Posts Tagged → produsage

in which i discover my field AND its identity crisis all at once

First, the good news.

Last week, I submitted my 42 page thesis proposal, take 2. Once I get the feedback from my committee incorporated and I scour the whole thing clean of APA atrocities, I’ll post it here for your collective input (or your gladiatorial thumping). I promise.

After submitting, I promptly packed my bags and ran off to the salt shores of Nova Scotia to present my research at the friendly and thought-provoking Social Media and Society ’13 conference (in the midst of which I ran further off to the backwoods to sleep in a shed by a creek with a bunch of banjo-loving photographers I first met online years ago…because hey, banjos and bonfires are a known remedy for the marathon aches and angst acquired during proposal journeys).

What I presented at #SMSociety13 was this: 15 minutes, 15 slides, on the ethnography I propose for my dissertation study.

I opened the presentation by asking how many in the room of perhaps close to 100 were live-tweeting the session under their own names: a fair majority raised their hands. I asked how many also had some kind of academic or institutional affiliation using those same names. Still a majority.

I said, “So…I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable…but I’M TALKING ABOUT YOU, here”.

Nobody ran away, gentle reader. These were my people: networked scholars, ready to hear about my work and engage with it publicly, in the moment: to build an ephemeral yet traceable public conversation around it.

I opened by confessing that the title of my presentation is – from the perspective of most networked scholars – a lie. The idea that there’s a Star Wars-style epic battle raging between the forces of networks and institutions is a false binary. Truth is, most of us who’ve made thinking out loud online a central part of our scholarship also have a foot in the world of conventional, institutional academic practices too…because those are the practices hiring committees recognize and the majority of us like to eat and stuff. So I’m poking fun at my own reinforcement of the binary in my choice of font, here.

But. The binary is also a very helpful expository device, especially if one’s audience is not entirely comprised of networked scholars. Networked practices are immersive, and difficult for those without experience of them to even imagine. So much of conventional scholarly practice is about citation of norms that even talking about networked practices as scholarship doesn’t compute for many folks: hence my extensive use, this last six months, of various versions of the comparative Institutions/Networks slide found in the middle of this presentation. The comparison is meant to make visible the familiar logics of conventional scholarship as well as those emerging in participatory networks.

There’s huge overlap: as I point out in slide 3, both academia and networks are reputational economies. But it’s the distinctions – the ethos and specific practices by which networked scholars build ties and reputations and conversations and leverage these into forms of capital that aren’t always financial – that interest me. My hope is that mapped against the familiar terrain of institutional practices, networked practices become intelligible and visible. Not necessarily legitimated – that’s a separate step. But the academy cannot begin to think about whether the practices of networked scholars are legitimate if it cannot even see them and the logics that drive them.

Networked practices excite me. Three years into this Ph.D and more than three years after I started exploring the idea of networks and branding out loud on my old blog, I think I finally understand what I’m doing. Not as a researcher, necessarily, and certainly not as an academic – I have a lot to learn – but as a thinker. At the end of all my roads of exploration – the common thread running through my work on brand and identities and cyborgs and MOOCs – the Rome I keep coming back to is networked practices, or what we do when we’re out here online in participatory spaces. Specifically, it’s networked practices as identity work: the ways in which networks shape the performative practices by which we shape how we are seen…and, I will argue, who we are.

Yay.

***

And then there’s the bad news.

I woke up yesterday and realized I haven’t posted here since June. Which is okay – I had a thesis proposal to write and kids home with me five weeks of the summer. But I didn’t particularly feel as if I’d fallen off the face of the earth.

Which means the very networked practices I’ve just settled on and built a proposal about are shifting. I suspect the whole political economy that underlies them is shifting…or as some would frame it, depending on their perspective, “maturing.” The “media” in social media is increasingly in ascendancy over the social…though again, the idea that the two are a binary is false. Still, this field of study I’ve just settled on? Seems about to hit an identity crisis.

The “Web 2.0” era definitions of networked participation no longer effectively describe dominant practice.

I have STELLAR timing, people.

It used to be if I went so much as a couple of weeks without a blog post, I felt transgressive. Not because my voice is any special snowflake, but because speaking – contributing – has always been the price of admission into the conversation out here in the open networks in which I’ve circulated. No matter the circles – momblogosphere, narrative writing, Edtech – the practices have been broadly the same, and broadly reciprocal. Whenever I slipped away from the habit of contributing, I tended to feel as if I owed my readership an opening act of contrition…because even if that readership was numerically small, it constituted what boyd (2010) calls a “networked public:” both a space created by networked technologies and the imagined collective emerging from the intersections of people, technologies, and practice. And our practices were based in produsage (Bruns, 2007), in establishing voice and identity within the reciprocal production/consumption cycle.

I think produsage still operates, but what counts as production or contribution is shifting…minimizing. The filtering and re-sharing of others’ work – commonly called “curation” to the endless grief of librarians and art specialists everywhere – has become the base price of admission: as more people join participatory circles, voices and identities are established via signals that take less time to both craft and to assess. Blog posts are not necessary, and in fact, unless they come under the banner of a major media consortium, may not even have cache: produsage is being sped up, these days. Reputations and identities need to be established on terms that require less investment.

