Produsers and Produsage

Vienna.
My paper is in the next session at EDEM 2009, but we start with a paper by another Australian-based researcher, Mary Griffiths. She begins by highlighing the extremely broad range of digital media channels which are now available to users (in Australia and elsewhere) to engage with each other and with various organisations and institutions. There's only limited research at this point which provides a full picture of this digital landscape, and the visions which emerge of it so far remain quite utopian.

Web 2.0 cuts across these different areas, and there is a great deal of hope for social media, societal change, and e-democracy developments. But the difficulty is that in business and the corporate world there is an uncomplicated sense of this fragmentary landscape; the diverging agendas and the diverse literacies of users within this environment are not fully recognised. It's a substantial distance from Web 1.0 to full online engagement and content creation; indeed, not all these literacies may matter to citizens engaging with one another in political deliberation.

Vienna.
From Transforming Audiences in London I've now made my way to a surprisingly sunny Vienna, where the 2009 Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM) is about to begin. We begin with an opening speech by Roland Traunmüller, outlining the challenges ahead for e-Governance, and he notes that IT and governance concepts have changed substantially over the past few decades. There has been some academic interest in e-governance of some form or another for the past three decades or so, ever since computer technology became more mainstream, ad the International Federaton of Computer Societies has been examining the opportunities since 1990.

London.
The penultimate speaker at Transforming Audiences is Emiliana de Blasio, who shifts our attention to Italy and begins by questioning the optimistic rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0. Political participation using social media depends on three steps: access, interaction, and participation. In this, access 1.0 is simply access to information, access 1.1 is access to relatively open mass media; and only access 2.0 is an opportunity to have one's own produced content published or broadcast. This requires the skills to receive content and provide feedback, and takes place in the context of a networked individualism which replaces other types of social formations.

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Lisa Farrance, whose interest is in alternative media practices; she distinguishes between a range of uses from the simple (publicity, organisation within and between social movements, and uncensored and counter-information) through to greater ambitions of giving a voice to the voiceless and achieving democratic and political renewal.

Theory, in this context, can aid practice: it should position itself as the growing point of practice. Useful theory may include a study of political eonomic contexts and constraints, and a return to early Marxism in pursuit of a new materialism. Lisa now takes us through a number of key concepts in this context.

London.
The next presenter at Transforming Audiences is Stine Lomborg, examining blogging as a form of collaborative produsage. She focussed on three personal Danish blogs, and examined six months' worth of posts and comments for this study, as well as interviewing the authors. The produsage angle of this study examines blog-based communication as an ongoing collaborative development of a shared text; this is combined with socio-cognitive reception theory in which genre is seen as a socially distributed cognitive architecture. The texts themselves were studied using conversation analysis.

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Christian Christensen, who begins by highlighting the emergence of what he calls the 'replay-relay audience'. One example here is the discussion between Daily Show host Jon Stewart and MSNBC financial host Jim Cramer about the quality of MSNBC's financial coverage; another is Stephen Colbert's White House Correspondents' Association dinner speech in 2006, which tore into both the Bush administration and the mainstream media for their coverage of Bush's administration; yet another is Jon Stewart's 2004 appearance on CNN's Crossfire, which ultimately led to the demise of that show after Stewart fatally critiqued the show's format and its effect on journalism and public discourse in America.

London.
The first day at Transforming Audiences finishes with a keynote by Natalie Fenton and Nick Couldry. Natalie points to creativity, knowledge, and participation as the three central themes of this conference - in that context, what does it mean to be political in the new media age? What are the principles for the way we conceived of and carry out our citizenship? How do we engage in political life?

There are multiple conflicting views on the impact of social media on political participation, of course - a sense that social media break down public/private barriers and lead to new forms of participation, and those who characterise such participation as an incessant meaningless conversation which never leads anywhere. Taken by themselves, both are likely to be wrong - so what is the real story here?

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Uwe Hasebrink from the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, focussing on a large study of young people's social Web use in Germany. Social Web use is a crucial tool in identity formation and expression today, of course, as well as in the managing and maintaining of relationships. The study, which Uwe conducted with his wife Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink, involved an analysis of relevant Web platforms, a qualitative study with young users, and representative telephone interviews with such users.

London.
The final speaker in this Transforming Audiences session is Floriana Bernardi; her focus is on the role of the audience for Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, a book on the mafia which was published in Italy 2006 and has been translated into some 40 languages (possibly the first such books to reach a large international audience). Gomorrah focusses on the banal everyday business of the mafia, rather than glorifying (or emotionally denouncing) the criminal life. It confronts the omertà - the resigned silence which prevents citizens from speaking out against the influence of the mafia on everyday Italian life.

London.
Jo Pierson and An Jacobs are up next at Transforming Audiences; their focus is on user innovation in creating new sociotechnical systems. Technology is layered, ranging from the application layer through presentation, session, transport, network, and data link layers to the physical layer; user innovation takes place to date mainly at the top of this layering, not in the lower levels. How can this be changed, and what tools are required to achieve it? How can the user be placed in control of the creative destruction which innovation can bring about - and indeed, what kind of innovation are we talking about?