Crowdsourcing is one of a select group of buzzwords and catchphrases that, like “core competencies” or “It is what it is”, never fail to give me gooseflesh. Too often it is used to disguise what is in essence just another marketplace bidding process, wherein many parties contribute, but only a few realize any benefits.
It was refreshing, therefore, to watch projects like The Triangle Fire Archive, Curious City, and Hear Here do crowdsourcing correctly. Not only do these sites solicit material and labor from their communities, they actually reciprocate. The TFA provides a venue for the artwork and testimonials they receive; Curious City investigates the questions that Chicagoans want answered; and Hear Here allows its listeners to create an audio map of San Francisco and Oakland.
There are many contributors and many beneficiaries here, the biggest being the community whom the sites serve. Curious City seems the most invested here, as it not only presents answers delivered by traditional media, it also highlights the best user response (determined, naturally, by user votes) in the comments section. This alternative answer section proves invaluable when WBEZ hasn’t yet had a chance to explore the issue.
My first instinct was to wonder whether projects like these could successfully be rolled out to more rural areas, but after further consideration I’m somewhat skeptical as to their utility. What do you think?
I guess I need you to define utility for me, or how you’re using it. Usefulness? Purpose? Goal/outcome?
I would say yes to the first and the last. I was thinking specifically of small towns suffering from post-industrial decay (like Lebanon, PA, where my parents currently live) or dealing with the side-effects of MTR (mountaintop removal) or fracking. Those towns have histories and communities worthy of commemoration, but I don’t think their populations are such that I don’t think crowdsourcing a project from them would be something they would use. It’s been a while since I visited, but I don’t think the farmers and blue collar workers that make up the town’s population would be ideal participants. I just don’t see them connecting online the way the users on Curious City and Hear Here do.
Given their history (Lebanon, for example, has a fascinating narrative up until the closure of the Bethlehem Steel plant in the 1980’s), I think these towns should be given a chance to tell their stories. The more I think about it, however, the more I incline to the model used in Black Gold Boom and Reinvention Stories… or, failing that, advocate waiting for David Lynch to do a Small Town America Project.
One of the projects actually was done in a rural area! I think it was rural Colorado. It’s called “iseechange.” Anyway, the producers were tasked with creating an app that the community could use to communicate about environmental issues as it related to the actual farming they were doing. They wanted to crowdsource the observations of the people living there. Halfway through the project they realized that the small, rural community was not going to be using an app. What they did discover is that the farmers/ranchers had been keeping detailed journals. So, they created a site around the idea of an almanac that incorporates both the farmers/ranchers information and knowledge about the changes in climate that had been affecting their crops and information from climate scientists. What they were able to see was that both the locals and the scientists were kinda reporting the same thing, though using different language and possibly with a skepticism about climate change. Anyway, I didn’t thoroughly explore this one, but they did touch on it in the “What is Localore” doc. Still, it seemed like a success to some degree and they did find a way to incorporate the stories and info into a site that served a purpose for the community.
So I guess it sort of depends on the goal.
I think personal stories of economic distress in areas with a boom-or-bust economy are very compelling. And in the face of fracking, the situation is complex. People need jobs. Fracking provides jobs. But it provides jobs a lot like the steel mill did: for awhile. Until it busts. And there will be huge consequences, economic and environmental.
So, the stories from the people of Lebanon are powerful. The closing of Bethlehem Steel Mill was huge (I grew up in MD; so I’ve heard of it, kind of). If their stories are powerful, what would prevent a project like any of the Localore ones from being powerful?
As Jarratt mentioned, the “iseechange” project in rural Colorado needed to change its approach before it struck on something that the community could buy into. Perhaps one reason the first iteration of the project didn’t work was that the person spearheading it wasn’t from the community. It took some time before she was able to get a good read on what works. My hunch is a crowdsourcing project would work in Lebanon as long as there is community buy-in and someone like Steven (someone who knows the community) was leading it.
If you consider how some community newspapers focusing on local news seem to be thriving better than bigger city papers, projects like Localore seem to be right on the money (pardon the mercenary expression). I guess so long as they don’t try to pull off something that might be counter-intuitive to the local way of doing things, like expecting the residents to suddenly start talking about the weather with a mobile app. As Jarratt mentioned, farmer’s almanacs have been around for ages and across cultures. In Japan, they even cross over to poetry and prose writing.
And some themes naturally lend themselves to a local treatment. The local food scene? Sure. Climate change? Don’t stir a hornet’s nest unless you absolutely have to. And I still would entrust most of my news gathering to professionals.
I think the core of your question about whether interactive media experiences could be rolled out to rural communities is asking a deeper question about participation in these experiences, and who has access to them. Essentially, what you’ve noted is an emerging form of “crowdsourced” democracy around stories, one that generates good information, further research, and reciprocal discussion between maker and viewer. I don’t see any inherent issue with rural communities experiencing projects like this, but I think that question brings up legitimate concerns about the ultimate utility of such projects, and the issue of access. Thinking about these projects from the perspective of people who don’t traditionally have access to the networked world, or whose lived reality is firmly outside it, exposes the limits of these community mapping projects.
Perfect entry into looking at Week 7’s now archived rurally-based project “Saving the Sierra (2008)” The questions and issues that Amanda raises were central to the output and goals of STS. The media producers and project designers, jesikah maria ross and Catherine Stifton created a multi-layered project that lived both online and in Storybooths, tour buses and organizational headquarters.
They used multiple entry points to reach their story gatherers. More on this methodology later this week. Access need not be limited! Remember Precious Places. There is a long and subversive history of media people working with rural communities, where they said it could not be done…Appalshop, etc.