actually make use of such an understanding seems to have time to do, because we’re always too busy trying to find the cutting edge. The feedback wasn’t overly negative, but I was gobsmacked to find that it said there was not enough emphasis on the future.

So let’s pretend for a moment that I’m in the business of making naive and idealistic manifestoey statements. This is what I’d want to say about how “new media” talks about itself, and about how new media scholars talk about it:

Old things are as interesting as new ones.

The speed and spectacular novelty of a particular innovation should never be a measure of its value or the basis of its justification. (But I get why they are).

We* need time to explore slow and ethical innovation.

We need more space for quiet voices, more room for thoughtfulness and more recognition of the value of boredom.

We have a lot to learn from the practices of late adopters, as well as those of the thoughtful, the sceptical, and the reluctant. We should watch them. We should listen.

But that’s just between you, me and the choir.

*designers, users, researchers, critics, teachers, students, policy-makers, journalists. you. me.

According to Theory, Culture and Society we are having a complexity turn. From John Urry’s introduction to the special issue on the topic:

Overall, complexity approaches both signify and enhance a new ‘structure of feeling’; one that combines system and process thinking…such an emergent structure involves a sense of contingent openness and multiple futures, of the unpredictability of outcomes in time-space, of a charity towards objects and nature, of diverse and non-linear changes in relationships, households and persons across huge distances in time and space, of the systemic nature of processes, and of the growing hyper-complexity of organizations, products, technologies and socialities.

See also Fibreculture Journal’s latest issue, on Distributed Aesthetics, edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson:

Rather than try to define the terminology or taxonomy of distributed art theories and practices we have proposed instead a descriptor for the ‘aesthesia’ of contemporary networked encounters. Distributed aesthetics, then, concerns experiences that are sensed, lived and produced in more than one place and time. This might equally be a sketch of reconsiderations of the operations of cultural memory or of phenomena such as endurance performances. But what we propose, through gathering together the disparate pieces in this fibreculture journal issue, is that techno-social networks are crucially constitutive of this distributed aesthesia. In various ways, all the texts here take up the mode through which ‘the network’ – the juncture and disjunction of here and there, you and I, social and individuated – functions as the crucial operand in dispersing and contouring perception, art practice and aesthetics.

Although I am probably more interested in socially distributed and differentiated aesthetic (value) systems, rather than the spatial and temporal (albeit networked and socially contingent) distribution of art, this is kind of tangentially useful as I attempt to describe the complex system of technologies, literacies, values, and social identity formations that shape effective access to ‘voice’ in the apparently autonomous ‘cultural public sphere’ of the Internet (i know, doesn’t work as a sphere, but leave it for now). It seems to me that it is necessary to find a rigorous and defensible position on the ‘democratisation’ of technologies of cultural production that evades binaristic thinking, does not simply ‘debunk’ hyperbole, does not promise or warn of utopias or dystopias, and does not simply rely on glib theoretical virtuosity (or glib neologisms) to get out of those double binds.

A commitment to participatory ethics in research, combined with lightly interventionist research-led practice and an insistence on theory grounded in the empirical practice of such research is both a way through these problems and an additional burden - but all worth it. And I don’t want to wake up and realise that yet again I’m either the voice of complicity - using academic rigour to legitimize shallow marketing hype - or (even worse) the arrogant and ascetic ‘voice in the wilderness’. I have to sleep at night.

In this post about the risks of critiquing that which is cool (in this case, ‘things’), and this one on technological inevitablity and intervention Anne seems to me to be practising the steps of a similar dance. I think she is falling over a lot less frequently on the slippery floor than I am, though.

As an example of where I might be able to add some value to these debates: from Bradley Horowitz, an interesting post that explains the (exponentially scaled) continuum of online participation replicated across yahoo groups, flickr, etc. (although he’s careful not to call it a ‘natural law’). The post is thoughtful, the numbers and the graph are useful, and I was quite taken by the acknowledgment of ‘implicit creation’ as a legitimate form of participation (well, actually, as a form of participation that will still work to create value for the web service - flickr, say).

Still, I can’t help but feel that there is so much missing here - why does participation pattern like this? What does it mean for the emergence of complex systems of cultural capital and social power in these environments? Does it matter, for cultural democracy? And what about considering the idea that the necessary motivation to be a content creator or even editor is not only a matter of personality, but articulates to social identity, class, education, and literacy - which itself is a complex formation that articulates to the other three. And so on we go.

