The history of participatory practices: rethinking media genres in the history of user-generated content in 19th-century travel guidebooks

Retrospectively making sense of ‘an accidental observation’

When I visited the offices of Lonely Planet in San Francisco in 2009, the then Vice-President of the world’s most reputable contemporary guidebook publisher emphasized the following:

What matters here is the business of good content, no matter in what guise a travel guidebook comes – an app, or ebook or print. Digital is actually a godsend, not a bogeyman. The new media changed everything. We have professional authors that can get under the skin of a place. And everyone else adds value digitally. We have a profound conversation with our vibrant online community. We receive over a thousand emails per month. Our authors read every single tip and check out every reader’s grievance. […] Readers complement authors. They work collaboratively.

While counteracting an initial sense of deep disorientation in the industry arising from the abundance of freely available travel content online (‘digital is a bogeyman’), such a self-theorizing disclosure also echoes a widespread belief in the power of new media to revolutionize content production (‘digital is a godsend’). Digital technologies are infrastructures of participation that make user-centred collaborative production possible. Producers of ‘good content’ can thus turn digitally empowered ‘interactive audiences’ (Jenkins, 2006) into value-generating co-producers or ‘produsers’ (Bruns, 2008).

While browsing through the library after my meeting with Lonely Planet, I serendipitously came across an interview given in August 1889 to The Pall Mall Gazette by John Muirhead, the English editor of Baedeker, a revered 19th-century German guidebook publisher. Here, Muirhead offered another self-theorizing account:

A guidebook is not made, it grows. […] It is the way in which travellers respond to the invitation for amateur aid […] that is one of the chief elements in the growth of guidebooks. When a new edition is being prepared, the first thing we do is to go carefully through the mass of correspondence, generally very voluminous, which has come to hand. This consists of hotel bills, notes, complaints, and suggestions. […] Many of the letters thus received from tourists are most useful, not only so as to make correction of matters of detail, but in suggesting additions of one kind or another, improvements in maps and arrangements.

Although 220 years elapsed between the two accounts, the practice of professional travel guidebook production and reader participation that the publishers ‘theorize’ remains remarkably identical. And while the scale, intensity, velocity and immediacy of audience–producer digital interactions (based on multi-user software and instant connectivity) was unmatched in 19th-century guidebook production (based on handwritten letters delivered by post), the underlying principle of audience participation and its industrial capture seems immune to change.

If industrial appropriation of user-generated content was central to guidebook production in the 19th century and thus could not have been a direct upshot of technological advances, industrial changes or fluctuating social-cultural contexts of technology use, how then can we explain the evident longevity and consistency of participatory and crowdsourcing practices? Why do the production/reception practices pertaining to an analogue print medium and ‘read-only cultures’ exhibit the very dynamics of an interactive medium and ‘read/write cultures’ (Lessig, 2004)? What has made such continuity possible?

In this article, I hazard an explanation of the accidentally observed longue durée of these practices by focusing on what has ostensibly remained immutable amid palpable technological, industrial and socio-cultural changes, namely the genre of the travel guidebook. According to genre scholars, the ‘deep’ structure and function of the travel guidebook genre remains diachronically invariable, even though its synchronic semantic ‘surface’ manifestations have altered as the guidebook audience has widened from male and affluent to mass and middle-class, and as travelling habits have evolved (Gassan, 2005). Guidebooks are characterized by genre stasis in respect to two dominant formal and functional characteristics (Jakobson, 1960): referentiality (objectivity, accuracy, facticity) and performativity (performing a didactic, guiding function) (Alacovska, 2013; Jack and Phipps, 2005).

Despite the non-participatory medium of the printed book, the formal-functional characteristics of the guidebook genre intrinsically prefigured the space for readers’ participation and autonomously instigated user-production. No single expert-author could produce an ‘objective’ and ‘complete’ reference to a ‘total’ reality. All analogue ‘worlds of reference’ are ‘like a fossil’: the moment they are printed, they become out-dated and inaccurate (McArthur, 1986: 11). At the same time, ‘worlds of reference’ reject closure and anticipate future revisions, thereby becoming ‘unendable enterprises’ – labour-intensive and expensive works-in-progress (McArthur, 1986: 124). In turn, the guidebook calls forth collaborative authorship so as to uphold its ‘unendable’ character. Moreover, being simultaneously both referential genres that have their reference in the ‘real world’ and performative genres that orient action to the ‘real word’, guidebooks immanently stipulate a reader’s agency. Each actual guidebook’s use therefore becomes a veritable act of testing and verifying on-the-spot (in the ‘real world’) a guidebook’s accuracy, reliability and utility, thereby allowing readers to co-produce content in the form of corrections or additions.

By virtue of their genre characteristics, guidebooks can be expected to afford participatory and crowdsourcing practices independently of digital technologies – practices that have been conceptualized to date as Internet-only phenomena.

New media scholars define participatory user-production as ‘produsage’ (Bruns, 2008) – participation of non-professionals in collaborative producing and improving of existing media content. The propensities of users/readers/audiences to author content online make ‘crowdsourcing’ feasible. Crowdsourcing happens when a producer-company outsources ‘problem-solving’ to a large online pool of individuals summoned via open calls, often rewarding the most meritorious contributions with cash (Brabham, 2010).

