Winchester School of Art
Graphics Building, Seminar room 7-8
28 November 2012, 4.00-5.30pm [note new time and room]
All welcome, free admission, no tickets

In this talk, David Gauntlett will consider creative and innovative practice as disruption of existing media and cultural ecosystems – and why this is (usually) a good thing.

He will use the notion of disruptive innovation to look at three cases:

• Case #1: In which the everyday creativity of users disrupts the traditional professional media ecosystem;
• Case #2: In which the creative understanding of the potential of the internet disrupts the traditional critical approach of media and communications studies;
• Case #3: In which the everyday creative uses of online tools disrupt the dominant position of professional arts and humanities scholars.

David Gauntlett is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster, where he co-directs CAMRI, ranked #1 for media and communications research in RAE 2008. He is the author of several books, including Creative Explorations (2007) and Making is Connecting (2011). He has conducted collaborative research with a number of the world’s leading creative organisations, including the BBC, the British Library, LEGO and Tate.

Photo of students setting up a Winchester School of Art degree show, by Flickr user Davy Gibbons. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

Having arrived nice and early, I popped outdoors to make this short two-minute video in which I outline a bit of my argument. Partly I’m talking about the role of art and design in innovation, which is crucial but is often overlooked in favour of technology and engineering. And partly I’m talking about how we can work with all of the innovative things that are being developed online, not by academics or researchers but by everyday enthusiasts, doing it just because they want to.

How can art and design teachers and professionals work with these developments without undermining them? Here I propose that it must be about:

• participating in networks,
• making things happen,
• and a kind of leadership which works with all these other people participating in the space.

Here’s the video:

I was also interviewed during the day, by Ralf Steenbeek of Cultuurnetwerk. That five-minute interview is mostly about the arguments of Making is Connecting, and appears here:

We have now completed our final report which you can download here (PDF, 0.8mb).

The report includes a summary of our activities, and comments from external participants. It considers what we learned about the meaning of ‘digital transformations’, and presents (again) the ‘three spheres’ model which has proven useful for thinking about what AHRC digital transformations really means.

It also includes four feature articles which appear exclusively in this report:

• Big Broadcasters and Small Creative Communities: Connection impossible? — discussion by Jeanette Steemers
• Business models, rights and ownership — workshop overview by Paul Dwyer
• Designing Conversations: principles and challenges of designing online participation — workshop overview by Anastasia Kavada
• Crowd based Transformations: The transformation of culture and heritage via crowdsourcing — report by Melissa Terras

The report mostly follows a template provided by the AHRC, and is generally a reflection on the activity, rather than a presentation of ‘big findings’. We certainly did generate several ideas and hypotheses, as well as identifying areas of common concern, and these will be reflected in our future research and publications.

We would welcome any thoughts or queries in the ‘comments’ section below.

Photo by Flickr user Karsten Schmidt (Toxi). Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

I opened flippantly by saying something about being David’s high risk strategy as I knew little about digital media and was not sure if I would have anything to say.  In conjunction with my half truth, my fellow speaker, Amy Twigger Holroyd, had also described her work with knitting as primarily offline; both of us were to find that subsequent discussions of our practice post-panel suggested that we were more ‘digitally involved’ than we admitted.  This raised some interesting questions for me about how we perceive ourselves in relation to digital learning, where these views come from, and what it means for how we work and study.

In my case this has meant hitherto seeing myself as a face to face practitioner who uses online and social media rather than seeing myself as a digital expert. Two questions from the floor and preparing for a visit to UCL led me to reappraise this.  The questions, which came from post-panel debate, were 1) are we more digitized than we realize? And 2) if people don’t categorise themselves as digital practitioners, why don’t they, what would it take to shift that perception, and where does it come from? (Technically, I think this makes four questions but we’ll move on).

This question of recognition is one that I think is really at play in the ways we approach formal and informal modes of learning, as it influences what we use, where and how we do things, and the opportunities we miss or gain by so operating. It applies equally to staff and students.

In the next few paragraphs I want to relate these questions to projects I discussed at UCL and elaborate on some of the issues and opportunities that emanate from them.  In planning for the event I turned to David Gauntlett’s excellent 8 principles for building creativity using digital platforms.

At the risk of sounding sycophantic, these provided a brilliant means of bringing into focus for me the different platforms in use that I had not paid much attention to previously, for reasons we will touch on in principle 3. Running through all these are connotations of sharing and networking, two fundamental behaviours to foster community and collaboration, but which are not always unproblematic.  In addition, within all 8 reside implications of the expert/amateur divide, which seems to affect how users of digital media perceive themselves, and which is being dismantled by collaborations fostered through new (or not so new) media.  This divide, (embodied by the fact that in many universities we separate out learning and elearning) had affected me too; I’d set up a collaborative wiki, created web content, blogged, pinned, followed, shared and generally done things “e” – but because I saw myself as an amateur I did not see them ‘counting’ in the same way; experts knew how things worked and pretenders like me did the easy stuff, like clicking. Real digital pedagogues do it with code.

Identifying that this divide has been at work in my own psyche and releasing it into the wild was liberating; I’ll now move on to consider each of the eight principles in relation to our event theme of shared platforms for learning and share some examples and thoughts on where these are in operation.

1. Embrace ‘because we want to’

Learning projects and innovations see varying levels of embracing going on, particularly of the playful, from the dilettante to the aficionado.  However, where some fail to embrace, this may not be out of antipathy, but because they just haven’t seen the point yet. Certain tools and communities are dismissed for hosting trivial ramblings about social lives and dietary habits, but this is more about user choice than flawed tools.  Also key to embracing for many is transparency (which heralds 3); people want to get on and do without having to watch the cogs turn first.  So a platform which facilitates engagement quickly and easily will foster embracing and wanting. So far, so obvious. In the creative disciplines digital media are crucial for broadcasting and disseminating work; where there may be caution in how they are used can be seen in 2.

2. Set no limits on participation

Open participation is something that excites and scares in equal measure.   One of the greatest positives is in the rebalancing of power in terms of validating and accepting contributions from people with all levels of knowledge and experience.  This can be seen in the MyShakespeare project, in which students have been commissioned to ‘interpret, recode and remix’ Shakespeare, and their work features on the new digital platform, myShakespeare, alongside that of artists.  With a global reach, the project allows people who have not had the chance to encounter Shakespeare before to respond to texts and artefacts alongside die hard enthusiasts.

The negatives naturally concern the scope for abuse; What if someone uploads spam? Is a pervert? A Copyright Thief? The unacceptable may not be insults or infamy, but something insidious, belittling or inaccurate. Context for behaviour also plays a part; as the current Twitter joke from @laughbook goes:  “Someone follows you on Twitter YAY, a new follower! Someone follows you in real life HOLY SH*T A STALKER…” The desire to get things out there and share has multiple layers of consequence – while some are happy to offer all, others fear the loss of intellectual property or research/study edge.  Johanna Blakley, in her TED talk, puts a really positive spin on this in relation to fashion and IPR (fashion is deemed to be utilitarian, not art, therefore no IPR applies – you can copyright a trademark but not a design).

