Participatory Cultural Production and the Diy Internet: From Theory to Practice and Back Again

Abstract

The free and open source software movements have inspired a new mode of participatory cultural production. The early hacker communities elaborated a sophisticated socio-technical system of network-enabled collaboration culminating in the GNU-Linux operating system. More recently, a range of do-it-yourself (DIY) media technologies have given any user with internet access the ability to become a producer in a variety of social fields. This has spawned an entirely new understanding of authorship and content production in film (machinima), games (player-producers), journalism (blogs), radio (podcasting) and knowledge production (Wikipedia). A number of social science epistemologies embrace ‘practice’ as a representational category to explain the relationship between structure and agency, such as Giddens' (1984) and Bourdieu's (1977) theories of structuration. Missing from most of these accounts is any engagement in practice-based research to construct knowledge about their domains. It will be shown that action research provides an important empirical method capable of extending the field of knowledge about user-led innovation. Action research provides a practice-based method to explore how social shaping occurs in the development of participatory cultural production systems.

Student-Produced Podcasts as an Assessment Tool: An Example from Geomorphology

“…Its use in teaching has mostly been limited to audio and video recording of lectures to make them available to students electronically (Read, 2005;Thomas, 2006) or instructional, as in, for example, student guides to library use (Jowitt, 2008). There is an emerging use of participatory video and audio, including podcasting, in the field of cultural production and research (Sharp, 2006), but the technology potentially has a wider range of applications to geography and the social sciences, and its broader benefits to undergraduate student learning are beginning to be explored (e.g. Lee et al 2008;Salmon & Edirisingha, 2008).…”