Scholars have repeatedly argued that the fundamental difference between the participatory production of digital (user-generated) content and the production of print content (professional, industrial) lies in the community-based character of produsage/crowdsourcing (Benkler, 2006; Brabham, 2010; Bruns, 2008). New media blur the roles between producers and users, thereby enhancing their interaction and community bonding. The community of digital co-producers works collaboratively towards a common project, which is the continuous development of ‘an unfinished artefact’ such as Wikipedia (Bruns, 2008) or open-source software (Benkler, 2006). Online user-production, unlike traditional production, is as much communal and altruistic as it is entrepreneurial: love of ‘online community’ drives user-production, together with the non-professionals’ hopes of future professional employment/payment (Brabham, 2010).

However, to argue that digital technologies (the medium) have radically disrupted traditional content production is to disregard the fact that all content production happens first and foremost within the formal and functional frameworks of certain genres and only secondarily in relation to a specific medium (English, 2011; Livingstone, 2004). It is fallacious to conceptualize an online encyclopaedia (Wikipedia) as a ‘novel’ interactive and community-based ‘unfinished’ digital artefact/practice (Bruns, 2008) inferring solely from the medium’s properties. It is the genre of the encyclopaedia, ‘a world of reference’, that is quintessentially and historically participatory and ‘unendable’. It is owing to their nature and form that encyclopaedias (guidebooks, dictionaries) are so amenable to digital delivery and user-production, not vice versa. The worlds of reference require ‘updatability, searchability and unlimitedness’ – features that immanently transcend a print medium’s facilities and demand continual collaborative (co-)production (Thompson, 2005: 318–320).

Moreover, the community-character of online user-production becomes less ‘revolutionary’ if we acknowledge, following pragmatist genre theory, that all content production happens within ‘genre communities’ wherein individuals share common genre resources, values and norms to accomplish communicative tasks and joint rhetorical projects (Devitt, 2004: 37). ‘Genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community’ (Miller, 1984: 165), be it a fan community producing sci-fi (Jenkins, 2006), an accounting community producing memos (Devitt, 2004) or a participatory/crowdsourcing community producing (genre-specific) user-generated content. The accumulation of genre knowledge and competences secures community affiliation and professionalization.

In order to corroborate empirically the accident-driven hypothesis that genres structure producer–audience interaction and minimize ‘the component of chance’ (Merton and Barber, 2004: 159), I undertook an archival study of 19th-century travel guidebook (co-)production. Before providing compelling evidence that 19th-century guidebook production possessed the very same characteristics of online user (co-)production, I shall discuss the interplay between genres, practices and technologies in new media history.

New media history: media genres, practices and technologies

Media and communication scholars have started asking with increasing frequency ‘what’s new in new media?’ (Carpentier and Dahlgren, 2014; Ekström et al., 2011; Jones et al., 2011). These studies usefully confront the prevailing uncritical celebration of digital novelties by subjecting new media to historically embedded analyses and comparisons. However, these studies tend to offer only a nothing-new-under-the-sun explanation of technological novelties; they stop short at astonishing historical parallels, reminiscences and coincidences, and so fail to account for the internal dynamics of historical renewal and its reason d’être. For example, Good (2013) discusses scrapbooks as an early incarnation of Facebook, and Zimmer (2009) depicts 17th-century encyclopaedic renvois as precursors to hypertext.

My aim in investigating a historical genre-specific model of co-production is not merely to provide ‘reminiscing parallels’ or ‘precursory manifestations’. Rather, I focus on one possible factor contributing to the historical stability of participatory and crowdsourcing practices: the notion of genre. In doing so, I historicize and specify ‘media-related practices’ (Couldry, 2012) as genre-related practices – producers/audiences doing something with, through and within genres, rather than media-qua-technologies.

A more useful approach to studying the interplay between genres and media-related practices is offered by the history of technology studies associated with ‘the information age and society’ (Boczkowski, 2004; Headrick, 2000; Yates, 1993). The industrial era unleashed powerful forces for communication and collaboration: large amounts of data and information generated within industrial corporations necessitated reliable communication technologies for efficient management. Studies of ‘the information age’ fruitfully link ‘new’ communication technologies such as the telegraph, duplication technologies and, later, the Internet, with ‘the informational’ that is the multifarious practices of data and information gathering, processing and presentation. Here, the notion of genre becomes analytically salient. Latching onto the idea that genres are one of the oldest devices for classifying and categorizing communication, these studies conceptualize genres as primary technologies for organizing, handling and controlling massive quantities of information and knowledge. The genres of encyclopaedia and dictionary, for example, are argued to be archaic systems of information storage and retrieval, inextricable from the perpetual human quest for cultivating and categorizing knowledge (Headrick, 2000). Enhanced by already-always-‘new communication technologies’, genres became control mechanisms for achieving efficiency and consistency in 19th-century corporations and for assuring stability in contemporary media institutions. Yates (1993) has shown how circular letters and in-house magazines were used as managerial tools to enforce on-the-job compliance and worker loyalty in 19th-century railroads. Recently, Boczkowski (2004) has argued that new media did not shatter but actually reinforced already existing genre-pertinent ‘information practices’, such as editorial procedures and routines of ‘news’ gathering and fact-checking, because online journalists constantly draw on print era’s news-making conventions – ‘symbolic, behavioural, and material repertoires’ (p. 60).

