Wonderful to see the tentative program for MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age has now been posted – it looks jam-packed with very good stuff, actually. Our panel, Produsing Culture (not ‘producing’ as Axel was very, very quick to point out to the organisers!) has been scheduled for 9.00 Saturday morning…not usually my most scholarly time of the week but I’ll see what I can do. Early to bed, early to rise and all that. Which is not my usual conference behaviour, either…

Our original panel proposal had an abstract which won’t appear on the website, so I thought it might be useful to post it here:

Produsing Culture: Implications of User-Led Content Creation
The proposed panel draws on the work of the User-Led Research Group based at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. The panel explores the practices and politics of cultural production in a range of contemporary new media contexts that are structured by collaborative user-led content creation, dissemination and evaluation. The shared approach of the papers is one that rejects both dystopian or utopian discourses in favour of a critical, grounded exploration of the complex and emergent ways in which cultural and media power relations are being reshaped or reconfigured in specific contexts, and the broader social implications of these shifts for democracy, cultural work and cultural participation.

My abstract:

Vernacular Photography 2.0: Flickr, Aesthetics and the Relations of Cultural Production
The photo-sharing network Flickr is one of the better-known examples of the participatory turn in web business models commonly referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’ This paper demonstrates that Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics,’ focused not on discrete art objects, but on the modes of social connection that are both made possible by and flow through images within the network. At the same time, those social connections are used to collaboratively construct, negotiate and learn visual aesthetics and techniques. Rather than representing a revolutionary takeover of photography by untrained amateurs, Flickr is a highly heterogeneous ‘architecture of participation’ where the social worlds, technologies and aesthetics of ‘professional’ photography, art and everyday life collide, compete and coexist to produce new forms of intensely social and playful cultural production.

The abstract definitely shows signs of being written 3 weeks before PhD submission (and what was I on, buzzword pills??), but luckily allows me to move forward into some of the stuff I’m actually doing now. Should be fun.