Over the last four years, and with the support of numerous people including many in the Aotearoa Digital Arts network, I have been writing articles, giving talks, editing books, producing creative works and organising events that ask what it means for new media to consider the implications of indigenous knowledge, culture, and ways of being.[1] These have all been experimental activities: they have been undertaken to create change but without certainty about what the results would be. The methods have been relatively simple: to attempt to work collaboratively with (rather than on behalf of) indigenous artists and practitioners, and to take a lead from the work of indigenous commentators and researchers in what might be important questions to explore in this engagement at what Martin Nakata calls the “cultural interface.”[2]

Given my low level of previous experience in indigenous culture and communities, it is unsurprising that this engagement has sometimes turned out to be challenging to achieve in practice. The challenges also emerge from not just my own lack of experience, but from the deficit of resources that are available to indigenous arts and artists in comparison to non-indigenous artists. However, undertaking this work has also been a great source of learning for me about what the possibilities of something called ‘digital media’ might be, and my goal is to use this learning to increase the opportunities available for indigenous and non-indigenous artists alike.

What has led me to pursue these questions?

A fundamental factor is that Aotearoa New Zealand has a distinctive social and cultural environment where indigenous issues have a high level of visibility compared to other English-speaking nations. At one level these questions are just around us on a day-to-day basis, and the sensitivities that Aotearoa fosters have something to offer the consideration of culture in other former British colonies and possibly further afield.

Secondly, my initial political and academic development occurred within the context of the feminist movement, where the politics of difference has always been a central theme. From feminist work I learnt that experience is irreducible. While it is not possible to say how a person of a particular sex/gender will or should behave, it is also true that it is clearly not possible for someone who is not a woman to experience the world as a woman. Once women’s perspectives are taken as important within a particular discussion, it becomes clear exactly how male-focussed language and structures of power are. Or as Gayatri Spivak suggests, to introduce the question of woman changes everything. This is obviously the case in a male-dominated technological media environment, and it is no surprise that some of the most interesting works in new media’s history have foregrounded issues of gender. For me, the work of cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix; designer and writer Brenda Laurel; and net artists such as Melinda Rackham were all influential, in part due to an emphasis on the politics of desire, intersubjectivity, and embodiment. In the field of science and technology studies, the work of Donna Haraway has always made me aware of how the politics of technology always carries with it questions of gender.

The other thing I learnt from feminism is that it is possible and necessary, if not straightforward, for someone from a dominant subject position to work with those from non-dominant positions on changing structures of dominance. So it seems to me that identity-related (or, I would prefer to say, experience-centred) social movements ask deep, difficult and significant questions of the political and the aesthetic in both dominant and non-dominant cultures. Feminist work is specifically useful in this problematic because sex/gender is an originary binary within the Western philosophical tradition. Feminist thinkers have done the most significant interrogation of the political effects of such binaries and this work is directly relevant to the dichotomy of coloniser and colonised.

A third reason these questions are interesting to me is because the dominant understanding of ‘the user’ in new media discourse is limited by the subjective experience and imaginations of the creators of electronic interfaces, who have for too long been dominated by a narrow demographic (almost always white and male). But there are a whole lot of other ways of being in the world. From working as an interactive designer in the commercial sector I learnt time and again that whatever you might think the user might do when engaging with a website or program, what users actually do when they engage with new media is something different. New media theory, with its overwhelming focus on the formal aspects of networks and systems rather than the people who use them, has mostly neglected the very different subjectivities of people who engage with new media outside of the dominant cultural assumptions of Europe and North America.[3] Projects of cultural self-determination by indigenous peoples offer models for reading technology outside of the narrow and specific cultural imaginaries that are too often prerequisites for participation in the new media environment. A hint of the potential can be found in the suggestion by Cheryl L’hirondelle that “the current lack of attention being paid by programmers to Indigenous communities around the world represents a missed opportunity, because our languages are eloquent, concept and process-based, and fully capable of describing various complicated technological dynamics.”[4]

A fourth prompt for pursuing this work is the centrality of colonial myths in cyberspace. The language structuring the Internet has always involved spatial metaphors – domains, multihoming, namespaces. This terminology has developed from a distinctly frontier cultural imaginary described by Cameron and Barbrook as “The California Ideology.”[5] To take a well-known example, John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace is an influential text in early web culture, which captures the epic mythology of the new online world. The text was critical in forging a collective sense of possibility in the English-speaking settler nations where web fever was catching hold. Barlow was a Wyoming cattle rancher, and for those of us working in the commercial new media industries the Californian Ideology was a Wired Magazine-sponsored rerun of the Wild West’s escape from the limits of government, and from politics.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. […]
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.[…]
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants.[…]
In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.[6]

From today’s vantage point, we can simply note that the anti-immigration provisions of Barlow’s declaration haven’t aged so well, and the cowboy’s identification as a ‘native’ seems all too resonant with the ‘Pakeha as a second indigenous culture’ trope promoted in New Zealand by some European commentators.

Virginia Eubanks highlights the problematic eloquently in her essay ‘Mythography of the New Frontier,’ which includes a discussion of historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s nineteenth century analysis of the frontier in the U.S., and Neal Stephenson’s ‘epic hacker travelogue’ Mother Earth Mother Board:

In much internet discourse, progress and conquest are suspiciously tightly coupled. When combined with the pioneer ideal of flexibility (translated for 20th century use as flexible accumulation of capital) and framed in terms of the ‘new frontier’ this mix becomes even more troubling. The concept of progress as social evolution is deeply embedded in the metaphors of the ‘new frontier.’ Turner masked the political and economic impetus and consequences of conquest in his pioneer ideal – the genocide of the Native American population, the exploitation of the natural environment, the aggression towards other nations with colonial holdings – by defining conquest as progress, discovery, the invention of new ways of life. The conquest of the frontier, for Turner, was about evolution, not aggression. This conceit is equally visible in Stephenson’s epic, and like Turner, Stephenson insists that this world-wide reach will have a naturally democratising and egalitarian effect.[7]

Deconstructing and reconstructing the binary

So, four impulses: a local context; the need to consider feminism and the politics of experience; the need for a culturally diversified theory of the user and the need for a decolonising of the cyberspace imaginary. Looking back at the itinerary of these interests, I can see them emerging from my experience of the cultural environment of Aotearoa New Zealand, with its unique mix of Pacific, Asian and European peoples. These cultures meet in a nation-state straining under the pressure of the two cultural systems joined in the Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty’s bicameral approach to legal administration could give us a clue on how to rethink new media protocols in a more diverse way. The work of both feminist and postcolonial theorists testifies to the power of this binary in thinking freedom from dominant assumptions.

Internet culture often reflects a distinctly European history of social thought, which begins with the concept of the individual subject, and extrapolates to that larger collection of individuals which is the ‘public.’ We can draw an analogy here to how the singular identity promoted under cultural nationalism (that of the ‘New Zealander’) becomes the basis for the pluralism of the multicultural state (it is this singular culture which defines the acceptable relationships between ‘multi’ cultures). Multiculturalism or liberal pluralism is a different way of thinking than the host-visitor model (tangata whenua – manuhiri) which is common to Pacific cultures. Of course, a host-visitor model can admit many – but a visitor will always exist in relation to the host. There is a dyad.

Psychoanalytically-inflected feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray show that to think in terms of this ‘two’ is to raise a very different type of ethical relationship than to think either the individual or the many, which have been more common social structures in European thought.[8] This relation to an Other calls subjectivity into question in powerful ways, questions we cannot hide from as we can in either the singular concept of ‘identity’ (where we are self-determining) or broader notions of the ’social’ (where we can disavow our subjectivity). Irigaray’s metaphor of two lips joined in one organ suggests this alternative, perhaps allowing us to attend to the flipside of the colonial history embedded in new media’s dominant discourses. The colonial moment is, as Frantz Fanon made clear, a dyad, a relationship between coloniser and colonised which has a binary logic. The binary relation of zeroes and ones, on and off, forms the very basis of the digital. Perhaps critical engagement with this binary, linked and mutually descriptive, offers potential to achieve the Internet’s original promise of an international, inclusive, and democratic environment?

It goes without saying that as a foundation for research, these questions do not lend themselves to simple solutions and settled theories. However, they have raised some new issues in my thinking about new media that I believe are worthy of further investigation, which I’d like to outline here in the hope of joining others who are also interested in pursuing such work.

1) Is new media a good thing, just because it happens to be good for us?

This first question is a formulation taken from Scott Lash: how do we live in a medium which enables not just the flow of goods, but the flow of bads?[9] New media theory has brought with it an ethic of circulation, exemplified by Stewart Brand’s famous comment that ‘information wants to be free’, emphasising the benefits of sharing knowledge and opposing restrictions on the free movement of information. However, the experience of indigenous peoples with respect to unauthorised circulation of customary knowledge has been one case among many that suggests the circulation of information does not always result in positive outcomes for all.[10] Saskia Sassen notes that informationalisation tends to bring about a centralisation of control activities and a dispersal of routine tasks.[11] The dream of millions of cottage industries engaged in telework has not quite eventuated, and instead we have a consolidation of capital in the urban environment and a removal of managerial and coordinating functions from non-urban areas. Geographical studies on the impact of communications on small towns offer a parallel example: building transportation and communication networks is an investment which allows resources to flow out of or through that place. The net effect may even be the extinguishing of an entire productive sector of the economy in that location as consolidation occurs.[12]

Can we push for the development of new media and the attendant focus on development of the digital economy as a necessity, when this medium might be responsible for the deepening inequalities that are well documented in heavily informational economies?

2) Can we think the network via the nodes?

Network theory, in its suppression of the human subject, tends to make a number of implicit assumptions about what kind of a person is on the end of a network. Vine Deloria noted that “Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spatial point of view.”[13] Instead of assuming that there is a neutral space from which we can view the network, perhaps we can instead highlight each specific experience and the kinds of network connections such a position allows and disallows. Here we do not to automatically think the connections others have to the networks are the same as ours.

Spivak points out the dangers of bureaucratic egalitarianism when not supplemented by other kinds of thinking:

Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, a common human essence is assumed which denies the procedural importance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history of a sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups of men and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwestern Europe or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me. It’s not so much a universalisation as seeing one history as the inevitable telos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and women everywhere.[14]

3) How do we think what is not connected?

