Four - Citizenship, value and digital culture

Summary

Introduction

This chapter sets out to illustrate how the many different notions of creative value among our research partners play out at the level of community practice. We work through a range of digitally enabled but locally determined amateur, semi-professional, informal and activist creative processes and attempt to articulate the nature and quality of the impact they create. It argues for the significance of these impacts on some of the infrastructures of citizenship: education, representation, communication, training, employment and environment, and thus supports the development of a new dimension to the concept of cultural value – one based on ‘impact’ rather than ‘intrinsic merit’.

We begin with a brief overview of the analytical frameworks that have helped us position our evidence, namely digital gift economies, local public spheres and participatory cultures. We then move on to classifying the evidence. Our method here has been to examine the research evidence for value-making statements. These may be statements where value is understood from context as intrinsic (such as trust or confidence), or they may be more judgmental, where the statement clearly makes a positive or negative assessment of process or experience. The evidence has been drawn from interviews, focus groups and asset mapping workshops, conducted across all strands of the research project. The interviews have been coded and compared across the different sites of investigation in order to support this qualitative analysis with quantitative data. The evidence is supplemented by observation, participation in co-production and textual analysis of content produced by our project partners. All of our evidence is the outcome of co-creative processes: our time, expertise and resources have been invested in our community partners in order to strengthen their organisations and networks. We have worked with them to produce, for instance, hyperlocal newspapers, digital stories, a virtual environment for planning and a graphic novel. Our understanding of value in these processes is therefore profoundly inflected by the nature of the co-creative relationships we have enjoyed with partners whose voices we hope to represent fairly in what follows.

Framing value

The idea of value is in crisis. The 2008 banking crash re-exposed the boom and bust cycle of financial markets as a dangerous and expensive game played with imperfectly understood and poorly regulated algorithms.