Sal Humphreys

The Labour of User Co-Creators: Emergent Social Network Markets?

Co-creative relations among professional media producers and consumers indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labour theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are perhaps less helpful than before. Can this phenomenon just be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of users, or is something else, potentially more profound and challenging, playing out here? Does consumer co-creation contribute to the precarious conditions of professional creative workers? This article draws from ethnographic research undertaken from 2000 to 2005 with Auran games (a game development company based in Brisbane, Australia) to engage with debates about the status of user co-creation as labour. The article argues that as a hybrid and emergent social network market these relationships introduce a form of creative destruction to labour relations in the context of the creative industries.

Wikis in teaching and assessment: the M/Cyclopedia project

In a knowledge-based, networked economy, students leaving university need to have attained skills in collaborative and creative project-based work and to have developed critical, reflective practices. This paper outlines how a wiki can been used as part of social constructivist pedagogical practice which aims to develop advanced ICT literacies in university students. The paper describes the implementation of a wiki-based project as part of a subject in New Media Technologies at Queensland University of Technology. We discuss the strengths and challenges involved in using networked, collaborative learning strategies in institutional environments that still operate in traditional paradigms.

Ruling the virtual world. Governance in massively multiplayer online games

This article explores governance and control in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). It examines areas where tactics of control are mobilized: by developers through design processes, by publishers through community management and legal practices and by players through participatory practices. As people with access to online technologies come to live more of their social lives (and work lives) in online environments, and to construct identities and communities in proprietary spaces, the terms under which they do so become increasingly important. In a context where economic value resides in intellectual property and immaterial labour, and where social networks have economic value extracted from them, the corporate practices which harness this value and the responses of participants become interesting for sociocultural and economic reasons. Using EverQuest and World of Warcraft as case studies, this article traces the flows of power between publishers, developers and players in the networked production of MMOGs.

Productive Players: Online Computer Games' Challenge to Conventional Media Forms

The online multi-user game is an exemplar of the emergent structures of interactive media. Social relationships and community networks are formed, and developer/player relationships are negotiated around ongoing development of the game features and player-created content. The line between production and consumption of the text has become blurred, and the lines between social and economic relationships must be redrawn. This article explores these relationships, using EverQuest as a case study. It suggests that the dynamic, mutable, and emergent qualities of the online multiplayer game exceed the limits of the reifying processes embodied by copyright law and content regulation regimes.

Reflecting on Gender and Digital Networked Media

This article explores gendered practices in new media formations. We consider the ways that emergent practices in new media bring to the fore and make more explicit some previously submerged practices. In identity construction, in spatial practices, and in the productive labor of users of new media, we see examples of how the fluidity of gender can be highlighted, the cultural specificity of some often taken for granted and naturalized practices can be more readily understood as constructed, and ironically, how the overt and self-congratulatory crowing of some gamer and geek cultures draws attention to their misogyny, creating a much bigger and more easily identifiable target for counterstrategies. The intersection of emergent technologies and sociocultural practices creates new areas of gendered negotiations.

Postfeminist inflections in television studies

To better understand how postfeminism might inform media production, consumption, and media scholarship, this essay explores a set of arguments that circulate around the intersection of postfeminism and media studies. Our discussion begins by tracing the complexity and controversy around the concept of postfeminism to clarify the term and draw out its more productive strands. In surveying the formal properties of postfeminist media texts and ways in which the concept progresses feminist media analysis, we also identify a set of limitations in the concept and this leads us to a cautionary conclusion about the balance between descriptive and analytical tools and political action.

Understanding the Role of Medium in the Control and Flows of Information in Health Communication

In this article we look at the use of social, digital and online media as a possible resource in health promotion. We do this through a framework of medium theory—which allows us to consider the social and power relations that circulate through and are generated by different mediums. The application of medium theory has great potential for communications literature and this article attempts to refine it by indicating how it may be pertinent in a health communication context. We analyzed health promotion literature to assess the current attitudes of medical professionals to the use of social and online media. Our own research discussion is based on a project in a metropolitan hospital, which has mapped media access and use by clients in an antenatal clinic as well as attitudes of staff. We outline the strategies the project is developing, using social, digital, mobile and online media to address the information needs of the clinic’s clients in new ways.

Discursive Constructions of MMOGs and Some Implications for Policy and Regulation

This paper examines how the production of interactive, co-creative software such as multiplayer online games differs from conventional media production, and how stakeholders employ different discursive constructions to understand those environments. The convergence of forms and functions, and the emergence of new structures that cross pre-existent regulatory and policy boundaries, mean that the discourses adopted to describe these environments and enact regulation and control need to be examined for the particular interests they represent. The paper canvasses six different discourses about online social software such as games, and briefly discusses the implications of each for areas such as intellectual property, classification, governance, data privacy, creative industries and global crossjurisdictional infrastructures.

Research Adventures in Web 2.0: Encouraging Collaborative Local Content Creation through edgeX

The intersection of current arguments about the role of creative industries in economic development, online user-generated content and the uptake of broadband in economically disadvantaged communities, provides the content for this article. From 2006 to 2008, the authors carried out a research project in Ipswich, Queensland involving local creative practitioners and community groups in their development of edgeX, a web-based platform for content uploads and social networking. The project aimed to explore issues of local identity and community-building through online networking, as well as the possibilities for creating pathways from amateur to professional practice in the creative industries through the auspices of the website. Against a rapidly changing technological environment with problematic implications for research projects aiming to build new online platforms, we present several case studies from the project to illustrate the challenges to participation experienced by people with limited access to, and literacy with, the internet.

Data retention, journalist freedoms and whistleblowers:

As members of the ‘fourth estate’, journalists have enjoyed certain limited protections for themselves and their sources under the laws of various countries. These protections are now uniquely challenged in the context of metadata retention and enhanced surveillance and national security protections. This article examines the recent changes to laws in Australia and the position of journalists as investigative watchdogs. It considers the nature of the new laws, the responses of journalists, the broader context of commercial journalism and the rise of the infotainment business model, and the role of the ‘networked fourth estate’ and non-institutional actors in creating accountable government in Australia.