Damn you, antipopper, for pulling out the term “prosumer” before I had even discovered it:
Apple?s announcement of GarageBand today was interesting ? it?s bundled with all new Macs from this month onward! There are concerns that Apple?s treading on third party developers? toes, but the emphasis of Apple?s ever broadening iLife suite spans the gulf between the home user and the prosumer ? a territory that needs more definition. There are great little apps everywhere, and the pro packages loom from above, but Apple really is perfectly poised to deliver products like GarageBand that edge into that prosumer middle ground.
I too find the abundance of software and hardware aimed at home producers very, very interesting – and garageband looks cool. Everything cool is for the Mac. (one day…)
But I’m not in the least concerned with whether or not all this technology will result in better cultural production, or just more crap. I’m interested in how, when, why and to what effect cultural consumption and cultural production are getting much, much more closely aligned. Does marketing stuff to them rely on the idea that they are aspiring to be “real” musicians, or photographers, or writers? I think in cultural studies maybe we have to pay attention to the pleasures of production – what is it about being able to say “I made this” that is such a source of (even ironic) pride? Why is it so fun to sit at the computer all day playing with drum loops (boy, is that fun – I can’t wait until I have time to do it again). Looking at questions like this allows us to sidestep the boring comparisons to “real” creative professionals. Who wants to hear another word about whether or not bloggers are as good/important as print journalists? Not me.
Of course the whole point is to ask how the structures of the cultural economy are shifting, and what this means, but I want to hear more about why, how and with what benefits people (and which people?) make, mix, mash up, blog, snap, filter, and distribute culture. Now that’s fun.
9 responses to “The Pleasures of Production II”
Indeed. But I’m still fascinated with the market positioning the Apple is attempting — their top-down plan for cultural production/consumption, as it were. For example, the templates in their amateur iDVD software are kistchily cute — much more so than Apple’s visual culture of previous decades. I think they’re attempting to create a lifestyle market in which an “authentic” kind of “professional” is still very much a marker, if only by implication — otherwise the kistchy, “good taste” overtones of aspiration would dissipate.
But in the meantime, of course, I’m the kind of person who thinks that “dodgy presets” are really cool to fuck around with and fuck up, and I think this is the space of ambivalent engagement in which people generally do their stuff — blogging, mashing, whatever. (BTW, the other day I started a LiveJournal, and I LOVE the dinky Mood labels — as Grant Morrison has proved to those who would preserve the integrity of professional writing, “I Love My Cat” narratives are sometimes the best narratives there are.) So perhaps the *friction* between “design” and “use” (if I can dodgily distil those terms) is where we should locate those questions of how consumption and production are aligned.
Actually, now that I think about it, these questions are also very pertinent to the capital/labour relation. “Orthodox” Marxism was all about capital as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and official opposition to capital was basically a “loyal opposition”, dedicated to building the productive forces and whatnot at the expense of people’s everyday struggles and creative capacities. Orthodox Marxists didn’t bother thinking about what working people’s unofficial activities in and out of the factory system could have meant. The Autonomia movement in Italy brought a vital corrective to this by thinking about working class “self-valorisation” and the idea that the relentless machinations of capital are in fact a desperate containment of constant, unofficial class struggle. Okay, I’m losing my train of thought, but there really was a link…
wow, excellent stuff in there – thanks for the comment. I’ve got nothing much to add, except to say, yep, yep and yep – and what *I* need to do as part of my upcoming research project is to work out some of the differences between various kinds of home/amateur/non-professional producers – so there are people like you with *extremely* high levels of cultural competencies and the ability to employ camp, kitsch, or ironic modes; but what about the ‘others’ – and I too am very interested in the really mainstream marketing side of the equation, like with the whole imac creativity-in-a-box vibe. Roxio is another great case study I think. I can’t wait to start this project so I can really get into it!
Is the link (to the Marxists stuff) something to do with containment of otherwise threatening consumer behaviour (like rampant pirating of software, or rampant creativity)- so if you get the neat little multitrack recording program in the box with your imac, you are more likely to think the solution you are presented with is satisfying, and don’t need to experiment, hack, mash up, or fuck around,…actually that brings me to another point – there is a lot of fun in being an autodidact in an area in which you’re an amateur as well. Maybe macintosh and roxio and even adobe have a teaching role that kind of stunts self-education? My train of thought left the station a while back…I can see it shimmering on the hot, hot, hot, horizon…need to go put ice down my back I think.