The principle of crowdsourcing operates from a position of trust as well; believing that an open call for participation brings richer benefits than assuming one person is the best person for the job. According to the medium and the need, sharing may bring you welcome attention or be counter-productive, as in the case of the singer who was advised to take down her videos from Youtube, not because they weren’t great, but because they made her look waaaay too eager to be noticed.

If we are going to have open participation, however, we need to get better at filtering, sorting and selecting (e.g. Blog-In for grouping your blogs so you just hear from the ones you want) rather than be deluged every day. Perhaps we also need to develop our own etiquette for Not Adding – is being Linked In to people we see every day useful backup or a surfeit of connections?

3. Celebrate participants, not the platform

A great example of this is in Process Arts; its creator Chris Follows describes it as using Drupal, an open source platform, with free functionality and which has the flexibility to move with the times. It has grown exponentially over the last few years from being the-place-where-Chris-keeps-his-stuff to a shared environment where anyone who wants to contribute material and thoughts on creative arts practice can do so. Students across the years can comment on and share work and alumni upload videos from their creative workplaces and spaces.

4. Support storytelling

Stories of student learning appear in their reflective records of all kinds as well as embedded into project evaluations. The digital story movement is well established, while wikis have provided a forerunner of collaborative online spaces where stories can be shared. David has talked about the accumulative power of tweets as stories; the precision of a 140 character reflection can be a using framing tool for saying something thoughtful in as few words as possible. If you want to really raise the bar, write your life story in six words and share it.

5. Some gifts, some theatre, some recognition

Moving into new arenas and spaces changes how we perform and respond, as we all know well. Museums and galleries make creative use of social media and digital platforms to attract visitors to events.  We have also seen our expectations shift in terms of who we can reach, and who might reach us; the spikes and tides of Twitter, where recognition can be sparked off by a single retweet or comment that shifts someone from 11 to 1000 users almost instantaneously. Sir Ken Robinson notes in Out of Our Minds that his phenomenal 5 million hits on a TED talk has been massively surpassed by the ‘talking’ kittens on Youtube (30 million hits).  We also have come to expect entertainment, (but not edutainment, its less palatable relative) in the ways we can learn, as illustrated by the use of Pirates of the Caribbean footage (copyright status notwithstanding?) to illustrate the stages of Bloom’s taxonomy.

6. Online to offline is a continuum

Given the diversity of disciplines within universities (even ‘monotechnics’ like ours which have an enormous range of subjects grouped under the umbrella term creative arts) there may be differences in terms of the kinds of platforms and modes of engagement that staff and students want to use.   A natural flow from online to offline can be seen in the fora and interest groups which spring up; at UAL one such example is the Learning Studio, an open forum for all staff on using technology for learning which meets face to face to discuss the digital.   The reduction in size and portability of technologies makes a blend of approach and suitability of environments much more flexible.  This obviously links into 7,

7. Reinvent learning

This is such a vast area I will only touch on it here but we have already mentioned the shift in relationships and powerbases in terms of collaboration and sharing.  Using apps and a single connecting mobile device already mean that we can photograph work, upload, share, link to, collaborate on and discuss in ways different from before.  Paul Lowe’s NAM project presents new opportunities for co-creation and creativity while focusing on questions of student identity in research (the move from student to practitioner). The NAM project has been funded by JISC and also uses a Drupal based open source site built in collaboration with students, where at the front end they can showcase work created from important resources such as the Stanley Kubrick archive, and at the back end they can collaborate, comment, feedback and curate.

8. Foster genuine communities

Many of our shared platforms are built to sustain special interest groups, projects and any kind of activity which brings people together for a common purpose.  Etienne Wenger’s work around communities of practice is familiar territory for thinking about how these communities are constituted and operate, whether online or offline.  In learning terms, if we are creating digital communities, despite the massive upsurge in use of smartphones and mobile devices we still need to be careful that participation is inclusive and not exclusive – not everyone has these. Having my iPhone stolen on the Central Line revealed to me my reliance on being able to communicate in a certain way; having to go home instead to tweet or use social media because the intermediate phone could not cope was a noticeable obstacle.  Digital media have made it incredibly easy to find people and make connections/create networks. In some cases they have functioned where other approaches have failed, as in the case of a colleague trying to get support with a book whose attempts at cold calling drew blanks, but whose Linked In network did the job.

In his book Where Good Ideas Come From Steven Johnson spells out the benefits which can be had through engaging with all eight principles, not just through 7 and 8. He describes the genesis of ideas through things like The Slow Hunch, the way that breakthrough ideas do not burst forth in a eureka moment but take time to evolve.  This can be considered in tandem with thoughts (pro and con) around the immediacy of digital connections; Johnson suggests that a collision of hunches is required for ideas to multiply – as through online communities and special interest groups; according to Johnson “Chance favours the connected mind” as the historic evolution of combining and connectivity over the centuries is where our innovation and originality comes from.

Alison James is Head of Learning and Teaching at London College of Fashion. Photo by Flickr user Partymonstrrr. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

After the presentations and a Q and A session, the audience and speakers broke out into groups to discuss other questions. The group I was in looked at the question of whether, ‘in a digital era, notions of ownership should be set aside.’ We had a really interesting discussion, with a wide range of opinions represented, from a staunch defence of existing copyright arrangements and their role in providing creative people with a reliable income, to a very different view – that these arrangements are no longer up to the job and are in urgent need of reform.

We discussed the ways in which copyright and IP legislation is currently being enforced and policed, the difficulties for some academics, researchers and writers in clearing permissions to reproduce images and text, institutions’ attempts to change their policies on licensing of material, piracy, and everything in between.

What was quite interesting, to me, was that nobody really agreed with the premise of the question. Everyone thought, more or less, that authors should retain some form of ownership of their work, the right to be identified as author, for instance, and the right to grant permission to copy it. The discussion was really about the legal extent of these concepts of ownership, and the efficacy of the mechanisms for enforcing them.

There was a general view that these mechanisms are increasingly unfit for purpose. We talked about the case of the Norwich boy who hacked into the club’s website CMS and posted photos of their new kit on his blog before they had been officially unveiled. After club officials noticed he had reproduced the images without their permission and before the embargo expired, they called the police, who visited the boy’s house.

This is obviously a very extreme instance of a heavy-handed response to a case of copyright infringement, but it is by no means the only one. And as we have seen with rights-holders in the music industry suing individual file-sharers, or lobbying to have their internet connections cut off, it’s perhaps an apt symbol of a wider problem. Of course, rights-holders are simply using the tools available to them to prevent what they see as theft plain and simple. But these methods are at best ineffectual, at worst counter-productive and morally questionable.

