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Produsers and Produsage

Produsage in The Australian

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.

Habermas on the Internet (in more ways than one)

Jean has posted a YouTube video of a recent interview with philosopher Jürgen Habermas, and also links to my recent comments on Habermas's continued refusal to engage meaningfully with the Internet and other networked, decentralised, public many-to-many media and with what they may mean for the future of the public sphere. There's also the start of a little further discussion about how to situate such media within Habermas's theories. I meant to reply directly there, but my response turned out a little lengthy for a blog comment, so I'm posting it here instead.

Coming Up...

Leeds.
The past few days have been nothing but productive, even if I've taken some time off my research for the book. Instead, I've completed and/or revised a number of conference papers and other articles that are due over the next few months - clearing the decks, or indeed the desk, before I fully descend into book mode.

2007 is going to be a very productive year for me, as far as papers, articles, and other publications are concerned. I've managed to combine my stays here at Leeds University and later on at MIT in Boston with a few conferences in the UK and the U.S., respectively, and there are a number of further conferences in Australia and elsewhere as well. There's also a couple of book chapters and at least another journal article, but most those I can't say that much about yet. I have now posted some of the completed conference papers on this Website, though, so please feel free to have a look (and to comment, of course!).

Changing Models of Scholarly Discourse

Leeds.
Towards the end of March, I'll be attending the ICE 3 conference (Ideas, Cyberspace, Education) at Ross Priory on the shores of Loch Lomond, Scotland (hopefully the conference acronym won't reflect the weather there). My own paper deals with issues around teaching produsage, but in the lead-up to this small but apparently high-powered conference (Gunther Kress is a keynote speaker), one of the presenter teams has set up a blog to discuss the challenges of social software and other online publishing models for the traditional academic publishing environment. Reading one of the position statements, by Bruce Ingraham, led me to post a somewhat un-bloggy, lengthy response, which I'm also reposting here:

Narratives and Identities in a Produsage-Based Environment?

Leeds.
After my guest lecture at the University of Lincoln the other day, one of the students, David Lawson, sent me an email with a couple of very thoughtful questions. I thought I might as well answer them publicly - further comments are, as always, invited...

After thinking about your lecture and how it may relate to the work that I'm doing, I saw the connection. The new publishing mode that you propose, 'produsage', throws up the question of Does this model better fit today's society, with relation to people's attraction to media that has no set narrative trajectory? If users are finding, contributing to and distributing the news then where is the narrative structure of this medium?

'Anyone Can Edit' Rides Again

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Leeds / Lincoln / Leeds.
I'm back from a quick trip to the very pretty town of Lincoln, where I've visited my former M/C colleague turned University of Lincoln lecturer Guy Redden, to catch up and do a quick guest lecture: a very much revised version of 'Anyone Can Edit', the lecture I toured on the U.S. East Coast in late 2005. This new revision of the lecture incorporates some more of the research I'm currently undertaking for my book project From Production to Produsage, of course. After the lecture, I was also able to catch up with some more of the students at Lincoln, which was very enjoyable.

'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser (2007 revision)

'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser

2007 Revision (updated from 2005 Revision)

  • 21 February 2007, 4.30 p.m. - University of Lincoln (long version)
  • 28 February 2007, 4.30 p.m. - University of Leeds (short version)

:: Powerpoint (long version - 640kB) ::
:: Powerpoint (short version - 970kB) ::

Going Somewhere

Heathrow.
Well, the last couple of months have been pretty much write-offs as far as blogging was concerned - let's see if we can't change this. All going well, there will be a few things to report over the course of 2007, too - in addition to the house Ann and I have just bought and moved into, there are also any number of research and teaching projects lined up for the coming months.

Plane at Heathrow Right now, I find myself sitting in a departure lounge somewhere in the bowels of London Heathrow airport, having just spent the past 28 hours on flights from Brisbane via Singapore. I'm waiting to begin the last leg of my journey to Leeds, where I'll spend the next couple of months with Professor Stephen Coleman at the Institute of Communications Studies. Stephen is an expert in the area of e-democracy, and I'm interested to connect his work with those aspects of my research into produsage which play into citizen engagement and democratic participation.

Still Struggling with Producers and Consumers

My colleague Stephen Barrass from the University of Canberra sends on a link to Todd Richmond's models for producer/consumer and teacher/student relations in analog, digital, and transitional environments (via Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs blog) - including images like the following:

Transitional Media

Spreading the Memes

Over the past few years, I've created a few neologisms - terms such as 'gatewatching', 'newssharing', and of course 'produser' and 'produsage'. While some might frown on this (hi, Jean), in my view it's absolutely necessary for researchers to abandon traditional terminology when it becomes overly limiting, and obscures important new features of their objects of study. So, for example, the traditional journalistic process of gatekeeping is giving way to a new mode of gatewatching in news production; for journalists and other news commentators this is "a shift from the watchdog to the 'guidedog'" role, as Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze have put it.

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