10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17184
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2038-3460
17184
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Federica Timeto
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer, Collaborative Media. Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions, The Mit Press, 2013
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
5
Book Reviews
2014-07-14
2023-06-13
2014-07-14
2023-07-24
222-225
TS
Federica Timeto
2014/07/14
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17184
222
"Carlo Bo" University of Urbino
2038-3460
1
en
225
Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer, Collaborative Media. Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions, The Mit Press, 2013
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17184/16084
5
222                                                             Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

Griesemer to the taxonomists, bioinformaticians and molecular biologists
followed by Waterton, Ellis and Wynne at London Natural History Muse-
um.
    In the end, the need for classification and standardization of knowledge
is a master or grand narrative of science and goes hand in hand with the
resilience of infrastructures of and for science. Forms and networks which
comply with this need can be very diverse. This diversity is vital for
knowledge infrastructures, as much as biodiversity for life survival and de-
velopment. But more often than not, “what are really continuities in prac-
tice can appear and be claimed as dramatic innovations” (p. 39).
    This infrastructural inversion a la Bowker goes straight to the book final
concerns about knowledge ethics and politics. These concerns substantiate
the call for a modest, responsible and relational thinking on technoscience,
based on the awareness that the shifting boundaries and apparent inconsist-
encies of genomic taxonomy can serve - and become - different technosci-
entific articulations. These can functionally enroll scientists and their disci-
plinary scientific communities, but also embrace and enable public “poetic
sensibilities” (p. 177) towards the crucial and ambivalent relevance of
‘treating’ and ‘caring’ about global biodiversity.
    Indeed, the book final reflections go far beyond taxonomy and ge-
nomics, or genomic taxonomy: the current hype on ‘Big Data’ infrastruc-
tures ‘in an age of consistency and coherence loss’ (to suggest an echo of
the book subtitle) makes even more urgent the quest for new sensibilities,
to see contradictions embedded in the making, use and maintenance of
emergent sociotechnical arrays devoted to archiving and using myriad of
sensitive information set.


                                     ***


Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer
Collaborative Media. Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions
Cambridge MA: The Mit Press, 2013, pp. 198

Federica Timeto ‘Carlo Bo’ University of Urbino

    This book is based on the fifteen-year collaboration between an interac-
tion designer (Löwgren) and a media scholar (Reimer) at the School of Arts
and Communication and the Medea Collaborative Media initiative at
Malmö University in Sweden. Combining interaction design with media
and communication studies, Löwgren and Reimer’s approach draws con-
nections back to the main assumptions of cultural studies about cultural ar-
tifacts, and to Stuart Hall in particular, while showing an affinity with the
recent materialist turn of social sciences and its interest in the generativity
Book Reviews                                                                 223
of matter and the materiality of information.
    All media are social media. However, collaborative media can be de-
fined as action-oriented social media, or mediated cultural forms, that en-
hance collaboration in the first instance. Here, action is intended as the par-
ticular form of mediated interaction that links human and humans but also
humans and machines inside a mediated environment. If the notion of af-
fordance proposed by Gibson and extended by Norman partially addresses
this concept, action, so intended, is more similar to the notion of inscription
proposed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In fact this theoretical frame-
work not only foregrounds the ways in which artifacts can be encoded with
context-specific meanings, i.e. ‘inscripted’; it also brings forth the links that
relate human and non-human actors in ways that produce action and change
at the social level, while also making the social context ‘happen’, so to
speak (thus overcoming the system-actor distinction).
    The recurrent aspects of collaborative media that Löwgren and Reimer
identify are: collaborative media are above all forms of practice; they make
possible three forms of practice, production, consumption and design; such
forms of practice “prioritize collaboration”; collaborative media should be
read like frameworks rather than containers or vehicles in which the ele-
ments can be differently appropriated and combined; infrastructures and
texts are always interlinked in collaborative media; this is also what makes
collaborative media more and more ‘material’ as well as cross-medial.
    As it has already been highlighted in media and communication studies,
with the emergence, diffusion and increasing availability of new media
technologies, the relationship between production and consumption has
radically changed: while acknowledging the importance of concepts like
pro-am (professional-amateur), produsage (production and usage) or
prosumption (production and consumption), however, the authors prefer to
maintain the distinction between production and consumption. Actually, if
these practices can happen simultaneously, it does not mean that they com-
pletely overlap, and a third important moment, that of the design of the in-
frastructure, clearly characterizes collaborative media practices, according
to the authors. Löwgren and Reimer specifically attribute the latter to the
characteristics of those media in which the producer/consumer distinction
is becoming less clear than it was in mass media like television, since col-
laborative media are decisively more open to modification and sharing than
other media, thanks, for example, to open source software and platforms as
well as easily mixable components. Additionally, the three moments of
production, consumption and design are not only not necessarily sequential,
according to the authors, since the process of collaboration can be initiated
at any moment; each moment is also linked to the others and also contains
them, so that, for instance, there can be moments of design-in-production
or design-in-consumption, an aspect which is valid for each part of the pro-
cess. Paramount to understanding such interchanges is the concept of infra-
structuring, which, as Löwgren and Reimer explain, stresses the socio-
material linkages between different social actors and the role of the design-
224                                                            Tecnoscienza 5 (1)

