More than a desire for text

Abstract

Why and on what bases do people choose content and share it in an online environment? At the centre of Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture lie in the transforming links between active, participative audiences, media content and media corporations. However, the ‘textually motivated’ desire to participate in the circulation of and control over texts is just one among other key motives for the dissemination and recirculation of content. Ethnography-based research conducted at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic suggests that when exploring participation in textuality, performative self-exposure and self-presentation must be taken into account as well as the context of audiences’ everyday life. Thus, I propose to approach participation as based not only on a ‘will to text’ but also on a dialectical relationship between a ‘will to self-performance’ and a ‘will to conformity’. These three factors then impact on the social curation of content – a reflexive process in which members of the audience construct texts for consumption and recirculation.

Keywords

Audiences cultural capital everyday life narcissism online participation social capital social curation of content social networking sites spectacle

In the research that informed this contribution, my intention was to add nuance to a simple question: what are the audiences’ motivations for a more or less active involvement in the online reception, creation and recirculation of mediated content?¹ The question alludes to the dimension of everyday life and so it enriches the debate by a few theoretical aspects that did not form part of the main conversation between Henry Jenkins and Nico Carpentier. Nonetheless, I hope that my explorations are not entirely remote and can complement the debate about political participation.

Here, I outline mainly theoretical and speculative issues that emerge from my current research. It deals with the activities of audiences in the context of everyday life, home and the private sphere. The goal is to understand how the use of a wide variety of new media transforms and restructures media-related routines and communicative practices and, through these practices, how people reconstitute the experience of ‘home’ and its relational, spatial and temporal dimensions. Furthermore, it aims to understand how people deal with the subtle dialectics between ‘private’ and ‘public’ when both these cultural spaces are increasingly mobilized and when the boundaries between these spaces are challenged by interactions in the hybrid, semi-public spaces of social networking sites as well as by the use of technologies that enable our constant availability to others, to private and semi-public communication.

The specific practices that are addressed here are those appearing in semi-public and public-mediated spaces and include

creation and posting of audience’s own content;

reception of content made and posted by others (‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’); and

sorting and recirculation of content made by others.

I use the term online participation in content to denote these practices and I do so by acknowledging Nico Carpentier’s understanding of participation. This term reflects the fact that some crucial aspects of the audiences’ textual practices (potentially) have a participatory dimension since they are linked to power relations and decision-making processes and can hardly be described merely as interactions. But at the same time – in my conclusion – I make the link between online participation in content and the normative model of democratic participation more complex as I argue that the cultural sources of online participation in content are led by something other than a motivation for democratization.

The key issue in this respect is that the creation and posting of one’s content and the sorting and recirculation of that of others can be seen not only as the production of a text or an act of recirculation but at the same time as a performative self-exposure and as a performative exposure of taste and consumption. In other words, members of online audiences also share, narrate and circulate ‘themselves’ and representations of their lifeworlds. This would seem key in answering the opening question as our findings across various projects suggest that these activities cannot be fully understood solely through the audiences’ desire to interact with or participate in textuality or through their willingness to challenge broadcasters. Henry Jenkins (2006) is undoubtedly correct in identifying these motives as distinctive and core features of convergence culture. But at the same time, I would suggest that it is useful to explore the other two aspects of motivations that relate to ‘the will to text’ – ‘the will to conformity’ and ‘the will to self-performance’.

The will to text

I intend to demonstrate here that online participation in content is based on more than a desire to produce text. Yet, textuality – and needs related directly to content – remains central.

I do not engage in the prolific debate on textuality and its reception here, rather I propose that the debate as well as our empirical research indicate that in relation to ‘the desire to text’ it is appropriate to ask two seemingly banal but crucial questions addressing two sets of text-related needs. These are: first, what texts do people deal with and why? Second, why do they demand control over a text and how do they practice it?

