On November 9, 2010 Olia Lialina presented her new book on Digital Folklore. The book describes the aesthetics of the amateur web which has been Lialina’s object of study for the past ten years. The book reflects on amateur culture as the basis of the Web; the web that has been built by us, the amateurs. The Vernacular Web refers to the aesthetics of the early web of the amateurs. Not only the World Wide Web but also the 3D amateur culture and font creators indirectly contributing to the graphics online. It is about being a “real” user that uses Comic Sans. Part of the challenge of creating the Digital Folklore book was how to translate the World Wide Web into paper?

The term digital folklore is a term where everybody seems gets the idea but it is not clearly defined. Folklore is traditionally defined as: “The “traditional,” usually oral literature of a society, consisting of various genres such as myth, legend, folktale, song, proverb, and many others.” (Routledge). But how do we translate this type of oral literature to the web genres of under construction banners and animated gifs? The book describes what digital folklore is, why it is important and why it should be studied. It presents digital folklore as a field of study.

Digital Folklore encompasses the customs, traditions and elements of visual, textual and audio culture that emerged from users’ engagement with personal computer applications during the last decade of the 20th and the first decade of the 21st century.¹

User Timeline

The preface of the book, ‘Do you believe in Users?,’ is presented by Lialina and is shown as a Google Docs working document in Comic Sans. The preface is a historical account of the changing role of the user in the history of computers:

1940′s Vannevar Bush – imaged the Memex, the table, a personal working stage, where the user was the Scientist.
1960′s Douglas Engelbart, the user was the Knowledge Worker, Intellectual Worker and the Programmer.
1970′s XEROX PARK: Thacker, Alan Kay, Licklider (History of the personal workstation) – Lady with the Royal Typewriter, Kids, Real Users (People who are buying computers, especially personal computers)
1974 Ted Nelson – Dream Machines, the Naive User² Two categories of users: user hackers and naive users. A user can be a developer of the system with no distinction between developer and user.
1982 TRON – You believe in the Users? Big moment for the user, the user as God.

1983 Time Magazine, “The Computer Moves in.” Machine of the Year. Technology becomes the person of the year.
1993 Eric S. Raymond: September that never ended. User lacking netiquette. “September that never ended” refers to a phenomenon happening since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhytms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plugging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. (more info)

1996 The New Hacker’s Dictionary is a lexicon which contains an entry on the user:

user n.

1. Someone doing `real work’ with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.

The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don’t understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as `real winners’.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context. (source)

The entry clearly distinguishes between implementors (hackers) and lusers (users). Lialina observes that twelve years later the Software Studies lexicon does not contain an entry dedicated to the user.

2006 Time Magazine: YOU!

From 1983 onwards people are designing posters in Word, praise activity of the users that are disrespected, the users that are not developers. You are now appreciated for your lolcats, your Facebook Likes. The User is only appreciated now.

An alternative history

The history of the World Wide Web is often dated in 1993 with the appearance of the Mosaic browser. It marks the year when the first users started to design the web. While Tim Berners-Lee invented the technology that build the web four years earlier, in 1989, the web was shaped by its users from 1983 onwards. In this publication (Digital Folklore) the user is pushed to the foreground. As such it provides a different history which foregrounds the users instead of the technology.

The idea of the “Rich User Experience” is one that typically accompanies Web 2.0. The term refers to all the Ajax apps with a richer interaction in the browser but also in general the claim that with Web 2.0 and social networking sites users finally have a rich experience. In the Midnight project based on Google Maps the rich user experience is hiding the real user experience. In the Gravity project navigating is done by scrolling providing a more rich interactive experience to scrolling.

The research not only about aesthetics but also about what the user could be and how to change it. One example of such a project is Trailblazers:

This is a project by Theo Seemann, a student of Russian online art pioneer Olia Lialina at the Merz Akademie in Stuttgart. Seemann created Trail Blazers as a surfing match in which the winner is the person who can find the shortest path between two sites, with only a mouse to navigate. The player has no keyboard and cannot use a search engine. The game is played with a slightly modified browser that registers every click. Besides being a lot of fun the project seems like a declaration of war on the search engine. It is a return to the feel of the early Web, in which navigation largely depended on links. In this sense it is also a return to the truly social web. In a time when the search engine, and this is usually Google, increasingly guesses the pathway (‘did you mean?’), link surfing is the digital equivalent of the six degrees of separation. (Josephine Bosma on Neural.it)

The project is based on the Memex from Vannevar Bush where he describes the (professional) users of the system as trail blazers: “‘There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.’” (Bush, 1945) Lialina shares that the most difficult part of the Trailblazers projects was how to get out of walled gardens like Facebook.

Related projects and writings by Olia Lialina

• Digital Folklore
• A Vernacular Web
• Art.Teleportacia.org (Net.art)
• Prof. Dr. Style.
• Trailblazers

1.  Dragan Espenschied and Olia Lialina, Digital Folklore: To Computer Users, with Love and Respect (Merz Akademie, 2009). [↩]
2. “Person who doesn’t know about computers but is going to use the system. Naive user systems are those set up to make things easy and clear for such people“. Ted Nelson: “The Most important computer terms for the 70′s”, in Dream Machines, Tempus Books, 1987, p.9 [↩]

The following post is a combination of a transcription of Manovich’s keynote and my own notes and commentary.

