DIY Culture

18 Dec 05
● Culture
● Folksonomy

Showed up at a talk on DIY culture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here in London, mainly to support a couple of good friends, Sheikh and Frances, who happened to be sitting on the panel. Aside from the irony of sitting around talking about DIY culture at an institution on the Mall (which is regal territory, in case you don't know London), it was worth the trip.

The panel consisted of,

  • A kid from Universal music who had a real guilt complex as to his role at a large media behemoth. He couldn't go two sentences without saying 'universal' and making self-deprecating jokes about being 'evil'. His name was Luke and he seemed nice enough.
  • A musician called Fink from the Ninja Tunes record label.
  • Nick Luscombe, a radio presenter (XFM) who's curating all the music events at the ICA right now. Very nice chap.
  • Frances, who edits a print magazine called Plan B.
  • Sheikh, who ran Absorb.org (an electronic music resource) for 10 years and now blogs about digital music
  • Ned Beckett from LittleBig promotions.

The main points i made were the following,

  • The concepts of a 'mainstream' and an 'underground' are laid to rest by networked culture. There are only open and closed networks. Everything is flat.
  • Top down control structures (like major labels) are unable to assure quality control in the same way bottom up structures can. In networked culture, quality bubbles up from the bottom, and the role of large entities (like major record labels) as arbiters of taste is undermined as a result.
  • Collaborative filtering in trust-based networks is the way in which networked culture will deal with information overload.
  • The printed press' hallowed notion of 'genre' is under threat through the processes of user-generated metadata that describe Folksonomy.
  • The concept of DIY is less relevant to networked youth culture today as it was when we grew up (with movements like Hardcore). DIT - Do It Together - which finds it's roots in the Open Source movement's model of production, is a far more relevant paradigm today.
  • Bit-torrent is currently the most powerful distribution technology thrown up by the web.
  • DIY culture was always about control, from production through distribution, performance and promotion of cultural product. It enabled people to have control over the end-to-end process of communicating through cultural products. A network of trusted people could be used to oversee all aspects of production/distribution/retail.
  • DRM - Digital Rights Management - is a survivalist legal attempt from a desperate culture industry to preserve a revenue model (content ownership) which is at odds with a new medium for culture (digital networks).
  • The new revenue model for cultural content in digital networks involves syndication of content with embedded, trackable advertising.

Update: OK so i turned off Trackbacks due to spam headaches, so here's me manually telling you that Sheikh posted some more on this over at failme.net.

ernest says

couldn't agree more. it's all about bottom-up collaborative value creation and content filtering. big industry is convulsing in its death throes. quite rightly. and its attempts to survive via orwellian control implementations a la Sony will almost inevitably end in failure.

still, everyone should stay on their toes.

Sam says

From my point of view, one of the things that's interesting about debates of this nature which focus on the future of the 'cultural industry' is that the aspect that tends to get ignored in favour of the technological debate is the actual economics of the model of digital music distribution and it's associated ideological impediments.

When compared to other sources of revenue, I don't actually know anyone who has made any significant amount of money out of digital music distribution (it accounted for 0.38% of my last royalty statement). It tends to be seen by musicians and independent record labels I've dealt with as a way of introducing people to the music, as a kind of addition to the radio etc. Selling real artifacts such as records and doing concerts is still the activity that actually generates the revenue that allows most musicians to continue what they do.

The current situation is also symptomatic of the relative ease with which it is possible to produce a recording nowadays, something which no longer entails, as used to be the case, a certain level of investment in music itself. In my experience, the associated changes to the recording process bought about by digital technology, far from aiding, focusing and capturing a 'definitive musical article', have had the opposite effect; the relativism and ubiquity of recordings has become a catalyst that leads to an increased entropy within the medium and hence a greater interest by audiences in other aspects the music/technology paradigm engenders. This in many cases has led to an increased interest in how music is presented live and what informs it's actual creation and production. In the case of electronic musicians in particular, this has not only lead to a demand for more performance related events (witness the myriad of electronic music festivals that now take place across the globe), but has also lead, on the part of the musicians themselves, to an in depth analysis of what constitutes musical discourse, how it is understood and in many cases at what point more traditional models break down.

The elaboration of the technology that created the music industry has re-aligned culture in a very different way from the model it originally proposed and yet the perceived new direction originates from within the original model. It effectively constitutes a type of hybrid evolution and I think from this point of view it starts to become clear that top down structures not only have a hand in proposing that evolution, but also exist to be evolved. For example, it is clear to me that electronic musicians are not seeking to destroy music itself, but are seeking to evolve our inherited concepts of what actually constitutes music. This proposes the point that there is always going to be a stage at which the broader social evolution of perception itself challenges the engendered notion of hierarchical classification as a result of the fact that it is inherently dynamic. The difficult part is in actually understanding and confirming what constitutes a 'beneficial' evolution and equally recognising the part played in that evolution by the existing hierarchical structures it seeks to change.

Even though in certain cases such as music, hierarchies and models are in practice being blurred, are broken down or remain visibly hidden, thematically, they almost always still exist or are latent in some modified form in even the most self-declared radical of works. In most cases, it is a relationship to economics that necessitates certain hierarchical structures irrespective of implied changes to their value. If a debate about cultural industry is to go beyond the rhetoric of simply affirming these changing values, it needs to engender some kind of sustainable economic model that helps these values survive and this in my mind still requires a broader social responsibility engendered by certain top down models.

gerv says

hi a.
you really couldn't be more right.
in my opinion.
gerv