Second Keynote
Cultures of Participation: Opportunities and Challenges for the Future of Digital Libraries
Gerhard Fischer
Professor of Computer Science, Institute of Cognitive Science Fellow, Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder
This talk alone was worth the conference registration fee. If Dr. Fischer is speaking somewhere near you, run, don't walk, to hear him.
Society is moving beyond the capacity of the unaided individual human mind. Fischer offers a continuum of sophisticated activities that have gotten less and less privileged over the course of human history, beginning with basic literacy and moving through the invention of the printing press, the advent of computing, widely-available personal computers, invention of the Internet, and landing at social networks. He uses the phrase "cultures of participation" to describe the popular adoption of networked activity, but points out that we may be giving up in long-term attention what we gain in collective human thinking power. Digital libraries have also been affected by this shifting focus from the privileged individual to the popular group as computing has moved through its own continuum. Much like basic literacy, computing began as an exclusive activity focused on hardware contained within electrical engineering departments and conducted in terms of calculations accomplished by renting mainframe time. As computing became more ubiquitous, its focus shifted to software taught in computer science departments concerned with problems of artificial intelligence and programming. Now, computing's focus is on information, or what Fischer calls "infoware," taught in information science schools concerned with problems of retrieval, preservation, and organization.
Fischer describes cultures of participation existing in opposition to consumer culture, which passively consumes finished goods. Participation means personal involvement in activities and content creation that individuals care about. When this participation takes place in a networked environment, what you get is 2.0-ness, or domains of cultures of participation. Recent examples of these domains include the Web, learning, the President, science, digital libraries, electricity, and health - all areas where people have taken an active interest not only in consuming information, but in creating it and participating with interested others in its creation. Concepts of cultures of participation include pro-sumers (producer + consumer), pro-ams (professional + amateur), user-generated content, wisdom of crowds, crowdsourcing, and the long tail.
With all this activity taking place, an analytic model to foster cultures of participation is needed, one that:
Understands its strengths:
- engage the whole world's talent pool
- put owners of problems in charge of solutions
- make all voices heard
- reach extensive coverage
- expose artifacts to public scrutiny
Understands its weaknesses:
- collective is not always better
- loss of individuality
- accumulation of irrelevant information
- lack of coherent voices
- companies offload work to consumers (a downfall of a DIY society)
Fischer calls Wikipedia the Drosophila for both the strengths and weaknesses of cultures of participation. In other words, it's the experimental proving ground. Other examples of such proving grounds include the Encyclopedia of Life, Second Life, and the concept of open source. These examples work because of meta-design; that is, design for designers.
Meta-design does not develop content; rather, it develops environments in which contributors can then develop and contribute content. Meta-design requires designers to give up some control at design time to contributors at use time. Meta-designers use their own creativity to create socio-technical environments in which other people can be creative [JBK comment: an excellent model, I think, for a library's "systems" office]. Such environments include contexts and content creation tools and technical and social conditions for contributors to be creative and collaborative. These environments create richer ecologies of participation, where there are more possible roles for interested individuals to take on. The binary model of producer/consumer (or software developer/user, or professional/amateur) has evolved into a multi-faceted world of roles: producer, curator, steward, active user, passive user, rater, tagger, and so on. Fischer points out that these roles are distributed throughout communities (for example, as user communities tend to fall into power users, regular users, and novice users), with the consequence that not everyone needs to know how to do everything. Rather, there's a gradient from consumers (lots of people, low expectations) through contributors, curators, and collaborators to meta-designers (few people, high expectations).
Fischer offers the concept of social creativity as a way of solving current design problems. He notes that current complex design problems are systemic - they seldom fall into the boundaries of one discipline or area of inquiry, and reinforce the need to work within cultures of participation to solve them. So what does all this mean for research on digital libraries? For one thing, it poses a major problem:
- How to preserve both the information inside digital environments AND the contexts in which they are created?
Fischer suggests that the problem needs perspectives from both social and technical systems, since this is not only a technical issue. Such a perspective can account for the element of participation in preservation, and can approach answers for troublesome preservation questions, including, "Who benefits from the work?" "Who does the work?" "Who cares about the work?" Fischer compares two models of information production/consumption. An authoritative model (consumer culture) operates as "filter and publish," with strong input filters, small information repositories, and weak output filters. Fundamental limitations of this model include silencing many voices and fostering mindless trust of experts [JBK comment: when Fischer mentioned this, I had a momentary vision of people achieving academic degrees as incremental accretions of trust certificates]. A democratic model (participatory culture) operates as "publish and filter," with weak input filters, large information repositories, and strong output filters. A fundamental limitation of this model is the questionable reliability of information. An audience member pointed out during the Q&A that the correllary to mindless trust in an authoritative world is mindless distrust in an open source world. In essence, in a participatory culture, digital libraries must move beyond the authoritative model of preservation and create environments where people who care about an area or activity can preserve what they care about [JBK comment: this echoes almost exactly something that Carl Grant proposed in a commentary on his blog and in person at ELUNA 2009].
Finally, Fischer takes on the long tail. In the long tail, the "hits" are located in the head, while niche interests are located in the tail. He encourages a hybrid model for education that approaches teaching and learning a bit differently. Currently, formal education tends to focus on the head, while post-education professional activities (or personal activities of interest) focus on the tail:
- In the head: basic knowledge and skills, learning to learn, learning on demand, preparation for future learning, soft skills, and digital fluency.
- In the tail: personally meaningful problems, idiosyncratic interests and passions, self-directed learning, intrinsic motivation, and local knowledge in a globalized world.
He points out that cultures of participation outside education already focus on the tail - you get involved in things that interest you. Focusing education on the tail would take advantage of the motivation of learners' own interests and create richer learning environments. Regarding the issues of mindless trust/distrust mentioned above, Fischer points out that this is an educational goal that needs more focus. [JBK comment: Obviously, this is something that librarians have been trying to teach for a long time, but we don't do it within the long tail, i.e.: we don't generally tailor our message to focus on the very specific things that people care about.]
In conclusion...
This is a time of exciting innovations and transformations. In past decades, digital media provided new powers for the individual. In the future, the world's networks will provide enormous unexplored opportunities for groups and communities. Cultures of participation offer opportunities and challenges to provide all citizens with the means to become co-creators of new ideas, knowledge, and products focused on personally meaningful activities. Meta-design, social creativity, and the long tail are frameworks that support and foster cultures of participation.
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