Produsers and Produsage

It's been a while since I've posted anything about my produsage book project - the last update I gave simply consisted of some quick stats about the continuing writing process when I was still on sabbatical with the Comparative Media Studies group at MIT in Boston. Back then, for those of you keeping count, I was almost a fortnight into writing the book itself (following months of research and preparation), and had written about 150,000 words; after another few days, the complete first draft of the manuscript weighed in at a slightly frightening 190,000 words - at that time, something …

Vancouver.
We're coming towards the end of the last day here at AoIR 2007, and Kirsten Foot is the first speaker in the post-lunch session, presenting a co-authored paper on link structures and engagement practices in U.S. and U.K. fair trade networks. Fair trade movements aim to develop more equitable practices in international commerce in a variety of commodities (not just coffee), and Kirsten and her colleagues examined fair trade movements' historical roots (since the end of World War II) in a previous study; in the U.K., contrary to the U.S., there are also important relationships with government bodies (and there are a number of official 'fair trade towns' in the U.K., but only one in the U.S.). U.K. movements are now having some impact even on European Union policy, in fact. In the U.S., targets of such movements are usually corporations, by comparison.

Vancouver.
The second keynote at the AoIR 2007 conference is by MIT's Henry Jenkins, speaking on the moral economy of Web 2.0 (in a presentation coauthored with Josh Green and emerging from the work of the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT). The central principle of Web 2.0 is to embrace the power of collective intelligence, as Kevin O'Reilly has said; another take on this is that users make all the content, but corporations keep all the revenue (according to Bash.org). There's a proliferation of pronouns (you, we, us), which opens an interesting tension of individual versus collective action (is 'you' singular or plural here?). Indeed, YouTube is a meeting place of so many different communities that talking about it in general misses most of the specificities of individual uses.

Vancouver.
In the post-lunch session at AoIR 2007, I'm in a session on Second Life, which starts off with Slava Kozlov and Nicole Reinhold from Philips Design (the design division of Dutch electronics giant Philips) in the Netherlands. The begin with an introduction to the many spaces of Web 2.0, and note that many users have existences, identities, experiences in a number of these spaces, engaging with them in a playful manner which includes experimentation and exploration, role-playing, active and imaginary work, and a focus on experience and process rather than efficiency and results. How playful, in this context, is Second Life?

Vancouver.
The next session at AoIR 2007 begins with a paper by Ralph Schroeder and Mattijs den Besten on the section in the Pynchon wiki which has sprung up to collaboratively annotate Thomas Pynchon's much-anticipated novel Against the Day. There are some interesting statistics on how user participation shifted from the Pynchon mailing-list before the release of the book to the wiki once it was released; today, the wiki works as a reference source, as a tool highlighting connections to other Pynchon novels, and interpreting the content of the book. By July 2007, it had 200 contributors, 5000 entries, and contained some 400,000 words.

Vancouver.
This Friday morning at AoIR 2007 I find myself in a pedagogy session, and Gary Natriello and Anthony Cocciolo have made a start. Their interest is in the effect of Web 2.0 learning environments on student learning. PocketKnowledge is one project which they've designed, in which users maintain a high level of control of their information, a high level of community trust, and a non-authoritative organisation of information, which ideally generates a playful attitude. Users create 'pockets' of information, and get to determine organisation, access and copyrights for this material, but user-to-user comments are also possible.