We can also begin to identify networks more accurately by observing not what they connect together but what they fail to connect. A positivist mindset assumes that an example can generally be replicated by other examples – in other words, a model of a process can be applied in every situation with appropriate customisation to the environment. This positivist mindset implies that global diffusion of the Internet and its models is inevitable. However, while Internet networks are theoretically ‘global’ there is never an actual globality, and the technocratic new media discourse is generally less eloquent on the reasons why theoretical globality fails to be achieved in practice. As Kerry Macnamara points out when talking about Information and Communication Technology for development:

Despite a proliferation of reports, initiatives, and pilot projects in the past several years, we still have little rigorous knowledge about ‘what works.’ There are abundant ’success stories,’ but few of these have yet been subjected to detailed evaluation.[15]

Immanent methodologies are not sufficient to understand new media networks, we have to supplement them with experiences outside our networks to sensitise ourselves to their limits.

4) What systems are unknowable to us?

While the previous point might be seen to support anthropological or ethnographic methodologies (encountering the Other in order to understand our own issues), there are also genuine aporia or unbridgeable differences between our ways of being and those of others, which mean that any connection we seek is always deferred and never quite achieved. How does someone with experiences we cannot have (for example, those native to other language groups) think the network? Here is where the value of dialogue and intercultural conversation comes into play, where instead of smoothing over differences in the name of standardisation, we can foster multiple protocols for engaging with new media content. As poet and librarian Robert Sullivan suggests, such questions of protocol and holistic context are integral to indigenous cultural maintenance:

How do we send a message that strengthens the holistic context of each cultural item and collection? How do we ensure that both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples receive the message? How do we digitise material taking into account its metaphysical as well as its digital life?[16]

5) How will the philosophical underpinnings of new media theory be tested?

The construction of hardware and software packages requires a particular kind of test to be made of the developer’s capabilities – the result either works or it doesn’t. As we move into knowledge about the new media field and its social implications, we can no longer test our theoretical constructions so thoroughly, even though there is a tendency to analogise from the processes of software development to the social relationships that users engage in through new media tools. One of the best-known examples of this thinking is the Creative Commons, a form of intellectual property rights management for digital content drawing its inspiration from the GNU General Public License, a licence traditionally applied to software in the Open Source movement. The rigor of evaluation which operates in software development is however rarely present in the analogous social theories which spring from it.

This leads to the question of how we test a knowledge system. In the worlds of philosophy and social theory, the emphasis is usually placed on evaluating conceptual or descriptive work in relation to previous methods and concepts. In more applied forms (say the visual arts, or politics) we tend to look to circulation and effects to prove a concept. One of the questions that continues to haunt interdisciplinary work (not just in new media, but also in fields such as cultural studies) is that centering the community of knowledge around the object of study rather than the methods of inquiry tends to result in a lack of interest in or knowledge of precursors from times before that object came into being. To name one example, new media thinkers tend to valorise participatory models (such as ‘citizen journalism’) without reference to the investigations of the limits to citizenship and participation in pre-Internet media. This ethic reflects a particular instance of what Stephen Turner calls “settler futurism” and Barthes called “neomania”, a focus on “making over and moving on” that is incompatible with cultural systems based on a different sense of time.[17]

Where could these questions take new media and its future? There is no endpoint I can visualise – in fact, this approach to new media is oriented against a philosophy that takes development as a given. My questions are part of a search for an ethic of new media that can make the openness and diversity of Internet content manifest in its interactions and structure. The Internet has been described as a series of diverse monocultures, but our skills in working with other knowledge systems will have to improve as the demographic base of the Internet expands. Against tropes of speed, connection and movement that are so common in Internet discourse, this ethic could emerge from a focus on gaps, nodes, difference and incompatibility – spaces of unsettlement and possibility. Such a development of the imagination is surely the role of the arts – to imagine outside of the given, the instrumental and the immediately useful.

1 Examples include the Cultural Futures event co-organised with Jon Bywater and Nova Paul, and the edited collection PLACE: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice currently in press with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. http://culturalfutures.place.net.nz Other works are available at http://acp.dannybutt.net
2 Nakata, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Cultural Interface,” 281-91.
3 Nakamura, Cybertypes.
4 L’Hirondelle, “Sub-rosa.” http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/tell.php?is=17&file=0&tlang=0
5 Barbrook, and Cameron. The Californian Ideology. http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology-main.html.
6 Barlow, Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
7 Eubanks, “The Mythography of the ‘New’ Frontier,” http://web.mit. edu/mit/articles/index_eubanks.html.
8 This point is based on Spivak’s reading of Irigaray in Spivak, “French Feminism Revisited,” 141-172.
9 Lash, Critique of Information.
10 Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art.
11 Sassen, The Global City.
12 Daniels, Service Industries.
13 Deloria, God Is Red, 63.
14 Spivak and Sharpe, “A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” 617.
15 McNamara, “Information and Communication Technologies.” http://infodev.org/en/Document.17.aspx.
16 Sullivan, “Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights - A Digital Library Context.” http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/sullivan/05sullivan.html
17 Turner, “Aotearoa/New Zealand: The Homeland of Make-over Culture.”

The issue of evaluation is far from the sexiest topic for a journal issue on community technology. It brings to mind the endless forms and responses required by funders, or writing proposals with a detailed evaluation methodology when one is sitting there thinking ‘If you don’t give me any money there won’t be a damn project to evaluate!’ The word evaluation just innately conjures negative affect. Say it and see how it rolls around on your tongue: ‘project evaluation’. Compare it to ‘Web 2.0′ or ‘information superhighway’. It just doesn’t sound like fun.

While my own tawdry presentation skills likely played a role, there’s no doubt that the lukewarm reception my talk received at the 2007 Making Links conference in Sydney, Australia, had something to do with focusing on a topic that is the community media worker’s equivalent of going to the dentist. No inspirational success stories, no rousing polemic about the need to get with the future programme, no fancy technologies, no ideas for new programmes. Maybe that’s what the sector is about? Maybe I’d misjudged my audience completely, I thought? Maybe I am just interested in arcane bureaucratic nonsense for my own reasons and this doesn’t offer anything useful to anyone?

I was fortunate at dinner that night to be slightly relieved when the director of a well- established NGO looked me over with a suspicious eye and asked me why I didn’t talk about any of my projects. I replied that I wasn’t really a practitioner, just a consultant and academic. She wasn’t having any of it. ‘But everything you talked about are the issues we deal with on the ground - it was obvious you’d dealt with them, but the projects themselves weren’t there.’ I admitted that I do actually work on projects, but I don’t like to talk about them. Partially because the projects are long-term and small scale and unsuited to conference presentations, but also because I just don’t know if talking about them helps the projects (Spivak and Sharpe 2002: 623), and it also introduces the risk of obscuring the more important issues that structure practice but are not drawn from it. Evaluation is one of those topics whose unavoidable importance has not generally been asserted by those working on the ground. It emerges from an international discourse that, I offer, urgently needs to be transformed by those with on-the-ground experience. But in order to change that we have to focus on this discourse and where it comes from, testing it against our experience and making interventions back at that level, rather than expecting that our realities will be understood by those setting the terms of reference for our projects. In this paper I want to highlight some of the challenges to effective evaluation in the sector; look at the lessons drawn from the international discourse on evaluation; and suggest some pragmatic responses that can be made by project workers.

This approach seems appropriate to both my current role as a consultant/academic and my experience in the sector. My masters study initially looked at rural community development through ICT, but ended up in social theory, once I realised that the structuring concepts around the ‘digital divide’ that constrained development possibilities where I lived were not local issues, though they had local impacts. Perhaps more accurately, I realised it was at the definitional level where I could contribute most and where change seemed most urgent, and those wouldn’t be accessed through local interventions when the connecting discourses in the institutional support were inadequate. While I still regard the community impacts as the test of my work, it has proven useful to venture into the wild jungles of international policy and development agencies in order to better understand why different local experiences seem to struggle with the same issues.

Since then, I’ve been fortunate to be involved in a number of Asia Pacific ICT-for- development (ICT4D) initiatives where I see the results of the work of many projects. If I were to summarise my experience of the community sector, it would mostly be based on two observations:

Firstly, community sector ICT workers are dealing with a huge range of competing demands, and compared to their larger organisational colleagues they have to assume many more roles. The upside of this is the level of flexibility and an ability to ‘get things done’ with minimal bureaucracy. However the downside is time-poverty, where blocks of time allocated to strategic planning evaporate in the face of urgent demands such as keeping the website up or the email working.

The second is the chronic undercapitalisation which affects many community projects. On one telecentre project described by the late Steve Cisler (2007), USAID staff responded to problems by extending the project life cycle and pumped some more money into lab maintenance while demanding that the project be ’self-sustaining by month 18.’ What does it mean to talk about ’sustainability’ in a setting where there’s little money available to the administration or any of the users and where costs of fuel, paper, staff time, Internet access, and electricity were/are very high? Yet without such an impossible exit strategy for the donor, no money will be forthcoming for the project, and it would be a brave or foolhardy person who would decide to not just keep their mouth shut and say all the right things, knowing that communities are in desperate need of resources, and pandering to unrealistic expectations of funders is a small price to pay. But is it a small price to pay to have a funding environment that evaluates projects according to fantasy? That becomes a decision only the practitioner can make.

What these two issues suggest to me is that one of the most important determinants of the ‘practical’ possibilities is precisely in the political dimensions of our organisations. Technical workers are historically not very interested in politics; or more correctly, they prefer not to discuss the political aspects of their practices. However, a recent Australian study (Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts 2005) highlights three critical factors in realising benefits from a range of ICT projects:

1. Being ICT Aware
2. Being open to Organisational Transformation
3. Being persistent through the time lag.

These are all political issues! As the French saying goes, ‘those who don’t do politics get done in by politics’.

Evaluation in the ICT4D Imaginary

If I sound cynical, it is only because in 15 years of work with technology projects I have too often seen convenient fantasies of results manufactured that serve the short-term interests of projects, but eventually leave community workers disillusioned and funders dissatisfied when these results cannot be measured or achieved.

Let me take an example: Throughout the Asia Pacific, the theme of ‘universal access’ drives ICT4D policy; policy initiatives are given ambitious titles such as ‘Computers for all’ or ‘One laptop per child’. These are worthy ideals but in the policy setting they become problematic as they are never finally achievable and provide little guidance for the tough decision-making that is required to support the use of ICTs where basic poverty issues such as access to food, water, and basic healthcare remain unsolved.