We talked about the chilling effect of high fees for reproducing images in academic works, and the similar problem of permissions fees for poetry or text. Many in the group were of the view that rights-holders would actually benefit from operating a more efficient permissions policy and that it was uneconomical for them to pursue online infringement of these rules.

To take poetry as an example, poems appear in full, unauthorised, on thousands of blogs and other websites. No publisher could ever track down and take action against the copyright infringer in the majority of cases, and even if they could, the cost and time it took would soon outweigh the slim additional income they might receive from the permissions fees they recouped. In any case, there might be a beneficial relationship between having these poems so widely available online and sales of the poet’s books. Paulo Coelho, for one, is an author who firmly believes that when his work is reproduced on blogs and other websites, it helps his sales.

So, there was generally a feeling that although authors ought to retain some ownership, there ought to be a greater recognition of the problems the Web creates for existing rights regimes and licensing arrangements, and that this ought to be reflected in more suitable, and subtle, legislation and mechanisms of enforcement. These should include the ability to discriminate better between different types of uses, and users, of intellectual property, so that rights holders wouldn’t need to charge an academic researcher the same as a media company, and a simplification of the process for requesting permissions. Convention and incentive need to replace legislation and enforcement. But in order for that to happen there must be simpler ways of licensing or clearing IP.

Fortunately, many of these ideas seem to chime with the recommendations of the Hargreaves report, and increasingly the attitudes of various rights-holders who are seeking to make it easier for their material to be copied and re-used. It seems that there is a broad movement towards greater consensus about the need for some changes to make the reproduction and transmission of intellectual property easier and simpler. Nobody wants to set aside ownership completely. We just want to make sharing better and simpler.

This post was originally published on Charles Beckett’s blog, How To Think About the Future. Photo by Flickr user AstronomyBlog. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 licence.

As it happens, my particular area of interest is in the challenges faced by British Public Service Broadcasters (PSBs). PSBs are, of course, different to other broadcasters in that they have a defined responsibility to provide public value. Different broadcasters articulate this responsibility in different ways: The BBC has a set of 6 public purposes which are included in their charter, and which inform all of the corporation’s activities; Channel 4′s remit has been defined by law, and gets changed periodically when new broadcasting or communications acts are passed. The current BBC charter tasks the BBC with Sustaining Citizenship and Civil Society, while Channel 4 have a responsibility, since 2010, to “promote measures intended to secure that people are well informed and motivated to participate in society in a variety of ways” (Digital Economy Act, 2010). Michael Tracey, in his overarching study of late 20th Century PSBs identifies Serving the Public Sphere as one of the core principles which underpin all PSBs (1998, 28-30). (Incidentally, S4C, the Welsh-language fourth channel that I’m involved with has a remit defined by statute, like Channel 4 – but it is far more narrowly defined, and makes no reference to any overarching duty to serve the public sphere.)

When commercial media companies fall prey to a changing world, it’s of little concern to us. We accept that the rise and fall of multinational corporations is part of the natural order of the market; if they fail to adapt to changing market conditions, it’s a matter for their shareholders, rather than the broader public. But if we accept the argument that has dominated British media policy since the 1920s – that PSBs have an essential role to play in the public sphere – to what extent can we allow PSBs to drown?

At the moment, our PSBs seem to be in fairly rude health. Individual institutions or services might be faring better than others, but the fear that was prevalent 5 to 10 years ago – that “the internet” would destroy “the media” – seems to have subsided. I attended the Edinburgh Television Festival last August, which was themed around the concept of “TV+”. Each delegate was given a pamphlet produced by Deloitte analysing recent trends in British TV viewing. The message within the pamphlet, and the overwhelming feeling amongst festival delegates, was that they had weathered the internet storm. TV viewership was rising, not falling; digital technologies were complementing TV, not challenging it; convergence had driven people to TV, not away from it.

These are my own personal observations rather than something that I’ve researched in detail, but a recent keynote given by James Bennett at a conference in Canterbury Christ Church University suggested a certain level of complacency at the BBC which chimes with my experience in Edinburgh. (Bennett’s paper is awaiting publication, and I’m aware of the dangers of quoting (or mis-quoting) from memory – which I will seek to negate by drawing your attention to the fact that its publication is imminent, and that it will form a chapter in in Derek Johnson, Derek Kompare & Avi Santos’ collection Intermediaries due out with NYU Press later this year).  Bennett quoted from an interview with a member of BBC Vision staff which expressed relief at the introduction of the iPlayer – a familiar, linear method of delivering TV content. It is a sentiment that is echoed in Bennett’s paper by BBC Director General Mark Thompson. One of Bennett’s conclusions was that the BBC – on an institutional level if not always an individual one – sees online media as a continuation or an expansion of the traditional broadcasting model. Without being overly-reductionist (and taking care to emphasise that this is my reading, and not necessarily Bennett’s) new media is about delivering old content in new ways; the BBC is happy to expand into new areas, as long as the essential relationship between producer and audience remains fixed.

To what extent does this complacency matter? If, like some within the TV industry believe, the supposed war between new and old media is over, then we need not worry. A passive audience will continue to demand no more than television programmes (or radio programmes, or print journalism) made available through an ever-greater number of devices. The demand by government that PSBs serve the public sphere will continue to be fulfilled by a traditional broadcast model, albeit one which offers increased choice, diversity and flexibility. In short, online is about doing old things in new ways.

The BBC is a huge organisation that employs thousands of people, and I’m sure that there are a great many who don’t see online media in this way. But I would venture as far as to say that this remains the dominant view within the TV industry (which is the medium that I happen to be most familiar with). My own experience of working on a new media strategy for S4C has thrown up a number of experiences which reflect Bennett’s findings at the BBC.

Is this necessarily a problem? In a very simple sense, it will become a clear and unavoidable problem for the BBC if an obsession with a linear, top-down broadcast model alienates the audience. As people spend more and more of their time engaging with media which gives them the opportunity to do more than just passively consume, they might get bored of the BBC’s top down model. In this scenario, people stop watching Eastenders, and start spending their evenings writing fan fiction about Ian Beale, forcing the BBC to sit up and take notice. At the moment, this seems an unlikely scenario, and as long as sufficient numbers of people are doing both things (or just watching Eastenders), the BBC can carry on as it is – creating great content for people to consume.

