Using Media for Social Innovation

Chapter 1

Social Innovation Media

A rocket booster has fallen from the sky in remote Western Australia. A group of Aboriginal kids who call themselves the Love Punks must now save the world from intergalactic catastrophe. NEOMAD is a ‘futuristic fantasy based on real places, real people and the world’s oldest continuing culture’ (Big hART 2015), produced by the Australian community cultural development organization, Big hART. The project, funded out of corporate social responsibility money and government grants, resulted in an interactive comic book and a documentary, both of which received critical acclaim. In late 2015, Big hART was also working with the Mawarnkarra Health Service, assisting young Aboriginal people in the same disadvantaged region to produce short films with a focus on health and culture.

EngageMedia, a not-for-profit media and technology organization that works primarily in South East Asia, is teaching video production and distribution skills to migrant rights activists. The stories emerging from this work raise awareness of people who have either chosen or been forced to leave their homes through dire financial need. EngageMedia is drawing attention to the conditions that migrant workers face including the withholding of passports by employers, exploitative practices whereby agencies neglect to inform people of their rights and the consequences of injury.

The Big Issue commenced in 1991 as a means to assist homeless people to make a living. Vendors buy the magazine and sell it for a higher fixed price, keeping the profits. John Bird and Gordon Roddick founded the magazine in the United Kingdom, with a start-up grant of 50,000 pounds from The Body Shop. The magazine is now distributed across four continents, making it the world’s most highly circulated street newspaper.

What do these three projects have in common? Each seeks to find new solutions to a seemingly intractable social problem through media technologies (the problems being Indigenous disadvantage, migrant workers’ rights and homelessness, respectively). They use deliberate strategies to achieve outcomes rather than affecting social change as an incidental outcome of their creative and symbolic work. In the process, they reposition what the media is for and how media practice happens. Each exists not for creative expression or for profits but for an identified cause. Collectively, we call these projects and others like them, ‘social innovation media’.

We opted for this term to draw attention to the two interlocking concerns at the centre of this book: the growing international visibility of ‘social innovation’ in policy and academic circles and the longstanding contribution that media makes to fulfilling of social justice goals. Social innovation media projects exist in various forms. They can result from experimental social partnerships that transcend sectorial boundaries, originate from grassroots initiatives or emerge within established media institutions such as community or Indigenous media enterprises. Sometimes they are attached to traditional social services, sometimes to local governments or state-funded cultural organizations. Social innovation media projects can operate internationally or at the local level, and can be ongoing or fade away after a defined distribution period or cycle of funding. They tend to work by seeking public attention, leveraging networks and appealing to human emotions – asking us to care, and to share.

The media has been a tool for positive change throughout history, from citizen journalism to the use of information and communication technology for development. For instance, the famous Polish educator and writer Janusz Korczak established a print media initiative called Mały Przegląd (Little Review) in Warsaw in the 1920s as a spin-off from a popular magazine. Run by and for young people, the magazine covered issues pertinent to them. Scholars of digital media, Mirek Filiciak and Piotr Toczyski (2012), describe it as a progressive effort to use media to extend civic participation and literacy to a group normally excluded from the public sphere, offering them concrete opportunities for cross-cultural debate and learning. In many ways, they argue, the programme’s intent and co-creative dynamics make it a precursor and an exemplar for today’s digital media: one that was socially innovative. Contemporary parallels perhaps include the use of digital technologies for co-producing news (citizen journalism), or digital stories for peer learning and support.

Social innovation media is now a growing field, and is impelled and enabled by other developments such as crowdfunding, co-creative media and social media. As the domain of social innovation grows, these media experiments also bring a host of problems and concerns into the social innovation space, including security and privacy concerns for the individuals and communities they seek to enlist or assist.

In this book, we draw upon various strands of media studies research and theory to unpack how media fits within that sphere of action. In doing so, we are not setting out to create a new field of media analysis or to usurp existing sub-disciplines in media and communication studies, but we do deploy existing conceptual tools that we consider to be useful to the pragmatic social innovation agenda. Along the way we use our own research, with numerous other studies, to examine various dimensions of social innovation media, including the motivations of creative workers, issues related to evaluation and the role of networks. The case studies and examples in this book share an element of experimentation and risk-taking and not all have necessarily succeeded. We explain how they go about fulfilling their mission, what practical tools and infrastructures they exploit and what they consider to be successful outcomes.

Social innovation

What is social innovation? Scholars from the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business offer this definition:

A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than exiting solutions and for which the value created accrues to society as a whole rather than private individuals.

