From DIY Design to Production

May 27, 2009 at 2:15 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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Over the past five weeks I have spoken about the new concept in the media world known as “produsage”, the rise of citizen journalism and how that is effecting the way we receive news and information, collective intelligence through portals such as Wikipedia and the pros and cons that are involved with that, and lastly the Pro/Am gap and whether or not we should be worried about the uprise of the Amateur and potential downfall of the Professional.  All of these factors now play a part in my final topic of discussion – how produsage is moving in a way that does not limit it to the online, digital realm.

As we are all aware, the internet is massively useful (and successful) in allowing information to be shared on a much larger scale than any other kind of media.  It’s the excuse kids tell their parents when they want to be allowed just a bit of extra time on the computer, it’s a basic knowledge that most jobs require you to have - to know how to email or look up information.  However, the concept of produsage is not limited to only being online.  For example, the Australian Holden car dealership (like many others) will allow a customer to look online and pick which colour they want their car to come in.  Not only that  however, Holden allows the online option of building your own car in a series of steps.  To build your car, the consumer goes through a series of steps, including choosing initially which car they want to build, which model, what engine and transmission they prefer, the colour and trim, and lastly which options and accesories they’d like to go with their new car.  The last page allows a number of options for the buyer to pick from, including getting a quote from their dealer.  This is a classic, yet often overlooked example of how produsage manifests itself in a physical way as well.  Through using the internet, the user is able to let the producer know exactly what it is they want, send the order, pay their money and drive away in their car that now suits them exactly.  This is an industry that allows online communities and users to design their products virtually.  A method a lot easier for some particular customers than going into a shop and asking questions they may not understand.

For once, these new strategies veer away from the money-focused commercial entities who make sure they have a tight grip on what the customer gets and pays for – most of the time ensuring that they receive a large profit.  For once, the producers are making an active, and obvious effort to find out what the consumer wants and negotiate from there.  Through this method, companies are able to understand and realise what they might be doing wrong in the customers eyes, and adjust themselves accordingly, all the more making sure the customer is happy and has exactly the product that they want and need.

The Pro/Am Gap: Who’s got the upper hand?

May 20, 2009 at 1:18 pm | In Uncategorized | 1 Comment
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So far I have written three blog posts, prior to this one, and all three of these posts have a certain aspect in common with the other: In the first one I talked about produsage, and discussed how in the new media world of today, there are more and more new terms being conjured up in order to more accurately describe how things are changing, and how people are doing things different.  The word “produsage” described how users are swiftly becoming the producers of content and information as well.  In my second blog, I spoke of professional journalism versus citizen journalism, which also relates directly to my third blog on Wikipedia.  It’s because of these that I’m sure there’s no surprise in the general theme of this weeks blog.  The professional and amateur argument is just another issue of citizen journalism and produsage.

It’s been recently and often argued about whether or not amateur material is a positive thing in today’s media world.  Amateur material consists of videos, photos, or anything such as blogs or comments posted on news stories that is simply to allow the general public to air their opinions or even a chance to provide a different perspective of a news story as someone actually involved, rather than a professional journalist reporting from the sidelines.  Similar to the debate about citizen journalism (actually in my opinion, almost exactly the same debate), the ability for amateurs to provide their own viewpoints or stories in their own way has received mixed response from both professional and amateur groups.  In this case, professionals are those who have gone and worked hard to get their degree, or have some kind of education in the area in discussion – which is journalism mostly.  Amateurs for example, include those who simply blog about something that is of personal interest to them, or are actual participants in a news story and are able to give their own perspective of an event.

However, each position differs slightly to the other.  Professionals (or “experts”) must at all times remain completely unbiased in their reporting.  It’s considered unethical for a journalist to present an obvious one sided account of what they are showing to the public.  However, for amateurs (or “folks”), those rules do not apply quite so much.  Amateurs are able to post comments on news articles or other blogs with their opinions on the topic in discussion, or alternatively they can create their own blogs for the purpose of getting their opinion across.  Whatever kind of content amateurs choose to create, they have a step up on professionals in terms of how they present it to their online world.

In this online world in particular, amateurs and professionals are head to head in the amount of content that is being produced group.  They are head to head because it seems almost like a competition of who can bring the best information or content to the community, the professionals who have qualifications but might have lost touch, or the comparitively inexperienced amateur who might just bring the perspective around enough to give a real personal point of view.

Wikipedia: The Ultimate Example of Collective Intelligence

May 14, 2009 at 2:14 am | In Uncategorized | 2 Comments
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I remember when I was younger, in grade two to be exact, I had to write an “essay” about the heart and my first point of reference was the old, heavy encyclopaedia’s my parents had bought somewhere along the line of my older sibling’s education.  As I heaved up the “H-I” volume to the dining room table, I flipped through the pages until I found the section where “heart” could be found, and proceeded to begin the work for my essay.  This continued on through my primary and high schooling years, however once I reached high school, my sources began turning to a different kind of “encyclopedia” as my starting point of information: Wikipedia.

For most assignments I’ve had throughout my schooling years (ever since Wikipedia began to exist), I had always used it as a starting point for research, a way to initially find out about something so I felt like I had some knowledge to carry on my research of sources that were considered more academic than Wikipedia.  It is widely known that Wikipedia is not considered a reliable academic source of information due to its easily manipulated nature.  The content that is found on Wikipedia is supplied by users themselves, leaving it susceptible to pranksters vandalising pages with false or vilifying information.  It is because of this that some people tend to automatically turn against the idea of Wikipedia and persuade users to discontinue their reliance on it. 
But is it so bad that Wikipedia is used as a grounding source of information?  Especially for students, is it such a terrible thing that if they require the basic knowledge of a topic that they may know nothing about, they turn to Wikipedia in order to assist them in beginning their research?  In actuality, a random browser might be very lucky to actually find a page in Wikipedia that has been tainted with swearing and vandalism, unless they knew to actually look for the page in Wikipedia that shows the most recently updated pages – an area which devout users take upon themselves to monitor for pranksters.