Where I think the greater issue lies is with our public broadcasting institutions’  commitment to fulfil a remit which makes a meaningful contribution to society. Informing people about what’s going on in the world – whether that’s done through news and current affairs or soap operas – is a fundamentally important part of their commitment to serve the public sphere, but it only goes part of the way. Indeed, the BBC itself recognises that to effectively fulfil its remit, it needs to encourage people to participate in the public sphere, not simply be told about its goings on. Dig down into the BBC’s Purpose Priorites for Sustaining citizenship and civil society and you will find a commitment to “Encourage conversation and debate about news, current affairs and topical issues” as well as “Enable audiences to access, understand and interact with different types of media”. The BBC knows that moving beyond the linear broadcast model is an important part of fulfilling its remit, but struggles to understand how to do this in practice. Interaction between producer and audience is age-old, but remains confined to the editorial straight-jacket of the radio phone-in or TV vox pops. What’s interesting about the BBC’s public purposes is that as well as serving the public sphere, it also sees itself as having a responsibility to “Stimulate creativity and cultural excellence”.  I suspect that the “cultural excellence” has a tendency to win out, meaning that creativity is stimulated, as long as it conforms to traditional notions of quality – that is, we want to foster the next generation of creative professionals, but are less interested in the amateur.

Where PSBs fall short is that they doesn’t see the natural link between both of these public purposes. As David Gauntlett has argued, creativity is valuable not only because it creates cutural artefacts, but because the process of creating strengthens social bonds, provides the creator with a sense of meaning, and contributes to overall happiness. If PSBs want to encourage people to engage with one another, or with the world around them, the creative process is key. Likewise, when PSBs think about stimulating creativity, the natural end point of that process shouldn’t necessarily be “cultural excellence”. Cultural excellence is a valuable by-product of creativity, but isn’t necessarily the most important or desirable outcome.

The point of this post is not to find fault with the BBC specifically. As it’s the largest of our PSBs it provides more examples for me to use to illustrate my points – it also happens that I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to draw upon James Bennett’s BBC-specific work to support some of my own (fairly anecdotal) perceptions of PSBs. But my central argument is that the attitudes discussed here dominate thinking about Public Service Broadcasting in the UK, and that issues which are illustrated by BBC-specific examples certainly exist within other institutions. My own work with S4C has involved rehearsing many of the arguments in this post, and trying to influence a broad strategic context which would push PSB in the right direction.

And this remains the real challenge for the PSBs themselves. Understanding that participation and creativity have an intrinsic value is relatively simple, yet remains an important first step. Defining a role for the institution which moves away from the traditional broadcast model is much more complex. Funding pressure, audience metrics, public value tests, compliance, and an entrenched working culture are all significant barriers to change. Public media may not be drowning just yet, but the waters are slowly rising. A move away from being exclusively producer-comissioner-distributors to taking on the role of facilitators is an essential part of ensuring that our PSBs are not lost below the waves.

Dyfrig Jones is a lecturer in media at Bangor University. He also sits on the S4C Authority, and Chaired the Authority’s New Media Forum. The S4C New Media Forum’s interim report can be found here. Dyfrig is writing in a personal capacity, and his views do not represent the views of S4C. Follow him on Twitter: @dyfrig

Photo by Flickr user TimboDon. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.

The tweets from each event are archived here. We used the Tweetdoc tool, which creates PDFs of tweets from the previous seven days.

• First event: 29 March 2012: Digital transformations in production and creativity workshop, at University of Westminster, London.
   
• Second event: 20 April 2012: Digital transformations in business models, rights and ownership workshop, at British Library, London.
   
• Third event: 15 May 2012: Designing for community-powered digital transformations workshop, at Tate Britain, London, followed by Henry Jenkins talk and discussion in the evening, at University of Westminster.
   
• Fourth event: 21 June 2012: Community-powered digital transformations in learning workshop, at UCL, London.

Photo by Flickr user chapmankj75. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 licence.

1. Hackerspaces Require Embodied Interaction

Perhaps to state the obvious, hackerspaces are defined by both online interactions and space they create for working on projects. This stands in contrast to how hackers are often investigated as an online-only category. As Gabriella Coleman reflects in her explication of hacker conferences such as DefCon, the literature “fails to substantially address… the existence and growing importance of face-to-face interactions among these geeks, hackers and developers” (Coleman, 2010, p. 48). This is unfair to hackers, painting them as stereotypical geeks that do not come together in shared rituals and learn from each other. I would similarly counter by saying that place and digital tools as symbiotic and non-exclusionary, and hackerspaces cannot be reduced to virtuality. The more we learn about learning in blended contexts, the more the online and offline seem symbiotic. For example, the PLAY (participatory learning and you) project works as an educational “toolkit” to connect community members and teachers to students in classrooms through participatory culture, not to replace classrooms.

Hackerspaces are a kind of “third place” (Oldenburg, 1997) outside of the home and work where individuals can come together. They also involve adults in continued learning, which is an angle I often seen neglected in favor of a focus on youth. Both youth and adult learning are necessary. They are not necessarily an ideal type of organization, however. Looking to hackerspaces as paragons of efficiency is not the best perspective. Learning is messy business. Hackerspace projects are often not going to change the world and often fail. There is plenty of interpersonal conflict. This is what makes them such lively spaces, but also organizations that are continually learning and redefining themselves through communication in what Taylor and Van Every called the “emergent organization” (Taylor & Van Every, 2000).

2. Hacking is tinkering

The term “hacking” has been much disputed, resulting in an array of definitions including the portamento “hacktivism” and the more criminally-inclined “cracker.” The roots of the term “hack” can be traced back to the MIT model railroad club, where it was used to refer to a creative or effective fix for a problem. But in the current day the term “hacking” increasingly politically charged and not useful to discuss meaningful learning that takes place in these spaces. I prefer tinkering, a term that, implies appropriation of technologies for unintended uses and also captures a playful character that is present in hacking but ultimately overshadowed by aspersions of criminality.

The pedagogy of hacking can be seen as a cross between technological appropriation and “tinkering,” – a kind of creative misuse. Doug Thomas (2002) described Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman’s Yippie movement as a predecessor of contemporary hacker culture because its “primary missing became the distribution of information” (p. 16) used to understand systems. Thus, tinkering may have little to do with computers at all, but access to information and a physical space to employ it by conducting meaningful work and learning by doing. Jordan (2008) describes this as a fringe type of hacker, but I would argue that tinkering is at the core of what we consider hacking to be: the understanding of a closed system by sanctioned and unsanctioned means.

The hacker ethic promotes pushing boundaries of established systems as a right and necessity, as mirrored in its own online discussions and printed magazines. The mantra “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it” is often repeated by hackerspace members. Nostalgic tales of western ingenuity also prevail in my interviews of hackerspace members, pitted against overseas producers that are often also deeply involved in practices of tinkering and appropriation. For example, the Chinese practice of shanzai, or reverse-engineering of goods, is heavily embedded in a tinkering context that is profoundly different from its western counterpart.

