Abstract
The free and open source software movements have inspired a new mode of participatory cultural production. The early hacker communities elaborated a sophisticated socio-technical system of network-enabled collaboration culminating in the GNU-Linux operating system. More recently, a range of do-it-yourself (DIY) media technologies have given any user with internet access the ability to become a producer in a variety of social fields. This has spawned an entirely new understanding of authorship and content production in film (machinima), games (player-producers), journalism (blogs), radio (podcasting) and knowledge production (Wikipedia). A number of social science epistemologies embrace ‘practice’ as a representational category to explain the relationship between structure and agency, such as Giddens' (1984) and Bourdieu's (1977) theories of structuration. Missing from most of these accounts is any engagement in practice-based research to construct knowledge about their domains. It will be shown that action research provides an important empirical method capable of extending the field of knowledge about user-led innovation. Action research provides a practice-based method to explore how social shaping occurs in the development of participatory cultural production systems.
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