[DIY Media] Mizuko Ito on amateur cultural production in the new networked age

Mimi Ito’s talk is entitled "Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age." She is a cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US. She is currently co-leading a multi-year project on Digital Kids and Informal Learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this project she is conducting case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Communication.

As part of last year's Networked Publics program at the Annenberg Center, Ito and her research colleagues have been examining the changing relationship between cultural production and consumption. They have looked at the ways that many-to-many distribution, peer-to-peer social organization, and the availability of low-cost digital authoring tools have lowered thresholds to cultural production "manifest in public culture as increased visibility and mobilization of those actors traditionally associated with cultural consumption." They see three domains "growing in salience with the turn toward networked public culture: 1) amateur and non-market production, 2) networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, 3) niche and special-interest groups, and 4) aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation."

Ito spoke about the amateur collectives who volunteer to provide subtitles for Japanese anime films (and who withdraw them out of courtesy when English-language versions are introduced), and showed a The Race by Istiv Studios, mashup of hundreds of anime characters. She also showed the combination of coordinated peer production and machinima in this strangely lyrical music video by Snoken Productions, repurposing the multiplayer war game Battlefield 2, a parody on a Sony advertisement that had thousands of balls bouncing down a hill in San Francisco. The production of the machinima version required the coordinated cooperation of dozens of individual players who agreed to hop like bunnies instead of blasting each other away. She pointed to these nascent artforms as examples of how amateur cultural production is being augmented by newly accessible digital video tools and Internet distribution.