These ideals are part of what Iris Marion Young (1990: 18) calls a ‘distributive paradigm’ that ‘defines social justice as the morally proper distribution of social benefits and burdens among society’s members.’ Virginia Eubanks (2007) notes that this paradigm is at the heart of much work in the community informatics sector, but that it restricts the scope of an equity agenda because, among other things, its demographic cast cannot account for the complex inequalities of the information economy. As ICT4D matures as a field, a number of reviews of ICT4D literature are beginning to appear (Wilson 2003; Ekdahl and Trojer 2002). They find recurrent features in ICT4D reports which are in tension with findings in other parts of the development sector.

Firstly, the ICT4D literature’s metaphors of catch-up, progress and leap-frogging present development as a linear pathway and ICT as a positive, or at least neutral development. As Eubanks suggests, when technology is framed as a commodity to be received, rather than a complex field to enter, we are unable to account for the gap between the normative solutions we seek and the lived experience of unintended effects of technological systems in communities.

Secondly, there are common demands for urgency and the need to act quickly on ICT4D in order to not be excluded from fast-paced developments – even though national human development indicators listed in the United Nations’ Human Development Reports remain remarkably stable over time. I am certain that anyone who works in the community technology sector has used this rhetoric, as the discourses of speed and paradigm-shift are fundamental to how we understand technology in the West.

Thirdly, assumptions are made about what kinds of information are valuable for development, and a category of information-poor peoples are implicitly compared to the knowledge-holders of the developed world, rather than looked at in terms of reference drawn from the context of their life. We are cast in the role of missionary, bringing the new religion to the people. Or perhaps, if we are more cautious, we are bringing people an understanding of a new power system and structure (ICTs) that they will need to learn to navigate.

It is worth taking a sceptical approach to these ‘articles of faith’ in ICT-enabled development, because as Kerry McNamara points out, there is still a significant gap in evaluation:

Despite a proliferation of reports, initiatives, and pilot projects in the past several years, we still have little rigorous knowledge about ‘what works.’ There are abundant ’success stories,’ but few of these have yet been subjected to detailed evaluation. There is a growing amount of data about the spread of ICTs in developing countries and the differential rates of that spread, but little hard evidence about the sustained impact of these ICTs on poverty reduction and economic growth in those countries. (McNamara 2003: 1)

The point is not that these articles of faith are wrong per se. It is that they exist within a distributive paradigm which suits the ICT industry - including the ICT4D industry - more than it suits the long-term needs of communities. Now in Australasia many in the community sector are not dealing with such a huge gap between the basic life conditions of ourselves and those benefiting from our work, but I would say that this still generally holds true: much of the time projects occur because one of us thinks it’s a good idea or we know resourcing might be available for these projects, rather than coming from detailed experiences of project success.

We have to more rigorously question this paradigm for our work if we are to learn from the work of others and not simply promote what ethnographer Eric Michaels (1994) termed ‘well-meaning but ineffective advancement projects, the discarded skeletons of which litter the countryside.’ This paradigm puts us in the producer role and our communities in the consumer role, and causes funders to evaluate development as a product rather than as a relationship. The currency of international ICT4D is the photograph of the rural woman (preferably with child nearby) in front of a computer. The photograph will probably not be taken by a member of the woman’s community, but by an external consultant who is initiating or evaluating the project. The photograph will appear in a project report (or, if it is a good photograph, the funder’s annual report), and the fantasies of rural women entering the information economy will be complete. At this point, the project has been a success for the funder, and their future programme budgets are made more secure. If the community worker remains to try and consolidate this initial success into the fabric of the community in a positive way, they will soon realise that the support that is required may not dovetail smoothly with the need to produce success stories - they might find that the cycle of intervention and evaluation takes longer. They will then fall out of favour with an evaluation cycle whose political exigencies require faster results. The community worker might move to a new job or sector to regain their enthusiasm, the funder might shift their program budgets, and the communities who were promised the dream of the ICT panacea will wait until the next person who comes along who sees the ‘potential’ in a ‘project.’

This might be considered a harsh assessment, but it is one that I think is congruent with the experience of many who have worked in this sector for some time. This does not mean that I don’t think anything good comes out of community technology projects, but it does mean that I believe it is vital to begin shifting the terms by which we evaluate projects. This is why I want to focus on evaluation, because to me it is one of the key battlegrounds for the political dimensions of ICT projects in the community sector. My hope is that this discussion will not just shift the way you think about evaluating work for your own purposes, but that it helps those who work with funders, donors, and budgets gain more traction in the realpolitik of resource allocation.

Evaluation is no panacea—it is often an instrument of control and this is the way that those working in the community technology sector generally experience it. Niles Norris vividly captures the perspective of those who receive evaluation criteria from above:

‘Mostly executive decision makers do not want to be told that things are complex and open to different interpretations and valuing; they know that. It is the way out of or around the complexity and the plurality of interests and values that they want help with. They want to use evaluation as a resource to solve problems, not pose or redefine them. Some of the problems they want to address are social problems. Other problems are creatures of the politics of government: avoiding embarrassment, displacing blame, deflecting criticism, maintaining reputation, legitimating action or inaction, reordering priorities, justifying budgets. To the governmental frame of mind, beset with accountability, other people’s autonomy is a problem. It is a source of contingency, ambiguity, and unpredictability and a potential for loose cannons. The increasing tendency of governments to prespecify the characteristics of good evaluation by providing guidelines and standards stems from an understandable desire for greater predictability and control over the content and process of evaluation. It is a kind of security blanket.’ (Norris 2005: 584)

However, as I have discussed in the previous section, it is not only governments and funders who could use evaluation criteria to secure their projects. It can also be a powerful tool for deconstructing the assumptions we might hold working on the ground, particularly if we make the formulation of these criteria a collaborative exercise with our communities. In all such cases, it is important to identify the cultural assumptions embedded in the way they describe projects. There is a practical reason for this, which is that it helps avoid the unintended consequences that come from using a shared language (’technology’, ‘development’) but having different understandings and intentions.

Unintended Consequences

Unintended consequences are central to the rationale for evaluation, and there are three stories about them I’d like to share.

The first comes from Ramsay Taum, a Native Hawaiian leader from the University of Hawai’i I was fortunate to work with in 2006. He tells the story of a fish and a monkey who had become good friends. The monkey would stand at the edge of the stream and talk to the fish everyday. One day, the fish came along and said to the monkey, ‘Friend, I need your help’. The monkey replied, ‘Sure!’ and pulled the fish out of the stream, placed it in the most bountiful tree in the forest, and walked off feeling proud of his generosity. That is probably my favourite story about development.

The second concerns the unintended (or perhaps semi-intended) consequences of eGovernment projects in India. According to the World Bank, the government of Andhra Pradesh developed a land registration system where the land owner can enter details of their property (location, dimensions and other factors) and the system then calculates the value. Prior to the system, land valuation was performed in an entirely non- transparent system by assessors and agents, was fraught with corruption, and often required weeks and sometimes additional payments. After the implementation of the new system, land registration can be completed in a few hours where earlier it took 7–15 days (Parks 2005: 6). However, researcher Solomon Benjamin (2005) has found that such new land regimes might have very uneven effects. In Bangalore, the reduction of complexity in titles and centralization has made land much more open to larger purchasers and more competitive for local investors who are unable to compete. ‘This has allowed very large real estate companies catering to the IT industry to access land in Bangalore, resulting in dramatic changes in land markets’ (Benjamin 2005: 8). Gentrification makes the rights of the poor more tenuous when ICT enables companies and politicians to collaborate on larger ‘real estate development projects’, which may be good for a region’s overall economy but which result in the transfer of security away from the poor to the benefit of the wealthy.

A third, more academic story comes from Jonathan Morell (2005) who completed a substantial academic review of the research on unintended consequences. He notes that explanations of unintended consequences discuss the complex nature of systems: multiple cross-linked processes, non-linear interactions, long feedback loops, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the inability to completely specify all relevant variables, among others. He suggests that a lack of information about the environment we are trying to affect is chronic rather than exceptional, and that we often lack vigilance in scouting for environmental changes that would be tell-tale signs that things will not unfold as we expect. Complicating this further is that ‘the nature of planning is such that opportunity for powerful intervention and change exists at only limited times in the life cycle of a policy or a program.’ (445)

Morell distinguishes unforeseen consequences as those that emerge from ‘the weak application of analytical frameworks and from failure to capture the experience of past research.’ Unforeseeable consequences, on the other hand, ’stem from the uncertainties of changing environments combined with competition among programs occupying the same ecological niche.’ (446) Morell suggests a range of remedies which are too extensive to list here, but which should be read by anyone involved in planning or evaluating projects. They generally involve more rigorous pre-programme evaluation of similar projects, diversifying inputs, and maintaining flexibility in programme direction in response to shifting circumstance.

Evaluation in ICT4D Projects

Regardless of whether one believes in the value of evaluation for programme practitioners, there is a degree to which it is now an unavoidable fact of life in the community technology sector. In a time where the ongoing maintenance costs of technology are rising, and it gets harder to gain support for new initiatives, we need a different mindset from the philosophies that served us during the dotcom era. I’d like to finish by offering some personal observations on what I see as being useful considerations for practitioners in evaluating their own projects.

Firstly, there are three imperatives that are oriented toward funders and donors:

1. Distinguish what should and shouldn’t be measured, how, and when, before your funder does. This is not always possible, but it is often possible to set evaluation measures around phenomena which you know are real, while also giving a funder something like what they want. For example, a programme which aims to increase educational opportunities for target groups could be measured in educational participation of participants over a number of years. But if your evaluation cycle is shorter, you don’t want to get sucked into measuring large-scale behaviour change when this might not always be visible immediately. Instead, one can evaluate attitudinal changes, confidence levels, or other behaviour which will influence later outcomes the project is trying to achieve.

2. Build in a Quick Win. For example, when instituting a content management system or a blogging platform, ensure that there is a voice in the community that can contribute immediately. It is often especially successful to schedule an event-related initiative early in the project. Small, carefully focussed, time-bounded projects are underrated and have the advantage of gaining visibility when documented well, yet have much more predictable resource demands than ongoing projects.

3. Communicate the Results. Simply: be proactive about setting your own measures for success that are appropriate to the communities you work with (preferably developed in collaboration with them) and continually communicate these to all stakeholders. This is easier said than done under the day-to-day grind of keeping projects on track, but it helps bring upcoming problems into view earlier.

Evaluating the user relationship

There are three other criteria that I use to think about projects in how they relate to communities of users.

