Abstract
This book explores the media environment that engages audiences as content producers, and content producers as enablers of collaborative practices. Beyond the environments of social, digital, new and online media, this book explores the role mediated communication plays where users are legitimately engaging in co-creative practices to create cultural texts. The authors focus on the authenticity and genuine aesthetic of collaborative media which is often associated with do-it-yourself (DIY) media movements, such as Machinima, fan fiction and mashup production. The point of difference with this book in comparison to the many others that explore user-created content and cocreation, however, is in how this book explores the technological infrastructures that enable such practices, while developing a useful interdisciplinary approach.
The approach that Löwgren and Reimer adapt is a unique exploration of academic disciplines, in that they draw on media and communication as its foundation, yet they incorporate the research design discipline to explore how users co-create. The book’s foundations are built upon establishing collaborative media’s cultural history, which borrows from Raymond Williams’ cultural form that suggests all media are created within a cultural context. This theoretical basis extends to highlight the action-related notion of collaborating with others to assist in the creation of new communication channels. They further integrate Stuart Hall’s idea of encoding/decoding as a point of departure to highlight four distinctions that collaborative media is of this moment: collaborative, a blur between production and consumption, users also create the infrastructures for collaborative media, and that collaborative media is nonsequential.
The book also locates the author’s work through several empirical case studies to bolster their framework for collaborative media. However, their strong scholarship is in their interdisciplinary methodological approach for researching collaborative media. By combining approaches from media and communications, political science, sociology, ethnology and STS, the authors highlight the significance that research design can play through participatory design. First, they note the difference between research and design, where research produces knowledge and design produces things. They highlight the tension between these two approaches is moot, in that researchers should become involved in their research sites to create and improve the process – action research. They finally provide a call to action for collaborative media researchers to be involved in their research field by being collaborative, being an interventionist and by being public, agnostic and accountable.
This book is an essential contribution to the fields of participatory media and user-created content. The authors provide a useful theoretical framework to locate work in this space, along with a unique methodological approach for others researching the field of collaborative and participatory media. The book is essential for scholars of convergence, social media and digital media practices, along with those interested in platform providers, broadcast media, DIY, community media and community practices. It is a useful exploration of collaborative media through the lens of society, institutions and ‘tribes’ engaging in its practices.