Produsers and Produsage

Boston.
My colleague Jean Burgess is the first presenter this morning at MiT5 - we have an all-QUT panel going this morning. She begins with a nod towards Andrew Keen's recent book The Cult of the Amateur, which provides an argument not based on a deep understanding of Web2.0, but is mainly a response to the increasing hype around Web2.0 (providing a kind of hysterical anti-hype which in itself still adds to the hype, though). Jean's own work on vernacular photography provides a more intelligent, nuanced look at some of the Web2.0 phenomena.

Boston.
We're now in the second plenary session at MiT5, which was opened by Tom Malone who began by introducing the concept of collective intelligence (and MIT is now starting a Center for Collective Intelligence). The first speaker is Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity, and he notes that one of the key questions in participatory, collective environments is now that of labour - all the many activities performed by the users in such spaces can be described as a form of labour, but in the main such labour contributes particularly to the value of the spaces within which it takes place, not so much to the fortune of those performing that labour. This, Trebor says, is a further move towards the commercialisation of social life - the very few benefit from the work of the very many, in a classic capitalist move.

Boston.
The next session I'm attending has nothing less than the task of defining what exactly we mean by 'Web2.0'. Fred Benenson and Peter B. Kaufman are making a start with their Five Theses about Creative Production in the Digital Age, and Fred also notes the importance of free software as an enabler of the Web2.0 development. He sees YouTube as the key mediator of Web2.0 styles and ideas at present, and as a site which opens up further questions of copyright, creators' rights, and other related issues.

Boston.
From the packed plenary theatre we have now moved on to the first of the smaller sessions (which is similarly full) - one of nine or ten parallel sessions (so please don't take these blog entries as entirely representative of MiT5 proper...). This session is on creative labour in a produsage environment, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer begins by "Revisiting the Case of Interactive Audiences and the User as Producer". He notes that in 1983 TIME nominated the (personal) computer as 'machine of the year' - an interesting precursor of the recent nomination of 'you' as person of the year 2006, which has perhaps redressed the balance again from technology to users.

Boston.
Today we're starting the MiT5 conference here at MIT, and we begin with a welcome by Comparative Media Studies director Henry Jenkins. He begins with a nod to fan culture as a space of media mash-ups, and plays a short excerpt from the Colbert Report, which issued a challenge to remix its content and provided a segment ready-made for remixing. Inded, Henry suggests that Colbert as a comedian was inherently made by YouTube, and he has shown strong interest in remix culture in other environments (he also issued a challenge to his viewers to introduce falsifying edits into Wikipedia, furthering his playful engagement with participatory culture).

Boston.
After a very brief few weeks in Brisbane, I'm back on the road again, for the second leg of my sabbatical. This trip takes me to Boston, where I'm a visiting scholar at MIT for the next couple of months. I'll also present at MiT5 and Creativity & Cognition 6, and when I return to Brisbane at the end of June, I'll hopefully have most of my upcoming produsage book ready to send to my publisher.

For now, though, I'm taking it easy these first few days here, dealing with my jetlag (which doesn't seem too bad right now, but we'll see). Having arrived late on Friday, I've started the weekend with the customary breakfast here in what a certain Kazakhi would call the U S and A, and have spent most of Saturday sightseeing and enjoying the very welcome springtime sunshine - at least for now, it looks like the weather will be nowhere near as ghastly as it was (at times) in Leeds. A few first snapshots are up on Flickr now - and I'm also enjoying the newish geotagging functions: nice way to explore the neighbourhood.

Leeds.
Well, as the great mind and speedy fingers that is Robert Fripp might say (or type), my suitcase is about-to-be-becoming packed; my time here at the University of Leeds is at and end, and I'm flying back to Australia tonight. I'm spending a last few hours here at the office to say my goodbyes and gather my various notes and files. Time to reflect on the past two months, too, and to tie up a few loose ends. My thanks first of all of course to Stephen Coleman and the rest of the staff at the Institute for Communications Studies for making me welcome here; I hope to stay in touch with many of them even after I've left the place.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
It's a clear but frosty morning here in Scotland - for the first time in some 14 years, I've had to scrape ice off the windshield of my car today... We've reached the last day of ICE 3, and I'll be the first speaker, presenting on the implications, for the field of education, of the move from production to produsage (full paper here). I'll try to record the talk as well, and if all works out I'll post it up here some time soon the recording is below as well as here. For now, here is my Powerpoint... I must also apologise to Debra Ferreday and Vivien Hodgson for not blogging their talk - my laptop was in use to run the presentation.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last ICE 3 speaker before lunch is Andrew Ravenscroft. He begins by discussing some of the traditional conceptualisations of cyberspace, such as the descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer, which saw cyberspace as a distinct space which one would enter; The Matrix is perhaps the most prominent visualisation of this idea (and Andrew shows a very funny Muppet version of the Matrix trailer which can be found on YouTube).

There's a nice piece by Rosemary Sorensen in the Media section of today's Weekend Australian newspaper, called "Time You Turned On the Tube", discussing the implications of the recent rise to prominence of YouTube and other user-led content sites. Rosemary spoke to me at length for this article, and I'm very happy with the way it's turned out - sometimes such articles end up being little more than mainstream media hacks' attempts to denigrate what they don't understand, but this article balances an enthusiasm for the changes being brought about by such sites with the legitimate questions of intellectual property rights, quality, and economic sustainability which can be asked of them.