Jorinde Seijdel, The Rise of the Informal Media

The Rise of the Informal Media
How Search Engines, Weblogs and YouTube Change Public Opinion.

The media through which news and information are gathered and exchanged have expanded significantly in the last several years. Weblogs, advanced search engines, virtual environments like Second Life, and phenomena such as MySpace, Hyves, Flickr and YouTube are offering new tools, communication opportunities, social networks and platforms for public debate. These are informal media, largely programmed, supplied and broadcast by the user – in contrast to conventional macromedia like television and the printed press, which are more institutionally determined. This issue examines what the implications of this are for the public sphere. Questions are raised, among other things, about how news and information are handled on the internet, about the conditions of our everyday media practices and about the opportunities for artists to work in a culture in which the lines between maker and user, between amateur and professional, are being blurred.

The media through which news and information are gathered, produced and exchanged have expanded significantly over the last several years. Weblogs, advanced search engines, virtual environments like Second Life, phenomena such as MySpace, Hyves, Flickr and YouTube are offering new tools, communication options, social networks and platforms for public debate. These are micromedia or grassroots media, that is to say media that are largely programmed, supplied and broadcast by the user – in contrast to conventional macromedia such as television and the printed press, which are more institutionally determined. And these are ‘informal media’, media that are used outside the formal protocols and authorized precepts of the old mass media, although, of course, various overlaps exist.
The rise of the informal media also implies the rise of the amateur, of the layperson or ‘citizen journalist’ making public pronouncements on all manner of social, cultural and political issues. Andrew Keen, in The Cult of the Amateur (2007), argues that the ascendance of the masses is a threat to the culture of authorities and experts, with mediocrity becoming the norm. He bemoans a lack of ‘gatekeepers’, of accredited persons or institutions who can determine the value of news and information on the internet. His critique allows no room for considerations of the emancipating, democratizing or subversive effect of the informal media.
Henry Jenkins, in his Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), is more nuanced about the blurring of boundaries between media producer and media user, between the professional and the amateur – a process he calls ‘cultural convergence’. He emphasizes that this process is born out of the interaction between the commercial media industry and the user, out of negotiations between the consumer and the producer. The result is dynamic and capricious, has no clear outcome and is devoid of any set ideological programme. According to Jenkins, questions about the control of new internet platforms are particularly relevant.
In any case, in order not to be entirely lost or carried away in today’s public sphere, in order to be a political, social or cultural voice or player, it seems essential to study the new instruments and platforms that function within that sphere critically. This issue of Open features contributions from theorists and artists who reflect on the implications of the informal media for the public programme, broadly conceived as the whole of public principles and requirements. Questions are raised, among other things, about the conditions of our everyday media practices and about the opportunities for artists who work in a convergence culture.
Open 13 also includes specific attention to the changing position of conventional public media. Media scholar Oliver Marchart wonders how a radically democratic media policy can be conceived within the information society. The public dimension of the television culture is also the focus of the special Hot Spot section compiled by programme maker Geert van de Wetering. Hot Spot, an initiative launched by the Dutch broadcasting organization VPRO, is an informal club of public programme makers looking into what implications and possibilities the shifts in media production, distribution and consumption might be. How might programme makers benefit from an audience that has begun to participate in conceptualization and discussion?
Media philosopher Martijn de Waal assesses the democratic quotient of processes of valorization and systems of collective intelligence within the public sphere of Web 2.0. Internet critic Geert Lovink delves specifically on the expanding ‘blogosphere’. He sees blogging as a nihilist enterprise that undermines traditional mass media without stepping forward as an alternative. Henry Jenkins’ ‘Nine Propositions Towards a Cultural Theory of YouTube’ are included in the column. American media theorist Richard Grusin looks at the commotion around the Abu Ghraib photographs in light of our everyday media practices. Art theorist Willem van Weelden interviews web epistemologist Richard Rogers on the politics of information and the web as a discrete knowledge culture. Web sociologist Albert Benschop compares the 3-D structure of Second Life with the old, ‘flat’ web in relation to such aspects as methods of communication and the creation of power. DogTime students (at the Rietveld Academie) Arjan van Amsterdam and Sander Veenhof made a pictorial contribuition. Artist and media researcher David Garcia sees, precisely within a commercial service industry in which media are omnipresent, opportunities for artists to contribute critical services and constructing instruments.
Artist Florian Göttke created a pictorial contribution derived from his iconographic project Toppled, which is an archive of a significant number of news and amateur photographs taken from the internet, documenting the toppling of the statues of Saddam Hussein. This author has written an introduction about iconoclasm and iconolatry and the potential of Toppled as a shadow archive. Felix Janssen and Kirsten Algera, of the design and communications agency Team TCHM and the makers of PRaudioGuide, produced the contribution Hollow Model, a number of templates with text in which they interrogate ‘the public of the public’ and the role that media and media use play in this. Is the public made hollow if it exists only in the media?