The coupling of genres with information-processing practices is especially propitious for the study of the co-production of travel guidebooks, themselves being an information system of fact-filled, accurate and up-to-date information for practical use. The question looming large for guidebook producers is how to employ the available technologies so as to efficiently manage the magnitude of data and handle the incessant influx of updates. Accuracy, reliability and freshness of information, however, not only are technological, systemic or epistemological features but also have to be brought to life, ontologically enacted by producers endowed with motivations, attention and responsibilities for attaining pre-existing genre-specific production values, or what Scannell (2014) calls ‘care-structures’ of production. Scannell (2014) argues that broadcast technologies did not instigate but reinforced the production practices of ‘live genres’. The basic care-structures of broadcast ‘live genres’, such as talk shows or quiz shows, consist of managing ‘liveness’, that is, developing pre-mediated tactics for the production of an effect of unpremeditated immediacy. However, such care-structures were prefigured in live conversational genres, such as speech acts and epic canting, long before the advent of broadcast technologies. Hence, according to Scannell (2014), media-related practices do not exist and hence cannot be studied outside the historical, localized and genre-specific ‘care-structures’ of production.

New media studies nevertheless frequently disregard genres. When they occasionally do take genres into account, the accent is overwhelmingly on ‘emergent genres’, that is, those genres that obliterate ‘antecedent genres’ when migrating online, such as emails versus memos (Yates and Orlikowski, 1994), blogs versus diaries (Miller and Shepherd, 2004) and social-networking sites versus scrapbooks (Good, 2013). By assuming that technological advances automatically propel genre transformations, these studies misidentify ‘the medium’ (physical/technical properties) for ‘the genre’ (structural/formal properties). This misidentification privileges the technological causes of a genre’s ontology and thus denies the potential of ‘received cultural forms’ (Williams, 1974: 71) to affect ‘new’ technology practices by themselves.

In fact, there is abundant evidence that most online genres ‘reproduce’ old-media genres while reinforcing their production practices (Crowston and Williams, 2000). Despite contrasting technological protocols, a user-generated encyclopaedia emulates the norms and expectations associated with the print genre, such as formality, neutrality and consistency (Emigh and Herring, 2005: 9).

To grasp the complexities of media practices, it is necessary to disentangle the genre from the medium. Since online users directly engage with genres rather than the physical properties of technology (Livingstone, 2004), genres should be studied as ‘the interface’ (p. 83) between the medium, the text and authors/readers (Lomborg, 2011). Yet genres themselves also possess mediating power and productive facilities. Kress (2003: 4–5) and English (2011: 64) call these facilities ‘genre affordances’, meaning that genres enable both text/content writing and reading by way of furnishing structural/formal/functional resources for appropriate thinking, behaving and feeling (see Cawelti, 1976 on how formal structures influence crime fiction production, and Kling, 1994 on how genre conventions shape non-fiction).

Accordingly, I situate the shifting relationship between audiences and producers within what Schryer (1994) calls ‘stabilized-enough genres’ (p. 89) – arenas of recurring social, ideological and communicative actions, intents or care-structures. To Schryer (1994: 89), genres make work (the production of content) possible, as producers mobilize the resources furnished by genres (e.g. frames of reference, discursive orientation and mode) to accomplish communicative exigencies and fulfil audience expectations. Accordingly I am not interested here in how the travel guidebook genre has been transformed by digital technologies but in how one ‘stabilized-enough’ genre enables appropriate doing, behaving and acting for both readers and producers in the historical context of (co-)production. In emphasizing the resources furnished by genres, I relocate the analytical focus from technology issues – how genres change – to pragmatism, that is, to what genres do (accomplish) for their users–producers (Devitt, 2004) independently of technologies.

Below, I briefly focus on the methodological and research design challenges when approaching the history of co-production in relation to genres and their care-structures.

Blurring the boundaries between producers and audiences: a matter of genre

The most studied pre-digital participatory practice was letter-writing (McMillan, 2010: 211). Through in-depth archival research of fan mail in the US radio broadcasting (Simmons, 2009) and letters-to-editors in local Swedish newspapers (Lundell, 2011), recent studies have concluded that 19th- and early 20th-century media predicated on technologies bereft of interactive properties were nonetheless perceived by their users as responsive and dialogical. Letter-writing audiences believed they could influence professional content production by supplying criticism, suggestions and rectifications. Evidence as to the actual impact of letters from readers and listeners on professional media production is rather tentative and largely assumed, however, since archival studies of audience feedback tend to disregard the ways that expert producers have dealt with user-generated content.

Similarly, the significance of letter-writing for the consolidating 19th-century media industries is inferred through textual analysis of publishers’ solicitations of reader participation and letters published in magazines as ‘reader contributions’ (Griffen-Foley, 2004), whereas the extent to which the alleged ‘reader letters’ were genuine or beneficial for producers remains unknown.

