Participatory cultures: moving from the web to mobile

Last month I (Leora Kornfeld, writing on our group metroCode account) was fortunate enough to attend the Futures of Entertainment Conference at MIT, hosted by Henry Jenkins, founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program, and author of 2006' "Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media collide"

Jenkins is also the man who coined the term 'textual poachers' in a book of the same name, back in 1992. Years before the web made fan cultures possible, he drew on the theoretical framework of such fields as literary criticism and cultural anthropology and mapped these consumer-driven communities, using such popular culture phenomena as Star Trek, Star Wars, Twin Peaks, and Saturday Night Live as his reference points.

While at the conference I couldn't help but think about how fan cultures will manifest themselves in the mobile space. We've seen how they work in the pre-Internet world, we've seen how they work in the web world, but it remains to be seen how the leap to mobile will be made, if only because when you are mobile you are necessarily doing something else. An entirely different experience from being at home on your computer posting to discussion boards about whatever your interest/obsession du jour is.  Companies like My Space have recently launched services for mobile and it will be interesting to see what the uptake is like and if/how the interactions differ from the web platform to the mobile platform.

Fan cultures are interesting to consider as previously they were almost exclusively the domain of 'freaks and geeks'. The people to whom William Shatner, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live in a sketch about rabid Star Trek fans (I believe Chris Farley stuffed into a Mr Spock shirt was one of them), advised to "move out of your parents' basements!'.

How things have changed! No longer is it considered to be pathetic/get a life behaviour to be deeply involved in fan cultures. Jenkins uses terms such as 'empowered consumption' and 'passionate consumption' and it is interesting to think about the ways in which computers (completely equated with geeks pre the mid 1990's) have facilitated this shift.  The question is then raised: how will mobile devices alter our participation in such communities and activities.

Jenkins referred to You Tube as a prime example of a meeting point of participatory culture, a place where top down consumer culture and amateur culture meet, and the public has demonstrated an overt willingness to sort it out for themselves. We have moved, on a large scale, from consumer to pro-sumer. A wonderful example of this from right here in our back yard came from Dave Wishnowski of Wishbone X at last week's New Media Day, held at the Great Northern Way Campus. Davie is founder of the Pro Wrestling X movement, and the creator of the pro wrestling video game made for the fans, by the fans. His presentation detailed the profound extent to which the fans shape everything from the narratives to the characters to the chairs that the wrestlers get hit over the head with.  We're not talking about a few mods here and there to the basic game, we're talking about fans taking an active part in the creation of the product.

The phenomenon of Web 2.0 (a moot phenomenon, I know, I know) could be considered to be responsible for this migration of fan cultures from the outliers, the geeks and freaks, to the mainstream millions who visit, and participate in, sites like You Tube everyday.

(As a side note I should mention that at this conference Jenkins led the entire group in a spirited New Year's Eve type countdown, marking the end of Web 2.0, and the birth of Web 3.0, which is immersive worlds such as Second Life, but that's a whole other discussion).

What resonated for me from Jenkins' talk was actually something he said when he spoke at UBC in June 2004, when he delivered the keynote address for the New Media Consortium (www.nmc.org). He talked about the web as a 'digital fridge', as creating a place where people can be bad, where the amateur and the personal is welcomed, and where the issue is not so much one of quality (as in high production values) but of creativity as a process.

One of the issues we are challenged with on our project, metroCode, is creating a public interest in the creative process, in encouraging community participation in public art (via our cell phone tour of the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale and The Grid portion of metrocode.net, currently in development). In designing our systems we built in a number of modes for public involvement, such as voting, leaving voice comments, leaving and viewing text comments, and leaving and viewing multimedia comments, all via cell phone. To date (and the project has been up & running for 7 months now, and continues through to April 2007) the response on that front has been, well, disappointing. This could be owing to a number of factors; a significant amount of enlightment came via the focus groups conducted by Richard Smith's team at SFU last month.  Other questions are raised, ones that we all need to think about designers of mobile experience, such as what does community participation on mobile devices look like? Because when you're mobile you're multitasking (walking, talking, possibly at work, etc) your ability to participate in your environment will take a different form than on the web and in video games. 

With MUSE 3 just around the corner it seems to me that we need to think less about building technological superstructures and more about the shape and character of what these interactions are, and the meaning and value they may bring to the massively mobile community out there.

At project leader's meetings and at the recent New Media Day there has been talk about getting some informal gatherings going to toss around ideas for MUSE 3...so let's get our daytimers out and make it happen.