Co-creative Media Research Articles

Collaboration & Co-Creative Media Making in Precarious Times

This contribution fathoms the potential of collaborative, co-creative media practices in precarious times – in times of climate emergency and a terrifying loss of biodiversity, accompanied by socio-psychological and socio-cultural crises. It is set in times in which, despite the urgency to react, we are still often facing a lack of comprehension for the complex global dimension of these crises, accompanied with a paralysing apathy, passive-depressive resignation and sometimes even a refusal to face collective and individual accountability as well as respond in actual doing to the urgent call to action. Taking Félix Guattari's ecosophical thought of three interdependent ecologies (1989, 1996) and their prolongation in currently emerging environmental humanities with recent discourses in documentary and digital theory as a framework, the objective of this contribution is to discuss approaches in emerging media making and to deduce strategies how to 'make things matter'. Within this bigger context, the theoretical argument is based on key concepts in co-creation as well as aspects in the creative use of mobile, interactive, networked devices to 'craft' media assemblages in which often, processes are more important than artefacts and which make participants/user-creators aware of being themselves entangled in multifaceted biological, psychological, physical, social and cultural contexts. The nucleus hereby resides in the intertwining of emplaced interaction in hyperglocal contexts, the idea of focussed perception and perspective taking, and foremost the potential for networked|networking (Wiehl 2019). The hypothesis runs that due to their specific affordances, especially co-creative media practices can contribute to a shift from mere matters of fact in climate communication to matters of concern (Latour 2004) and – ultimately hopefully – matters of care (La Puig de Bellacasa 2017). The idea is to mobilize (co-)creative participants not only to witness climate change and document the most often invisible shifts in their surroundings, but rather to invite them to engage in local and at the same global interventions and thus to rediscover collective responsibilities and communal agency in this situation. Through the lens of these features, different strategies of how to mobilize user-participants will be discussed, focussing on different venues to encourage an empathetic idea of local as well global consciousness, care and emotional engagement – an approach which goes beyond top-down communication of (scientific) facts but which encourages creative communal action-taking. As paradigmatic projects, we will examine The Disaster Resilience Journal (2014) and ISeeChange (2019) – both of them being multilayered configurations building on various activities around 'doing documentary'. It will be discussed how interdependent entanglements of agents in these two projects aim at catalysing meaningful place-based environmental engagement, including community-based citizen-science driven action-taking but at the same time experiences that go beyond cognitive understanding.

Co-creative media: Capacity building with participatory communication to adopt good agricultural standards practice for people’s health

The World Health Organization (WHO) has used communication methods to promote the international ban of the agricultural pesticides paraquat, glyphosate and chlorpyrifos. This ban has led to misunderstanding among farmers who still use these chemicals, which may be available under different brand names. Communication with the non-scientific community is uncertain leading to miscommunication, especially where scientific language is used. Governments have banned the use of these agricultural chemicals. The scientific arguments are not necessarily understood by famers so they may ignore the prohibition and continue using them or other similar chemicals. This study uses story-telling and qualitative research methods where a questionnaire is combined with the content analytical technique. The quantitative research method was used to collect data in the field where 351 participants took part. Participatory action research is a method where community farmers engaged in self-reflection on the impact of chemicals on their fields, their health and the health of others. Their understanding of the non-chemical usage model and good agricultural practice farmers in the vicinity, especially as they were personally involved in the creation of the media from script preparation, to acting, filming, and evaluating the final docu-dramas. The findings of the docu–drama programmes of 5 GAP farmers are presented to identify the perception of how to avoid using chemicals and their solutions for tangerine farmers through a manual that is the media output from the project and the resulting findings suggesting that the factors related to the effectiveness of scientific communication are divided into pull factors and push factors.