The actual influence of ‘audience feedback’ on professional media production could only be investigated by combining the study of audience letters with on-site observation of and interviews with coeval media producers (Turow, 1977–1978 on radio producers). Recently, burgeoning ‘online newsroom ethnographies’ have investigated how professional journalists treat user-generated content (Boczkowski, 2004; Paulussen and Ugille, 2008). All these studies find that direct user involvement in professional news production is relatively negligible. Media producers, working in the genres of ‘news’ and ‘informational programming’, largely ignore audience input since it potentially threatens to upset genre-specific standards of impartiality, authenticity and fairness. Likewise, studies of fan fiction empirically demonstrate that media industries treat ‘interactive audiences’ as loyal consumers of franchises and spin-offs rather than as fully fledged co-producers (Jenkins, 2006). Slightly more meaningful user involvement, mainly in the form of visuals and amateur footage, has been detected in the sub-genre of ‘breaking news’, which involves immanent production obstacles such as emergency situations, remote locations and far-flung disasters (Harrison, 2010: 245), as well as in ‘soft news’, which involves readily available free-floating gossip (Jönsson and Örnebring, 2011). Soliciting eye-witnessing audience footage and tip-offs for ‘major news stories’ was a common practice in BBC newsrooms long before the Internet (Wardle and Williams, 2010).

The producer and audience values, perceptions and beliefs that underpin media-related practices appear historically antagonistic. Or, as Cover puts it (2006: 141 and 150), in military terms, the history of interactivity is a century-old ‘tactical war’ between, on one hand, authorship values – professional producers ‘pushing’ for greater textual control, closure and individuality, and, on the other hand, a long-standing ‘cultural desire’ for co-creation – audiences ‘pulling’ for textual modification and collaboration.

On closer inspection, however, as the above-cited studies of news production demonstrate, this generalized ‘push-and-pull relationship’ (Cover, 2006: 153) seems also to be mediated: either attenuated (as in ‘truce’) or exacerbated (as in ‘battle’) by the nature of the texts themselves, understood as specific forms of communication, or genres. Some scholars acknowledge but do not probe further the possibility of participatory and crowdsourcing practices being contingent on forms of ‘media content’ (Jönsson and Örnebring, 2011: 133; Simmons, 2009: 455). Aarseth (1997) argued that the value of digital technologies is not absolute. It increases proportionally to the extent to which textual classes intrinsically prefigure audience–producer interactivity. According to McMillan (2010), a symbiotic relationship between audiences and producers is predicated on ‘user-to-document interactivity’ (pp. 213–214): ‘some forms of mediated communication actually require participation’ (p. 214). Some scholars note, in passing, that certain genres necessitate audience co-creative capacities as a precondition for their own existence, such as confessional genres (Griffen-Foley, 2004) and tabloids (Jönsson and Örnebring, 2011).

To investigate a genre’s power to spark user involvement in professional media production, I studied guidebook-related audience feedback sent between 1836 and 1890 to John Murray, a now defunct British publishing house, and empirically traced the ways in which John Murray’s professional guidebook producers dealt with audience-authored content.

Method

From 1836 to 1915, John Murray, the venerable publisher of Darwin, Austin, and Byron, published an extensive travel guidebook series under the umbrella of the ‘Handbook project’. The company’s archives are housed at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where I conducted archival research in October 2009. To examine historical participatory practices, I mainly studied handwritten letters from readers referencing ‘the Handbook project’, archived as MS 41613(436A), but also, where appropriate, MS 40988 and MS 42258. Most of the reader letters have disappeared, but those that have serendipitously been preserved bear witness to intense reader participation (Gretton, 1993: xlvii).

If the ways in which contemporary media producers treat user-generated content are examined through interviews and on-site ethnographies, the challenge in archival research is how to go about investigating the agency of deceased actors and fundamentally inaccessible professional practices. For this research, I traced marginalia – including publisher’s comments on the margins of received letters, annotations, cross-outs and highlights – so as to follow how professional producers processed reader feedback. Marginalia ‘represent the actual responses of actual readers’ (Jackson, 2001: 253), evincing readers’ mental processes and intentions. Marginalia on reader letters, therefore, represent a record of the intended activities of guidebook producers. Producers perused reader letters with the purpose of acting upon them. Guided by the marginalia, I inferred the performance of producers by comparing an earlier edition of a guidebook to which a letter referred with the subsequent edition, that is, the one subject to revision. In this way, I registered the letter-induced corrections, deletions or additions. The textual alterations from edition to revision are proxies for producer agency, and thus a source of insight into the extent to which reader feedback was used to modify the original text. I have thus heeded the methodological injunction of a sociological ‘genetic approach’ – reverse engineering finalized texts by tracing ‘the compositional process – sketches, alternative versions, revisions’ (Becker, 2006: 25) which through comparison reveal a historical producer’s agency. In identifying the guidebook editions and revisions, I consulted Bill Lister’s (1993) meticulous bibliography of Murray’s Handbooks.

The constitutive role of genres in blurring the lines between producers and audiences is inferable from paratexts, that is, the supplementary texts through which publishers forge a rapport with audiences by explicating their genre-bound production work (Alacovska, 2015b). Accordingly, I conducted a paratextual analysis of guidebook prefaces in which publishers aired ‘open calls’ summoning reader participation.

