The Power of Collaboration
In previous articles for MediaMagazine, ideas such as personalisation and democratisation have been explored in relation to new media technologies. In this article I want to bring together a few terms you may have already come across which can tell us a lot about trends in the media, particularly new media: open source software, Creative Commons and Web 2.0.
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is increasingly popular in writing about the internet, and it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean: there is no separate second generation, or second version, internet. Instead, there are websites and services that follow particular practices which can result in them being labelled Web 2.0. Such websites tend to put user content and collaboration at the forefront of what they offer visitors. Without any difficulty you can probably name a multitude of websites which are almost completely reliant on the content generated by users: MySpace, Bebo, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr are just five relatively new websites, all reliant on photographs, videos, or information from users. It’s worth bearing in mind that elements of Web 2.0 can be found in long-established websites; arguably one of the biggest Web 2.0 websites is Amazon, with its longstanding use of customer reviews and favourites lists. In preparation for OCR’s Audiences and Institutions: New Media Technologies question, you could develop a case study based on such websites, considering the extent to which they are allowing a more democratic approach to media content creation and consumption. No longer are a few gatekeepers in charge of media production and distribution; with an internet connection you too can compete with media professionals, goes the theory.
Creative Commons
To many, copyright is seen as a challenge to the development of thinking and the arts in that the sharing of ideas has been a defining quality of human advancement. Copyright, though, is there to protect against the exploitation of someone’s original work. Creative Commons is an organisation which has the aim of ‘enabling the legal sharing and reuse of cultural, educational, and scientific works’. It encourages content producers to licence their work with a Creative Commons licence, enabling greater re-use than under traditional ‘all rights reserved’ copyright whilst still protecting against commercial exploitation. Its website (www.creativecommons.org) has full details of its operations, including how to licence your own work so that others can legally share, develop and extend it.
Creative Commons is an important movement for media studies because it represents a challenge to traditional notions of copyright and because it can protect the growing number of ‘pro-ams’, amateurs who are able to produce content which is consumed worldwide thanks to the internet but who don’t have the power of large media organisations to guard against copyright violations.
Creative Commons’ CC365 campaign highlighted a different piece of music each day licensed using Creative Commons. In a world of high-profile prosecutions of those who download and share music, it is striking that artists are willing to distribute content in a way that encourages, rather than criminalises, sharing. The challenge to existing media institutions is how to develop a business strategy in which content isn’t used to generate income by direct selling. To do so would mean the sharing of content by the audience would be seen as a positive force to be celebrated.
Open Source
Open source software is that for which the code written to create it is freely available for anyone to view, modify and redistribute. As a student of media, issues of institutional ownership should not be unfamiliar. With these issues in mind, it is easy to see why those in favour of open source are seen as a threat; why would anyone give away their work for nothing, especially if it could make money? The answer is not straightforward, but looking elsewhere on the internet reveals that this trend is not specific to software development. Across the world there are millions of people producing entertaining, or instructional, or educational content for nothing. They do it because the internet allows them to do it easily and for little expense, if any. They do it for the cachet. They also do it because there’s a sense in which to offer material in this way is to contribute to the community from which we all benefit. Open source software is built with this sort of community spirit and as a result is driven by what the users want, rather than what focus-group surveys have suggested. As a student of media studies it’s also worth knowing that open source software can provide great software that’s free: both free ideologically and £0!
Why all this matters
With new media technologies it’s best to focus on how people are using a particular technology rather than on the technology itself. These three areas (Web 2.0, Creative Commons and open source) are valuable to reflect upon in that they are part of a growing trend in media away from established institutions and ‘expert’ content, towards user-generated content and the power of communities, in this context especially virtual communities. You can’t have failed to come across the story of how Arctic Monkeys used MySpace to take over the world. Even though it’s not strictly true, MySpace did help to generate a tremendous amount of interest in the band amongst users, illustrating the power to reach audiences new media can offer. It also demonstrates why traditional media institutions are threatened by new media: if they don’t keep up they will die. Why else did News Corp buy MySpace, or MTV offer up screen time to user-created content, or the Guardian set up so many blogs and talkboards to encourage audience participation? Critics of new media gloomily refer to the damage to society inflicted by pervasive electronic communication, ignoring the strong community aspect to many of the technologies they attack.
That’s not to say all this user-generated content is without drawbacks. Tim Berners-Lee, considered by many to have invented the internet, has suggested that the deluge of content from, well, almost everyone, could mean that internet content is unreliable, making the internet itself a devalued medium. Certainly, Wikipedia has had issues with the freedoms it allows with its content. As with the rise in citizen journalism, several critics are keen to point out that professional expertise is just that; the man on the street may think he can compete with the professionals, but that doesn’t mean he can. In a data-rich world, perhaps we need experts to sift, sort and explain things to us. As user-generated content grows, perhaps the filtering of media institutions is needed more than ever. After all, the theory of YouTube is great, but in reality a large percentage of its content is either uninteresting home video of stunts gone wrong or stolen clips. Perhaps there is a need for media experts and professionals.
Software for media students on a budget (or for those not on a budget but who want great software!)
Firefox - For many the first look at what open source production is capable of was the Firefox web browser. (www.getfirefox.com)
OpenOffice.org - OOo is an office suite which will play nicely with the majority of files created in MS Office. It has all the features without the price tag. (www.openoffice.org)
Audacity - A terrific audio editor with lots of powerful editing tools. The perfect way of producing your podcasts! (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)
GIMP - An image editor that rivals Photoshop. (www.gimp.org)
Scribus - This DTP program is rapidly gaining fans and for good reason: it’s great! (www.scribus.net)
Inkscape - At the time of writing not quite at version 1.0, this is nevertheless a pleasing vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator. (www.inkscape.org)
WordPress - WordPress is blogging software for those of you with your own server. This site is managed using WordPress and we use it to provide media students with blogs to record the progress of production and research tasks. It’s highly adaptable and again, it’s free. (www.wordpress.org)
Moodle - Your school or college may have adopted Moodle as it VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) of choice. Full of fantastic features and all created by community endeavour. (www.moodle.org)
Linux - Perhaps the greatest open source triumph is Linux, an OS (operating system) which is growing in popularity. (There are lots of versions of Linux but Ubuntu is currently the most downloaded - www.ubuntu.com)