Sharing therapeutic experiences of place: Co-creative digital storytelling as a way to explore connection to place

This paper explores two seemingly diverse case studies that share stories of place through co-creative media digital storytelling practices. The co-creative media practice of digital storytelling is applied as a framework to extend the current understanding of community issues in their individual contexts. Case one applied digital storytelling as a tool to investigate aged-care residents' therapeutic landscape experience. In Case two, it explores local communities’ experience of flood and how digital storytelling was applied as a way to relieve trauma. This research adopts a comparative case studies methodology. With the two cases in very different contexts, common themes of “a sense of identity”, “memories and belonging” and “therapeutic narratives” emerged. Findings suggest digital storytelling enables social connection. It also engages with memories as narratives and is an effective way to recall significant experiences, in our research contexts, therapeutic experiences. Finally, digital storytelling as a co-creative practice is also a way to build resilience and contribute to co-creating places.

Co-Creation of Public Service Innovation Using Open Data and Social Media

This article presents the analysis of the usage of open data and social media in the co-creation of public service innovation. The article concludes that using open data and social media in co-creation of public service innovation is a promising approach but not yet fully implemented. It seems clear that the advances in digital technology may provide a bridge for bringing service providers and service users together. The benefits are clear. First, the more accurate and real-time data available, the more effective the service provision will be. Second, the more citizen participation, the more tailored services can be co-created. Third, the more transparent governance becomes, the more legitimate and accountable it becomes. Fourth, governmental legitimacy increases societal trust which supports knowledge sharing and spurs innovation. However, co-creation of public service innovations can be more complex, more unpredictable, and more political than what the rhetoric indicates.

Value co-creation and social media

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to deliver a summary of the influential work regarding value co-creation in the context of social media. Although, research on the role of social media in co-creation and new product development is growing field; the extant literature is still in developing stage, which needs systematization and categorization to comprehend its current stage and previous research.Design/methodology/approachFor this purpose, existing literature on social media and co-creation was studied. Initially, a citation analysis was conducted of influential papers correlated with the topic to identify three streams of research. Later, thematic analysis was carried out to explore specific themes within these categories.FindingsThrough citation analysis three research streams namely customer’s co-creation on new product development, firm specific capabilities for knowledge sharing, absorption and processing and new opportunities were identified. Later, total four categories were identified through thematic analysis which contains different sub-themes such as test of theories, proposed theoretical frameworks, lead users characteristics, customer’s motivation and experience regarding co-creation, online communities of customers and open innovation.Research limitations/implicationsThis study also categorizes and systemizes the extant literature exploring role of social media in value co-creation. Such systematic review of the extant literature will help the academicians to understand the previous stream of work and pursue a particular line of enquiry in furthering the understanding of interaction between social media and co-innovation.Practical implicationsThis work is particularly useful for practitioners as more firms are moving the business online. These firms are actively using social media and user-generated content to gain insight into customer’s preferences. By increasing the participation of customers and lead users through online communities, firms can also increase customer’s commitment.Originality/valueThe paper adds to the extant literature by identifying research streams and themes in the extant literature on the role of social media in value co-creation. Later, these themes are abductively linked to develop a theoretical framework.

Brand co-creation in multichannel media environments: a narrative approach

ABSTRACTThis paper advances knowledge of the productive, strategically important roles that media consumers play in brand co-creation in the empirical context of multichannel media outlets. Based on a qualitative study, the paper shows how a media company leverages the power of communities and networks in its strategic brand management to engage its consumers in brand co-creation by authoring, contesting, and circulating narratives about the brand and their relationship with the brand in the course of their identity work as individuals and members of the online community of the brand. The paper concludes that in the contemporary co-creative media culture, media managers might need to develop new practices and approaches to brand management that stimulate and motivate brand co-creation all the while preserving the brand’s essence.