An unendable enterprise: the infinite empiricism of guidebook production

Genre awareness and knowledge are a prerequisite for proper participatory practice. A publisher’s paratextual disclosure of an overarching genre-specific method and care-structure of production (modus operandi) opened the doors of guidebook-making to virtually every reader keen on participating. Publishers tutored dependable reader co-production by publicly expounding the dominant structural principles of the guidebook genre.

In the preface (paratext) to the first edition of The Handbook for Travellers to the Continent (1836), John Murray revealed the modus operandi of ‘a kind of book’ characterized by factuality, that is, ‘matter-of-fact description’ corroborated by ‘personal observation’, as well as performativity, that is, readers following the text in practice while subjecting it to a ‘severe test’ of ‘on-the-spot verification’:

The writer of the Handbook has endeavoured to confine himself to matter-of-fact descriptions […] avoiding florid descriptions and exaggerated superlatives. … Most of the information it contains being necessarily derived from books, modified by actual observations. […] to this have been added the results of the writer’s personal experience and inquiries made on the spot; and he has taken much pains to acquire the most recent information from the best authorities. […] The blunders of the author of a Tour on the Continent published for the edification of the public at home may escape detection, but a book of this kind, every word of which is liable to be weighed and verified on the spot, is subject to a much more severe test and criticism. What Dr. Johnson said about Dictionaries is also applicable to Guide Books: ‘They are like watches; the worst is better than none – the best cannot be expected to go quite true’. (1836/8: 3–4)

In the production of travel guidebooks, the impossibility of attaining perfect accuracy and the ontological unfeasibility of unmediated ‘as-it-is’ descriptions of reality ceases to be a matter of instant failure, fabrication or deception and instead becomes an issue of ‘epistemic credibility (for the author) and creditworthiness among the buying and reading public (for the publisher)’ (Withers and Keighren, 2011: 566).

To cultivate ‘epistemic credibility and creditworthiness’, guidebook producers publicly disseminated knowledge about their quasi-scientific method of production. This is the method of ‘brute empiricism’, which prescribes systematic empirical observation and rigorous data-recording: ‘direct and repeated on-the-spot personal observation’, ‘on-site inquires’ and ‘actual observations’. The paratextual exposition of method conjures an ethical and trustworthy producer to compensate for the ontological impossibility of attaining accuracy while simultaneously equipping readers with compositional frames of reference, appropriate competences and literacies requisite for textual production. Acquainted with the guidebook genre’s modus operandi, readers could supply appropriate raw material – corrections, additions and updates – that professional producers would subsequently implement in new editions. That 19th-century guidebook-making was indeed a veritable pre-digital model of collaborative user-production is attested to by some 200 expert-writers, editors and updaters whom Lister (1993: lix) identified in John Murray’s Handbook ledgers.

Since a guidebook as a ‘world of reference’ is ‘an unendable enterprise’ (McArthur, 1986), its production is amenable to being outsourced to the distributed and continual performance of a multitude of readers previously initiated in the genre-appropriate production procedures. The referentiality of the guidebook genre, and its complex empiricism, was successfully tackled by breaking a compound ‘always-work-in-progress’ enterprise into minor, modularized, genre-specific ‘empirical’ tasks at scale, with the updating, correcting and amassing of naturalistic details entrusted to legions of readers. In addition, since guidebooks are a performative genre exercising ‘an agentic influence’ over their readers (Jack and Phipps, 2005: 82), readers using a guidebook by default test its accuracy on-site and hence can immanently dabble as problem-solvers, remedying blunders by providing experts with the results of ‘actual observation’, ‘verification’ and ‘review’. This type of co-production not only predates digital ‘produsage’ of ‘unfinished artefacts’ (Bruns, 2008) and crowdsourced online problem-solving (Brabham, 2010) but also epitomizes a much earlier model of user-production that Hamilton (2014) shrewdly calls ‘Baconian empiricism’ (p. 496). Similar to Murray’s veritable collaborative guidebook-making, Francis Bacon’s inductive ‘collaborative’ philosophy of nature was rendered possible by the assistance of an army of empirical observers who, by following strict methodological guidelines, amassed raw data from which expert philosophers could distil natural laws.

Murray regularly ‘crowdsourced’ by exhorting readers to actively participate in guidebook-making. Reminiscent of crowdsourcing ‘open calls’, Murray placed such exhortations to reader in the prefaces to every guidebook edition:

The Editor, […] requests that travellers who may, in the use of the Work, detect any faults or omissions, which they can correct from personal knowledge, will have the kindness to mark them down on the spot and communicate to him a notice of the same, favouring him at the same time with their names […] They may be reminded that by such communications they are not merely furnishing the means of improving the Hand-book, but are contributing to the benefit, information and comfort of future travellers in general. (1936/8)

By mobilizing readers to produce through on-the-spot verification of professional content, Murray interpellated them as fully fledged participants in guidebook production. Bibliographers estimate that thousands of readers must have written to Murray in response to his ‘open call’ for collaboration (Lister, 1993: lix). Bearing in mind that postage costs were paid by recipients in the 19th-century postal system and were expensive even for established companies (John, 1995), Murray’s welcoming of copious reader correspondence is an evidence of the importance placed on reader participation. Furthermore, the bibliography evinces (by the miniscule sums featured as payments) that ‘especially detailed and meritorious’ readers-cum-letter-writers were regularly compensated (Gretton, 1993: xlvi), rendering 19th-century guidebook production a fascinating pre-digital instance of paid crowd work (Brabham, 2010).