1. Is the project giving key users what they want? It sounds simple but a surprising number of projects treat their outcomes as a self-evident universal good. Meanwhile, key users battle low motivation as their goals are not those of the project, but they hope to achieve their goals through their participation in the project. It is important to remain sceptical of our own knowledge of what users want, even when they tell us. User communities may not understand all the implications of their desires and an important role for project workers is to help them clarify their goals in ways which are true to their impulses yet also achievable.

2. Is the project going through the channels the user expects? The build it and they will come era is over. Channels have matured and have more specific genre constraints on the kind of content that fits in a particular format. Channels that we can consider include not just email and the web, but SMS, YouTube, Facebook, RSS, Google. If the channel isn’t under your control, partnering might be required. Many projects have tried to build entirely new platforms (e.g. a ‘local YouTube’) whose sustainability is predicated on participation by a much larger community of users than the initial project participants. This is a very risky strategy and ultimately, a potential waste of valuable resources when existing platforms are often available and such funds can go into developing user capabilities to navigate and critically assess those platforms.

3. Is it building future capability and flexibility? Whatever we know about technological platforms, we know that they will be different in the future. It is important to ensure flexibility in platforms and content that are generated, and to increase the skills and capacity of communities to adapt to change.

Conclusion

Over time I’ve come to believe that our core skill is not so much our technological expertise, which is rapidly becoming commoditised by web 2.0 platforms, even if it often prompted our entry into the sector in the first place. It’s our understanding of our stakeholders, our ability to visualise the way they use the internet, to empathise with their needs and to bring our related organisations around to support it. Increasingly, this probably requires less of the skills of the technologist and marketer, and more the skills of the anthropologist and facilitator. The debates on anthropological method are asking critical questions about the value for communities of projects whose benefits were previously seen to be self-evident. I suggest that evaluation methodology is one place where we can productively bring some of these insights to our own work, to step outside of technological fantasies and increase our value for the communities we represent.

References

Benjamin, Solomon. 2006. Analogue To Digital: Re-Living Big Business’s Nightmare In New Hydras. Impressum: Institut für Neue Kulturtechnologien/t0, November 20 2005 [cited 6 December 2006]. Available from http://static.world- information.org/infopaper/wi_ipcityedition.pdf

Cisler, Steve. 2007. Re: OLPC presentation in Norway. incom mailing list, http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/incom-l/2007-February/001592.html.

Department of Communications Information Technology and the Arts. 2005. Achieving Value from ICT: Key Management strategies. Place Published: Australian Government. http://www.dcita.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/25466/Achieving_value.pdf (accessed October 2, 2007).

Ekdahl, Peter , and Lena Trojer. 2002. ‘Digital Divide: Catch up for What?’ Gender, Technology and Development 6 (1):20.

Eubanks, Virginia. 2007. ‘Trapped in the Digital Divide: The Distributive Paradigm in Community Informatics’ The Journal of Community Informatics 3 (2).

McNamara, Kerry. 2003. ‘Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience’. In infoDev Annual Symposium. Geneva, Switzerland: infoDev.

Michaels, Eric. 1994. Bad Aboriginal art : tradition, media and technological horizons. St. Leonards, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin.

Morell, Jonathan A. 2005. ‘Why Are There Unintended Consequences of Program Action, and What Are the Implications for Doing Evaluation?’American Journal of Evaluation 26 (4):444-463.

Norris, Niles. 2005. ‘The Politics of Evaluation and the Methodological Imagination.’ American Journal of Evaluation 26 (4):584-586.

Parks, Thomas. 2007. A Few Misconceptions about eGovernment 2005 [cited February 2, 2007]. Available from http://www.asiafoundation.org/pdf/ICT_eGov.pdf.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Jenny Sharpe. 2002. A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (2):609-625.

Wilson, Merridy. 2003. ‘Understanding the International ICT and Development Discourse: Assumptions and implications.’ The Southern African Journal of Information and Communication 3.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Tena koutou katoa and welcome to the panel “Pakeha/Tauiwi and Tino Rangatiratanga: A possibility for peace or a contradiction in terms?” I’d like to give thanks to Te Miringa Hohaia for inviting me to speak at the forum; to the superb forum organisers Jos, Te Aroha, Hinerangi and their team; to the people of Parihaka for their hospitality and inspiration, and to the panellists for supporting this kaupapa. We’re all a bit nervous but also greatly honoured to be presenting here.

It will be obvious to most of you that if, as a white Australian, I was delivering these opening remarks in te reo Maori that it would signal that New Zealand was a different cultural environment than it is today. I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of indigenous cultural practitioners across the world, and one of the ironies of this international work is that people are so often working to overcome colonisation using colonial language, and this is frustrating because language comes with built-in assumptions abut how people exist in the world, it shapes how we think. I believe that the development of Maori language education is creating a sea-change in the cultural politics of this country.

I regularly give myself a hard time for not keeping up with my language education as much as I should - mostly because I am too often overseas - and I used to cut myself some slack with the fact that I grew up in Australia. But then 18 months ago I was at a conference in Christchurch with Teresia Teaiwa, the Pacific Studies scholar based in Wellington. She opened her talk with a mihi that included a couple of minutes of remarks in Te Reo Maori, and I think she’s lived in New Zealand for half the time that I have. So no excuses after that.

But Teresia said something very interesting in her talk that has stayed with me. Like many successful people of Native Pacific ancestry, she is often asked to represent the Pacific in largely European institutions on account of her “Pacific identity.” And this caused her to think that being born in Hawai’i, from Kiribati and Banaban descent, and having long periods of her life in Fiji, Santa Cruz, and now Aotearoa, that her Pacific identity was never quite “Native” to any of those places. A “Pacific identity” was less important to her than a Pacific *identification* - it was an active process for her to wake up every day and decide to identify with the Pacific. And her way of doing that in Aotearoa was to learn the language and customs of her Maori cousins in the place where she lives.

That resonated with me because my identification with international indigenous political struggles is obviously not based in my identity as a Pakeha. My identification is a choice that I have to take responsibility for, though my European heritage from England, Wales and Norway via Australia means that it is only appropriate for me to take some roles and not others in support of this struggle.

The indigenous political agenda is not one social justice struggle among many, as it is sometimes characterised among the white left, who constantly ask others to suspend their lived experience in favour of a “larger” political agenda like anti-capitalism. (And I think the exchange after Jane Kelsey’s presentation shows us that sometimes the global issues, while important, are only changeable through local situations and local people.) Why would I be interested in supporting indigenous self-determination? Well, from Maori I’ve learnt values such as whakawhanaungatanga, manaakitanga, and kaitiakitanga which - despite my very limited understanding of their true historical function - have become central to how I think about my life. And through my work with Maori I’ve developed working relationships with tangata whenua in the places I was born in Newcastle, Australia, in Awabakal country; and where I grew up, in Gombemberri country on Queensland’s Gold Coast. As I’ve developed all these relationships I’ve learnt more about what it means to live in a place.

So indigenous development and self-determination represents my preferred future at a personal level. It reflects the suggestion to white Australia by the Aboriginal activist Lilla Watson, who said, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

However, for many Pakeha the prospect of Maori self-determination is not so appealing. I came to writing about these issues from teaching in an art school, noticing that when the discussion shifted from European modernism to issues of cultural identity, cultural politics, and appropriation of cultural property the Maori and Pacific students, who were usually very quiet, would become active in the discussions. The Pakeha students, who I often couldn’t get to shut up, would become very quiet or defensive. They felt that anything they said would be wrong, as if somehow that culture belonged to the brown people. They had a lot of anxiety, and it made me sad.

The feminist science studies scholar Sharon Traweek did some anthropological studies of strange tribes of largely male high-energy physicists. She described them as having a “culture of no culture”, which is a great phrase. They had a culture that required that knoweldge could not have a place or knower. The idea that what we know might be affected by our social or cultural position was a massive threat to the entire system of hard science, and had to be avoided at all costs. European knowledge systems are often committed to describing the entire world, in their own image, with no exceptions. That’s why the Martinique-born writer Frantz Fanon suggested that in the battle between coloniser and colonised, the only outcome was the wrecking of colonial culture, rather than a happy bicultural accommodation. And when I think about stories like Parihaka, or the recent Foreshore and Seabed legislation, I think his pessimism was warranted.

It’s one thing to analyse the differences between Maori and Pakeha perspectives, and another to know what to do about it. For Maori, despite the long and complex struggle for survival, it is very simple to strike fear into the hearts of the ruling elite. To simply survive and grow while identifying as Maori, rather than only a “New Zealander”, is a political act. It gets Pakeha worried, and Hazel Riseborough’s presentation on Parihaka’s history showed how colonial cultures respond when they feel threatened.

But for we Pakeha and Tauiwi, natives of the “culture of no culture”, how to act in this political field is not so straightforward, because if I’m working with you, my own cultural power might be the problem in our work together, reflecting my culture’s dominance. Cultural power is a funny thing. I can’t put my cultural power on the table like a cake and divide it equally among us, and have everyone walk away with the same amount. No matter how much I want to give it away, I still have it. If it was a question of my land or money (if I had those :) ), it would be a different story.

I’m very skeptical of people who think these issues of cultural power aren’t important, that the imbalance can be easily fixed through goodwill or the right organisational structure. I’ve seen too many organisations committed to indigenous development where European workers or funders end up setting agendas through very subtle ways. Sometimes assuming positions of guilt or feigning a refusal of power is a way of getting these power imbalances off the table where they end up sneaking in through the back door. In any case, political struggle requires resources, so for Pakeha to marginalise themselves doesn’t necessarily help when we could be amassing more resources to support the self-determination movement. The activist-critic-philosopher Gayatri Spivak says that she “refuses to marginalise herself in order to gain sympathy from those who are genuinely marginalised”, which is a position which I think is important for activism generally.

So for us there is a constant shuffling between on the one hand, holding on to the utopian ideal that we can live together in peace and freedom no matter what our cultural background; and on the other being constantly aware of the constraints our lived experiences place on what we can practically do together. It’s a delicate balance and there aren’t really many guidebooks. So I thought that rather than you listening to me I’d try and bring together people doing this work around the country, and these people have responded to the call.

We have three panellists - Margaret Smith, Jakob Otter and Poneke 171, and Suzanne Menzies-Culling from Freedom Roadworks / Tauiwi Solutions who will each speak for about 10-15 minutes, and I’m hoping to keep them to time so that we can leave room for the experiences of both Maori and Tauiwi in the audience. No reira, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.