er as facilitator (what in ANT terms would be called a ‘mediator’).
    Actually, focusing on the importance of participatory design, a term
with which the authors “do not mean the design of an artifact or an infra-
structure, but the design of the situation making practices and collabora-
tions possible”, they prefer to speak of interventions rather than actions,
combining the particular situation that requires that certain conditions of
interventions are designed (metadesign) with more conventional forms of
design aimed at producing things, but always according to a participatory
approach that prioritizes expression and communication rather than the
mere resolution of problems.
    The first part of the book focuses on what characterizes collaborative
media as a cultural form that enables new practices, and on the possibility
of adopting a trans-disciplinary approach that, following the approach initi-
ated in the recent field of digital humanities, combines the study of tech-
nologies and societies and includes the practice-based approach assumed in
the field of interaction design inside collaborative media research: this in-
volves non-academic actors and relies on real-life experiments (the Living
Lab) to support theoretical assumptions and to take action at a social level.
The second part collects the examples of ten case studies that have person-
ally involved the authors as researchers in the past years, and takes into ac-
count collaborative media practices at a social, institutional and “tribal”
level.
    The “Social Section” includes examples that show how collaborative
media contain the potential for (which does not mean that always lead to)
social change that relies on grassroots activism and bottom-up governance.
The Avatopia project, an attempt by Swedish Television (SVT) to experi-
ment with cross-media formats brings together different social actors, from
students and activists to researchers; Bambuser, a mobile-first live video
stream service based in Sweden also linked with an online archive, mas-
sively downloaded and accessed by worldwide users and also remediated
by broadcast media for the coverage of critical events such as, the Arab
spring in 2011; Parapolis, a project of participatory urban planning of
Malmö’s city administration that asks citizens with the collaboration of ar-
chitects and graphic designers, among others, to envision future urban de-
velopments by means of an augmented reality device, the Parascope, that
overlays imagined cityscapes on existing ones.
    The institutional case studies account for the ways in which collabora-
tive media engage with institutionalized media or other institutional sec-
tors of society. So, for example, in MyNewsMyWay, whose long term ef-
fects are taken into account in the following section, with the analysis of
the complementary OurNewsOurWay project, the innovative aspects of on-
demand media are experimentally assumed by Swedish institutional televi-
sion to take advantage of the increasing collaborative merging of the pro-
ducer and the consumer; Substrate is a collaborative platform showing the
positive effects of collaborative media on the production and diffusion of
technical information, particularly business-to-consumer (B2C) technical
Book Reviews                                                                225
information, that are the instructions traditionally contained in a manual
and increasingly replaced by Internet searches and peer advice today; Kliv
is a sort of video-tagging of medical equipment made by the intensive care
unit of the Malmö Hospital, in order to share one’s practical knowledge so
as to enable others to be familiar with the work environment; Hacktivism,
explores fashion as a form of social activism according to Otto von Busch,
a fashion designer whose work is an example of the way fashion can also
be used as a form of collaborative media to facilitate collaboration through
the horizontal distribution of skills and tools and through practices of re-
combination.
    In the end, focusing on “tribes”, Löwgren and Reimer analyze what
happens with collaborative media in small communities characterized by a
very high level of cohesion and reciprocity, using them as a magnifier to
better highlight some specific traits of collaborative media practices. After
opening with the OurNewsOurWay project, the central part of the section
analyzes the renowned Arduino project, focusing on the potentialities of
open source hardware and software for their design-in-consumption aspects
in particular, and its connections with the principles of hacker culture, play,
hobbyism and artistic as well as amateurish creativity. The last case dis-
cussed is the Malmö City Symphony, carried out at the School of Arts and
Communication in Malmö to put together a landscape of video clips of the
city with the collaboration of both professionals and amateurs, and the aid
of a P2P platform (The Pirate Bay) for their open archiving, distribution
and further modification.
    The book ends with a section of insights and conclusions, which is by
far the most interesting, since the authors, after summarizing the specifici-
ties of collaborative media in what they devise as six major “recurrent
themes”, already introduced at the beginning of this review, nonetheless
maintain their focus on the differences among practices. They restate the
importance of situated methodologies and practical interventions at the lev-
el of research. At the same time, they deal with the most common critiques
advanced against collaborative media, trying all the while to escape the bi-
narism between what they call “bright-side” and the “dark-side” perspec-
tives. In fact, even when they recognize that some open issues actually ex-
ist in collaborative media, for example the blurring between professional-
ism and amateurism and the loss of competencies, the question of intellec-
tual property, the difficulty of using traditional categories such as quality or
originality to assess the value of collaborative media products, or the risk of
exploitation of free labour and corporate control, they problematize each
conceptual node, indicating the importance of adopting specific, situated,
nontrivial perspectives for each criticality that they examine.


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