<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">HI all<div><br></div><div>Decided to sit down and read the 37,000-odd words so far generated on this list, and it's like riding a bucking bronco... exhilarating, but bruising. </div><div><br></div><div>I'm hoping to respond to many of the points in specific, but in lieu of that, I thought I'd share this slightly edited fragment from a presentation I made at Cambridge University's CRASSH seminar earlier this year on metrics of creativity (and their impossiblity!). I think It relates to recent iDC discussions on fan-labour and playbour. </div><div><br></div><div>I'm trying to look at the interactions on our Hue And Cry Music Club site through the lens of two research papers from academics presenting at the seminar - one an anthropologist who studies social creativity in Melanesia, and one from sociologist Nigel Thrift (mentioned by Trebor recently) who has a radical (and to me somewhat pitiless) social theory about innovation in the network age. </div><div><br></div><div>I kinda feel like Engels the reluctant business partner to the various multiple Marx's on this list, sometimes... hope that a trader's perspective, working through the "murky typologies" of interactive enterprise, may be of interest. </div><div><br></div><div>best, pk</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>FROM "<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold; "><font class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;">Taking Reality Lightly: the challenge of play to metrics of creativity" </span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; "><a href="http://www.theplayethic.com/2009/04/measuringcreativity.html">http://www.theplayethic.com/2009/04/measuringcreativity.html</a></span></span></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">LEACH: THE COMMANDS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">...The first piece I was given was by my chair, James Leach, titled '<a href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com/files/leach_modes-of-creativity.pdf"><font><u><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Modes of Creativity</font></u></font></a>'. As I understand it, James is attempting to specify what he would call a 'Euro-American' appropriative model of creativity, rooted in a conception of creativity as the intellectual act of an individual/individuals upon a material world – a world that remains inanimate until its elements have been recombined or transformed by external mental activity. This conception is the basis of what we might called Western intellectual property and copyright law. </p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">Leach compares this mode of creativity to that experienced by Nekgini speakers in the Rai Coast, Melanesia. For me, this was a head-wrenching account of a profoundly non-Western and relentlessly intersubjective world of people and things – an effect which I expect the best anthropology is designed to do for the reader.</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">But what struck me was actually the possibility that, in the Euro-American techno-culture, an existing middle-ground between these two modes of creativity – one appropriative, one generative – might well be opening up, right in the heart of the network society. But that middle-ground is very tough, complex and ambiguous.</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">In short, I found myself comparing a lot of James's distinctions between these two wildly different modes of creativity, with what we're trying to do with an online community website we're running around Hue And Cry, called the Hue And Cry Music Club (<a href="http://hueandcry.ning.com/"><font><u><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">http://hueandcry.ning.com</font></u></font></a>).</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">For the Rai Coast people, James says that their "spirits/songs are seen as a resource – a powerful one, as they elicit the currency of kinship, the currency through which affinal (reproductive) relations are managed."</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">Well, I don't know that we have kinship, or affinal relations managed through our website (although there's a lot of flirting between members). But it clearly struck me that our songs are a resource and currency for friendship and affiliation between our fans. That's exactly how they use these songs, as they surf and morph these ramifying, malleable networks. The strange thing about networked digitalisation, and the way that it's currently challening old ideas of how to commercialise music, is that it's supporting the kind of 'music as social currency' practices that James sees in indigenous societies. There's a kind of resignation about 'the end of music as property' in the music biz – which opens up interesting new opportunities for live performance.</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">But other things about the Reite people's mode of creativity sounded familiar to me. I quote James again:</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">"For Reite people creativity is a necessary process. Human life does not continue without it. Humanity is not defined by the contingency of creative action (in thought/mental operation) but by <i>the necessity of embodying and acting creatively</i>…</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">"Relations established with others create those others and oneself in the work of differentiation… We come to this insight through the contrast with intellectual property rights, which <i>make creativity into a specific resource, its presence contingent upon certain conditions of emergence. The notion of resource implies scarcity, and scarcity is a measure of value. But creativity is not scarce in Reite. Resources for these people lie elsewhere. People themselves are valuable, not what they produce as objects."</i> (My italics)"</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">Now I'm struck by how similar the idea that "people themselves are valuable, not what they produce as objects" is to the experience of social networking that our site demonstrates and many social network sites do. Certainly, the experience of social networks is of a realm defined by a plenitude of possibities for creative interaction with others, rather than a scarcity. Our Euro-American, rather than just Melanesian, "necessity for embodying and acting creatively" is possibly disclosed by the radically cooperative nature of socio-technical networks. Clay Shirky in his recent book Here Comes Everybody notes that the cheap organising tools of Web 2.0 – their propensity for 'insanely easy group-forming' – are revealing a realm of daily sociability that simply hasn't had the opportunity to express itself in such an organised way before.