Saw this Error Message Generator on Drew’s blog and couldn’t help but create some popups that a user/interactor/operator/reader/vuser/viuser/wreader/player etc may come across:
Let me know if you come up with any too!
Author:
Participatory Design is in the Content
Just scanning over audio interviews over at IT Conversations and I came across an audio recording of a chapter from Lawrence Lessig‘s (Professor of Law at Stanford Law School) book titled Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The ideas discussed in it and the subsequent ‘derivative’ works created around it are very pertinent to a discussion I’m having with Monique De Haas on the different types of content creation (gee, we’re having fun and learning alot together but can’t someone else join in too!!?). We’re discussing appropriators, ‘textual poachers’ (Henry Jenkins), fan fiction, pirates and so on and looking at when an appropriator becomes an artist, and also how this relates to top-down management of rights etc. Lessig is acutely aware of the difficulty in defining a ‘creator’, a ‘pirate’, a ‘copyist’ and so on. I’ve only just started reading his book but here are some quotes from Lessig’s book that have resonated so far:
A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.(ix)
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.(xv)
A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists donÂ’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators canÂ’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.
Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.(xvi)
…this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that process.(7)
This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.9 The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture. (8)
Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today—all so long as the RCAs of our day don’t use the law to protect themselves against this competition.(9)
My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet “pirates” will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start.(10)
To build upon or critique the culture around us one must ask, Oliver Twist–like, for permission first. Permission is, of course, often granted—but it is not often granted to the critical or the independent.(10)
There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.(12)
What I also love about the concept and the complementary content creation around it is the application of the ideas — the good ol’ putting your money where your mouth is. The book’s website offers not only further discussion and the whole book for free, but an index of ‘derivatives’ or ‘remixes’ from/of the book by people (fans). These works include audio versions, html, pdfs, pdas, flash, wikis and so on. Of course! This excitement and participation reminds me of the hacking of the Hackers movie website in 1995 (of which I can’t find the hacked version on the web anymore — anyone found it?).
Interesting and exciting stuff. But the discussion about types of participation and the issues around it really calls for a continuum of participation. I’m working on that at the mo…any ideas?
The “New” Psychology of Persuasion
I’ve just watched (online) the PBS documentary on the ‘new and surprising methods’ advertisers are using: The Persuaders (thanks to Douglas Rushkoff). It seems the ultimate persuasion is to persuade a person to persuade themselves. It is a technique that many companies are employing, like the ‘search operas’ mentioned in a previous post, where the entertainment company 4orty2wo ‘don’t send an advertising message into the maelstrom of other competing messages: we reverse-engineer the process, so that the consumer comes looking for our campaign and our client’s product’. Once again, like anything, the technique is nothing new. I’ve got a book, published in 1965, (Whitney, R.A., Hubin, T. and Murphy, J.D. (1965) The new psychology of persuasion and motivation in selling, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.) that outlines how the system is needed and works. A quote from the book details how in 1957 Dr Thomas Gordon explained to a National Sales convention the then recent research:
Traditionally we have been led to accept the common notion that the best way to influence or change people is to communicate something to them-tell them, advise them, suggest to them, appeal to them, teach them, persuade them.
Recent psychological research studies have turned up evidence that casts considerable doubt on the validity of this approach. The approach that appears to be far more effective in influencing or changing people is to encourage them to communicate to you, express their opinions and ideas, verbalize their needs and complaints, talk out their problems and deep feelings, discuss their resistance to change…
The chapter goes on to describe how when people are allowed to ‘genuinely participate in the decision making process they were much more likely to “buy”‘, that there needs to be a ‘two-way communication system between speaker and listener’ (40: original emphasis). ‘Social interaction’ was deemd the ‘most effective form of persuasion’ (48). In those days participation was enacted through discussion groups with housewives, with salesmen, since media was delivered to people through a one-way channel. Nowadays we have the Internet and feedback measuring techniques that make the process more two-way. The technique is the same but the application of it is not.
In my research into what motivates a user to act, to move between channels and modes through a cross media work (or ‘narrative universe’ as Henry Jenkins describes it) I’m looking at advertising techniques such as persuasion in the networked environment. I don’t think HCI techniques have quite touched on the dynamics of motivation like marketers have, and at the same time, franchise designers haven’t quite touched on motivation like narratologists have. I’ll end with a quote from the documentary by Frank Luntz — political consultant/spin-docotor?/reader-response expert?:
I don’t argue with you that words can sometimes be used to confuse but its up to the practitioners of the study of language to apply them for good and not evil. It is just like fire: fire can heat your house or burn it down.