3. Hackerspaces as Creative Glue

The more we learn about being creative, the less it seems like a solo enterprise (Ogle, 2007; Sawyer, 2006). Rather, to employ David Gauntlett’s concept of creativity as a kind of meso-level “social glue” (2011, p. 217), the pleasures of making are both a motivation for and result of coming together. He described the maker movement as engendering connectivity in three ways. First, it encourages new relationships with materials and ideas in pursuit of projects. Second, it involves connecting to peers and socialization with like-minded others in a community. Finally, it encourages connecting and sharing information to the outside world.  Communication scholars are often very serious about “connecting,” and those using network analysis have proposed that our relationships are predictive. For example, Granovetter’s concept of “weak ties” is often used to describe the importance of loose friendships online, for instance in propagation of innovations. Yet, I would argue that network analysis frequently misses the cultural and embodied context of interactions that Gauntlett describes.

4. Toward Connected Learning

Henry Jenkins advocated for a move from “do it yourself” to “do it together,” which better captures “collective enterprises within networked publics” (Knobel, 2010, p. 233). Like “affinity spaces” (Gee, 2005) and “communities of practice” (Wenger, 2002), hackerspaces have low barriers to entry, operate through social learning, and encourage informal mentorship. However, unlike communities of practice, they are self-governing and are defined more by their collective rather than community practices. A reconciliation of these two terms is outside the scope of a blog post, but briefly, I believe that hackerspaces are supportive of their members, but they are more accurately viewed as blended online/offline collectives that are always in the process of organizing rather than communities.

Mimi Ito’s concept of connected learning (DML Central, 2012) is helpful here to describe the importance of hackerspaces. According to Ito and her team, different online and offline learning contexts are symbiotic, producing a network for learning. The three design principles of connected learning are: production-centered, open networks, and shared purpose. Applying these principles to hackerspaces, a person cannot be a member without participating, even if it is peripheral, such as by acting as an assistant or watching. Similarly, open networks are a given, with hackerspaces operating as a kind of nexus for various school, work, and recreational networks. By providing a space and receptive collective, hackerspaces connect individuals to tools and ideas that have a material impact. In interviews members often referred to this extra push as the 20% that you can’t do alone. Hackerspaces encourage individual autonomy and efficacy rather than push a preconceived agenda.

It should also be noted that hackerspaces are similar to several other movements, such as fablabs and shared work spaces. In the educational arena, the computer clubhouse effort (Kafai, Peppler, & Chapman, 2009) employed constructionist theory to connect K12 students in underserved communities to create “a supportive space for its members to design, build, and share their projects and ideas” (p. 4). The founders sought to go beyond mere questions of access to help guide youth and provide valuable skills they use toward their personal goals. In the current day, advocates such as Mitch Altman are trying to bring the hackerspace experience to K12 education, and spaces such as the Mt Elliott makerspace are based in increasingly diverse communities. The close imbrication of alternative spaces and digital tools for learning in everyday life still seems an open question.

Photo by Flickr user laRuth. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY 2.0 licence.

#AreWeContent?

‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice … ‘now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was!’ – Alice in Wonderland

In using social media and engaging with web 2.0 technologies, I often imagine a hidden hashtag, like a date stamp marking us in and out of every little transaction. #AreWeContent? We enter into an online social environment like Alice in her adventures in Wonderland. We are never quite sure of our size and distance in relation to others. We might at times be baffled at the nature of conversations – indeed, who lies behind all the voices we ‘hear’? Like Cheshire Cats they appear to come and go. We can make various adjustments (as Alice might) and in the event we get bored we might soon declare how preposterous it all is. Yet, to avoid disenfranchisement we generally accept a place somewhere within the labyrinth.

Working with students on a Media programme at York St John University, we adopted ethnographic methods to explore both the online and offline experience of various news media and arts organisations, notably Tate Modern and (much smaller in scale) York City Art Gallery. We visited the galleries and we looked at print and TV media at the same time as ‘lurking’ online, in order to explore how the rhetoric of audience participation equates to lived experiences. We can quickly find new media technologies remediate old media formats. Websites often still just publish and promote centrally produced material, and those excitable invitations from broadcast media for audience participation through emails, texts and tweets conflict with heavy-handed moderation, or are simply made meaningless when read out randomly on air.

When asked how we might rate organisations such as the BBC, The Guardian, Independent and Tate, they generally score well in terms of being ‘digitally savvy’. Yet, these organisations might themselves be surprised to find they are viewed as being distant, even anti-social. The graph shown here cannot in anyway be taken as scientific; it is simply the result of a group discussion following 6-8 weeks of low-level, ‘trainee’ ethnographic work. However, it is thought provoking. The York City Art Gallery would be the first to admit they lack a digital strategy, which they tend to see as a resource issue. However, the gallery space itself lacked appeal to the visiting students. A potential problem is that new media gives rise to whole new expectations about cultural experiences. A worrying thought would be that it isn’t just the implementation of new/social media that is lacking, but that we desire culture to be more like an online experience. However, on the right-hand side of the graph the Huffington Post, which represents a purely online and social-media driven approach to reporting the news, is mixed in with the other more traditional media outlets. Interestingly, One&Other – which is particularly relevant to the York area – scores well in terms both of being digitally savvy and sociable. The site describes itself as a social enterprise, offering local news and information:

One&Other is a media brand fit for the 21st century.  Our platforms are the home of local news, culture, and conversations that inspire and empower communities for good. Out goes the negative news agenda and in comes more considered reporting, reviews, and experiences, combined with the long-lost art of storytelling and beautiful design.  […] …we’re making it our mission to re-inject the relevance, intelligence, charm, beauty and purpose back into local media.  We also believe that local media have a responsibility beyond profit that needs to be protected, that is to serve, enlighten, empower and advance communities.

Again, it would be wrong to read too much into these findings, but a picture emerges: The big players, such as the BBC, newspapers, and well-known cultural organisations such as Tate, are well resourced. Often they are trendsetters, yet their concerns for brand, editorial, and/or curatorial control gives rise to significant dilemmas when seeking to engage with audiences. Smaller organisations with more regional or local outreach are often poorly resourced, and/or inhibited about digital strategies (a problem The Space is clearly seeking to remedy). Instead new, digital entrepreneurial initiatives are emerging, which typically focus on user-generated content. As a result, community now becomes its own content, which – to draw on Jean Baudrillard postmodern allusion – runs the risk of turning our map of culture into its own simulacrum; being a ‘map that precedes the territory … that engenders the territory’.