They’re still relational, I maintain – we still read and assess signals from each other about credibility and status and whether we like jellybeans or potato chips – but as scale increases, recognizable reputations carry more power to signal. They are the only ones most of us can differentiate from the noise. Thus, the reversion to major media channels rather than a truly peer-to-peer production model. In this sense, I wonder whether our networked practices – our habits of use and the ways in which we connect and signal – aren’t also becoming increasingly reflective of society’s inequities, bringing more attention and more capital – financial, social, even symbolic – to those who start from a position of scale.

Or that’s what I wonder and worry about. But data collection is yet ahead of me! Stay tuned…and please, throw in. What do YOU think is up with networks and participation, these days? If you’ve been around awhile, do you see a shift?

 

what produsage is and why it matters

One of the things we’ll be talking about in my upcoming Building a Culture for Reading in a Digital Age course is, of course, not just reading but the whole digital age itself.

What is the culture of this so-called digital age? What distinguishes it from the era in which most of us grew up?

One of the major markers, I’d argue, is in the participatory capacity of digital media: the ways in which the distinction between producers of media and consumers of media begins to collapse.

We become digital, goes the argument, as we become part of the cycle and networks by which media is produced.

Facets of our identities become embedded in digital interactions and networks and practices.

I began blogging a little over six years ago, just before my elder child was born. I didn’t set out to have the experience create a shift in my identity. I didn’t even set out to become a blogger per se: I didn’t actually read blogs much, at the time.

But something changed for me in the first year after I began blogging. Other people found me, found my writing, and began to leave comments. Their comments generally linked back to blogs of their own. I started to read. Conversations developed. Relationships developed…even friendships. Some of those friendships became fleshed out by face-to-face meetings. Shared histories evolved, preserved in the amber of our blog archives. I became a consumer of the medium, as well as a producer.

Now, most people read blogs before they write one, or look at Instagram or Flickr before they begin sharing photos of their own. But it doesn’t matter which way one goes about it: once you start contributing and sharing and connecting with the work of those who connect with yours, you’re engaging in something called produsage. You’re in the network.

That capacity to join in strikes me as one of the most important distinguishing aspects – or at least potentialities – of digital media. When I watched TV as a kid, it was a one-way medium, a broadcast medium. Sure, I once wrote a fan letter to Mr. Dressup, and got a stamped reply in a CBC envelope, but the relationship between myself and the TV shows I loved was a one-to-many exchange. Mr. Dressup was the one, and I was – as far as the medium enabled our relationship – part of the many, one of a hundred thousand other largely indistinguishable kids who grew up with Casey and Finnegan.

Produsage is not broadcast.

The digital innovation and connectedness that mark social media practices like blogging, Tweeting, photo-sharing, etc, occur in what Axel Bruns (2007) calls a produsage economy, one in which creation and consumption are combined. Also referred to as prosumer exchange (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2012), this phenomenon is one of the key factors shaping social media’s relational, interdependent environment. In social media, basically, the faceless mass of the broadcast audience becomes a network of individuals.

Produsage relies on networks to collapse notions of production and consumption. The exchange is, on the surface, simple. I write posts, you read them, and vice versa. You make a YouTube video, I click the link on Twitter and leave a comment. You announce your start-up venture, consolidating information I think might be useful, and I share that with 1400 followers. Or twelve. Or 63,000. So long as we are networked via some platform and I happen to be present and catch what you share, the opportunity for that exchange exists.

The size of individuals’ networks matters less than their interconnectedness, their capacity to intersect and create reciprocal audiences…at least until a user’s popularity reaches a scale where one-to-one communications become impossible, timewise. But still, the capacity to interact with large-scale produsers or prosumers on social media platforms is there: if you engage with someone in a sustained manner and offer them value, chances are good that a relationship may develop. Figuring out what individual users consider value and will respond to, and building a profile and network from which to engage, are part of the art of social media.

Produsage matters because it offers people the opportunity to be part of the media they consume. For me personally, it’s been valuable to my development as a writer and as a student: my networks have expanded my horizons and my contacts and my opportunities on both fronts. It’s also been valuable simply to me as a person, in terms of the relationships and friendships I’ve built.

Over the past few years, however, I’ve noticed that the enthusiasm over produsage that marked the early days of social media seems to have been subsumed in the pursuit of ever-bigger audiences. Blogging – and most other social media platforms – have become increasingly monetized, populated with people and corporations interested in reaching broad audiences for business reasons. This ends up prioritizing old broadcast media-style practices, and small produsers with small voices can end up feeling drowned out by the large ones.

I see the promise of produsage being watered-down by this turn of events, and I wonder what it means for those of us interested in having a voice, even in small networks? For the uses of digital media within education? For encouraging kids to become produsers as part of reading in a digital age?

And I wonder, too, what happens to the culture of digital media if – like most media before it, printing press and radio and TV included – it ends up in the hands of a few powerful interests? Produsage offers the possibility of many-to-many communications, but the serious reconfiguration of cultural practices and power relations involved makes navigating the path to becoming a producer as well as a consumer an increasingly challenging one.

What do you think? What do you think are the barriers to produsage? The costs and benefits? Has the capacity to participate and produce as well as consume media had any resonance or impact on your life, personally or professionally?

Where do you see the roadsigns pointing us, as a culture?