Institutional Cultural Intermediation

Abstract

Within media organizations, cultural intermediaries are the conduits between the organizational, management and production stakeholders, and the audiences wishing to participate in the co-production of cultural artefacts. They are translators of tastes, languages, norms, rules and regulatory frameworks between the organizational and audience stakeholder groups. Cultural intermediaries have historically been perceived as one of three substructures. First, cultural intermediaries have been observed as the construction of new facilitating roles between production and consumption of cultural goods (Bourdieu in A social critique of the judgement of taste. Routledge, London, 1984). Second, they are conceived as the taste agents that promote a relationship between creativity and economy (Smith Macguire and Miller 2014). Third, cultural intermediaries can be conceived as both new cultural production facilitators and economic taste agents within the cultural industries. In the context of this book, cultural intermediation takes on the role of the third substructure by both representing emerging new roles within media organizations that engage the increasingly blurred lines between cultural productions, while also incorporating the significance of the marketplace within cultural production. Further, and within public service media, cultural goods production facilitates a particular role within society insofar as content performs specific normative functions, for example, to educate, innovate and entertain. In this context, this chapter makes a case for the importance of cultural intermediation and how it is applied within the public service media sector engaging in co-creative cultural production, primarily through the efforts of online communities. This chapter then explores how online communities tend to employ heterarchy models of governance, where lead users influence the community norms and collaborative efforts. Heterarchy governance models indicate the rejection of top-down hierarchies, presenting a tension in how these spaces are governed: Is it by the hosting organization or the participants? Contradictorily, institutions operate through hierarchies as indicated through levels of management, which are in place to provide a clear focus for the organization’s goals while also facilitating the management of multiple individuals to mitigate concerns surrounding group complexity. The praxis of heterarchies and hierarchies indicates the necessity for cultural intermediation to not only manage the difference between polities, but to also ensure the interests of the stakeholders are calibrated and that information and knowledge are suitably exchanged to collaboratively produce cultural artefacts. Cultural intermediation provides the backdrop for exploring co-creation within the media organization setting, particularly when exploring participation across non-organizational platforms as the basis for the following four case studies. In doing so, this chapter also looks at the role new media technologies, specifically social media, play in the production methodology and ecology of institutional arrangements.