</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">Another quote from James:</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">As Wagner points out, ‘Westerners’ value the objects, the outcomes of creativity: ‘we keep the ideas, the quotations, the memoirs, the creations and let the people go. Our attics ... [and] museums are full of this kind of culture’ (Wagner 1975: 26). In contrast, palems [the groups that the Reite people form] do not last. <i>Torrposts [one of their symbolic objects of exchange] rot away in the bush. Their effect is to maintain separations between people, to distribute ‘creativity’ throughout existence. Intellectual property regimes have the effect, to the contrary, of concentrating creativity in particular individuals, and then in individual kinds of mental operation which amount to forms of appropriation by the subject." </i>[My italics]</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">In light of this point, wasn't it fascinating to see those recent protests organised against Facebook's explicit 'apprpriation of the subjective flows of its users' sociability? My guess is that the mentality wasn't as much "you're trying to make money our of my stuff', as much as "you're commodifying something which I regard as a record of my sociability with friends and family". It also reminds me of the debates we had in setting up the Music Club – whether to charge a fee or not. The rule-of-thumb for this in e-commerce is that you get a tenth of the possible community membership if you ask people to pay for a service. The intrinsically commons-based nature of the Net compels any web-commercial enterprise to take into account that, at the very least, the cash nexus has to be sensitively handled, or pushed to the margins. There is a default expectation among users that this is a 'cornucopia of the commons' (however much of a 'tragedy' it might be for one's cash-flow!).</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">My take-away from Leach's paper is that the Euro-American mode of appropriative creativity is already being challenged by open-source production and remix culture. Yet it's the "hybrid" enterprises trying to survive in this environment that concern me – those that balance closed copyright or enclosed and scarce commodities, with open commuity involvement. Other than via a neo-communism [the social wage suggested by many Italian Marxists and Greens], how else can creators find some way to be recompensed for their art?</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><br></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; ">THRIFT: THE COLD CHILL OF DEPLOYMENT</span></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><br></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">This brings me to the second paper – Nigel Thrift's <a href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com/files/thrift_re-inventing-invention.pdf"><font><u><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000">Re-inventing Invention</font></u></font></a>. To me this was almost like reportage of our business model, and about a near to a political economy of play as I've ever read, particularly if play is about 'taking reality lightly'. I could talk all day about this, but I'll confine myself to a few comments.</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">What Thrift gets absolutely right is the strategic intent of people like myself who are trying to ply my cultural trade, in what he calls "a different kind of capitalist world, one in which a <i>new epistemic ecology of encounter</i> will dwell and have its effects, a world of <i>indirect but continuous expression</i>, which is also a world in which that expression can backfire on its makers".</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">He also gets it right about what kind of business cultural players, and particularly musicians, are up to in this environment – "from <i>simply the invention of new commodities to the capture or configuration of new worlds into which these commodities are inserted"</i><b><i>. </i></b>As the strap-line for our Music Club has it: "Music, Friendship and More for Hue And Cry Fans". The 'And More' isn't accidental…</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">Another quote:</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; "> "Consumers have become involved in the production of communities around particular commodities which themselves generate value, by fostering allegiance, by offering instant feedback and by providing active interventions in the commodity itself". </font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">That's absolutely accurate about the intentional design, and the eventual usage, of our site. But the key experiential driver of the site is the live experience of watching our band – urging fans to record the gig on their phones, to record themselves at the gig, to create collages that represent their experience.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">Professor Thrift puts the relationship between digital plenitude and live experience into his theory as well (he should be a music manager):</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">"In line with the increasing tendency to want to gather invention in wherever it may be found, new time-space arrangements have to be designed that can act as traps for innovation and invention. They are spaces of circulation, then, but, more than that, they are clearly also meant to be, in some (usually poorly specified) way that is related to their dynamic and porous nature, spaces of inspiration incorporating many possible worlds."