blog 9- Produsage

This article mainly talks about consumers, distributors, and producers. In today's society the producers are essentially becoming the consumers and the consumers the producers. In an Internet world, the producers, say of a web page, are considered a consumer because they utilize the website themself, thus making he or she a consumer (even if they are the one who created it). Consumers may also be a producer, for instance editors of Wikipedia. Our class will become prodcuers when we post our Wikipedia project. It's that simple to be a producer. Although the idea itself is not difficult, I feel the article was very informative and professional sounding. It seems more complicated than it really is. In produsage, everyone is a contributor with equal acess to information. The preconiditons for produage are affordances, rather are essential in order for it to work. They include, probalistic, equipoteniality, granular, and shared (in a nut shell). What do they mean? In other words, there is a community of users who contribute to solve problems. These problems are not specific but can be anything. Groups then group on these problems and the solution grows off of the contributors. In which, everyone has an equal level of participation and access of information (oppse to a hierachy). Moreover, there is distributed knowledge meaning everyone has a piece of the solution that is put together in a larger whole to solve the "puzzle". The more produsage, the better because the more solutions and input possible. These concepts relate to social networking sites in the fact that everyone has a say; it's open participation. Wikipedia as mentioned earlier, phone novels, even facebook and myspace. The famous "Tom" although created myspace therfore a "producer" participates, he has a page and sneds messages to you, posts,etc. and therefore he is a "consumer". We utilizing the myspace are "consumers" however, are also "producers" because without the people making the pages there wouldn't be a "myspace". By creating a page, you became a "producer". There are lots of social networking sites today that use this "everyone is a bee working in a bee hive" concept. In which, what everyone does matters and everyone is equal. I liked this article, it was really interesting. I never really thought about all this before but I can totally see Brun's point. I wonder what made him think of it though...hm