To return to the metaphor of Alice, she is never really content, her adventures being akin to an anxiety dream. The source of Alice’s anxiety is twofold. Firstly, she is aware of being unable to control the dynamics that press upon her. Yet, equally, she is aware everything revolves around her. This kind of double anxiety surfaced during the aforementioned ethnography and the conversation leading to the plotting of the graph above. As expectations rise for greater engagement, so the disappointments loom as individuals reveal just how faraway they are in the act of being in ‘dialogue’ with online platforms.  The anxiety dream is of course the manifest of our latent concerns. We are the content, and it leads us to try desperately to become more content or at ease. In this vein, Jodi Dean, in her book Blog Theory (2010), offers a psychoanalytic reading of the compelling, yet all too often empty experience of being online:

As we share our opinions and upload our videos, there are more opinions to read and videos to watch and then more responses to craft and elements to mash up. And then there are still more responses to read, and as these increase so do the challenges of finding the ones we want … It’s easier to set up a new blog than it is to undertake the ground-level organizational work of building alternatives. It’s also difficult to think through the ways our practices and activities are producing new subjectivities, subjectivities that may well be more accustomed to quick satisfaction and bits of enjoyment than to planning, discipline, sacrifice and delay. – Jodi Dean, Blog Theory.

Dean alerts us both to the enticing nature of online activity, yet warns against confusing such activity with social impact. Similar concerns have come through for the Digital Transformations Research Network when considering the ‘creative relationships between cultural and media organizations and their users’. The new media companies – the likes of Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – are agnostic about the meaning of content. Instead, they provide the means for ‘us’ (whether individuals, communities or organisations) to make the content, and to be happy in our own ‘business’ of making it. As one thoughtful YouTube video puts it, the ‘Machine is Us/ing Us’. To go beyond merely inputting our data into the available systems and platforms, we need to ask what we want from community, collaboration and conversation. In turn, this raises questions about the current set of templates for content, and whether or not we need to design for participation and dialogue in completely new ways.

The Importance of Being Data

I recently attended a ‘Hack for Culture’ event in Liverpool, which brought arts and cultural organisations (including the Everyman Playhouse, Liverpool Philharmonic, and Tate Liverpool) together with Merseyside’s digital and creative industries. The aim was to explore and experiment with a variety of cultural data sets. Data sets are generated through the work of arts organisations, ever eager to locate and understand their audiences. Yet, these same organisations can lack understanding, expertise, or resource to generate something more dynamic and progressive from the data. As reported in The Guardian, the idea behind so-called ‘hack’ events is to bring together developers, designers, academics and arts and culture professionals in order to ‘change the dynamics of the arts-technology relationship’. The underlying argument resonates with the interests of the Digital Transformations Research Network:

Paying a digital agency to deliver your website is not a collaborative relationship – it’s a transactional one. Given that in most cases this is how a cultural organisation engages with digital talent, it doesn’t develop much capacity for innovation. Hack days remedy that, freeing us to have a creative conversation with digital talent to explore what might be possible rather than being fixated on what we think we want and need. It also exposes us to the creative processes of the digital sector. (Rohan Gunatillake, ‘The rise of the hack day and what it means for the arts’)

The increasing cultural significance of data requires particular attention. The explosion of infographics, for example, highlights a shift in not only how, but more crucially who is representing information and ideas. Of course, it is no longer just tapping away at keyboards that generates data. Increasingly, the talk of is of so-called ‘Big Data’, a cascade of self-producing algorithms and automated programs plugged into online networks, and sensitive to supply chains and markets.

One of the speakers at the Liverpool Hack for Culture event was Zarino Zappia, a product designer and coder at ScraperWiki. Combining the open source culture of wikis, with the growing interest and need of ‘scrapping’ data, or handling digital data sets, Zappia demonstrated how his free to use platform quickly combines and visualises data sets for new ends. The strapline for the platform is ‘ScraperWiki makes data do things’ – and clients include The Guardian, Informa, and the Cabinet Office. The demonstration I witnessed combined Tate Liverpool’s ticketing information with local government educational data sets. The results were not particularly surprising (more of the middle-classes are visiting the gallery etc.), but the speed of the calculation was a revelation. Within just a few hours social profiles can be mapped against cultural activity.

To take another example, a TED lecture given by technologists at Harvard and Google presents the idea of ‘Culturomics’. Drawing on the ‘data’ from billions of words from Google Books, they demonstrate the possibility of analysing culture as never before. The resulting Google Labs N-gram Viewer is another free to use tool supposedly putting the power of analysis into anyone’s hands:

The Google Labs N-gram Viewer is the first tool of its kind, capable of precisely and rapidly quantifying cultural trends based on massive quantities of data. It is a gateway to culturomics! The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (‘banana’) or phrases (‘United States of America’) in books over time. You’ll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published!

It is as if the once groundbreaking and painstaking sociological analysis of ‘cultural capital’ (cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, 1984) is now achievable on a laptop in an afternoon. The sites of critique and social/cultural analysis are seemingly shifting away from established organisations and critical voices to a more fluid, open source community of developers and designers. As a result, exciting opportunities open up, yet equally there remain unanswered (and arguably unconsidered) questions of ethics, methods, and cultural meaning and worth. If the arts-technology relationship is to break with a transactional model, arts and culture organisations, and their communities, must get in on the act. At the very least, this will mean possessing greater understanding of data handling and design to ensure a clearer sense of purpose.

The Culture Social Industry Reconsidered

Data provides all sorts of facts and figures about cultural engagement. However, it does not tell us how we feel, nor does it reveal anything of our hopes and aspirations. Advocates of new/social media would suggest we know how we feel and we make use of new technologies in creative and collaborative ways that benefit us. A more critical view would argue data is influencing behavior (and online design), even entrenching a bureaucracy of culture and leisure.

Adorno and Horkheimer’s well-known essay from the 1940s on the ‘culture industry’ is often used to portray an out of date ‘big, bad’ theory of media. Their phrase ‘mass deception’ sounds overblown, and does not match with much of what we know through ethnographic studies of audiences. Yet, their overarching concern about the interface of bureaucracy and technology retains currency:

‘The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry. The old experience of the movie-goer, who sees the world outside as an extension of the film he has just left (because the latter is intent upon reproducing the world of everyday perceptions), is now the producer’s guideline. The more intensely and flawlessly his techniques duplicate empirical objects, the easier it is today for the illusion to prevail that the outside world is the straightforward continuation of that presented on the screen’ (Adorno and Horkeimer, ‘The Culture Industry’)

In the context of contemporary media, particularly social media, the idea of cultural representations being an extension, or indeed the duplication of the ‘world outside’ remains prescient. Of course, with user-generated content the distinction between producer and consumer dissolves, but arguably this can compound the culture industry critique. The idea of mass deception does not need to be premised upon vertical, hierarchical power. The deeper problem – which connects with psychoanalytic concerns – is the willingness of individuals to partake in systems such as the ‘mass customization’ of culture.

