Students As Producers
This weekend I'll be at the Soundhouse Association national conference and i was asked to speak on the topic of Students as Producers. More than just another spin at the quickly establishing notion of consumer co-creation, the idea of what it means to teach students of the Digital Native holds particular interest and pertinent questions. heres soem of thoughts I'll be kicking around....
The concept of the 'pro-active public', what
Axel Bruns as termed the PROD-USER; the driver of consumer-driven content, has quickly one of those concept-statements bandied about with casual nonchalance but which most often escapes a real and tangible understanding.
The observation of the effects of evolving technology on 'how' we do things is only one part of the equation and too often this is where our critical thinking stops. What is much more profound than the means is the impetus to engage the means.
What prompts the engagement with producing?
What is the mindset of those that produce?
How do our expectations and values change as a result of the producing?
And how do we teach those who make no distinction between 'produce' and 'producing'?
The real power and strength of the Prod-User generation is Not that everyone can be a creative producer but, rather, that there is the broad, popular, social and cultural perception that they CAN produce... The perception of possibility and accessibility to production is exponentially greater in social value than the specific worth of the content that is produced.
A community, a society, a country who's preset default is can rather than a factory setting of cant is exponentially an empowered and dynamic one regardless of the 'quality' of that which is created, be it great or mediocre.
To understand the Prod-User generation we need to dissolve a great many traditional divisions and hierarchies that have been so dear for so long. The first is that there is no viable distinction between the Technical and Creative Music, Video, Image, Sound, even the Written Word in the digital age is a wholly Techno-Creative process whereby the Aesthetics cannot be understood without knowledge of the Technology and the Technology cannot be engaged without embracing the Aesthetics.
We, as digital immigrants, see intrinsically the divisions between the two, are well entrenched in creative processes that make hierarchical separations between 'Composer' and 'Engineer' between creatively inspired and technically competent.
Digital Natives do not, they are one and the same, any separation arbitrary and un-useful.
Following this, the Prod-User generation make none of the traditional distinctions between media forms as separate arts. Music is a Music-Video, a video Game is a type of Movie, a Movie is a Musical experience. Where traditional arts practice flows from a separation of powers, the Prod-User generation find those separations fundamentally at odds with the process of Producing and Creating.
To the Prod-User there is no hierarchy in delivery means the movie Theatre is not better than the TV, the TV is not better than the Internet. Likewise there is no value hierarchy of privilege and importance content from the TV is not more valuable than content from the Internet.
Of course all this then has a profound impact on industrial revolution paradigms that have shaped modern culture regarding 'ownership', 'intellectual 'property' and 'copyright'. A computer is a glorified copying machine replicate, copy and distribute Zeros and Ones is all it does and all it will ever do. We have spent 30 years telling the world's citizens that they must all have this miraculous copying machine in their homes, in their bags and in their pockets. And then, just as we have bred and engineered a generation fully immersed in the power of the grand computer copying machine, we have the absurd audacity to cry foul when they do exactly what the technology was designed to do Copy, Distribute, Replicate and Manipulate. Is it any wonder the Prod-User generation simply ignore our cries of Copyright Infringement as if we hadn't spoken and continue to
Mix, Rip, Burn in a frenzy of popular creative ebb and flow?
Much more than the just simple ideas of accessibility to technology and the ability to make with technology, it is these fundamental cultural positionings that separate the Prod-Users from previous generations. Their brains are simply wired different... And to those charged with educating those brains falls the task of re-thinking so much that we have come to accept and which is now rendered largely irrelevant.
An holistic embracing of the Student as Producer lies not only in a provision and facilitation of 'means to produce' but in acknowledging the mindset, culture and conceptual impact that the 'means to produce' intrinsically encompasses.
Posted at 01:00AM Sep 13, 2007
by Mike Jones in media education |
