In my paper I explore how production of specific cultural artifacts – images used to identify users – is conducted in an online environment in a mode that Yochai Benkler defined as commons-based peer production.

LiveJournal is one of the most popular blogging sites (with about 1.5-2m active users), though commonly regarded – for instance in the wider blogging space - as highly mundane, banal or even primitive, inhabited mainly by teenagers producing thoughtless and valueless babble. My focus is on one simple feature of the system: “user icons”, images that users choose to identify and represent themselves, around which a range of interesting and important social and cultural practices take place.

Because  the LiveJournal system does not offer ready-made icons, users have to produce them themselves. A great variety of icons exists, differing in subject matter as well as complexity and professionalism of design. I analyze a segment of users from fandom and self-titled “icon making” communities, whose icons are artistically and technically more sophisticated and who usually reuse existing, mainstream media content. In these communities, a non-financial economy has developed, involving users as producers or consumers and icons as circulating goods and “currency”. This production fits the peer production model: a) icon makers self-select for the tasks and work without any financial incentives; b) production is based upon mainstream media content (mainly images of celebrities) treated as a common resource; c) elements such as fonts, brush templates, production techniques and icons themselves are shared and reused; d) producers are motivated by a robust and varied system of incentives, built upon individual reputation and peer recognition.

Peer production of LiveJournal icons is an interesting phenomenon for several reasons. Firstly, it is a manifestation of what John Fiske calls popular culture, that is reworking and appropriation of mainstream, dominant content by an active audience. Functioning of popular culture (and with it, the possibility of a semiotic democracy) has been transformed by the relative ease with which symbolic content can be produced with digital media. In the case of LiveJournal, peer production of icons was motivated and is facilitated by the system’s architecture. Parallels can be drawn with Mizuko Ito's analysis of the audiences of Japanese commercial “media mixes” - the difference being that here not just a collective subversive imaginary, but material (although digital) artifacts are produced. Secondly, the case of icon making allows us to observe popular attitudes towards intellectual property – LiveJournal users at the same time strongly respect authorship of icons and ignore rights to commercial cultural products, treating the latter as freely available “raw resources”. Thirdly, icon making is both an unusual and specific example of the peer production model. It has developed organically, there are no signs of conscious borrowing of methods from, for instance, FLOSS production. Because of an extremely modular and granular nature of the task (the provision of icons to the community) and specific – mainly aesthetic - criteria of success, icon production is largely devoid of coordination mechanisms and relies heavily on contests for establishing icon makers' reputations.

Presence of peer production in such an environment raises issues of its political significance. Can icon making be considered a way of contesting dominant culture? Icons are an interface between the fantasy imaginary of mass media and everyday lives and identities and it remains unclear whether, through icons, users re-appropriate this imaginary, or whether it further infuses their lives. My argument that icon making can be a form of cultural struggle is based on Alexander Galloway's views on the transformation of protest in face of distributed forms of control.

Icon making proves wide applicability of the peer production model  (similar patterns of production of popular online content, such as icons, page templates or background designs can be found in other similar environments – I provide examples from Polish blogging sites as well). This suggests that it is a natural model of cultural activity, made possible by freely available “raw materials” and enabled by new digital technologies. Drawing on the thoughts of Polish thinker and anti-communist opposition leader Jacek Kuroń, I show this model fits his vision of a “global social order, based on creating the world together in love”. Treated as a social project, it can play a significant role in, for instance, Eastern European, post-communist societies.

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