The first question links directly to the realm of everyday life with media and texts being its constitutive elements and where audiences’ relations with textuality are formed, fulfilled and affirmed (e.g. Bakardjieva, 2005; Silverstone, 1994). My current research focuses precisely on what structures people’s choices of particular media and texts (what needs these media and texts fulfill) and how this occurs. I use the concept of media ensemble – ‘more or less reflexively created, changeable and negotiated structure’ of individual media-related practices (Macek, 2010, forthcoming) – for this particular purpose, and my 2012 pilot study indicates at least two (maybe not exactly surprising, but important) insights (Macek, 2012).

First, the media ensemble is structured not only by individual cultural capital and individual needs but also by the cultural capital and needs of other family members. Or to put it differently – as Morley (1986) and Silverstone (1994) noted in relation to watching television – media-related practices are negotiated with respect to the roles and to the needs and priorities of the family or household. These negotiations, just like the articulation of preferred needs, reflect power inequalities within intimate and family relationships.

Second, these (negotiated) needs vary widely depending on individual or shared leisure activities (such as pleasure arising from reading fiction), instrumental needs as well as needs for interpersonal contact. In addition, the need for a temporal ritualization of daily activities, the need for interaction with the public space or the need for political participation has also their impact. Importantly, all these needs (along with rationalization, i.e. ‘why I do it’) are more or less firmly interwoven within the story of the individual’s identity.

The second question (‘why do they demand control over a text and how do they practice it?’) deals with the need to gain control over textuality and moves away from the inner circle of the private, everyday sphere beyond its borders to the ‘external’ power of textuality. When talking about control over text, I take into account Nico Carpentier’s distinction between participation and interaction as well as Henry Jenkins’ thoughts on interactivity, as recognized earlier.

Contrary to Henry Jenkins, I attribute interactivity to the process of communication and not to technology. My understanding of the concept of interactivity (or interaction with a text) follows from Rob Cover’s (2006) definition of interactivity as a culturally motivated and historically variable desire to participate in textuality:

In the context of emerging theories of interactivity […] it is one articulated not as determined by technology, programming, production, and authorial ‘permission’ to alter the text, but constituted within culture as a means or desire to co-participate in the textuality of the text, in its narrative, in the course or temporality of its flow or in its structuration. That is, some level of engagement with the text in the act of reading or usage that substantially and self-consciously shapes the text or the experience of its reception. (Cover, 2006: 141)

Cover – advancing arguments formulated by Rafaeli and Sudweeks (1997) – understands interactivity as an extension of relations between consequent messages that could be described as the (culturally motivated) participation of one subject (the reader) in a narration created by another subject (the author) or object (machine). The affordances of media play an important, although secondary, role here – new and digital media make interventions into textuality easier than, for example, fixed print media, but Cover does not see them as a source of interactivity.

This particular approach to interactivity is based on a post-structuralist understanding of the reader–text–author relationship, where the culturally constructed reader and author battle for legitimate control over the treatment of the text. It enables Cover to connect the concept explicitly with the question of power in a way reminiscent of Henry Jenkins’ tension between broadcasters and audiences in convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006). At the same time, it possibly opens – as an expression of the desire to have control over decisions about textuality – an opportunity to view it in relation to Nico Carpentier’s notion of interactive control over the text as participation in textuality.

The will to conformity

Sharing content as well as experiences and opinions linked to content at the same time has a very obvious ‘wider’ social dimension. People deal with texts not only for the pleasure of reception (or other ‘directly textual’ gratifications) and not only within the private sphere but the consumption of certain cultural objects and the public or semi-public exposure of this consumption should always be understood as an expression of culturally structured taste and as one of the sources and expressions of group, subculture and class identity. This has been explored in great detail by several authors on many levels but to put it briefly, and in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1996) theory of social distinctions online participation in content is one of the ways we now look after our cultural and social capital. Through participation, we establish our common interest in shared content and so we ensure that our cultural capital (and thus our values, preferences, tastes and opinions) and that of those included in our social circles are compatible, that we are surrounded by ‘proper people’ with ‘proper interests’ and that our textual interests and pleasures are consistent with the rest of our habitus.