Danny Butt - http://www.dannybutt.net

This paper emerged from an invitation to join a panel for myCreativity on alternative business and organisational models, which I accepted because I was excited to participate in such a convivial environment with friends I knew well, and wanted the opportunity to meet others at the event whose work I’ve admired. I can see why on the surface I might have seemed like a good choice for such a panel. I’ve worked as a contractor inside a few different kinds of organisations - from commercial web shops in the 90s, advertising agencies, cultural institutions, and academia. As well, I’ve participated in many not-for profit groups and collectives of various types. Now, as a consultant, I am lucky enough to get to see the inside of many different kinds of firms and engage with their business models (and, of course, our own professional services firm has its own distinctive model). Finally, through work in the field of Internet Governance, I have spent time formally researching and assessing different kinds of models that exist in intergovernmental organisations and NGOs - attempts to support diverse and ethical mechanisms for collectivity and organisation.

However, after all of these experiences, I am less comfortable about proposing alternatives ‘outside state subsidies and hyped markets’, as the framing for the panel suggested. That seems like an odd thing to say given that I have, for as long as I can remember, anxiously sought alternatives to the status quo. However, while I still value where that search has taken me, and still believe in the need for alternatives, I can’t shake the feeling that the levels of alternative platform/model sustainability are mostly low, and that Spivak is correct in her suggestion that it is sometimes better to ’sabotage what is inexorably to hand, than to invent a tool that no one will test.’[1]

There are three reasons that have led me to this point of view. Firstly, alternatives are easy to propose and difficult to sustain. The need for better alternatives is a ‘mom and apple pie’ discussion in activist communities, and there is a moral flavour to the valorisation of the ‘alternative’ which overrides any true evaluation of one’s actual political effectiveness. Are we prepared to test the impact of our alternatives against the value of efforts at reforming existing organisations and institutions? Personally, I am not suffering for lack of potential new places to put my energy. What I struggle to find are situations where this energy can make meaningful change and such situations are usually attached to availability of resources. Resources exist in organisations and institutions, and I think that it is characteristic of new media and the creative sector to underestimate the resources required for projects: there is a feeling that if we could agree on the priorities for change that these changes would somehow happen ‘immaterially.’ However, without resources we are usually in the sphere of sacrificial labour, as Ross terms it[2]. The martyr streak runs strong in activist culture. The continuing Western European popularity of Mauss’ concept of the ‘gift’[3], idealised and decontextualised from the Pacific cultures which provided the concept for him, perhaps indicates the value that a postcolonial sensibility may bring in deconstructing a philosophical imaginary predicated on a utopian past which never existed, and allowing us a more nuanced view of ethical praxis.

Secondly, outside of the sustainability of alternatives, my ethical sense is that the important political work for those with cultural capital (those of us reading this book) is in precisely orienting our efforts to institutional reform, rather than looking around for emergent forms to appropriate. We have the capability to effect change in existing organisations and institutions, precisely because we have the capacity to critique them. Many others don’t. My interest is in clearing institutional openings to allow the non-dominant to assume their role of the emergent with the support of organisational resources that exist. This will entail us learning to have a dialogue with the agenda/context of the emergent. However, this learning must always be wary of reading the emergent agenda in terms of our own, as such appropriations result in the destruction of the difference.

In other words, we have to accept our cultural dominance in our textual work. We can only claim to be marginal within a very small proportion of the world, and I believe there is the opportunity to expand the field within which we see oppositions between dominant and alternative taking place. Here I would gesture toward, say, the various indigenous language education movements internationally, that perform an inspirational and practical critique of colonial education systems. I’m not quite sure what the lessons from those are for us in the West, and I suspect it is a personal and subjective encounter. But I do know that when I talk with people working in these initiatives I routinely feel refreshed and empowered to create change, which has to be a good thing.

Thirdly, when alternatives are proposed - and almost every meeting/gathering proposes an alternative network or a group as as an ‘action item’, morally opposed to the ‘talkfest’ - I rarely have confidence that they will raise a response from those in non-dominant cultural sectors. As suggested above, these are the sectors who I think have the most to offer by way of alternatives. I think Creative Commons is a perfect example of how the political economy of the creative sector all too easily becomes about the expressive capability of the Euro-American middle classes, which is a too-limited scope for discussion in the face of the financialisation of the planet under transnational capital. Despite the efforts of people like Lawrence Liang, we still have the Creative Commons leader Larry Lessig essentially describing Asia as a centre of piracy and implicitly morally defective[4]. This is not likely to bring residents of Asia on board the political movement of open content, and this is where I believe the most creative approaches to authorship and intellectual property are to be found.

If such responses sound mundane and sociological, they nevertheless for me reflect a vivid social context that is too-little discussed within the new media sector. During their presentation at MyCreativity, Rosalind Gill and Danielle van Diemen described a Surinamese new media worker who remarked on their experience of Dutch firms where the designers were all blond haired and blue eyed, and the service workers were all black. It was a poignant moment, as looking around it was easy to see that who was in our conference didn’t look like who is outside in the street, demographically. I know next to nothing about Suriname other than a schematic of its history as a South American Dutch colony, but I do know for sure that it is a place whose resources are intimately connected with the ability of the Dutch to have an advanced capitalist economy that can set policy around ‘the creative’, just as I know that the material basis of my own settler culture in Australia and New Zealand is based on the appropriation of indigenous resources here. We can only pretend to not be connected to those who are not in the room, even if the questions of how to engage are complex.

It’s difficult to know exactly how to respond to these suspicions of the ‘alternative’, but I would like to attempt some displacements of the alternative through the example of my own trajectory through the Creative Industries. For Judith Butler, ‘giving an account of oneself’ can be a way of exploring the limits of one’s experience as sufficient data upon which one can propose a model for change. The autobiographical mode of address implies the experience of another (you the reader) for whom I must attempt to make myself substitutable in this story - for the story to work you must believe that you potentially could imagine yourself within parts of this narrative. Where my self-presentation does not reflect your experience of yourself, is where we find the limits of our shared agenda, but also, paradoxically, opportunities for dialogue. As Butler suggests, ‘it may be that a certain ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in identity allows one to affirm others who may or may not “mirror” one’s own constitution’[5] and it is in this ‘impossible intimacy of the ethical’[6] that I have found value in work within diverse fields including deconstruction, Pacific cultures and my own work within the management consulting field. However, as Butler points out, this is not just a personal process: the terms by which I tell my story are not of my own choosing, and so there is also a larger social structure embedded in the language and terms of the story which I am not in control of, and therefore parts of my experience that remain opaque even to me. Every autobiography is also an auto-ethnography. As Octavia Butler’s character Lillith puts it in the sci-fi novel Dawn: ‘I suppose I could think about this as field work, but how the hell do I get out of the field?’[7]

The mode of the personal story is one which seems fraudulent or self-indulgent within the terms of reference of classical political analysis, but I wish to suggest that there is a resolutely pragmatic character to such stories , if one believes that the most urgent priority right now is to establish more effectively global intellectual platforms against international exploitation. There are two main themes in my story of creative industries practice that structure how I approach creative and intellectual labour: craft, and context.

CRAFT

I had my first real job of longer than a few months’ duration just before I turned 29, as a design lecturer. (I don’t count running a business as a job). Before that I lived a fairly typical creative industries itinerary. I finished high school with no idea that I would be a ‘creative’, as this was before the explosion in art/design/music programmes and the widespread marketing of the university in Australia, and in any case I couldn’t draw so was discouraged from studying art at school. After a year, I dropped out of my sociology degree to play punk rock in Sydney. I was also writing a fanzine on experimental music, and those connections eventually took me to New Zealand. In a way, even before the arrival of the web, I was used to the idea of my imagined community of peers being outside the local environment.[8]

When I arrived in New Zealand in 1993 I was able to turn my fanzine experience and music connections into a writing gig for the local student radio magazine SPeC, and this in turn got me an art-writing gig with the local daily newspaper. Later, I edited the magazine, all the while making music with the people who were some of my favourite musicians in the world at that time. I was developing two parallel crafts, in music and writing. I was also beginning to learn graphic design from a friend who was SPeC’s designer, and I was also writing and exhibiting in the contemporary art context, as some of my main music collaborators were also working in this field, and it turned out to be the place I felt most comfortable.

During 1993 I also discovered the Internet and that new thing called the World Wide Web, and along with some friends we decided to do a free newspaper/magazine about it during a festival in Wellington. The web, as you’ll remember, was a new interdisciplinary context which in the early days was very much the domain of the settler individual (almost uniformly white and male) who was required to integrate technological, design and editorial prowess. Through projects for both various independent media and art initiatives I taught myself interaction design in this environment, and this seemed to be something I was good at.

I was also reading a lot of philosophy and cultural studies on the side. By the time I was 27, I had pretty much done the equivalent of what I now see as two art/media/design degrees, but outside of formal academic institutions, if occasionally supported by New Zealand’s generous social welfare system. I had developed four or five of different craft bases which I could use with some facility, if not to a high level. But all of these had been deployed in organisational contexts which were largely self-directed, and where client work was involved it usually came about through personal connections. Overall, like the average graduate, I was more interested in the process of learning to make than what the effects were, and I was a bit naive and overambitious about the true impact of my work.

So far, not a completely uncommon story for a number of young white middle-class men from the suburbs. The explosion of the Internet and the dot-com boom during the 1990s provided an opportunity for self-styled media revolutionaries such as myself to ply their wares to larger media companies, and New Zealand in 1996/7 was no exception. A friend was working as a Photoshop artist for ad agencies, and it became clear that those agencies were not getting the input they wanted from ‘web companies’ that were primarily set up by people from a technical background, and whose whose understanding of how normal people communicated was a bit skewed. So we set ourselves up to do web development for this market, and suddenly I was not quite in control of the context where my work was being created and received.