Lilia Efimova has been thinking about the academic’s desire to explore and hunt down treasures deep in “theory land”, and how best to reconcile that with the ethics of research - by which both she and I mean something much more than the functional applied ethics that are represented by the hoop-jumping processes of getting “ethical clearance” from your university. Rather, the ethics at the core of our research practice have serious implications for how we go about engaging research “subjects”, the relationship theory has to methodology, and how our research is fed back into the world ‘out there’.:

For me research is about impact. Of course, intellectual curiosity, contribution to a theory and rigor should be there, but for me my own research makes sense only if it makes a difference in the lives of people. People who may or may not understand the language of theory […] It’s only now I’m starting to articulate my implicit beliefs in [the] researcher’s accountability to the broader community than his or her research peers, the responsibility to bring the research results back from the theory land to where most people live, either by translating them into everyday words, teaching the language of theory or even involving them as co-researchers…

Amen to that. Back here, there has been a bit of a discussion going around lately about the place of theory in Australian cultural studies.

What I would say about it is that cultural studies as research practice, at least in the tradition that I identify with most (OK, mostly ‘British’), has traditionally integrated and built cultural and critical theory in symbiosis with various kinds of empirical work, with both ‘theory’ and ‘praxis’ emphasised to greater or lesser extent. But if work that is happy to march under the banner of cultural studies loses its core ethics - which I might articulate variously as popular empathy, ‘critical’ engagement, and a commitment to building agency - then for me it just becomes the egocentric performance of theory. Really, although it can be seductive and mesmerising and intimidating, some of these modes of performance are not too much more than an exercise in theoretical and cultural omnivorousness and competetive aesthetic virtuosity.

More seriously, when the main game of theory is the performance of theory, it implicitly disavows any need on its own behalf to achieve material outcomes, or even material relevance, because Theory is supposed to be somehow inherently, transcendently, transformative. I didn’t leave classical music for more of that.

I’ve been aware of David Gauntlett’s ArtLab project at Bournemouth Media School’s Centre for Creative Media Research for a while, and keep meaning to post briefly on it.

The ArtLab studies represent a new type of research in which media consumers’ own creativity, reflexivity and knowingness is harnessed, rather than ignored. In these studies, individuals are asked to produce media or visual material themselves, as a way of exploring their relationship with particular issues or dimensions of media. Examples, which appear in the projects section, include research where children made videos to consider their relationship with the environment; where young men designed covers for imaginary men’s magazines, enabling an exploration of contemporary masculinities; and where people drew pictures of celebrities as part of an examination of their aspirations and identifications with stars.

It’s an innovative approach to media “consumption” research, and one which in many ways is the natural next step for cultural and media studies’ researchers who really believe in the active audience tradition and want to stop treating audiences as research ’subjects’ and start treating them as research participants.

Two comparisons occur to me: one is to art therapy, where, through self expression, the subject both “works out” psychological/affective issues and makes them visible to the therapist - similarly, in the artlab projects, the participants “work out” some of their relationships between culture, media and identity through creative practice. These relationships can then be harvested as data, apparently providing some answer to the longstanding problem of how to ‘get at’ media audiences and consumers in something approaching a naturalistic, or at least organic, way.

The other comparison that springs to mind is with “action research”, or ethnographic action research, methods, where the process is designed to have some positive outcome for the participants, and the research is around the process of achieving that outcome. In both the art therapy and action research approaches, there is the assumption that the subject or participant benefits somehow. Likewise, I think it would be interesting for the artlab projects to articulate more explicitly whatever the outcomes (especially unintended ones) seem to be for their participants. There certainly seems to be something implied in the rationale as well as the project descriptions and reports about creative and critical media literacies - if there’s something more elaborated on the website and I’ve missed it, I apologise.

Anyway, these issues are interesting to me because of the important but problematic place that “practice” has in my predominantly cultural studies-oriented research. That is, the small amount of work I do as a digital storytelling trainer and creative practitioner functions not only as an ethnographic instrument, but also as a direct intervention into the field I’m studying. In conducting digital storytelling workshops in the community, I’m not only “observing”, I’m trying to collaborate with the participants to contribute directly and practically, not polemically, to cultural change. This is a challenge that, to be honest, my formal research training in English departments hasn’t really prepared me for at all, but which I welcome as a chance to contribute to the development of a cultural studies praxis that can effectively combine “critical” analysis, participatory research methods, and (yes, I said it) instrumentality.

Back to the writing deadlines…

Nice list of qualitative research methods books from Anne, who is v. good at sharing.