Concept-driven Design for Democracy: Advancing Co-creative Media to Support Citizen Participation and Democratic Engagement

This article elaborates a concept of co-creative media that aims to support citizens’ democratic engagement by facilitating participatory and co-creative processes. The research adopts a concept-driven design approach to theoretically underpin and empirically inform the concept. This was accomplished by adopting theoretical resources from the framework of actor-network theory (ANT), identifying criteria in an analysis of existing socio-technical systems for democratic engagement, and building on the results from four research studies. The main contribution of the article, namely the concept of co-creative media, could serve as a basis for further theoretical reflections and a point of departure to support future participatory design processes where relevant stakeholders collectively contribute to the practical implementation and evaluation of co-creative media. Co-creative media have the potentials to provide citizens with a new approach to democracy and could broaden citizens’ democratic engagement by means of creating virtual spaces in which new ideas, initiatives, knowledge, and solutions could emerge.

Making media together: Experiences of Aboriginal participation within co-creative remote media production teams

Abstract This article outlines the findings of a research project that examined how participation can be understood, and subsequently improved, within collaborative, co-creative media practices. As a case study, the research project looked at Pintubi Anmatjere Warlpiri Media and Communications (PAW Media), a remote Indigenous media organisation (RIMO) based in Yuendumu in Australia’s Northern Territory. By means of 13 in-depth interviews, grounded in participant observation, the project examined how Aboriginal participation was motivated, enabled and limited from the perspectives of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal collaborators. The study revealed practices of Aboriginal participation at PAW Media that were highly valued by participants; nonetheless, limits to participation were noted and two conflicting views regarding improved practice expressed. Non-Aboriginal facilitators supported a transition towards greater Aboriginal autonomy over production, involving a handover of tasks and responsibility to their local Aboriginal counterparts; however, most Aboriginal media producers indicated that their participation was currently better served within a refined version of the existing co-creative structure.

Digital storytelling and the ‘problem’ of sentimentality

‘Sentimentality’ is typically used to refer to the excessive, self-indulgent and banal use of affect to manipulate audiences into ‘tender’ emotional responses Sentimentality is also one of the most common criticisms of ‘digital storytelling’, a co-creative media practice in which ‘ordinary’ people are taught to create short, usually autobiographical ‘digital stories’. Indeed, scholars and practitioners alike have noted the frequent reception of digital storytelling as ‘too sentimental’, ‘sentimental navel-gazing’ and ‘sentimental tripe’ This article uses Stories of Service – an American programme that facilitates the creation of war veterans’ digital stories – as a case study to investigate such criticisms, finding that not only does the programme make extensive use of the tropes and conventions of sentimentality but also that its ‘distinctive media logic’ is actually constitutive of the very sentimentality with which the practice is so frequently charged.

Digital storytelling as ‘national cinema’?

Digital storytelling is a co-creative media practice developed in California in the early 1990s in which ‘ordinary’ people are taught to create short, usually autobiographical ‘digital stories’. This article focuses on arguably the most famous digital storytelling project – the BBC’s ‘Capture Wales’ programme – to argue that not only are these digital stories, which are produced in workshop settings by non-professionals and exhibited primarily on the Internet in digital archives, ‘cinema’ but, moreover, that they collectively constitute a kind of ‘national cinema’. Crofts has, for example, argued that ‘[l]ocal cultural traditions and their articulation through film’ have ‘underpinned the best-known’ national cinema ‘movements’, which have tended to emerge at ‘historical moments when nationalism connects with genuinely populist movements to produce specifically national films that can claim a cultural authenticity or rootedness’ (4). This is the reading of Capture Wales – as, in fact, a co-creative national cinema – that this article offers.

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky” and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky” and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination

Community Uses of Co-creative Media Digital storytelling and Co-creative Media: The role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population-wide creative practice

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Enhancing Cocreation Using Social Media

Innovation is essential for firms to survive in today's global economy. Cocreation is a strategy where customers and providers participate in the innovation process. Social media is a perfect tool for cocreating value because it promotes communication between the organization and the customer. It's fast becoming an integral part of business operations and has many important uses, including innovation. This article explores the use of social media in cocreating business value. The authors' study provides a conceptual framework for understanding core elements and processes of cocreation using social media. Using the conceptual framework, they examine and analyze case studies from IBM and SAP in the context of use of social media in cocreation.