The formulation of the ‘culture industry’ sought to expose a fallacy that the declining authority of religion, along with technological and social differentiation had led to ‘cultural chaos’. To the contrary, Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument is that culture had come to impress the ‘same stamp on everything’. Such a claim continues to resonant when we think of the ‘time stamp’ of social media status updates and blog posts, as well as the ubiquitous, uniform templates these online platforms provide. With the culture industry made to pass through the filter of the whole world (web), we might usefully extend the term of the ‘culture industry’, to suggest also a ‘social industry’ of mobile and networked media. Our willingness to participate in social networks is a fait accompli, but do we really know what we want to say, or even what else we want to say via such networks?

Ways of Participating

The Frankfurt School’s questioning of technology, mediation and democracy evokes strong arguments and counter-arguments. Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Artwork in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’ (1936), is one of the most widely read texts, and perhaps precisely because it captures an oscillating view about mediation. Benjamin’s ideas explicitly inform John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which marked a critical intervention in cultural analysis in the 1970s. Berger openly challenged the hierarchies of the art world and high/low culture; and did so using the medium of television. Berger upholds the critical, political concerns of the critical theorists, yet he connects these with a progressive view of cultural participation and dialogue.

A particularly eloquent scene from the first episode of Ways of Seeing shows Berger talking with a group of primary school children about a Caravaggio painting. Berger plays a minimal moderating role, letting the conversation flow; only occasionally summarising to help establish the essence of competing views. What is fascinating about the clip is that through conversation a range of subtle ideas are explored, not least the sexual and gendered ambivalences of the painting. Ways of Seeing played an important part in opening up a new discourse and politics of museums, galleries, heritage and curatorial practice. Part of the legacy today is that we have naturally looked to digital resources as further means to enable visitor participation and outreach. Yet, what is it about the scene of Berger talking with the children that seems to defy digital translation? Or put another way, do comments following a blog post or on a Facebook page garner the same level of participation and subtlety? Ethnographic work as mentioned above would seem to suggest quite strongly this is not the case.

Caravaggio’s painting, The Supper at Emmaus (1601), presents a set of subtle gestures that would be hard to emulate through online conversation. And it is an emotional, empathetic engagement that allows the school children (with Berger) to open up such a fruitful dialogue. If we are to harness the digital realm for communities of engagement, people need to feel part of a conversation before even participating. The idea echoes how the National Gallery describe Caravaggio’s painting itself: ‘[t]he intensity of the emotions of Christ’s disciples is conveyed by their gestures and expression. The viewer too is made to feel a participant in the event.’

Dialogical Designs

In his book Together (2012), Richard Sennett argues the problem of online exchange relates to a dialectical and not dialogical approach to conversation (with the latter more suitably describing the scene from Ways of Seeing). In dialectic exchange, Sennett notes, ‘the verbal play of opposites should gradually build up to a synthesis’. When we are online, whether contributing or reading comments to a blog post, news article or Facebook page, we imagine the ‘conversation’ is heading somewhere, that it is building to a satisfying synthesis. Of course more often than not, the conversation reaches no such conclusion. We might say our conversations are more dialogic in nature; whereby, as Sennett describes, discussion ‘does not resolve itself by finding common ground’; and while ‘no shared agreements may be reached, through the process of exchange people may become more aware of their own views and expand their understanding of one another’. This may happen in some cases, but Sennett argues online communication is ‘designed’ to inhibit the dialogical.

Sennett provides an example of using GoogleWave, a now discontinued online service from Google ‘designed specifically for serious online cooperation’. In using this tool, as part of a group looking at policy initiatives in relation to migration to London, Sennett collaborated online with a number of statisticians, ethnographers and sociologists. It was necessary, he felt, to break with online habits, ‘which exemplify the fetish of assertion’; instead, he suggests, ‘only a dialogical, exploratory conversation could help … gain insight into the complex issues’. Despite high hopes for the technology, Sennett actually found the program to work against such exchange:

The program’s engineers had a definite idea about what cooperation entails; theirs was the dialectical model of conversation, one conducted in visual form. […] The program preserves what has come up before in a discussion, and makes the past immediately accessible with a click of the mouse; the visual set-up at a given moment, though, side-windows or suppresses what have come to seem irrelevancies and dead ends.

‘The instructions given to us for using GoogleWave claimed this set-up was an efficient way to cooperate, since irrelevancies fall to the wayside, but the program proved too simple. Its dialectical, linear structure failed to account for the complexities’ – Sennett, Together.

To consider just one simple, if fundamental aspect of online design, nearly all platforms require us to scroll down the page – which by default engenders the linear structure referred to by Sennett. Typically, emails, information posts, comments and tweets all accumulate down the page, the most recent either at the top or bottom of a long list. The result is the appearance of a single, unfolding dialogue. Of course, if we look closer at the individual messages we find a wide range of possibilities, but nonetheless, the design and conversational flow does little to capture how we talk and think together (as, for example, we witness in the scene from Ways of Seeing). In fact, the dialectical, linear structures or templates characteristic of Web 2.0 platforms, whilst undeniably enablers of social exchange on some level, are equally evocative of the bureaucratic ‘stamp’ on things noted of the culture industry.

There are examples of how design can be made more intuitive and subtle. Touch-screens are one clear example of how both technology and interface design can dramatically alter the nature and experience of our interaction with information. Apple’s dominant market position can in part be attributed to design enhancements. The company has not reinvented computing and mobile technology (indeed they are frequently in the courts regarding patent disputes!), but they excel in making an interface appear more tangible and intuitive. So, for example, the way in which iPhone (and other mobile phone) touch-screens appear to slide from one screen to the next is a matter of coding (and aesthetic design), it is not an intrinsic quality of the hardware technology. Of course these are only cosmetic matters (and in the case of Apple says nothing of the problems associated with proprietary formats and a globalised labour-force). Getting beyond dialectic models of conversation and exchange potentially requires a potentially fundamental and integrated rethink of design.

Making Things More Difficult…

Reflecting on the AHRC Digital Transformations project, David Gauntlett considers three, interconnecting spheres of transformation to which we need to pay attention. These are: (1) Transformations in cultural life and cultural artefacts; (2) transformations in theories, approaches and tools; and (3) transformations in communication, engagement and participation. In thinking. In the 1970s, John Berger’s work can be understood as part of a wave of critical transformations, which echo these three, interconnected transformations. Berger’s account of new forms of reproducibility examined only analogue, mass media forms. Nonetheless, his political, social and cultural concerns map onto present interest in digital media. For Berger, at the time of presenting Ways of Seeing, there were significant transformations taking place in mediated cultural life, which in turn connected with new theoretical ideas and approaches; as well the shifting agenda regarding audiences and participation.

The scene from Ways of Seeing (discussed above) captures the ‘art’ of dialogical exchange. It yields a beautiful discussion about ambiguity, which is not premised upon prior, official knowledge, but simply keen, sensitive engagement. In going online, one of the critical questioning facing arts and cultural organizations is how to facilitate such an exchange, in which the flow of conversation is not linear, nor necessarily is it easy. ‘In dialogics,’ notes Sennett, ‘people do not neatly fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle;’ which is precisely why ‘they can get both knowledge and pleasure from their exchanges’.