CONTEXT

Working in advertising (firstly as an external contractor, then based inside the agency) was the first time I had really worked for a sustained period to a contextual/cultural script that was not my own. The values, methods, and temporalities in the agency environment were quite contrary to mine. My work motivators are essentially intellectual and political - projects have to be interesting or doing good, and preferably both. My working style is process-oriented - I prefer to do things with all the relevant information at hand, and to document processes so that next time around I do it better. The agency field, on the other hand is success-oriented, and personality-based. ‘Quality’ is very situational, individualised. Sarah Thornton, in her excellent ethnography of adland, describes the criteria implicit in her job interview perfectly:

Although ideas about advertising were at issue, the questions that seemed to loom largest were: Do I like this person? Will others in the team like her? Is she or can she be one of us? While it would be considered an inappropriate official criterion for working in an academic post, personality is a legitimate concern in a business where working in teams and pleasing clients are essential.[9]

Working in advertising taught me that context itself is different than craft. One might have a certain set of craft skills (say, graphic design) that are theoretically applicable to a particular domain (such as advertising), but in practice they are not because those craft skills have been learnt within another context (say, contemporary art) that turns out to be incommensurable. It’s an experience of not fitting in, where even one’s body seems to give oneself away constantly. It’s not that I didn’t understand how advertising worked. I was an assiduous student and rapidly learnt more than many seasoned professionals about the structure of the industry. But in fact, my very hunger to learn the structure of it gave me away as someone who couldn’t be effective in it. My suggestions never seemed to quite get taken up; my ability to articulate areas of risk or likely error for projects - even when couched in the correct terminology - would be seen as ‘unhelpful’. I gave it my best shot, but in retrospect it was clear to all concerned that I was not ‘one of us,’ and after 6 months working inside Saatchi New Zealand I left for academia.

I’d done some design teaching on the side when we were running our business in Auckland and enjoyed it, and was able to got a real job teaching undergraduate design students on the basis of my professional experience. Teaching in a design school also required me to get my own academic qualifications, and so I enrolled in an MA under McKenzie Wark, ostensibly to look at rural Digital Divide issues (I was living in the countryside), and ending up studying class theory which is where the structuring questions for those concerns seemed to be housed. The academic world also, at last, provided a context for my own writing. Writing is probably the craft I am best at, but it had not had much of a run during my time in the new media design world, and my art and music writing always felt limited by the constraints of formal aesthetic explication which was central to those genres, and in which I had no formal training.

However, while most people now see me as a natural academic, the organisational environment of academia has never been a natural home for me, and I had to work hard to understand it. No one in my family had been to a university, and I didn’t even really have a sense about the social function of the institution. Coming from a small business environment, then through advertising, the sheer scale and immovability of the organisational structures made the academic institution a frustrating place to work, impervious to the rhythms I was used to. I come from the white colonies - we work fast and like to see results fast. Looking back I see that I gained success quickly, probably too quickly, and made some decisions that were also made too hastily, which I regret. However, once again, adapting to this environment/context, doing what it took to gain recognition within the academy, was a learning experience of a different order from learning a new craft skill. Shifting contexts is a test of one’s most basic drives, desires and consciousness - one needs patience and, I think most crucially, an ability to seek out good teachers and guides.

I always kept my hand in the commercial arena. My business partner and I were doing consulting work in the new media industries: assisting with strategic planning, business case development, new venture development, facilitation, competitive research and analysis. I think we ended up in consulting because as those of you who work in the design sector know, design is an integrative discipline that, at its core, has strong overlaps with organisational strategy. In design, one is really grappling with how the core aims of the organisation are embedded in product and service delivery. And during the dotcom era there was an unprecedented discussion about value chains, business models, and how businesses work, which we were really interested in - more so than what looked good or what was technologically possible, concerns which were more common for visual designers and technologists in the new media field.

I can also see that there were aspects to my own upbringing that made me suitable for this kind of work: my stepfather, who I grew up with, was a successful entrepreneur who turned a one-person surf shop into a 50-person business. My father started his work career as an electrician, worked for one coal company his entire life, moved eventually into a personnel role and then acted as a kind of internal consultant, receiving the very creative industries title ‘Methods Analyst’ in the 80s and being a kind of bridge between the shop floor and management, while not fitting into either. I find myself regularly bemused at the degree to which his dinner-table work conversations are reflected in my thinking. Further to that, I usually score INFJ on the Kiersey/MBTI personality tests and this puts me into the archetype of ‘Counsellor’. The old joke is that consulting is 70% therapy, 20% philosophy and 10% artistry and that’s probably about right. Clients are usually people whose institutional environment is driving them crazy. From my mother I gained some empathetic skills that are critical in that kind of work.

Eventually I grew tired of the particular academic institution I was in and wanted to further my research on settler-indigenous relations, which seemed like the most complex and critical social issue where I live, and one which has many resonances with my other research interests. I also wanted to have more diverse work, and my father had been unwell so it felt important to have some time to attend to family. So for the last eighteen months, I’ve been running a company with my business partner based in Australia. While academics often suggest that I’m ‘brave’ for having left academia for ‘life outside’, I don’t see it that way. Working in the private sector doesn’t make one autonomous - if anything, I am now more dependent on the financial variations of our academic clients than I was when I was employed by them. This is why I’m most likely to end up back in academia if I find the right gig - the freedom from business pressure inside the academy, despite the complaints of the natives about commercialisation, is significant, and I’m not really driven enough to be good at business development. But that’s another story.

The beauty of the experience of consulting is that it has allowed me to see the inside of a further range of organisations than I knew before: broadcasters, NGOs, government agencies, the UN system. So I’ve had to formalise my methods of adapting to new contexts. This is where the ability to conceptualise difference than I’ve learnt from feminist and postcolonial work, and from deconstruction, is constantly put to use. When entering a new context of practice, I need to make a subtle reading of cultural scripts that are operating, and learn the operational languages, if I am going to make interventions that elicit a response from those contexts.

Note the methodology embedded in this language. It is not about learning to read a situation in order to make a commentary elsewhere (standard academic social sciences technique: I study something in order to talk about it at a conference). Nor is it about learning to read a situation in order to make a recommendation which has an impact (instrumental consulting technique: I propose a solution which fits your situation). It is about trying to enter the fabric of a context and make a contribution which will be seen by that context as an impetus for change. Spivak [10] calls this the ‘uncoercive rearrangement of desire’, which is a great phrase. It’s a very tough thing to do, an impossibility. But an urgent impossibility that is the hallmark of the consultant’s work (we constantly fight our desire for control which we have no authority to take), and of course, work in teaching the humanities. If our goal with political action is to be more broadly inclusive in our work, I am convinced that a methodology for negotiating difference is critical to enabling effective change.

FIBRE

Reflecting on the trajectory of my work, I can see the range of craft skills and contextual understandings that led to my current interests, even though I had no idea how they would become integrated at the times I was learning them. It’s because I can speak the various associated languages of these crafts and contexts that I can be ‘interdisciplinary’ - interdisciplinarity is not newly divorced from any of threads of craft/context, but is precisely woven from these threads. Like a length of rope spun from off-cuts, there are no clear points where it is easy to say ‘this colour starts here’, even though not all fibres travel the entire length of the rope. And neither are all the fibres fused into an amorphous mass - under close analysis all of the different filaments are visible as distinct entities, and are largely non-substitutable. The specific colours of threads in our various yarns, perhaps, is what makes our creative identities unique.

I surface this fabric/sewing metaphor - with echoes of the Pacific and the interrogation of metaphors in Traweek and Haraway’s work in science studies) because it illuminates what for me is the critical question in the practice of political change. What craft skills can I learn, or am I prepared to learn? These crafts take time, experience and teachers to develop. Perhaps more significantly, what specific contexts of practice am I prepared to participate in, where I can actually use my craft skills in a way which draws a response from that domain of practice? I have a number of connections to contexts where I essentially have no authority and capability to make a significant impact on the political agenda - how do I conduct myself in these?

These questions ask me to reconsider the relationship between theory and practice in particular contexts. If I write academic work in English, that is because that is what I can or am doing, and being able to do it means I might not be able to do other things - or at least, I cannot necessarily do all of the political things I might wish to within the context of theory. The ‘global’ is not accessible to me through theoretical work - instead my own practices of reading and writing are constrained by limitations of language, craft and contextual understanding. Following Butler above, it has proven useful to me to evaluate my own writing and political practices sociologically, to better understand who I develop intellectual relationships with, and in which contexts my work can be effectively made use of by others. In this way, I can also evaluate who is not in the economy of my textual circulation.

This sociological perspective leads me to a level of frustration when encountering theoretical work which seeks a ‘totality’ which remains uninfluenced by the critical literature from the new social movements in ecology, peace, ethnicity, anti-colonialism, gender and sexuality that primarily identify outside classical Marxist terminology, and which have been most influential on my own intellectual and political development. This is not because such totalising categories are not useful - after all, there are international systems which must be described, and this is why I value Marx still - but because their value for the dispossessed can only be activated through resonance with specific social contexts, and the world is bigger than 19th century Europe could conceive [11].

Whenever I attend conferences such as MyCreativity which attempt to engage the question of political change, I feel very aware of the limited capacities we have to identify ‘the political’, and also the limited scope of ‘the political’ that is customary in English-speaking new media discourse. Overall, we are more comfortable talking about something ‘political, out there’ (capitalism, war, or technology) than the openness of our hearts and imaginations to other possibilities which might be excluded from the room we are in. Yet, my suggestion is that it is through our elaboration of our own subjectivity and position that we can connect to others who can help us in our work, rather than limiting our connections to those who already share our ways of making sense of the ‘world.’

So it feels more critical than ever to pull apart narrowly shared understandings of the ‘political’ and to narrate the politics of how we come to these understandings. These politics are, simply, our own stories, our ability to listen to the stories of others, to allow the stories of others to transform our own, and to understand the limits of our ability to tell, limits that are inextricable from the social/economic/cultural locations we inhabit. These limits are, of course, constructed by ‘big issues’ and ‘global themes,’ but whose big issues, from when? The geopolitics of significance in our political imaginary seems unbalanced, when I know more about the history of the political environment in Paris leading up to May 1968, than I do about that in any African nation on its path to decolonisation - let alone the Pacific region I live in today.

Exploring a more global sense of accountability for my writing and work has not been so much about travel to new physical locations, but recognising that a shift in consciousness can take place in the imagination. This is the lesson from feminist theory: the movement that is required is not of ourselves as subjects within the world, but to allow the nature of ourselves as subjects to be moved by the presence of another subject. If there is one thing I’ve learnt from working in the creative sector, it’s that the affective dimensions of our practices, where we feel ourselves changed emotionally, that build solidarity and motivate our engagement at both the practical and aesthetic level. In seeking analogues in the theoretical/philosophical domain I return to Irigaray’s fundamental understanding of the importance of openness and receptivity in the ethical subject - where we are at risk of change from the touch of the other. To write ‘I’ and ‘you’, as Irigaray does, is not to write ‘he’ and ’she’ - the subjects in the I/you question are not substitutable, or able to be easily instrumentalised in systems thinking [12]. It’s through the sociology of our imagination, perhaps, that we find the structural boundaries that are most in need of transformation in ourselves, and a possibility for a utopian politics which constitutes itself in the ethics of our encounters.