The cultivation of the common textual interest does not necessarily take a very explicit, active and reflexive form; we can see this in the case of text-oriented subcultures and groups such as fandom, knowledge communities (Hills, 2002; Jenkins, 1992, 2006) or activist networks (Jelečková, 2012; Macková, 2012). Rather, it tends to manifest itself in more banal ways, as Nela Studýnková (2010) and Jiří Fiala (2012) show with consumption of illegally distributed TV shows and movies. These consumers can opt for highly individualized choices and download and watch ‘any imaginable’ content – however, they build their content agenda in large part based on face-to-face and online communication and consequently they all watch ‘the same things’. At the root of such conformity lies ‘a desire to share the experience of one’s peers, usually friends or colleagues’ and to ‘keep up’ with them (Studýnková, 2010: 52–53).

Similar patterns of socially motivated content choice can be identified in the consumption of music – tracks or music videos are obtained or relinked usually on Facebook, YouTube or specialized services such as Last FM (Fridrich, 2011; Okáč, 2011).

This will towards social and cultural conformity itself is clearly not new or specific for the online environment. Indeed, it is one of the crucial forces that, on the level of everyday life, constitute social cohesion. The same may be said about the role of mediated textuality in the construction of social and cultural conformity as, for example, Raymond Williams (1975) and David Morley (1986) noted in relation to television. What is specific is the significant role of the online environment in shaping particular practices that saturate the need for conformity.

These practices are enabled by the affordances of new media and more specifically social networking services (SNS). The ego-centred network topology based on social capital enables the constitution of a socially and culturally smooth social arena. The instant and permanent visibility and availability of social peers (and the permanent exposure of their content-related activities) enable the instant and permanent social control of exposed activities and connect the semi-public-mediated space with the private place of home. In addition, the convergent nature of the platform (i.e. the permanent and straightforward possibility to receive, post and repost various media) lowers barriers for the participation in content and at the same time brings the text right next to the negotiations of its value.

Fiala (2012) arrives at the conclusion that SNS play a crucial role in the ‘participatory’ construction of cultural consent – the permanent availability of others and a culturally relatively homogenous semi-public environment amplify the role of trusted opinion leaders and strengthen peer pressure to conform.

The will to self-performance

In online participation, the will to conformity has its dialectical counterpart in the will to self-performance. Conformity is being performed, exposed, articulated and reproduced in a performative interaction. Online participation in content, thus far depicted as a demonstration of taste, therefore, could also be approached as a spectacular and reflexive performance of the self. People, on the one hand, do not want to be excluded from their social milieu and silenced for being different – yet, at the same time, they want to be visible, unique and specific and carefully and reflexively manage their self-representation to serve this urge. Participation, therefore, seems to revolve around tensions caused by these antithetical needs.

How can we explain the will to self-performance in relation to audiences? The connection between performing audiences, everyday life and broader social sources of performative practices is insightfully explored in Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst’s theory of diffused audience (1998). This theory, based on a critical evaluation of the epistemology of audience studies, underpins the immanent and constitutive character of ‘being an audience’. The authors note that:

… life is a constant performance; we are audience and performer at the same time; everybody is an audience all the time. Performance is not a discrete event. (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 73)

Furthermore, following debates about spectacle and cultural narcissism, Abercrombie and Longhurst state that the diffused audience is an offspring of two old, essentially modern, social trends that form the media-saturated everyday life.

On the one hand, there is the construction of the world as spectacle and, on the other, the construction of individuals as narcissistic. […] Spectacle and narcissism feed off each other in a virtuous cycle, a cycle fuelled largely by the media and mediated by the critical role of performance. (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 75)

Thus, everyday routines and interactions and the Giddensian project of the reflexive self (Giddens, 1991) are fruitfully connected together under the umbrella of performance – driven by forces of spectacle and narcissism. This allows for a more nuanced exploration of online participation in content. However, there remains the fact that Abercrombie and Longhurst, when speaking about the diffused audience, address the era before the proliferation of new media. Interestingly, with the proliferation of new media and the emergence of convergence culture, some of Abercrombie and Longhurst’s tenets that were formulated in an abstract or a slightly metaphorical manner became literal. The authors, for example, note that ‘the media of mass communications provide an important resource for everyday performance’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 74) – however, in the online environment media are not only a resource but also a platform for performance. In other words, participatory audiences entered the media. They perform in mediated spaces, the performance itself is mediated.

