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 Maly Przeglad (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...