Introduction by Geert Lovink

Online video is renegotiating its (problematic) relationship with cinema. It deals with cinematographic principles versus the principles of the online age. We cannot directly transfer the cinematographic principles into the online age as new media has its own specificities. YouTube is not just video on the web but YouTube is a natively digital object.

Ten years ago Lev Manovich proposed to consider the database as the (new) dominant media form. The database is the hegemonic media form online, as can be seen on YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and Google. We should think beyond technology now the database is also becoming a dominant social form. The database is shaping the social.

User Generated Content by Lev Manovich

After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate – database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (Manovich, Database as a Symbolic Form)

These individual items could be considered to be little narratives. Even though it is debatable we could argue that within the database structure the actual elements are almost intensified little narratives.

It is interesting to note that Manovich starts his note by stating “I shouldn’t be here.” Even though he has a YouTube, Flickr and MySpace account he doesn’t use them because he is too shy. He dislikes talking from an expert point of view as he more of an observer than a participant.

The problems of user-generated content

The challenge user-generated content (UGC) presents to media theory is the same as it does to programmers: scale. If the number of people that produces content grows new social challenges arise such as the question of quality. Not only is the term user-generated content a term that is created by the industry it is also misleading. It is an umbrella term that not only simply counts users, it also tends to homogenize the content. Is every picture that is uploaded to Flickr meaningful? Content is created and uploaded for different reasons, purposes and audiences. Not all content is intended for wide distribution as some pictures are only uploaded for friends and family and others for general viewing. Some pictures are taken especially for (special-interest) Flickr groups and pools which illustrates that all pictures have a different purpose and meaning.

New social media behaviors

Both hardware and software (and interfaces if we choose to put the interface between hardware and software instead of seeing it as software) direct new users to turn their media into social media. YouTube pushes you to interact by offering a wide abundance of “social options” such as Share/Post video/Add to groups etc. I recognize this trend in the use of my new mobile phone. Not only is it my first mobile phone with an integrated camera it also gives me the option to publish a picture on the web immediately. This has been made even easier by installing a piece of software called Shozu that immediately pops up a “Send to Flickr” dialog after I have taken a picture. This causes me to upload nearly every picture I take to Flickr. My mobile phone creates new social media behaviors.

Software Studies

With newly created social media behavior we also need a new field of study to bring into focus the elements of digital culture created by software. Software shapes media behavior and that is why we need to study it.

Henri Jenkin’s Convergence Culture critique

Manovich main critique on Jenkins’ assumptions about user-generated content is that Jenkins’ does not evaluate the content. There is the underlying assumption that everything that the fans create is good. Even though Jenkins is from Humanities he takes a sociological approach and doesn’t look “inside” the content. We need to ask what the grammar of the content is? What is it composed of?

Users and Templates

Is the content produced by using old models, templates and iconography copied from mass media? Who are creating the new models? Are they still created by the professionals? Templates are no longer provided only by professionals such as the Word templates provided by Microsoft. Nowadays amateurs produce templates too. In relation to my thesis this can be applied to user-generated WordPress templates and plugins. Very few of these templates are created by so-called professionals. Where do we draw the boundary of professionals and amateurs? Are the default WordPress templates created by professionals? Most WordPress themes are created by the user community which we may label as amateurs. Some of these users are professional webdesigners or coders but others create themes for fun, recognition or money. To refer back to Henry Jenkins the themes are also part of the remix culture. Users adjust and adapt existing themes to their own needs. Keeping in mind Manovich’ critique on Jenkins not all themes bear the same quality. Not all themes are written according to W3C standards for example.

Cultural DNA

Models, templates and iconography are part of the cultural DNA of content. We should not only study the circulation of content but also this underlying cultural DNA.
Critique on the Long Tail

The long tail is often presented as having a fixed form while it actually comes in different shapes and forms. Not only is the curve is changing over the years, it is also different for different industries. The long tail in architecture for example is very steep with just a few major architects such as Rem Koolhaas. Manovich asks us what the different shapes of the long tail are in terms of popularity. Not only should we see the long tail through the eye of popularity, but we could also see it through the eye of quality or quotability. How many elements of a piece of content is used by others to produce a new piece of content?

New Tools

To be able to adequately analyze global culture (the numbers of professionals, prosumers and users continuously growing) – patterns of creation, consumption, circulation and remix of content – we need new tools. (Manovich slide)

This is exactly what we are dealing with at the Digital Method Initiative: natively digital objects need new tools and research methods that take into account the natively digital.

The Future

Future (media) theory will be software based. The analysis must be able to deal with the scale of contemporary culture. On top of that a gap between the cultural tools and the industrial tools (for example data mining) must be bridged. We need large displays to visualize the immense amount of data that is being produced and visualized. New software will be based on theoretical tools. Software theory will do justice to the scale of contemporary cultural production. The form of scale we are currently dealing with is new/unkown to Humanities. The content we find online is only a small part of the totality of the cultural circulation. Instead of a structuralism like semiotics, where the structure is imagined and tested with individual texts, here the individual movements (flows) of content form an emergent structure.

On top of quantative analysis we also need to take into account a qualitative analysis that deals with questions such as what happens if you switch on a certain piece of technology. It is a double approach that not only looks at software but also studies it using software. Michael poses the important reflexivity question as the software we use to study software has certain assumptions embedded into it. The Wikiscanner has a particular vision of Wikipedia built in it.

It will be interesting to see what kind of new cultural reflections will these (new) tools will lead to.