From identity-based social movements, as from craft, we learn the limits of elasticity in our thought: our ability to transform ourselves is much less than we think, and our identities, even under extreme pressure, will probably not turn themselves to something unrecognisable from who we are now. Here is where the value of the imagined ‘alternative’ system becomes less useful, or at least, we have to envisage alternatives in terms which are not available for us to invent, but are precisely constituted in our relationships with each other. This is not a disabling sensibility. In Undoing Gender, Butler considers the possibilities for transgender and intersex recognition in a binary gendered system, one where the subjects move toward and between alternative genres of life which are already overdetermined by binarisitic social discourse [13]. There is no possibility of flight from the gendered binary, and yet utopian impulses play a critical role even when there is persistent failure to achieve them:

Not only does one need the social world to be a certain way in order to lay claim to what is one’s own, but it turns out that what is one’s own is always from the start dependent on what is not one’s own, the social conditions by which autonomy is, strangely, dispossessed and undone.

In this sense, we must be undone in order to do ourselves: we must be part of a larger social fabric of existence in order to create who we are. This is surely the paradox of autonomy […] Until those social conditions are radically changed, freedom will require unfreedom, and autonomy is implicated in subjection. If the social world… must change in order for autonomy to become possible, then individual choice will prove to be dependent from the start on conditions that none of us author at will, and no individual will be able to choose outside the context of a radically altered social world. That alteration comes from an increment of acts, collective and diffuse, belonging to no single subject, and yet one effect of these alterations is to make acting like a subject possible.[14]

Notes

1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999, p.9.
2 Andrew Ross, ‘The Mental Labor Problem,’ Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000).
3 Marcel Mauss, The Gift : Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies ,London: Cohen and West, 1970.
4 Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin Press, 2004, Ch. 5.
5 Judith Butler, ‘Giving an Account of Oneself,’ diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): p.27.
6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited,’ in Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993, p.171.
7 Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 382.
8 Danny Butt, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Creative Industries,’ The Creativity, November 2006.
9 Sarah Thornton, ‘An Academic Alice in Adland: Ethnography and the Commercial World,’ Critical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1999): 61.
10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 101.
11 See, for example, Blaut’s critiques of Euro-Marxist diffusionism and the Asiatic Mode of Production. J.M. Blaut, ‘Marxism and Eurocentric Diffusionism.’ ed. Ronald Chilcote Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
12 Cecilia Sjöholm, ‘Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions’ Hypatia 15, no. 3 (2000).
13 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York: Routledge, 2004.
14 Butler, Undoing Gender, 100-01.

References

Addo, Ping Ann, Heather E. Young Leslie, and Phyllis Herda (eds), Hybrid Textiles: Pragmatic Creativity and Authentic Innovations in Pacific Cloth. Pacific Arts Vol. 3-4-5, 2007.
Blaut, J.M. ‘Marxism and Eurocentric Diffusionism.’ edited by Ronald Chilcote, 127-40. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
Butler, Judith. ‘Giving an Account of Oneself.’ diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): 22-40.
—. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Butt, Danny. ‘Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Creative Industries.’ The Creativity, November 2006, p.4.
Haraway, Donna J. ‘A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies.’ Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994): 59-71.
Haraway, Donna J. Primate Visions : Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories : A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture : How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
Mauss, Marcel, The Gift : Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen and West, 1970.
Ross, Andrew. ‘The Mental Labor Problem.’ Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 1-31.
Sjöholm, Cecilia. ‘Crossing Lovers: Luce Irigaray’s Elemental Passions ‘ Hypatia 15, no. 3 (2000): 92-112.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.
—. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
—. ‘French Feminism Revisited.’ In Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge, 1993, pp.141-71.
Thornton, Sarah. ‘An Academic Alice in Adland: Ethnography and the Commercial World.’ Critical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1999): 58-68.
Traweek, Sharon. ‘Border Crossings: Narrative Strategies in Science Studies and among Physicists in Tsukuba Science City, Japan.’ In Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

It’s a cliché that the currency of the creative sector is cosmopolitanism. The artist who sells hundreds of paintings through the commercial gallery system can be snubbed at the fancy opening, in favour of the artist with critical cachet who has just returned from exhibiting at a Biennale in Venice, Taipei or São Paulo. And while the visual arts is notable in its disavowal of the financial capital that enables it, this paradigm nevertheless exerts an influence on the more commercial strands of the creative industries. The designer and the film director, no matter how mainstream, will feel some anxiety about the “quality” of their work, and their position within an aesthetic hierarchy. At the end of the day, everyone wants to be cool.

What constitutes being cool is an ever-elusive prospect that consumes the minds of both the finest and highest-paid cultural analysts. But there’s no doubt that a key part of being cool is cosmopolitanism, of being able to transcend one’s social location to be “at home in the world”. Returning home with tales and trinkets from afar has long been a role for a particular class of the upwardly mobile. To be cool, you know what makes a good caipirinha, and are a regular at the new Vietnamese restaurant before it gets reviewed in the newspapers (by which time, you’ve found a cute new Thai-fusion joint). These displays of taste will give confidence to your collaborators and employers that your aesthetic is contemporary, in the zeitgeist.

It was while teaching in an art school that I realised how often the development of the creative cosmopolitan was based on a disidentification with one’s cultural environment. The paradigmatic art school student (like that other cosmopolitan, the academic) is one who never quite fit into their peer group while growing up, who was forced to retreat to a world of the imagination, expressing creativity from a kind of cultural exile, sending aesthetic remittances back to the homeland.

In his essay “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers”, Craig Calhoun states that most cosmopolitan versions of theory “share with traditional liberalism a thin conception of social life, commitment, and belonging”. What non-urban creative type didn’t dream, at some stage, of making it in New York, Mumbai, Osaka, Mexico City, or Milan? Of packing it all in to find the imagined community of similarly exiled others, gathered happily in urbanity and escaping the small-mindedness of their immediate environment?

I don’t mean to cheapen the cosmopolitan ideals that have been my own survival strategy in a sometimes hostile cultural environment. However, cosmopolitanism has always raised interesting contradictions for national arts policies, because it is in unavoidable tension with cultural nationalism, and the production of national culture has been the policy justification for arts funding support by the state. During the expansion of Western economies – largely built on colonisation – cosmopolitanism played an important role in opening up new markets and providing aesthetic narratives of globalisation that were recognisable at home: one saw one’s nation making it on the world stage. But during periods of economic decline, the creative cosmopolitan seems less tolerated, as they become a reminder to citizens that only a select few have the opportunity to move to where the action will be in the future.

Deep down, even ardent nationalists realise that a discussion of “culture” always exceeds the nation-state, and to closely investigate one’s own cultural history uncovers relationships to many different peoples and nations. The very existence of diverse cultures within the nation-state attest to its potential undoing, its artificiality. No surprise, then, that the discussion of culture so often raises discomfort, and that while many desire the worldliness of the cosmopolitan, they are also aware at a visceral level of their own inability to be as cosmopolitan as they might wish, due to a lack of economic, social or cultural capital. For those less able to move, the cosmopolitan represents a privileged elite who at the same time might be perceived as not sufficiently local or out of touch with the wishes of the ordinary person.

The shift of the creative sector’s “policy shelters” from cultural nationalism to creative industries seem to be at least partially in response to these problems in mandating a static, official culture. By transferring the supposed “public benefits” from the content to the economic returns, these tensions can be suppressed. “Listen taxpayer, you may not think that this film should be representing our people, but it’s making money, so who are we to judge?” After all, there are few more patriotic statements than the acquisition of wealth in the country where one lives.

But the success of an economic sector is increasingly tied to its export potential and so, in a roundabout way, the linking of culture with global capitalism only increases the problem. Even though creative industries exports might be promoted in the name of the nation’s economy, the reality is that to be a good exporter one has to know one’s market, and have experience outside of the nation. Exporting is not a vocation for the culturally insular. Perhaps for that reason, the cosmopolitan traders and creatives can be treated with suspicion: the exports of capital and culture open the gateway to potential cultural contamination, of the flows being reversed along the two-way trading streets.

This suspicion of the cosmopolitan who claims national economic development as a justification for governmental support of their sector might be well-founded. The rhetoric supporting development of informational industries like the creative sector emphasises the threat of the manufacturing sector’s migration to developing economies of cheaper labour power. But as Christopher May has noted, informational markets are highly competitive, and informational occupations are more subject to occupational ‘task migration’ than non-informational work. If Hollywood can hire creative talent working in your city, there’s a good chance they can also hire it somewhere else, and the factors structuring this decision are based on factors largely outside the control of policy.

Every country would like to believe that its unique culture and creativity will be recognised and could form the platform for a new economy. In that respect, the optimistic glow of the creative industries economic development advocate is not unlike the freshly minted fine arts graduate who believes their talent will get them a successful art career. It might happen, but you sure want to have rich parents and a good backup plan. And as the famous art “agony aunt” Mark Kostabi makes clear, in the arts, talent is only the price of entry into the game: more important are relationships that are based on how sexy and interesting you are to those with control of distribution channels.

The same is true of the creative industries. It might be possible to support development of creative sector SMEs, but how does a nation develop multinational, vertically-integrated production and distribution systems, which can make the financial decisions on where and how creative production occurs? Answering that question probably requires a different kind of research into the sector than mapping scale and growth in “hard numbers”. And to gain political traction outside the cosmopolitan classes, our creative industries advocacy will also require a more sober account of the street level socio-economic impact of a highly informationalised economy – particularly among those not enrolled in frequent-flyer programmes.

Danny Butt http ://www.dannybutt.net is a consultant in new media, culture, and development, based in New Zealand; and a partner at Suma Media Consulting.

Surfers - compared to most other white settlers who aren’t farmers - have detailed relationships with physical places and locations. “Local knowledge” refers to the insider information that surfers use to know under what conditions a particular surf break might be good, or how to surf a particular wave most effectively. While some local knowledge can be shared, a certain amount is tacit, experiential, and cannot be codified - remaining obstinately located around a particular environment and the people in it. Local Knowledge is reified in the doctrine of ‘localism’, that suggests special rights to the best waves for those who surf particular breaks regularly.

