J.D. Lasica has posted the video of his interview with BBC technology reporter Jo Twist about the personal media revolution.

Here are my notes on the interview, trying to pull out the way Twist characterises the relations between technology, creativity, and cultural participation (I am such a broken record, thanks to this damn PhD, oh well). The ways in which these relations are understood by Twist are getting very, very, familiar to me by now – which is good in that I have obviously got the “dominant” construction of this stuff right, but kind of wearying in some ways as well (the new media fatigue has, if anything, gotten worse lately). But in an effort to be a positive, proactive theory-builder rather than a whining, reactive theory-spouter in my own conceptual work, I have banned myself from using the word “hype” for the time being.

So, the notes:

Technology: “tools” [for production] marked by ease-of-use (eg blogger); platforms for networking and distribution (eg flickr)

Creativity: people need compelling motivations to engage in personal media creation (in Twist’s case, flickr led to blogging, and not the other way around)

Community: powerful distribution and connectivity, articulated to personal media creation, may deliver on the promise of online community, where community is understood by Twist as some configuration of: connectivity, relationships, and (I prick up my ears ever so slightly) difference.

Then there’s a whole lot of stuff about the contribution of citizen’s media to Big Media, podcasting, grassroots newsgathering, etc etc, all of which the BBC is leading the television industry in, but isn’t exactly what I’m into.

It disturbs me slightly just how weightless and effortless, how transparent and non-specific, these characterisations of the practice of “consumer” content creation are; I guess I am trying to do a little something about that, in my humble and painfully slow fashion. Tally ho, then.