Participatory Media and ‘Co-Creative’ Storytelling

Distinguishing critical participatory media from other participatory media forms (for example user-generated content and social media) may be increasingly difficult to do, but it nonetheless remains an important task if media studies is to remain relevant to the continuing development of inclusive social political and media cultures. This was one of a number of the premises for a national Australian Research Council-funded study that set out to improve the visibility of critical participatory media, and to understand its use for facilitating media participation on a population-wide basis. The term ‘co-creative’ media was adopted to make this distinction and to describe an informal system of critical participatory media practice that is situated between major public, Indigenous and community arts, culture and media sectors. Although the co-creative media system is found to be a site of innovation and engine for social change, its value is still not fully understood. For this reason, this system continues to provide media and cultural studies scholars with valuable sites for researching the socio-cultural transformations afforded by new media and communication technologies, as well as their limitations.

The Art of Co-Creative Media: An Australian Survey

Abstract This article describes how - in the processes of responding to participatory storytelling practices - community, public service, and to a lesser extent, commercial media institutions are themselves negotiated and changed. Although there are significant variations in the conditions, durability, extent, motivations and quality of these developments and their impacts, they nonetheless increase the possibilities and pathways of participatory media culture. This description first frames digital storytelling as a ‘co-creative’ media practice. It then discusses the role of community arts and cultural development (CACD) practitioners and networks as co-creative media intermediaries, and then considers their influence in Australian broadcast and Internet media. It looks at how participatory storytelling methods are evolving in the Australian context and explores some of the implications for cultural inclusion arising from a shared interest in ‘co-creative’ media methods and approaches.

Co-creative Media in Remote Indigenous Communities

Abstract This paper examines co-creative video outputs that have originated from, or relate to, remote Indigenous communities in Australia. Scholarly work on remote media has mostly operated at the interface of media studies and anthropology, seeking to identify how cultural systems shape the production, distribution and reception of media in Aboriginal communities. This paper looks instead at content themes, funding sources and institutions during the 2010-2013 period, and examines the factors that may be determining the quantity of co-creative outputs, as well as the types of stories that get produced. I argue that the focus on culture has obscured important shifts in remote media policy and funding, including a trend towards content designed to address social disadvantage.

Community Uses of Co-Creative Media: User-Created Citizenship

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To Brunswick and Beyond: A Geography of Creative and Social Participation for Marginalised Youth

To Brunswick and Beyond: A Geography of Creative and Social Participation for Marginalised Youth

Mediatisation and Institutions of Public Memory: Digital Storytelling and the Apology

Institutions of public memory are increasingly undertaking co-creative media initiatives in which community members create content with the support of institutional expertise and resources. This paper discusses one such initiative: the State Library of Queensland's ‘Responses to the Apology’, which used a collaborative digital storytelling methodology to co-produce seven short videos capturing individual responses to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's 2008 ‘Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples’. In examining this program, we are interested not only in the juxtaposition of ‘ordinary’ responses to an ‘official’ event, but also in how the production and display of these stories might also demonstrate a larger mediatisation of public memory.

Co-creative labour

• This article introduces a special issue on the topic of cocreative labour. The term co-creation is used to describe the phenomenon of consumers increasingly participating in the process of making and circulating media content and experiences. Practices of user-created content and user-led innovation are now significant sources of both economic and cultural value. But how should we understand and analyse these value-generating activities? What are the identities and forms of agency that constitute these emerging co-creative relations? Should we define these activities as a form of labour and what are the implications and impacts of co-creative practices on the employment conditions and professional identities of people working in the creative industries? In answering these questions we argue that careful attention must be paid to how the participants themselves (both professional and non-professional, commercial and non-commercial) negotiate and navigate the meanings and possibilities of these emerging co-creative relationships for mutual benefit. Co-creative media production is perhaps a disruptive agent of change that sits uncomfortably with our current understandings and theories of work and labour. The articles in this special issue follow and unpack the often diverse and contradictory ways in which the participants themselves use and remake the social categories of work and labour as they seek to coordinate and contest co-creative media practices. •