Hence, we need to review the ‘virtual invisibility of performance’ and the argument that ‘so deeply infused into everyday life is performance that we are unaware of it in ourselves or in others’ (Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998: 73). In their research on the self-presentation and reconstruction of the public–private dichotomy on Facebook, Lucie Paseková (2012) and Tomáš Fridrich (2011) show that communicative practices on SNS possibly emphasize the performative nature of social interaction and make the performance very visible, expected and reflexive. In addition, Petra Jelečková’s (2010, 2012) analysis of the practices and motivations of Czech elite cyber activists using SNS insinuates that the same could probably apply to the narcissistic dimension of performance. She links cyber activists’ tactics to the concept of civic narcissism (Papacharissi, 2009) and some of her respondents clearly consciously and knowingly take on the narcissistic role as ‘that’s the way the game goes’.

Social curation

I suggest that these needs are interrelated – the will to text, the will to conformity and the will to self-performance – together they inform the social curation of content, a process of potentially participative selection of the content agenda, a process based on audiences’ grassroots tactics.

When using the term, I build upon Fiala’s aforementioned ethnographic study of Czech convergent audiences and their reception of infringing audiovisual content (Fiala, 2012). In their daily use of online sources of content, audiences employ strategies of content choice that are distinct from those employed by broadcast media audiences. This leads Fiala to distinguish between expert curation (typical for the use of broadcast media) and social curation (typical of online audiences). Expert curation is based on broadcasters’ push strategies – it keeps audience’s decision-making within the boundaries of the pre-structured textual terrain.

In contrast, online participation in content requires the pull strategy of social curation. With the multiplicity of media artefacts and content sources, with the blurring position of the central authorities of broadcasters and with the ongoing shift from television sets to computers and other wired screens, expert curation is becoming, to some extent, obsolete. Under the circumstances, audiences employ their own successful tactics (De Certeau, 1984) and prefer to draw on their social contacts.

It is worth repeating what I already suggested in relation to conformity – for online audiences the social dimension of the curation of content is not a unique one. In making their decisions about content viewers, listeners and readers have obviously always combined expert and social sources of knowledge but what is new is probably the intensity of social curation in comparison with expert curation and the roles that SNS (and other online sources of user-generated content) and interaction play in the curation. Second, that the social curation of content can, in some cases, blend with distinctly political activities (see Jelečková, 2012; Macková, 2012 on Czech online activism) may also be seen as innovative.

I will end on a ‘however’ note which I consider important when discussing participation. The concept of the social curation of content can easily evoke an optimistic view of the participatory (or emancipatory) potential of online audience activities. This, however, is not my intention as it would be short-sighted. My aim is to suggest that the activities of online audiences (and thus social curation) are still in the first place linked to distinct sources of power, identities, social cohesion and conformity as well as the spectacular and performative nature of contemporary media-saturated society. As Nico Carpentier puts it, curation is one of the ‘fields in which participatory processes can be located’ ( p. 265). While he is undoubtedly correct, his cautious use of the verb ‘can’ also suggests that they do not have to – at least not in the normative, democratic way that Henry Jenkins and Nico Carpentier commendably plead for. Evidently, people can seek participation in textuality while following motivations that have little to do with ‘emancipatory’ or ‘democratic’ participation – motivations that are located outside the debate about democracy. Some of these motivations can even have unsavoury consequences (e.g. the bubble of homogeneous culture and opinion related to the will to conformity) for the democratic potential of online participation in content.

Footnotes

Funding

This article is part of author's post-doctoral research project entitled ‘New and old media in everyday life: media audiences at the time of transforming media uses’ (Czech Science Foundation, project 13-15684P). The author acknowledges the support of the VITOVIN project (CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0184), which is co-financed by the European Social Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.

Note

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