Who has access to irony? One of the frequent criticisms of “cultural studies” is that it overestimates cultural consumers’ capacity for irony. But I think both sides of that argument kind of miss the point — too often I think everyone confuses irony with sarcasm, whereas I’d like to think that irony requires a certain amount of actual love and earnestness to lubricate itself. And what is cultural competency, and how does it relate to various knowledges? For instance, as someone who works in the culture industry and who’s had some exposure to cultural studies, it’d be lame for me to disavow all sorts of institutional affiliations that let me be particularly “knowing” about all sorts of culture.
But conversely, I’m crap at engaging with the kinds of vernaculars that go matter-of-factly into, say, making a great party invitation out of clippings from trashy magazines, which people do all over the place, including, I’d venture, those “others” you mention. Such activities in and of themselves *might* sometimes reflexively involve various institutional knowledges, and sometimes not. Meanwhile, the irony, campness, the kistch is still there, regardless. Party invitations, I think, are the single greatest proof of *real* cultural literacy on the planet. 🙂
Yep, I agree with all of that, and I also think that “irony” too often is taken to mean a kind of condescending,sarcastic relationship to culture. I think, though, that if we expand the frame of “amateur” creativity way beyond media fandom and look at, say, quilting enthusiasts it might provide a useful field of comparison – e.g. how often do we confuse creativity with hipness? Or is hipness now a good measure of ideological independence?
Of course Henry Jenkins continues to do great work on participatory media when it comes to fandom, and it’s useful stuff. I am not really planning to cover fandom as a substantive area(mainly because it is such a populous field of research already), but I am interested in the relationships between technological design and use, capital and leisure, the aesthetics of “unprofessional” production, and especially the ethics of sharing (open content etc.)across a number of sites.
and btw I *love* cutup party invitations and cheesy presets in music programs (*and* cheesy photoshop filters).
Well, I think the culture of “cool” is one that depends on the manipulative power to assemble various arbitrary pieces of culture under a new aura, and that the nature of that power changes up and down the scale of cool’s institutionalisation into “hipsterism”. Don’t really have any ideas of how this is modulated.
Having reread this thread, I also want to correct the impression that I think manipulation by “consumers” is simply utopian. That’s why I’ve got this beef about the “digital superego” of the user that needs to be challenged. For instance, the official narrative of user-centric software design has always been about making everything seamless and transparent to aid the smooth manipulation of data by the user. I find that idea vaguely horrifying! This is an easy collusion between corporate ideologies of workplace productivity and (perhaps less obviously) an idea of (internally) hierarchicalised and abstracted (self-)management as a fundamental part of the process of individuation (phew!). The User as Lord of Their (Petty) Domain.
But alternatively, an interaction with design could be like a kind of distributed therapy, in which a user’s relationship with the world is challenged, their teleologies interrupted. Metaphorically: instead of “auto-correct”, what about an “auto-mistake” feature, which would open up creative possibilities and make interesting disjunctures where they weren’t immediately apparent? This has interesting implications for interface design. So it’s not always “noble users challenging design” — we always need to think about design enabling a rethinking of the Self and the world.
With your horror of seamless usability and the “auto-mistake” idea, you’ve touched on something that has been in the back of my mind for a while – one of the reasons I like playing with “professional” audio production software is a complexity that I’m nowhere near being able to control, despite a decent skill level – there are so many possibilites that aren’t closed off because someone is trying to make it easier for me to put together a dance track (e.g. Acid or Fruity Loops – which are also heaps of fun to use, but for different reasons). Trying to work out how to integrate Logic Audio’s inbuilt sampler, sequencer, and effects, I’ve stumbled on strange new sounds and built whole tracks on them.
so I guess to sum up, there’s a double-edged sword here – on the one hand, there is now a proliferation of software and hardware that make it easy for people to make pictures, music, movies and webpages straight out of the box, and so more people are doing it (I think); on the other hand, some of the pleasures of amateur production might be paradoxically closed off because the process has become simpler.
So maybe what we need is a better theory of play? Or am I just talking like every other geek who just wants to learn, learn, learn?
btw, I’ve really been enjoying this discussion – next time we end up at the same conference we really must hit the pub/go for coffee or something. 🙂