Conspicuous Participation in User-Led Content Creation

Frankfurt.
We move on to the next presentation at Prosumer Revisited, which is by Frank Kleemann and Christian Papsdorf, whose focus is especially on peer recognition in collaborative online content creation initiatives. Web 2.0 is based on technological innovation, but provides mainly a different approach to online collaboration; users invest a substantial amount of labour into their participation processes, but without expecting major monetary rewards from doing so. (However, some DIY auction and sales sites have also emerged, of course.)

What is common to many such sites is functionality which provides an opportunity for peer ratings, networking and feedback, and it is necessary to investigate the role of such functionality in organising the communitg and motivating participants. What form of social capital is desired by partipating users, and are we seeing here the emergence of a new leisure class?

Christian now moves through a number of examples for such Web 2.0-enhanced collaboration processes, including open source software development, open content projects (like Wikipedia), other forms of user-generated content (using both centralised and decentralised models), social commerce (for user-led product reviews, ratings, and recommendations that drive online commerce), and crowdsourcing (the outsourcing of tasks to users, including through feedback competitions, design collaborations, or the creation of micro-jobs).

What motivations for such user participation exist here? Toffler's prosumption was focussed more on personal demand; here, however, the focus is on satisfying experience, self-determination, and social recognition. Indeed, research in open source has identified intrinsic motivations that include the improvement of users' personal skills, fun, and the experience of creativity, while extrinsic factor include better employment changes, pursuing common goals, and recognition.

Expanding on the latter point: prestige can be seen as a basic human need, beyond material wealth, and it can be achieved through the acquisition of status symbols; an alternative to this is the recognition of constructive participatory acts, and this is implemented in many collaborative user communities. This is commonly done by automatically tracking, measuring, and rating the amount of access to user-generated content or the level of activity of particular users, by explicitly reviewing acts of contribution or contributors, and/or by providing more general feedback for contributions and contributors.

Such processes can be described as conspicuous prosumption, Frank says. Where previously there was a kind of conspicuous consumption, where the nouveau riche paraded their wealth by conspicuously displaying their status symbols, here we see participants in collaborative projects participating in these projects in a particularly demonstrative, conspicuous manner; such conspicuous display is addressed in the first place at the user community itself, so that the community recognises this participation. This is also a proud demonstration of participants' own content creation skills, of course - and such self-determined work is in itself a kind of luxury within the context of conventional work.

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