Historical forms of user production

Abstract

Common conceptions of user production overstate its novelty while understating its variety. To respond to these lacks, this article develops an analytic map that enables a more nuanced historical and critical understanding and investigation of user production. Historical approaches are well suited for capturing the multifarious forms of user production while also avoiding the problem of a-historicism. The article develops a contextual typology of user production by theorizing it as a cultural form. Primary forms discussed include those of buyer; source, subject, interviewee; contestant; supplier; financier; inventor; activist; and member, all of which are related to their generative formations and conditions. The article concludes by suggesting the kinds of questions and studies that such a framework makes possible.

Bearing the cost to witness: the political economy of risk in contemporary conflict and war reporting

“…However, notions of direct exploitation fail to capture the complex relationship between risk and labor in journalism. Historically, direct observation has been naturalized into the practice of journalism, obscuring the individual effort necessary to gather those observations, especially when those observations come from sources who are expected to have specialized information derived from their professional lives and daily experiences (Hamilton, 2014). Contemporary iterations of user-production build on these relations through the platforms, concepts, and production routines that construe individual experience as a raw material to be captured by journalistic practice (Hamilton and Heflin, 2011).…”

Daenerys Targaryen Will Save Spain:Game of Thrones, Politics, and the Public Sphere

“…As Benjamin Burroughs and Adam Rugg (2014, 15) rightly state, we are in the midst of a recalibration where the information “flow becomes increasingly channeled through the networked individual.” Working as individual nodes within a series of linked platforms, users with similar interests and ideological inclinations create their own online communities (Strangelove 2010), which may be firmly established or, conversely, contingent and temporary. User production, consumption, and distribution is consequently a multifaceted and intricate mishmash of practices working within different online networks globally trending or functioning, instead, within specific cultural and social frameworks (Hamilton 2014; Marwick and Boyd 2010).…”

‘We demand justice. We just getting started’: the constitutive rhetoric of 1Hood Media's hip-hop activism

“…This kind of relationship between audiences, production, distribution and new/social media platforms has been theorised using concepts such as user-generated content, ‘Prosumption’ (Ruckenstein 2011) , ‘Playbour’ (Kücklich 2005) and many other terms. Hamilton (2014) offers a historically grounded framework in which to think about these strategies. Gray and X's use of the participation in ‘communitarian’ user-communities associated with the aforementioned platforms fit within Hamilton's framework to some extent, but their negotiation of activist, capitalist logic warrants a nuanced reading.…”