Mapping, Tracking, Sharing, and Copying Creative Activity

Brisbane.
We're back to paper sessions at the CCi conference now, and for a change I'm in the cultural science stream. The first speakers here are Chris Brennan-Horley from the University of Wollongong Susan Luckman from the University of South Australia and deals with mapping the creative industries in Darwin. This ties into wider creative industries and creative cities theory, and Chris's approach here has been to focus especially on mapping the micro-level through qualitative ethnographic approaches - this is necessary as much grassroots-level creative industries activity remains unaccounted for in standard quantitative surveys of creative industries performance. Chris operated especially through interviews with creative industries practitioners in the city, and he was interested especially in geographic information - what spaces in the city were of importance to such practitioners in relation to their creative work?

Chris utilised geo-information services (GIS) to map this information onto maps of Darwin and identify its creative epicentres - these included standard, predictable sites (the city centre, known creative spaces) as well as a few unexpected ones, and they can be further examined for each creative industry and with a view to specific demographic factors. Peaks spaces of creative Darwin were the inner city and Parap, while key sources of inspiration were especially the city's waterfront areas, for example.

This cultural geography makes known to the wider community that (and where) Darwin is a creative city; it helps get across the messages emerging from this research, and points, for example, to the creative importance of its parklands. This also provides interesting input into city planning, of course - especially in the context of Darwin's current problems with space shortages which are likely to lead to a highrise building boom. This also opens up new ways of presenting research findings, using maps rather than conventional academic articles as a point of entry into research data. It offers new ways for researchers to engage with the wider community.

Next up is my QUT colleague Jean Burgess, looking at 'viral video' in YouTube's social network. The (biologically inspired) characterisation of DIY content as viral memes has a longish history now, but it is important to think through this - 'viral' videos are often simply videos which are seen by large numbers of people, and some such videos have very much been created by commercial organisations. Jean points instead to the central role of cultural participation - videos are not messages or products; they are mediated processes, and YouTube can therefore be seen as a social network site.

Jean points to some of YouTube's most responded-to videos which also had the highest number of overall views as examples of this - for example, Tay Zonday's surprise hit "Chocolate Rain", whose initial hit rating was achieved by a mischievous niche community, thereby allowing it to reach a wider audience. Multiple responses to the clip also emerged, reusing some of the mis-en-scene of the original. This can be seen as a fandom-based remix mash-up culture - a conversation through content creation.

Other examples, however, do not follow exactly the same process (Jean points to a metal reinterpretation of Pachelbel's "Canon" which received some 45 million views, and hundreds and thousands of response videos, for example). This can be seen as a kind of game as well as a form of peer teaching - users are both helping each other with their performance, and build on and attempt to outdo one another. Longevity is an indicator of how much the original video invites imitation and response, while mass media exposure for such phenomena often spells the end as such cultural phenomena lose their niche status. Such content can no longer be seen as mere cultural product - viral video is better described as a spread of replicable ideas (expressed and transformed in performances and practices) via processes of vernacular creativity, among participants in YouTube as a social network site.

The next speaker is Vicki Chihsuan Chiu, also from QUT; her focus is on friend-making (which I understand to mean social networking) Websites. She begins to note the amount of time that is now spent using Web 2.0 technologies in more or less work-related activities, and draws on Herzberg in suggesting that job satisfaction is determined by both hygiene factors (salary, work conditions, job security, status, fringe benefits, company policies, quality of technical supervision, etc.) and motivation factors (achievement, recognition, responsibility, the work itself, and advancement). How can these factors be translated to the 'work' performed by users of social networking Websites? Vicki studied users of Taiwanese social networking sites such as iPartment, Noname, and others.

Hygiene factors in iPartment include a comfortable Web environment with customisable features, technical help, free Web space, good Website security, interpersonal messaging and gifting features, and a customer bonus system; motivating features include a sense of achievement (after having built a comfortable and attractive Web environment), a sense of belonging (through various on-site events, e.g. for Chinese New Year), a sense of responsibility (requiring users to be active participants and rewarding them for doing so), and a sense of advancement (measured through user status as 'VIP' or 'super-VIP', and other ratings). This combines to generate significant site loyalty. In the future, further user buy-in may be able to be created through greater user participation in site management processes - democratising innovation in the social networking environment.

Finally on to Lucy Montgomery, also from QUT. Her interest is in film, music, and fashion in China, and she points to the shift from state-driven production to a for of production driven much more by entrepreneurial consumers. Private citizens have a vastly increased ability to become active creators of content in the new environment, and film, music, and fashion sit at various points along a spectrum from state control to open entrepreneurialism in this context. Film remains controlled, while fashion is much more open to consumer creativity; music sits somewhere in the middle.

Film is controlled especially through the state-controlled cinema system (but there also exists an active underground film industry); there are also various pre- and post-production censorship processes which limit the range of expressions possible. Also, there is no film ratings system, which means that all content must be suitable for all possible viewers from kids to the elderly. Further, there is no way for domestic product generated outside of the state-controlled industry to enter into standard cinema distribution. As a system, then, film remains very resistant to influence by consumers, even in spite of the increasing need for Chinese films to be commercially successful.

In the music industry, there exists a more diverse range of production models (professional as well as amateur), without pre- or post-production censorship. Many amateur musicians have been able to become commercially successful in recent years, for example, and this is also spurred on by the explosion of mobile modes of music use. There is also a potential for the introduction of a highly centralised commercial structure (under state control) in this context, however, as the Chinese government maintains ownership over mobile distribution networks.

Finally, the fashion industry allows for even more entrepreneurial, consumer-driven approaches. Fashion media actively encourage consumers to become actively involved and inform themselves about fashion trends, techniques, and opportunities; the industry relies on change, and impulses for that change to significant extent also come from fashion consumers. There is a long history for this, even throughout the age of direct state control in China's high-communist era.

All of this points to the tension between established control frameworks and the emergence of new opportunities for user involvement and consumer entrepreneurialism. Lucy points to Yurchak's idea of an entrepreneurial governmentality in this context, and also highlights questions of intellectual property which emerge in this context - strong IP protection often stifles the potential for user-led content generation and co-creation, and of the three industries, fashion is the one least reliant on copyright (as opposed to brands and trademarks). Music remains in an intermediate position as, in spite of copyright protections for music, there is also a strong push for digital distribution and a signficant amount of user-created content for which copyright is not strongly enforced.

Technorati : CCi 2008, China, Darwin, YouTube, creative industries, mapping, produsage, social networking
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