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Six - From networks to complexity: two case studies
- Edited by Ian Hargreaves, Cardiff University, John Hartley, Curtin University
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- Book:
- The Creative Citizen Unbound
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 06 April 2016, pp 129-152
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
From the noticeboard in the newsagent's window to multilayered online networks using social networking technologies, citizens access networks of support that uncover previously invisible opportunities. Such networks, online and offline, are facilitated by the use of social networking platforms but also through the everyday face-to-face interactions made possible by communities within localities. These overlapping networks are complex and dynamic and in this chapter we present two case studies where the micro-level actions of creative citizens generate impact within their communities and beyond. We consider how such actions, supported by and amplified by networks, often have wider impacts for the creative economy and for the relationship between citizens and those in power, taking us into territory illuminated by complexity theory.
In our first example we consider how a highly networked creative citizen has worked to fashion a ‘milieu’ to serve a community's creative needs and grow its cultural capital. We then turn to the way that citizen journalists, through a rejection of traditional journalistic practices and discourses, use networks to provide insight into everyday life, countering what Parker and Karner have described as externally-imposed ‘negative reputational geographies’ (2011: 309). In both cases these creative citizens enact a deft utilisation of their online and offline networks. Our intention here is to see beyond debates that tend to situate the affordances of networked technologies as the determining factor for success and instead ask how such technologies are put to use by creatives working in specific fields of cultural production. How do the networked actions of creative citizens create impact for themselves, their communities and for their practice? We begin by looking at debates about how the internet has by turns created and narrowed the opportunities for greater civic participation, before identifying useful frameworks to examine our case studies of networked creatives.
The civic potential of the internet
We might presume that in articulating a case for the importance of networks we take at face value the digitally enhanced role of technology as a transformative tool for positive change – a tool that seemingly allows those previously cut off from cultural or political participation to voice their concerns or engage in creative acts that will find global audiences.
Ten - Technology and the creative citizen
- Edited by Ian Hargreaves, Cardiff University, John Hartley, Curtin University
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- Book:
- The Creative Citizen Unbound
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 06 April 2016, pp 231-254
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- Chapter
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Summary
The starting point for our Creative Citizen research project was a question asking whether and to what extent digital communications technologies afford new civic potential. We also invited ourselves to consider how this potential might be enhanced by digital media, thereby making an assumption that agency and significance might properly be ascribed to technology in its relation to creative citizenship.
As we have seen in the preceding chapters and their detailed accounts of creative citizenship in action, this assumption demands critical reflection. Technology itself is rarely addressed head on within communities of the kind we have worked with. The truly indispensable drivers of creative citizenship are motivated people who have built a shared commitment, usually through face-to-face relationships in specific real world places. Digital technologies are today a commonplace and important tool for such groups, in some cases even an operational necessity. How are we to understand the role of technology in these processes?
The definition, meaning and agency of technology has long been a key question in media and cultural studies, as we try to make sense of the ‘changes in scale and pace of human affairs’ (McLuhan, 1964) that are a characteristic of living in a permanent upgrade culture, where the impacts of technological innovation often seem to be accelerating. Raymond Williams (1974), in his analysis of television as a ‘cultural form’, argued that the technologies of photography, telegraphy, and radio were components in the invention of broadcast television, but that what drove technological invention were accelerated social processes, notably mobility and growth ‘in a society characterised at its most general levels by a mobility and extension of the scale of organisations: forms of growth which brought with them immediate and longer-term problems of operative communications’ (Williams, 1974: 18–19). In this reading, technologies of communication develop in relation to the communicative and organisational conditions of society. So for Williams the accelerated development of industrial-scale printing technologies in the 19th century was associated with the communicative needs of a newly urbanised population seeking democratic representation, rather than an inevitable result of coal, iron and steam driven technologies (1974: 21).
Four - Citizenship, value and digital culture
- Edited by Ian Hargreaves, Cardiff University, John Hartley, Curtin University
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- Book:
- The Creative Citizen Unbound
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 06 April 2016, pp 75-102
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter sets out to illustrate how the many different notions of creative value among our research partners play out at the level of community practice. We work through a range of digitally enabled but locally determined amateur, semi-professional, informal and activist creative processes and attempt to articulate the nature and quality of the impact they create. It argues for the significance of these impacts on some of the infrastructures of citizenship: education, representation, communication, training, employment and environment, and thus supports the development of a new dimension to the concept of cultural value – one based on ‘impact’ rather than ‘intrinsic merit’.
We begin with a brief overview of the analytical frameworks that have helped us position our evidence, namely digital gift economies, local public spheres and participatory cultures. We then move on to classifying the evidence. Our method here has been to examine the research evidence for value-making statements. These may be statements where value is understood from context as intrinsic (such as trust or confidence), or they may be more judgmental, where the statement clearly makes a positive or negative assessment of process or experience. The evidence has been drawn from interviews, focus groups and asset mapping workshops, conducted across all strands of the research project. The interviews have been coded and compared across the different sites of investigation in order to support this qualitative analysis with quantitative data. The evidence is supplemented by observation, participation in co-production and textual analysis of content produced by our project partners. All of our evidence is the outcome of co-creative processes: our time, expertise and resources have been invested in our community partners in order to strengthen their organisations and networks. We have worked with them to produce, for instance, hyperlocal newspapers, digital stories, a virtual environment for planning and a graphic novel. Our understanding of value in these processes is therefore profoundly inflected by the nature of the co-creative relationships we have enjoyed with partners whose voices we hope to represent fairly in what follows.
Framing value
The idea of value is in crisis. The 2008 banking crash re-exposed the boom and bust cycle of financial markets as a dangerous and expensive game played with imperfectly understood and poorly regulated algorithms.