There is a class dimension at work in surfing’s localism: cosmopolitans who travel regularly see localism as small minded and against the spirit of surfing; while those who grow up around the best breaks (which tend not to be in major cities) rail against magazines, surf reports and webcams that increasingly provide information about particular surf locations, making them destinations for the “blow-ins” from somewhere else. It is true that even among the surfing community’s “locals” there are occasional, romantic nods to the “connection with the land” that Aboriginal peoples have. But in non-urban areas, settler culture commonly views indigenous culture as something existing in the past, that has “been lost”. To recognise indigenous culture as being contemporary and viable would call one’s own localness into question. So ironically, it is the urban cosmopolitans - unencumbered by non-negotiable attachments to a place - who are more open to the reality of ongoing indigenous relationships to and guardianship of land.

***

Abie and Wok Wright were born and raised in Newcastle, Australia, which is my home town. They also promote Local Knowledge - it’s the name of the hip-hop group they formed with Joel Wenitong in 2002. However, the “localness” of their knowledge is somewhat different. “Newcastle” was named after the English coal town by a British lieutenant who discovered coal while searching for escaped convicts in the early 19th Century. The Wright brothers, however, describe themselves in interviews as being from Awabakal country, a broader group of nations/peoples centred for thousands of years around Awaba, a lake also known as Lake Macquarie. While the rise of hip-hop is often characterised as a function of U.S. consumerism and inauthenticity, for Local Knowledge hip hop values articulate their anti-colonial cultural politics: keeping it real, name-checking your roots, and representing for your community all come naturally in both hip-hop and indigenous struggles for self-determination.

My experience of these competing versions of Local Knowledge leads me to reflect on the incommensurability of indigenous and settler versions of knowledge of the land, and how these echo in the activities of indigenous new media practitioners. There are at least three axes where this incommensurability is visible. These axes may also be described as “aporia” in the deconstructive sense - they are contradictory impulses that are not necessarily resolvable because they are constituted by the disjuncture between colonial and colonised cultures[i].

The first is the role of cartography and the map: the turning of land into data through surveying, mapping and renaming is the most basic function of the colonial process. In many colonial projects, the surveyor was hated and feared more than the soldier. The removal of surveying pegs, the refusal to be mapped is an important thread of anti-colonial activity from Ireland to New Zealand. This places the role of new media and its data-centricity in question. As Solomon Benjamin’s fascinating studies of land tenure in Bangalore have shown[ii], the systematisation of land information routinely results in a centralisation of control and a loss of local self-determination. Land becomes appropriable at a distance. A common theme among settler encounters with indigenous culture is to discover that the land is more full of story than we knew. The formation of objective, storyless data via, for example, GPS - even for the purposes of developing narrative media practices through ‘locative’ works - is difficult to reconcile with the non-transferable yet profoundly social relationship with land that is characteristic of indigenous epistemology.

The second is that of time. To claim affiliation to a space of land via a property right, or to activate the concept of sovereignty itself is an act of history-making. But as David Ellerman notes, this historical dimension is usually suppressed in Western economic and political theory:

Economics has focused on the transfers in the market and almost completely neglected the question of the initiation and termination of property in normal production and consumption.[iii]

Part of the silence around the initiation of property is that the actual, often grisly stories of property initiation raise questions about the legitimacy of that property. The reality of indigenous relationships to land, if connected to the history of property in specific locations, always raises an uncomfortable anteriority for a culture that views property as transferable, as James Clifford notes:

[The] historical, tangled sense of changing places doesn’t capture the identity of ancestors with a mountain, for as long as anyone remembers and plausibly far beyond that. Old myths and genealogies change, connect, and reach out, but always in relation to this enduring spatial nexus. […] Thus indigenous identities must always transcend colonial interruptions… claiming: we were here before all that, we are still here, we will make a future here.[iv]

Homi Bhabha has discussed the colonial moment as generating a “time-lag” which destabilises the ground from which a singular history or theory of place is possible. The perspective of the colonised puts both our contemporary theorisation of property and our understanding of property in times past. As Gregor McLennan puts it, “we cannot easily ‘readily reperiodise and re-name the object of enquiry” to fit our revised inclinations in the new media environment[v]. The “new” remains unhelpfully bound to different, competing histories of the past.

The third axis relates to the concept and function of knowledge itself. Historical knowledge is constantly reinterpreted and relocated to become useful for the work of the present. In settler culture knowledge is instrumental - it is useful because it can do things, here and now. In indigenous epistemologies knowledge is commonly viewed as what Maori call a taonga tuku iho, a gift from the ancestors to the present. The ultimate social good is not the transfer of knowledge as it is under modernist theories of information diffusion, nor is the maximum extraction of capital value as under capitalism. More important is who the knowledge is transferred to and whether their use of that knowledge will help maintain the entire knowledge system.

Poet and librarian Robert Sullivan notes, when considering the digitisation of cultural material, important questions for indigenous maintainers of knowledge are:

“How do we send a message that strengthens the holistic context of each cultural item and collection? How do we ensure that both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples receive the message? How do we digitize material taking into account its metaphysical as well as its digital life?”[vi]

Bridging these three contrary impulses would require “new media” where the technologically-augmented experience of location is inseparable from a philosophy of land and belonging. These are distinctive and important questions for new media practice. I don’t seek to romanticise the distinctions between indigenous and non-indigenous approaches to land and knowledge, or to suggest that indigneous knowledge systems can or should be adopted by non-indigenous cultures. For indigenous peoples, the recovery and maintenance of their cultural systems is quite simply a lot of extra work they do as part of their survival. But it is empirically the case that the cultural meaning of place and location is more sophisticated in indigenous culture than non-indigenous culture - indigenous practitioners are far more likely to be able to deploy a range of strategies for “reading the country” that emerge from a variety of world-views; and to be able to critically reflect on the effects of these understandings[vii]. Such systems make us aware that our vision for information technologies is limited by epistemological biases that we have developed experientially within colonial capitalism.

To understand some of these limitations it is instructive to look at the way new media theory is invested in settler culture and its relationships with land. In these relationships I mean more that the homologies Virginia Eubanks identified between the “mythographies” of new media development and the frontier values of “Conquest, Flexibility, Democracy, and Individuality” in the white settlers of the Western United States, though those are important[viii]. Instead I suggest that our very ways of thinking new media are inevitably invested in colonial epistemology.

For example, Lev Manovich, in his classic book The Language of New Media, identifies four distinctive properties for digital media products:

1. Discrete representation on different scales. Manovich imagines a fractal structure, where individual objects can be recombined at will into different contexts while retaining their individuality.
2. Numeric representation. Media can be described formally (mathematically or numerically), and subject to algorithmic manipulations.
3. Automation. Many media manipulations can occur automatically and human intentionality can be removed from the creative process.
4. Variability. New media objects (such as Web sites) are not something fixed once and for all but can exist in different (potentially infinite) versions. [ix]

Of course, these properties are clearly associated with the values of European modernism, but it is also interesting to consider the first two in relation to the development of “freehold title” - where divisibility and aggregation are important components of property under the industrial system. However, these first three characteristics - valorised in Manovich’s conception - are unhelpful under value systems where no person or media object is imaginable outside of specific social relationships, as these characteristics suppress the particularity of the subjective social context that produces them. As David Turnbull puts it, in a culture that prefers the abstract over the concrete (because the abstract is without annoying limitations to circulation), knowledge has to be presented as unbiased and undistorted, “without a place or knower.”[x] In a discussion of high-energy physics, Sharon Traweek describes this as “an extreme culture of objectivity; a culture of no culture, which longs passionately for a world without loose ends, without temperament, gender, nationalism, or other sources of disorder - for a world outside human space and time.”[xi]

By contrast, the new media artists and commentators who are producing the work I find most fascinating (such as those covered in the essays by Rachel O’Reilly and Candice Hopkins in this issue) create new media projects that are organised around experience-centred rather than system-centred claims to aesthetic value - they are not telling the story of an abstract “global” but are reflexively embedded in their own location and understanding. Works created by indigenous artists assert a different frame of reference for the role of the digital within their practice, highlighting the “alternative modernities” that have simultaneously existed outside European thinking, while forging political sensibilities in relation to colonisation and racial prejudice.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle notes that “the current lack of attention being paid by programmers to Indigenous communities around the world represents a missed opportunity, because our languages are eloquent, concept and process-based, and fully capable of describing various complicated technological dynamics.”[xii] The aim of the PRNMS Working Group on Place, Ground, and Practice is to bring these world-views - often relegated to the “cultural” as opposed to fully “contemporary” - into the mainstream of new media practice. For myself these “cultural futures”, as Eric Michaels terms themxiii, open new directions for critical practice among both indigenous and non-indigenous new media practitioners alike. These directions are not founded on the basis of shared values (though these are always being sought), but on what is different and distinctive. They are about encountering stories on our travels that emerge from and remain tied to specific locations, stories that - though they travel far and wide - have a home.

Notes

i I use the term ‘aporia’, from the Greek translatable as “impasse”, in the sense specifically associated with philosophical deconstruction, where an indeterminacy or gap is perceivable in the fault lines in a concept. For a definitive treatment of the aporetic effects of colonisation in philosophy, literature, and history see Spivak, G. C., A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

ii See S. Benjamin: “Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore”, Environment and Urbanization No.12: 35-56 (2000), and especially his recent work presented at the Incommunicado conference, Amsterdam, June 2005 and Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics, Delhi, January 2005.

iii D. Ellerman, “Introduction to Property Theory”, Social Science Research Network <http://ssrn.com/abstract=548142> (2004). Accessed 20th November 2004.

iv J. Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations” The Contemporary Pacific Vol. 13, No. 2, 468-492 (2001) p.482

v G. McLennan, “Sociology, Eurocentrism and Postcolonial Theory” European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 6, No.1, (2003) 69-86 p.74.

vi R. Sullivan, “Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights - A Digital Library Context” D-Lib Magazine Vol. 8, No.5, (May 2002) <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/sullivan/05sullivan.html> Accessed April 15 2005.

vii For an excellent example of this encounter between different knowledge systems, see Benterrak, K., Muecke, S. & Roe, P. 1984, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, W.A.

viii V. Eubanks, ‘The Mythography of the “New” Frontier’, <http://web.mit.edu/mit/articles/index_eubanks.html> Accessed May 2, 2002.

ix L. Manovich, The Language of New Media, (Cambrdige, Mass., MIT Press, 2001)

x D. Turnbull, Masons, trick