You are here

Produsage Communities

Yelp as a Site for Political Consumption?

Seattle.
Kathleen Kuehn is the next speaker at AoIR 2011; her paper is inspired by protest events against the apparently racist attitudes of the operators a local swimming pool which were conducted with the help of the local services consumer review site Yelp. Yelp provides a space for user-created reviews ; how is such consumer-reviewing perceived by users?

This work uses Alvin Toffler’s prosumption concept; consumer reviewing of local products and services can be described as a form of prosumption (and echoing the alternative explanation of ‘prosumption’, participating users may also be thought of as professional consumers). Ideas of consumer-citizenship – consumption as an expression of political will – also come into play here, of course.

Information Filtering in Social Networks

Seattle.
OK, I walked in a little late to the first AoIR 2011 presentation this morning, by Michele Willson, whose focus is on information filtering. There are different approaches to such filtering: at the user or at the service end, initiated by users or by the system, cognitive or social filtering, and based on knowledge about the user’s interests which may be acquired through a range of different mechanisms.

Different stakeholders in the process, and in developing these processes, will have a range of different agendas and interests – developers have specific algorithms they may wish to explore, funding bodies and sources have specific commercial or other imperatives, users and their friends are interested in particular forms of online activity (content sharing, phatic communication, etc.), and the social network providers overall are interested in increasing participant numbers and boost the stickiness of the platform.

Multi-Level, Multi-Method Analysis of Communication Processes

Seattle.
The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2011 is Amoshaun Toft, who is looking at three cases of multilevel communication networks: action against homelessness, a direct action tent city for homeless people, and the building of a new jail which would be likely to hold many homeless locked up for minor misdemeanours.

Politics is the struggle over meaning, and such meaning is relational and contingent. People contest meaning through political action by connecting discourses. Issues organise social action, in specific discursive fields, in particular organisational fields, or through issue industries focussed on given issue areas.

How MoveOn-Style Advocacy Works

Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Dave Karpf, examining the MoveOn effect. There are two robust findings around Internet politics in the U.S.: the idea of organising without organisations is well established, and the re-emergence of political elites in mass activities online. A third level which has been largely ignored, however, is the organisational level of politics: organising with different organisations.

The labour protests in Wisconsin provide an interesting example for this. What happened here was a rapid cooperation by Net-root organisations, from MoveOn through political blogs and fundraising sites to community Websites. All of them are Internet organisations, and different from legacy advocacy organisations. Three ideal types exist here: a hub-and-spokes model (like MoveOn, orchestrated by a small central staff), a neo-federated model (coordinating strong affiliate groups around the country), and online communities of interest (with an online membership coming together through the site itself).

Creating and Marketing Transmedia Stories

Seattle.
The first keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Mike Monello (who was also the producer of the Blair Witch Project). He begins by noting the importance of team collaboration, and says that Blair Witch emerged as a completely organic process involving its principal creators. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be completely improvised, and so created a deep mythology for the Blair Witch story; some of the (very realistic) clips recorded for the film were then broadcast on TV, and audiences were encouraged to go to the online community Split Screen to discuss whether what they’d seen was real.

The massive success of this online discussion then led to the setting-up of the Blair Witch Project Website, which contained the underlying mythology – fans speculated on the message boards and developed theories of what was going on, and the filmmakers themselves almost accidentally became involved in the story as filmmakers, therefore. While there was nothing on the site to identify the story as fiction, there was never any intention to mislead – and the site linked to information about the production process, too.

Using Social Media for Social Innovation

Vienna.
The final speaker in this session at Challenge Social Innovation is Ricard Ruiz de Querol, who begins by noting the major social challenges we currently face; in addition, we also have some very major social media platforms – his interest is in the overlap and connection between them. A third element is the realm of social innovation, which intersects both areas.

Social media is an umbrella term for a wide range of possible tools, platforms, and practices; even individual platforms like Twitter sustain a universe of applications and practices. Where do we start? How can and do developments – social innovations, even – in one corner of that universe gain speed and scale? How can social entrepreneurship gain a Microsoft or Google to support it (without the negative consequences that may come with such an embrace)?

A Manifesto for Social Innovation Using Social Media

Vienna.
The next speakers at Challenge Social Innovation are Christoph Kaletka, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, and Bastian Pelka, who are presenting nothing short of a manifesto for social media and social innovation. Social media, Bastian starts, are not a technology, but a specific form of using existing technology: a social innovation. Social media is an umbrella term for a rapidly growing set of practices and platforms, which are based around the core innovation of user-generated content as a new social routine.

Social media, then, describe a new communication pattern (a paradigm shift in communication), which replaces finished communicative processes with always-unfinished, collaboratively developed, incrementally evolving outcomes that are developed through bottom-up, collaborative, and distributed processes. Such shifts are in line with the overall shift from the industrial to the knowledge society; in the process, knowledge and content production processes are decentralised. Not least, this changes conventional ideas of ‘quality’, of course.

Commercial Approaches to User Collaboration

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Heidemarie Hanekop, whose focus is on user collaboration with companies. First, of course, such collaborations are importantly enabled by the Web, which makes a broad base of new knowledge publicly available and thereby enables new forms of information sharing and collaboration. This can happen with and without the help of commercial interests – from Wikipedia and open source to Facebook and YouTube.

Such new collaborative spaces are clearly attractive to users, which has also led to the involvement of companies in this space. But user collaboration stands in sharp contrast to the hierarchical organisation of companies and markets, so how can this work? What are the mechanisms that enable user collaboration on a large scale? How do companies adapt these mechanisms for their own purposes?

User-Led Innovation: The Case of Crytek

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Birgit Blättel-Mink, who focusses on the case of German games developer Crytek (which developed Far Cry, Crysis, and other games), based in Frankfurt, which engages with its users as innovators. The company has some 600 employees distributed across five international studios and two distribution centres; its core product is the Cry games engine.

Crytek’s user community includes casual gamers (on social networks), hardcore gamers (in the Crytek Mycrisis community and other online communities), and modders who generate modified games modules and take part in various specialist communities. Casual gamers are engaged with for marketing and promotion, hardcore gamers participate in quality control, bug reports, and bug fixing, and modders drive user-led innovation.

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Produsage Communities