Beyond clickbait and commerce

voice in seven unique contexts was a complex task that sits within
an ethical framework for a collaborative content creation process.
This accountability rested with me as the project lead. As both I and
the project prioritised authenticity for all the stories, a pragmatic
strategy was to customise an approach that would ensure integrity
of process for each community and its story.
One tactic for getting stories filmed would have been for my team
and me to come in as outsiders and take a story, interpreting as
best we could what it was the community wanted to say. This could
be described as an ‘exogenous’ initiative’ (Gaved and Anderson
2006: 6) in which ‘ …control and ownership may be exerted by …
an external body: for example government and/or university’ (ibid).
This has the advantage of efficiency but would severely constrain
authenticity. The exogenous approach simply would not have any
place in a project that has community empowerment objectives.
My preferred methodology is to engage with people one-to-one
in order that their knowledge and points of view, processed in
dialogue, inform their purposes as a group (Williams 2009: 92-94;
Williams 2013: 146). In this way the process can make some claim
to integrity and the outcomes to have credibility. At the other end
of the scale, we could have chosen the Participatory Video (PV)
approach to content creation, which prioritises horizontal dialogue
and local ownership. The participatory ideal is argued to be ‘highly
complementary to new digital communication environments, as
it promotes horizontal and participatory models of development
rather than vertical, one-way, top down, or trickle down models’
(Tacchi 2012). In PV, ‘a collective storytelling process that uses filmmaking
as a means to positive and transformative social change’
(Plush 2015: 15), the community’s involvement is required in the
entire message-making process from the choice of topics and
issues, to the planning and production of media content (Williams
and Saifoloi 2016). The community makes the content, with 100
per cent control.
RESEARCH
PAPER
In the context of The living community project, PV would have
required much more time than was feasible. Also a case can be
made for the proposition that putting cameras in participants’
hands does not necessarily make for a participatory process:
Visual research methods do not become participatory in and of
themselves; the role of the facilitator and the intention behind
the use and implementation of visual research methods is of key
importance (Reeves 2015: 3341).
From this perspective our ‘intention behind the use and
implementation of visual research methods’ (ibid) is a key
consideration, rather than what the method is called. The project
goal determined that the lens for all decisions was collaboration,
and that the communities were key partners in co-creation.
Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016 51