New Remix Culture Diagram
I’ve updated my MSMDX diagram, which illustrates how media and metadata flow to and from different activities around media on the web. The old diagram (on the left), which Chris Anderson called “one of the more cogent graphics illustrating the new architecture of participation in a remix culture,” and Howard Rheingold described as “a kind of mandala of technologies of cooperation in many-to-many cultural production,” was nice, but it had a few serious problems:
- It didn’t include any metadata flows from casual consumption to the other activities. This was a serious oversight, as this “attention metadata” is one of the most important and useful sources of information about the meaning of media. I strongly believe that “consumers” need to be viewed as active cultural participants and producers, not just passive receivers of “content.”
- It didn’t show that each kind of metadata is potentially useful for each of the other activities. This is mostly because of the way I designed the graphic: the arrows were too big to show too many of them.
- It wasn’t sufficiently Powerpoint-friendly.
So I attempted to correct these deficencies in the new diagram, which isn’t quite as aesthetically pleasing but is, I think, more useful. Comments and criticism welcome.
May 24th, 2007 at 7:11 am
omg, the link to the new version leads to the old one and it seems like nobody mentioned this all over those two years? and of course the file -is- there. http://sindikk.aeshin.org/files/media_metadata_ecology.png
May 24th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Actually I reverted back to using the old image at the MSMDX site after getting feedback from people who liked the original better. But I forgot to update this post to reflect that. Thanks for the heads up.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:44 am
i see - but i must say that i like your new version better (and will cite that in the paper i’m working on), since I believe that the aspect of attention data is a very important and it greatly fits.
even in the previous model od massmediated culture there was a response to the products, be it just the preference in buying, the market (clumsy, since the response rate to user’s prefernces was weaker than now) that was still ultimately responsible for voting for the hits.
anyway, thank you for your response.
May 24th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Yes, the lack of flows from the consumer was a large oversight in the original diagram. Actually, ever since reading The Practice of Everyday Life I feel that even the revised diagram understates the role of the consumer by focusing on “attention metadata,” which has connotations of passivity. Consumers do much more than simply voting with their eyeballs or pocketbooks. Furthermore, the distinctions among the roles of consumer, producer, enthusiast and remixer are much fuzzier than this diagram makes them out to be. At the time I created this I recognized that people could quickly switch between roles, but I didn’t give enough consideration to situations in which people take on multiple roles simultaneously, consuming and producing at the same time. This is something de Certeau made me think more about.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
A very good point, and a new book for me, I must admit. It reminds me of dominant, oppositional and negotiated reading in Hall’s theory a bit; I think his ideas must be taken in the context of his critics, but still I can clearly see his methods applied on what’s going on now on the web.
And the different roles - that is a theme worth a plot, which fits the concept better than any scholar can (all those people sharing torrents, and there are millions of them - generally still ‘pretending’ to be common consumers).