(Phills et al. 2008: 36)

As a relatively new but increasingly visible concept in the public policy arena, social innovation is still undergoing theoretical fine-tuning. The body of literature on the topic defines social innovation as an intentional, creative activity that is oriented towards solving a concrete social problem, and producing an enduring impact as reflected in changed social practices and even whole systems (Phills et al. 2008; Murray et al. 2010; Nicholls and Murdock 2011; Franz et al. 2012). While there are many innovations that have significantly transformed people’s social practices (such as the internet), what differentiates social innovations is that they are deliberately oriented towards social outcomes rather than accidentally producing benefits as a side effect of other objectives. Social innovation is thus different from social change that ‘just happens’ (Franz et al. 2012: 4; Lapierre in Godin 2012: 33). It is also different from social movements broadly where multiple pressures align (although social innovation media is often part of social movements and can motivate and inspire movements). Another distinctive characteristic of social innovation, as mentioned in the definition above, is its emphasis on value creation for society rather than individual benefits and profit making. Social innovation therefore involves an ethical or moral dimension, based on notions of social justice and wellbeing, accompanied by the rhetoric of progress (Mulgan 2012).

In their edited book on social innovation, Nicholls and Murdock emphasize that social innovation aims ‘to address suboptimal issues in the production, availability, and consumption of public goods defined as that which is broadly of societal benefit within a particular normative and culturally contingent context’ (Nicholls and Murdock 2011: 7). The ‘suboptimal issues’ that social innovations respond to are generally problems where there is no straightforward answer or that require significant coordination by different actors, such as the failure of the modern state welfare systems, the impacts of climate change, social breakdown and so on. In attempting to find solutions, social innovation looks to social resources and the cultivation of capabilities, thus producing ‘innovations that are both social in their ends and in their means’ (Murray et al. 2010: 3).

In the area of education, a frequently cited example of early social innovation is The Open University, which began in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s to propagate quality tertiary education through flexible, off-campus delivery. Originally the vision of social activist Michael Young, the Labour Party implemented the idea with significant buy-in from the educational sector and the BBC (which broadcast Open University educational content). Today the Open University is one of the world’s largest universities, providing online education internationally. Meanwhile, Young’s legacy continues through the not-for-profit think tank The Young Foundation, which specializes in social innovation (Mulgan 2006: 147).

The Khan Academy is a more recent initiative based on a similar ethos. Khan provides free online access to education. Established by educator and entrepreneur Salman Khan in the United States in 2006, the not-for-profit organization relies on philanthropic donations, corporate contributions (e.g. from Google, Bank of America) and digital capacities to produce and distribute educational content and resources in multiple subject areas and languages to students and teachers around the world. While both examples clearly involve social entrepreneurship and strategic partnerships, recent accounts of social innovation also highlight the open and collaborative character epitomized by Khan.

As we will see in Chapter 3, despite the popularity of social innovation in policy circles, social innovation is not the same as a social or public service reform run by the state or public institutions. The purchase of the idea can be linked to some of the complicated tasks that governments face and also to the shifting of responsibilities as a consequence of the diminished role of the welfare state (Martinelli 2012). Many social innovations emerge outside of the state, in the third sector and civil society. There is also a significant interest in how businesses can contribute to solving social problems (Osburg and Schmidpeter 2013). Indeed, judging by the proliferation of social entrepreneurship and innovation guides, it seems the idea of social innovation is of interest to the corporate sector, and that there can be alignment between social and economic progress (Bates 2012: xx). Simply stated, social innovation practice includes diverse initiatives and experiments, some located within formal public service provision and others in participatory processes. It is just as likely to be driven by non-governmental, cooperative and voluntary organizations as it is by government departments or business entrepreneurs, and often involves ‘boundary crossing’ – hybrid and cross-sectorial collaboration that requires the pooling of resources (Nicholls and Murdock 2011).

While we mostly deal with creative media projects in this book and the organizations that create them, the term social innovation is sometimes used to refer to ‘old’ large-scale innovations (examples are as broad as the establishment of international charity organization the Red Cross, the public schooling and library system or the introduction of voting for women in Western democracies in the early twentieth century).

In recent years there has been an interest specifically in digital media as a means to help reform inefficient public services, protect human rights and solve complex global challenges such as climate change. Others highlight new processes associated with the contemporary dynamics of the peer-to-peer knowledge economy, with examples in citizen science (such as the Smart Citizen Kit that allows people to collect and share environmental data), or in collaborative production and consumption, including flexible goods and resources sharing (Bria et al. 2014).