Despite the lack of academic reliability it holds, Wikipedia also has a step up on the encyclopaedia’s that we used to rely on for information.  This is the fact that Wikipedia does not cost anything to use, automatically increasing the amount of users, and that the information is constantly evolving as more and more events occur.  Traditional encyclopaedia’s did not hold nearly as much variety of information as Wikipedia does.  Nobody could go to an encyclopaedia and look up information about their favourite celebrity, or hope that a ten year old edition would hold up to date knowledge on modern medicine, just because they never got around to buying the editions that had come out since.
Wikipedia may not be an academically sound resource to use as references, and I do agree with that.  However, I don’t believe that it should be completely written off.  I believe that if Wikipedia helps students to have some idea of what they are being asked to research, why not support it?

Professional Journalism vs. Citizen Journalism

May 6, 2009 at 9:34 am | In Uncategorized | 3 Comments
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Is there a war going on between professionally credited journalists and those normal citizens who are taking it upon themselves to assist in bringing the news and current affairs to us?  There are significant differences between the two: journalists have studied and gained a degree in that field and most citizen journalists (or professional bloggers) are practising their various other professional interests elsewhere during the “working week” and write or blog for the pure enjoyment of it.  I don’t believe that there is anything wrong with this at all, however there are some (such as journalists themselves) who are wondering, and even worrying, that their own positions of importance in being the sole providers of news and current affairs is beginning to be underminded.  This is because more and more people are beginning to decide for themselves what news is important to them, and exactly what aspects of the news they either want to know about or need to know about.  For as long as journalism and the reporting of current news and events has been alive, hasn’t it been up to the journalists and their editors as to what news stories would be reported and included in the newspapers or the daily news bulletins, and which ones just “aren’t necessary” for the public to know?

As citizen journalism is becoming more and more well-known and a part of, especially online, news reporting these days, more and more people who read the news online are beginning to realise how their reading habits and articles they’re interested in is affecting what is offered as “important” to other readers.  News.com.au is probably a good example of this.  If you go onto the website, it has the headlining news, but then it has a section that is for “most popular” news stories.  This is judged by how many times readers have clicked on to view particular news stories, each click upping the rank of each story.  This isn’t so much an act of citizen journalists writing the actual stories, but this ties into the fact that what the public want to know about might not necessarily be what the journalists producing the news are actually providing.

Citizen journalism is all about the consumers of news having access all of the news stories first, and then later on deciding what they consider redundant or not.  Traditionally, as I mentioned earlier, this used to be the journalists job – to decide what information they will provide the public with.  But because lately the public are realising that they want to know everything before making a judgement on it, they’re taking it into their own hands.  People who are at the scene of stories themselves have the most convenience – they’re able to take pictures on their phones and go back home and write of their experience about it.

The question I put out to you, is if this is right?  Is it ok for normal, ordinary people who haven’t worked hard for a journalism degree to put themselves in the places of journalists?  Or, is it a good thing that finally the public are getting a voice and we may just be steering away from the biasness that the news can often hold?

Blogs, Wikipedia, YouTube and Produsage

May 6, 2009 at 1:25 am | In Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
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The New Media world seems to be in a kind of hype over new ideas that are quickly coming in to existence in the world of information and technology.  As this world changes and evolves, so do the terms and descriptive words that are used.  Terms and ideas that are traditionally known as seperate entities, such as “producer” and “user”, are suddenly becoming one single entity that has been termed as “produsers“.  This word and idea was created in order to keep up with and more accurately describe the way that we have changed and evolved our use of technology.  Users are also becoming the producers of the content that they, also among others, are using.  They are the ones who are writing the blogs and reading others posted, who are using tools such as Wikipedia, and updating pages themselves that they feel they can contribute to, who are filming and posting their own videos on YouTube, while frantically subscribing to and checking up on updates weekly, daily or hourly on videos being produced on other users and their channels.

Axel Bruns’ book ‘Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage‘ is an accurate analytical description of the meaning and connotations behind “produsage”, and is well written enough for any reader beyond a certain academic level to understand.  He describes “produsage” as simply a continuation of knowledge that is formed through users sharing information for themselves, rather than just simply consuming information delivered to them by producers.  Through collaborative communities such as these, users and consumers are able to practise their abilities at being the producer, thus becoming produsers or prosumers.  These two terms, in my belief, are extremely important in accurately describing the changes that are consistently occurring in the changing and evolving technological world.

Another way to describe or explain these terms is by stating that they are a form of “collective intelligence”.  Collective intelligence is a theory that suggests the existence of more information that is accessible all thanks to more and more creation and distribution of all kinds of content.  Collective intelligence allows users to build upon their already acquired knowledge that they use for themselves and use to distribute to others, by having more information to build their knowledge on.  This is because other users are also sharing their own knowledge, as opposed to producers being the predominant suppliers of information.  The information shared between people, is more information than a person would have on their own.

Henry Jenkins is a professor at MIT who is an avid pursuer of and leader in the advancement of Media and Cultural studies, in affiliation with the Creative Industries precinct of the Queensland Institute of Technology.  He explains the need for the creation of these new terms, and the difference between these and traditional models of production as a gradual shift.  And I agree.  This is not something completely new, and hasn’t happened overnight, leaving the way we used to do things as completely redundant or non-existant, but is something that is possibly another avenue for people to explore and use.

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