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">Thrift is talking here about the well-designed public centres for science and culture that are opening up to house what he calls the 'brainy classes'. But when we do a gig in Shepherd's Bush Empire, is it "a space of inspiration incorporating many possible worlds" – or an enclosed space in which one artistic experience is dominant? As a songwriter, I'd like to say that there are worlds within and between every song… but some may disagree…</p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">For me this is Thrift at his most spookily descriptive of my project as a musician in the world of indirect but continuous expression:</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">"Design has increasingly therefore become re-cast as interaction design : the design of commodities that behave, communicate or inform, if even in the most marginal way, in part by making them into processes of variation and difference that can allow for the unforeseen activities in which they may become involved or, used for which, may then act as clues to further incarnations. In other words, ‘the success of a design is arrived at socially’ - that is through structured processes of cultural deliberation which massage form…Another way of putting this is that ‘through the activity of design the process of production provides information for itself about itself ’ This is another means of understanding co-creation, of course, as<b> </b><i>a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration."</i></font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">Our experience of using the modular social networking platform Ning chimes exactly with this. We literally massage the form of this platform, shift one element around, create new ones and kill old ones, in the face of a stream of "unforseen activities" by users that give us clues as how to develop the site. "A continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration" is precisely descriptive of the relationship between our fans and ourselves through this network – their enthusiasm as they sit at their terminals throughout the country is indeed a "distributed aspiration", and their actions continually tune the music of our site's design and functionality. And to return to Thrift's initial quote: some of that tuning can be in the face of quite severe critiques from fans, not just for how much we're trying to sell them stuff, but sometimes how little (or how wrongly) we're trying to sell them stuff! Trade and commerce become one form of socially-regulated exchange in the Hue And Cry Music Club, among many other kinds of reciprocations, with no prior place in any hierarchy of actions within the site.</font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 10.0px 0.0px"><font size="4" style="font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; ">But there are points where that co-creation of the Hue And Cry interactive reality is limited or arrested. For example, my brother and I are still wedded to the idea of an CD with 12-15 songs, produced in seclusion by myself and my brother, the result of a silting-up of experience and living, and brought out to the world as a punctual event. As artists, we still want to reserve that old Romantic right to conduct an act of poiesis – rather than be always lost in the cybernetic coils of autopoiesis. And we believe that our fans want that also.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">I know what Thrift means when he talks of "a world made incarnate by a co-shaping which is an intrinsic property neither of the human being nor of the artefact", or when he dreams of "an animated economy in which the entities being dealt with are not people but innovations that are constantly trying to multiply themselves, ‘quanta of change with a life of their own’"… a world dependent upon and activated by germs of talent, which are driven by sentiments and knowledge and are able to circulate easily through a semiconscious process of imitation that generates difference from within itself. The world becomes a continuous and inexhaustible process of emergence of inventions that goes beyond slavish accumulation."</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">I know what he means – or I should say, I know what he memes… But emotionally, do I want to live there? I've rarely been as chilled in reading social theory when I read Thrift on one of the new sensibilities he thinks is worth charting in this new, full-on capitalism. This is a permanent tactical manoevering with the way the world is, an endless 'war of position' in everyday life: all of us interactives in a state of permanent, combative deployment (rather than employment) of one's energies and skills. (Thrift takes his metaphor from the Chinese military ethic of <i>shi</i>).</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal Arial; min-height: 15px; ">I returned rather gladly to James Leach's point that our over-intellectualised model of creativity does not consider how we socially reproduce that creativity, through families, affective ties, nuturance and community. For all the excitement of Thrift's non-human, cyborg-style modern consciousness, I'm still not surprised that most pop songs are about love. Or that some can present the best and most searching ethical questions you ever heard (or didn't want to hear).</p><div><br></div></div><div> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="font-size: 12px; ">Pat Kane</div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com/patkane">http://theplayethic.typepad.com/patkane</a></div></div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">Mob: +44 (0)7718 588497</div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">Twitter: theplayethic</div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">Ideas:</div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://www.theplayethic.com">http://www.theplayethic.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://delicious.com/theplayethic">http://delicious.com/theplayethic</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://www.softpowernetwork.com">http://www.softpowernetwork.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">Music: </div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://www.hueandcry.co.uk">http://www.hueandcry.co.uk</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://hueandcry.ning.com">http://hueandcry.ning.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><a href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com/patkane">http://theplayethic.typepad.com/patkane</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">All mail to: <a href="mailto:playethical@gmail.com">playethical@gmail.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px; "><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">The idea is all there is. Trust me.</div><div style="font-size: 12px; ">- Ornette Coleman <a href="http://bit.ly/2VDLPI">http://bit.ly/2VDLPI</a></div></span></span></span> </div><br></body></html>