Although we include processes in our definition of social innovation, we also feel it is important to distinguish between social innovations and technologies that enable social innovation. Doing so reveals the complex ways in which institutions and infrastructures can promote or constrain freedom. For instance, the Creative Commons licence provides the means for people to share and reuse creative content legally, overcoming restrictive intellectual property regimes. We would argue that Creative Commons creates conditions from which some social innovation media benefits, but it is ultimately the individuals and projects using it that create change. Similarly, we place crowdfunding in the category of infrastructures and institutions that enable social innovation media to be effective, in that it can tie real funding possibilities to campaigns, designs and products. However, on its own, crowdfunding can be used for antisocial purposes and hate crime. One such instance was revealed when, in June 2013, the crowdfunding site Kickstarter offered an apology for hosting a ‘seduction guide’ that promoted sexual violence against women, which disturbingly raised eight times what its promoter was seeking (Kickstarter 2013). Therefore, although crowdfunding is part of the conditions of social innovation (and uses digital media, marketing and social networks) we do not see it as social innovation in itself.

For the field of media, differentiating between social innovation and the conditions of social innovation is important because the once assumed global democratic space of the internet is becoming increasingly problematic in relation to human rights. The internet now resembles a ‘fragmented mosaic’ (Kelly et al. 2014: 1) where different rules, censorship, surveillance and content accessibility occur at the nation state level and online dissent can incur harsh criminal penalties. Corporate power on the internet is also consolidating. Social innovation media relies upon openness, but shifting business models and commercial imperatives are creating a system where content is routinely favoured or blocked. Although not all social innovation media projects rely on digital distribution or digital social networks, much of the activity we discuss in this book has been made possible by digital media. As more of these projects arise we need to be aware of both the opportunities and threats that accompany them. Indeed, some, such as WITNESS (see Chapter 4) are directly involved in making digital media platforms easier and safer, developing educational and technological tools so that those that wish to expose human rights violations online can do so effectively and with less personal risk.

The media and social change

All media forms have the capacity to engender positive social change. Investigative journalism and documentary, for instance, can reveal and inform the public of critical issues. Popular lifestyle TV programmes such as British Grand Designs can inspire people’s interest in sustainable design ideas or specific products or materials, in the process changing perceptions and shaping consumption (Podkalicka and Milne 2017). Media scholars have examined how different forms of media practice and entertainment relate to identity building and ‘DIY citizenship’ (Ratto and Boler 2014). Explicit attempts of nation-building through the media include public service broadcasters such as the BBC (Born 2005; Jacka 2003). Social media platforms are being described as the new sites for protest through group building (Chaudhry 2014).

While we touch upon some of these media attributes and affordances, our focus is on the more specific functions of social change through media, looking at institutions and projects designed to serve social benefit rather than commercial interests. Social innovation starts with a need that is not being met and with an idea for how it can be met (Mulgan 2011), responding to negative externalities (including when the usual responses, or usual actors, fail). When the media is deployed to meet that need, particular mechanisms come into play, including creative expression, the spreading of ideas, attention-raising, evidentiary value (witnessing) and reputation created through networks and audiences, all of which inspire cooperation towards social good. Social innovation, with its disruptive and experimental nature, will perhaps increasingly turn to the media, utilising these features to route around institutional barriers and to lever social processes. In turn this generates new formats, distribution channels, technologies and connections, repositioning the symbolic, material and human resources of the media.

Social innovation media is a discrete albeit under-examined segment of the creative economy. Since the 2000s, scholars and policy-makers have turned their attention to trying to map the creative industries, originally defined as encompassing advertising, architecture, art, antiques and crafts, design, fashion, film and video, games/leisure software and computer services, music, performing arts, publishing, television and radio (DCMS 1998; 2001). The field of creative industries research has primarily investigated how the creative sector contributes to the wealth of nations, as well as how creative innovation (including the novelty markets that leverage social and cultural capital) occurs in the process. The most recent research in the field looks at the ways in which creative industries skills and innovations are impacting on other industries as a result of digital technologies and design processes, including the manufacturing and service sectors, transforming processes and workforces along the way. While a great deal of research has looked at the commercial contribution of this wider creative economy (for instance, Flew 2012; see Chapter 5), scant attention has been paid to creative industries that are contributing to sectors whose primary goal is social benefit. There is a clear need to recognize and understand how creative innovation is used for social innovation, not just economic growth. The social services and NGO sectors are a growing part of the global economy (Mulgan 2006),