Resonating with the community-based nature of collaborative user-production, as well as community-driven motivations for participation (Brabham, 2010; Jenkins, 2006), many guidebook readers of yesteryear felt morally obliged, driven by ‘a public duty’, not only to assist publishers in expanding and improving guidebooks but also to contribute altruistically to the community of fellow-travellers:

Dear Sir, […] I wish to notice two trifling inaccuracies in the ‘Handbook’ in compliance with the invitation there given, for it is a sort of public duty to assist in rendering so useful and creditable a work as free as possible from even the slightest errors. (MS. 42258 (424A), William Gladstone, 5 Sept 1838)

According to Palmowski (2002), Victorian middle-class guidebook users belonged to tight-knit ‘actual communities of feeling’ (p. 106). ‘The Handbook’ instigated ‘a shared sense of culture’ and ‘particular modes of thinking’ (Palmowski, 2002: 106). Hence, the 19th-century guidebook ‘was in intimate communion’ with its readership (Palmowski, 2002: 111). Guidebook production, as a collaborative effort, could thus readily rely upon user communities closely affiliated with the genre. The genre framed the sharing of travel experiences, advice and recommendations within the community. The 19th-century guidebook co-production hinged on the ‘actual nature’ and ‘emancipatory potential’ of guidebooks, enabling audience productivity (‘amateur travel writing’) by providing a gamut of shared sensations, quotations, and expressions (Palmowski, 2002: 116). Reader-contributors to Murray’s Handbooks were all members of the British and European upper middle-classes who, as editorially solicited, regularly undersigned their letters, thus authenticating their community affiliation and co-creative credibility. The name vouched for a distant reader’s work ethic, guaranteeing co-production based on genre-appropriate ‘personal experiences’ and ‘first-hand knowledge’.

The art of correction and accretion

‘Named’ readers regularly mailed detailed genre-pertinent content. If not questioned for its observational rigour or objectivity status, reader-content was habitually subject to editorial redaction with a view to creating a standardized corporate voice. In this process, the editor had executive power over filtering, restyling and retooling reader feedback. As previously argued, unfettered user participation is illusory even in a digital context. Media organizations typically function as gate-keepers of user-generated content (Boczkowski, 2004; Wardle and Williams, 2010).

Given the intrinsic imperfection and outdatedness of ‘worlds of reference’ (McArthur, 1986), the incorporation of reader feedback in professional content production had both a problem-solving and incremental effect. This is a pre-digital instantiation of the principle of the ‘power of eyeballs’ in produsage, a principle which assumes that a community of distributed co-producers is more efficient than individual expert producers in ‘fixing bugs’ and ‘improving content’ (Benkler, 2006; Bruns, 2008).

The following voluntary contributions and their editorial reworking evince the corrective function of aggregated user-generated content.

On 6 October 1845, Sir Airy wrote to remedy ‘trifling inaccuracies’:

Sir, I have lately been travelling in the N.W. of France with the assistance of your Handbook (edition 1843), and have remarked the following trifling inaccuracies, which perhaps it may be interesting to you to know. […] Mont St. Michel. At neap tides (aux eaux martes) this rock is not surrounded by water at all, at any part of the day. At spring tides (aux eaux vives) it is surrounded twice each day, and then as one of the soldiers informed me, the sea sometimes comes into the soldiers’ mess-room.

In the subsequent revision of the Handbook for Travellers in France (1848), Murray appropriates this comment while legitimizing its intrinsic word-of-mouth status:

A good macadamised road […] terminates on the margin of ‘la Grève’ i.e. the sands, extending for many square leagues all around the mount […] ‘At neap-tides the rock is not surrounded by water at any part of the day. At spring-tides it is twice each day and then the sea sometimes breaks into the soldiers’ mess-room’ G.B.A. (p. 95)

In March 1846, the Earl of Shrewsbury wrote from-within-the-field (Southern Europe) to openly tackle ‘an omission’ in the Handbook for Travellers in France (1843):

You have not anywhere, I think, indulged in any remarks on the difference of character in the Gothic ecclesiastical architecture of the South & of the North in France. In the South the windows are much smaller, with a view no doubt of excluding both light & heat, which in my mind is an immense advantage, for it gives them a solemnity which is wanting at all the cathedrals of the North. In those immense lantern churches it was next to impossible to fill all the windows with rich stained glass, & consequently much more difficult to gain them their due effect than if the windows had been smaller & fewer. Even the chapel upon a fine day is too light, because every window is not filled with stained glass. The influence of climate is evidently the cause of the distinctive character of the two styles.