Richard Sennett’s Together is at root an account of an apparent ‘de-skilling’ in the social realm. His concern is that we are ‘losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work’. We hear a lot of rhetoric about community and cooperation, not least in respect of social media. Yet, if we accept the account of online communication as inherently dialectical, we encounter two potential problems. Firstly, exchanges can seemingly be forced to add up to some kind meaning that they do not necessarily possess; and/or secondly, given an overabundance of information we tend to cherry-pick, aligning ourselves with what makes sense to us and not others. In other words, we ‘collude’ with communities of like minds. The ‘good’ alternative, Sennett suggests, ‘is a demanding and difficult kind of cooperation; it tries to join people who have separate or conflicting interests, who do not feel good about each other, who are unequal, or who simply do not understand one another. The challenge is to respond to others on their own terms’.

Sennett’s account of cooperative communication brings to the fore the importance of sympathy and empathy. Both, he argues ‘convey recognition, and both forge a bond, but the one is an embrace, the other an encounter. Sympathy overcomes differences through imaginative acts of identification; empathy attends to another person on his or her own terms’. The scene from Ways of Seeing, in which children discuss a painting, is all about empathy. Through dialogue the children not only hear the views of each other, but they face up to the potential of conflicting views. They also attend to the person in the painting. They truly encounter the art. In this manner, the kind of dialogue we might hope for online needs to be more than just eliciting a response, and more than seeking consensus. It needs to bring about encounters, or as Sennett would suggest, to be ‘an earned experience rather than just thoughtless sharing’.

© Paul Foreman http://mindmapinspiration.com

In terms of aesthetic design, an obvious problem with online social templates is that all our thoughts and ideas end up looking exactly the same – constrained as they are by set colour schemes, fonts and character lengths etc. Sennett writes: ‘The desire to neutralize difference, to domesticate it, arises … from an anxiety about difference’. While he is writing about underlying problems of engagement, it is also fruitful to consider the argument purely in terms of design. What if, for example, we used the online environment differently? With an increasing number of galleries and museums installing touchscreen displays, is there a way to use the dimensions of the screen differently to foster greater complexity in our conversations? As one tentative suggestion, we could consider online comments and dialogue accruing upon a single screen in the form of a mind-map, rather than in a long, bureaucratic list. Thoughts and suggestions, which might seem to go in quite disparate directions could collect upon the one screen in thought bubbles of different dimensions. We could then make choices to move into further levels of conversation.

Such a design hardly solves the deeper dilemmas of dialogic and empathetic exchange, but it is suggestive of what might transpire in rethinking the container of what we wish to say and be able to say, together – even if, or indeed especially if that togetherness is about difference as much as similarities. However, the point here is not to present abstract ideas for alternative ‘templates’, but to place emphasis on the idea that we all need to get involved in thinking about dialogic environments and design elements, and that these environments should not be bolted on, but built into the transformations of the very objects, ideas and participation we desire…

The first stage has involved 18 relatively inexpensive projects: each has a budget of under £30,000 – although of course this adds up to a significant investment when multiplied by 18. I gathered the summaries of these projects into this handy PDF. The projects are running from February to August 2012.

On 30 April we had a meeting of the leaders of this first set of projects, at the University of Westminster. You can see our happy, digitally untransformed faces in the photograph here. Surprisingly, all but one of the project leaders was able to attend, and we were joined by Mark Llewellyn, the AHRC’s Director of Research, and Christie Walker, the AHRC’s Strategy and Development Manager responsible for Digital Transformations.

This first set of projects represent quite a mix of interests. The ‘subject areas’ covered include design, performance, literature and publishing, history and archives. But the whole idea of digital transformations, as far as I’m concerned, involves a disruption of the established notions of arts and humanities disciplines, and happily these projects are cross-cut with themes including co-curation, experimentation, collaboration, platforms, communities of practice, translation, games, IP & rights, and all kinds of general disruption and questioning. Good.

As it steps into its bigger second phase, I fear that some scholars might see the notion of ‘digital transformations’ as a kind of armageddon, where all the things we knew and loved are blasted to bits by the coming of ‘the digital’. Of course that’s not the intention. Arts and humanities research addresses timeless questions about the nature of human identities, communities, and creativity. New technologies do not alter that. But digital technologies bring new issues, and questions, and tools, which can challenge and transform what we are looking at, how the work is done, and how society can engage with it.

In a recent email, the AHRC writes:

With the introduction later in 2012 of a new Large Grants Programme, the Arts and Humanities Research Council will seek to encourage, support and reflect the unique role of Arts and Humanities Research in a period of intensive technological change. The term ‘digital transformation’ is applicable across the breadth and width of AHRC-funded research. Its impact is plural, transversal and generative: reaching from situations where digital media enables the broadening of audiences for funded research to the emergence of singularly new practices which are embedded in and integrated with rapidly changing media.

This is exactly the kind of thing I would say, and certainly the AHRC will need to push the Digital Transformations programme to be as adventurous and as innovative as possible. It can’t just be a place where researchers add a ‘digital’ veneer to existing interests; the programme is absolutely obliged to be as cutting-edge as possible, I think. But I can appreciate that the breadth of this attack could seem rather scary.

For that reason I offer my helpful ‘three spheres’ diagram, which breaks ‘digital transformations’ down into manageable blobs. It also shows how far-reaching the impact of ‘digital transformations’ should rightly be. But at least, when broken down like this, we can hopefully get our heads around it:

So the three spheres are:

• Transformations in cultural life and cultural artefacts: Digital technologies and cultures lead to new objects of study – new communities, networks, devices, texts and artworks which should be the focus of innovative academic research.
• Transformations in theories, approaches and tools: These developments lead to transformations in research practice – suggesting ways of thinking, connections, and ways of working, which change the practices and processes of research.
• Transformations in communication, engagement and participation: The ways in which research can be shared and engaged with is also transformed by digital technologies, which offer compelling new avenues and opportunities.

Of course, these three spheres are – or should be – highly interconnected. But this is one way of thinking about it, anyway. I especially like the third one, which is all about how we go about things – the ‘lively new life of research’, as I have called it elsewhere, where research can take on a life of its own which was all-but impossible before, enabling us to have conversations with a much broader spread of people and groups and organisations, and make connections which can add to the exciting project of breaking down all those tiresome silos which still exist across academic life.

With any luck, of course, this model of ‘digital transformations’ will itself be battered and transformed as we exchange ideas in the sunny Cotswold hills (or, er, a conference room somewhere near the sunny Cotswold hills) over the next couple of days.

Top photo of the Soyuz TMA-18 rocket launch by NASA HQ Photo on Flickr. Some rights reserved under a Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0 licence.