The publisher directly tapped into such on-the-spot personal observations to fix ‘the omission’ in the revised edition of 1848:

A marked difference of character prevails between the church and the architecture of the S. of France and that of the N., in the smallness of the windows, designed no doubt to exclude the glare and heat. This gives the southern churches a much greater solemnity than those immense lantern-structures of the N.: unless where the windows are entirely filled with stained glass, it is difficult to produce the same effect. The influence of climate evidently gave rise to the distinctions in the two styles. – E. o. S. (p. 439)

Similarly, in 1843, Felix Mendelssohn eagerly recommends a hotel neglected by the editors:

I travelled in Switzerland last year and while at Meyeringen lived at Michel’s hotel de la Couronne. I knew Michel, who had been my guide on a former tour through that country, to be a good and honest and well educated man. […] I lived there with a party of several ladies, and all agreed that the ‘Couronne’ was as clean & comfortable an hotel as could be wished for, & they preferred the house with its Swiss architecture & the good and friendly manners of those within. … I can accordingly recommend my friend Michel with good conscience & if you in the next Edition of your Guide, you could insert the name of his hotel.

Driven by the reader-review, Murray inserted the hotel in the Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland: ‘Couronne – clean and comfortable, obliging landlord’ (1851: 63).

Murray advertised every new edition as ‘corrected and augmented’. To attain immediacy and accuracy in a non-participatory medium, Murray kept the guidebook pages unbound for a long period of time so that ‘last-minute pages of the latest available information’, including reader-comments, could be printed concurrently and then attached to the book (Lister, 1993: lii).

The quest for professionalization

Digital technologies have been celebrated as a many-to-many medium, allowing amateur-users unprecedented access to the means of content production, formerly accessible only to professionals. The motivations for user-production have repeatedly been found to involve a quest for professionalization: users participating (content-producing) for the sake of experience and exposure in the hopes of securing future paid employment (Brabham, 2010; Jenkins, 2006). However, the professionalization propensities of users-cum-producers are by no means peculiar to digital cultures. Amateur travel writers of the 19th century longed to go professional while capitalizing on the guidebook’s participatory nature to fulfil this aspiration.

Not only did guidebooks inspire letters-to-the-editor, they also facilitated amateur travel writing in its own right. The guidebook genre provided the methodological rigour and expressive means expedient for travel writing (Palmowski, 2002). In turn, professional guidebook producers stayed alert to amateur travel writing. In arguing that historical guidebook production was inherently dialogical, Palmowski (2002: 111) discusses Jane Freshfield’s (1861) travel diary as an instance of bi-directional communication between guidebook readers-cum-producers and professional producers. Palmowski’s illuminating example shows how guidebooks shaped amateur writing, which in turn manifestly influenced professional practice.

On returning from her travels in Switzerland, Freshfield penned in her diary:

It is time that ‘Murray’ should qualify his assertion, that the Griess ‘is not a pass for ladies’. Acting on such authority, many may be deterred from a journey presenting no real difficulties, and offering great attractions. […]. The glacier, which takes about half an hour for the horses to cross, is quite peculiar in character, flat and free from crevasses. (1861: 40 and 42)

Murray’s Handbook to Switzerland from 1858, which Freshfield criticizes, portrays the Griess ascent as follows: ‘It is a mule-path, not dangerous, though it crosses a glacier, except when there is much snow on the col […] It is not a pass for ladies’ (1858: 98). Having, in all likelihood, read a draft of her diary sent to him for review, Murray acts upon Freshfield’s personal evidence and fact-verification. He subsequently rectifies the bigoted remark, simultaneously appropriating Freshfield’s discursive depictions, experiences and authentication:

It is a mule-path, not dangerous, though it crosses a glacier, except in bad weather, when there is much snow on the col, but rather long and fatiguing. […] The pass is quite practicable for ladies, who might ride across the glacier which is unusually free from crevasses. (Murray, 1861: 203, emphasis added)

As the reciprocal relationship between Freshfield and Murray demonstrates, the guidebook genre sparked professionalization tendencies among readers. A reader undersigned as Chapman recurrently submitted ‘content’ in the hopes of becoming a professional (paid) author. Disgruntled that his corrections were ‘productively’ used in subsequent editions without remittance, he wrote in April 1855:

Sir, […] In 1853, I believe, someone lent me a copy of the book, which I carefully examined and, with a view of inducing the editor or publisher to employ me in revising it. I did point out and commit to paper a great many glaring errors, leaving many others and not taking any notice of faults of print, punctuation, accent or other, […] trifling mistakes. I suppose my paper of suggested corrections had been used, though till this day I had heard nothing more about it. I have not a slightest objection to undertake the revision of any book you may publish, […] and, as a matter of course, for a fixed remuneration.

In the subsequent edition, Chapman is listed among ‘the authors’.

Readers with aspirations to professionalization conceived of letters-to-the-editor as an opportunity to display their accumulated genre knowledge and competence. Murray did indeed recruit future (co-) authors from the pool of ‘amateur’ reader-cum-writers who exhibited convincing genre competence. A regular reader-contributor, Henry Pullen, in an undated letter accompanying a longer list of corrections, strategically extolls his knowledge of a guidebook’s modus operandi:

I quite approve of giving the hours […] when possible, but it is very liable to change, and such information is normally best obtained on the spot. Being anything rather than a Romaniser, I have always tried to make the Handbook useful for R.C. [Roman Catholic] travellers – even to the length of giving a bit of English-speaking confessors in each town. I think the Handbook ought to be colourful in such matters, and adaptable to the convenience of all. (MS 40988)

The genre prowess thus professed – tactics for achieving on-the-spot verification, content freshness and readership expectations – led Murray to extend an employment offer to Pullen in 1885:

I am very sensible of the value and utility of the Notes and Corrections to my Handbooks, with which you have from time to time favoured me. They also induce me to believe that you possess the abilities, knowledge and experience fitting you to edit and revise my travellers’ Handbooks. (c.f. Gretton, 1993: xxxii)

The 19th-century readers learned the ropes of guidebook writing by intense reading of guidebooks. They supplied publishers with incessant streams of content in the hope of gaining a foothold in the publishing industry, much like many of their 20th-century counterparts (Author, 2013).

Conclusion

The archival study of John Murray’s 19th-century guidebook producers and their treatment of user-generated content shows clearly that full-blown audience-inclusive professional production was the norm within genre-specific print cultures long before digital cultures.

The longue durée of co-production practices can be ascribed to the travel guidebook genre which, logically, chronologically and ontologically, preceded and hence prefigured the participatory potential of new media technologies. The use of technologies in media production seems subsumed under, rather than imposed upon, genre-specific production values, practices and norms. The scope of this article has thus been to provide a history and genealogy of participatory and crowdsourcing practices, understood as genre-related practices possessing autonomous ‘care-structures of production’ (Scannell, 2014) rooted in empirical (co-)producers’ efforts to attain genre-specific production values (such as the values of referentiality and performativity within the guidebook genre).

Studies of print cultures never reduce books to print technologies, while studies of broadcast cultures refuse to define television programming merely as electronic tele-technologies. Histories of the book and of radio or television programming are intimately coupled with genre histories. The (historical) study of digital cultures should equally pay attention to genres. Only by asking ‘what types/genres’ of digital content production users-cum-producers produce, can we specify and contextualize such catch-all terms as ‘user-generated content’, ‘co-creation’ or ‘participation’.

Future studies should empirically test the participatory potential of genres within historical genre-specific production worlds and their care-structures. Archival studies of the (co-)production of ‘old’ media genres that thrive online as user-generated hives, such as encyclopaedias, cookbooks and more general how-to literature, should spearhead the investigation. By way of illustration, Driver (2009), a bibliographer of cookbooks, finds that in a pre-digital 1905 cookbook ‘the recipes were carefully chosen from the contributions of over two thousand successful users’ (p. 266) while its 1932 edition involved a staggering ‘fifteen thousand users’. A thoughtful new media history cannot merely rejoice in such fascinating analogies. We have to uncover their underlying dynamics and give answers to how and why genres were able to prefigure (digital) technologies.

Following Heidegger’s (1977) ontological history of technology, it could be said that referential and performative genres have, by their very nature, long augured the interactivity, immediacy and connectivity of digital technologies. Digital technologies, in Heidegger’s words (1977), ‘remained concealed’, that is ‘enframed’, in the genre: ‘that which is earlier with regard to the [technological] arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us men only later’ (p. 22). The genre has always prefigured the new media’s ‘technological essence’ or what Heidegger calls ‘technicity’, that is, new media’s potential for participatory/crowdsourcing practices. The participation-ability of referential and performative genres existed whether or not participants (either users or producers) drew on digital technologies. However, this could become intelligible (‘to us men’) only when the purported ‘novel’ participatory properties of new media came into existence.

Genres are thus modes of ordering, organizing or ‘enframing’ new media technicity, not vice versa. The ‘technological essence’ of new media does not ‘come forth into appearance’ as a proliferation and diversity of ‘interactive’ digital technologies, therefore, but as ‘a standing-reserve’ rendered available as frameworks, guidelines, ordering devices and stock techniques (Heidegger, 1977) or genre affordances, meaning the possibilities they provide for action/speech/expression (Kress, 2003). In other words, ‘technicity’ becomes a resource for carrying out ontic operations such as reading/writing/seafaring/eating that Siegert (2013) defines as ‘cultural techniques’. Cultural techniques are a nexus of practices that ‘precede the media concepts they generate’ such as the typewriter or the Internet in the ontic operation of ‘writing’ (Siegert, 2013: 58). Even prior to actual technologies such as typewriters or alphabets, (Siegert, 2013) writing/reading was ordered by ‘a standing reserve’ or genre affordances which were always unproblematically and meaningfully available to the participants. In accordance with this logic, digital technologies are neither the necessary nor sufficient grounds for content co-production.

Only by charting the ‘cultural techniques’ of user-generated content as historically genre-specific antecedents to new media technologies can we define ‘what’s new’ in ‘new media’, that is, the velocity and intensity of collaborative practices, but not their very arising or nature. Only by theorizing participation as an ontological and structural feature of genres can we hope to properly historically contextualize new media. If genres cut across conventional technological affordances specific to only one vaguely technological era – print, broadcast or digital – then genre-specific collaborative practices and their care-structures will serve as a kind of genomic bridge across media history (time) and innovation (change). Thus, ‘the technologically new’ will not be bound to a time-specific era but rather to a trans-historical set of cultural practices – or ‘cultural techniques’.