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Hamburg.


After the coffee break at next09 we're moving on to Andrew Keen, who's made something of a name for himself as a vocal critic of Web 2.0. He begins by responding to the previous two keynote speakers, and agrees with the idea that we're facing profound institutional change, but suggests that their analysis of wher we've come from is skewed. Industrial capitalism 1.0 created masses, created the industrial class, he says, and led to the development of strong hierarchical institutions; this system is now in demise.

Hamburg.


The next keynote speaker at next09 is Umair Haque from Havas Media Lab, who continues the theme by exploring what 'capitalism 2.0' might look like - his suggestion is that we're moving towards a new form of 'constructive capitalism', and that we need a capitalism where the costs of creative destruction are minimised, and the benefits maximised.

Today, the global growth in GDP has slowed drastically; there is a kind of 'zombieconomy' of old companies with obsolete business models which no longer manages to create value, but used to be core drivers of GDP. What this means is that corporate strategy as we know it is obsolete; instead, interaction between people is exploding, and this sits immediately at odds with the 'market are there to be dominated' approach of conventional industry.

Hamburg.


I've arrived in beautiful Hamburg, where I'll spend the next six weeks as a fellow of the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation for Communications Research and a visiting scholar at the Hans-Bredow-Institut for Media Research. The major event of these first few days here, though, is the next09 conference - a major conference for the German and European media industry which has drawn some 1300 delegates and operates this year under the title "Share Economy". I'm speaking tomorrow, on "Produsage and Business" (presenting some of the outcomes from my work in the Smart Services CRC). Should be fun, and it's held in a brilliant venue, the converted factory space Kampnagel (which reminds be a little of Toronto's Koolhaus). Videos from all of the presentations will be online soon, too!

(Crossposted from produsage.org.)

I'm briefly back in Brisbane before heading back to Europe for the next round of conferences and a good month as a visiting scholar and Alcatel-Lucent Fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. My time here at home has given me an opportunity to reflect on the conferences I attended on the last trip: WebSci '09 in Athens and Prosumer Revisited in Frankfurt.

Prosumer Revisited in particular, which I blogged about here, was an interesting experience - probably my first opportunity to reconnect in detail with the work being done in the overall area of produsage (and some way beyond it) in German academic research. A number of the keynotes at the conference were excellent, and it'll be interesting to follow some of the trajectories they explored.

Frankfurt.


The final speaker here at the Prosumer Revisited conference is Gerhard Panzer, whose interest is in the consumption of cultural goods. Such cultural consumption can be defined as the purchase and/or use of cultural works and services; these are objects that have specific embedded meanings, whose quality is realised through the process of reception. Their value is determined through attention and recognition; consumers of such objects are therefore co-producers of (the value of) cultural works.

Cultural producers, in turn, are also consumers of other cultural producers' works, and are influenced by their wider environment (competitors, financiers, publishers, audiences, etc.). This influence may have taken place against the wishes of cultural producers (where patrons or publishers altered works) or may have been specifically sought out by cultural producers (for example through live performance). Indeed, markets for cultural products are themselves also complex networks of institutions.

Frankfurt.


And we're in the last paper session at Prosumer Revisited, which is kicked off by conference chair Birgit Blättel-Mink whose interest here is in the sustainability potential of online trading using eBay. This work is part of a larger research project which examines the online used car trade in Germany. For the purposes of this project, prosuming using eBay is defined as usage of the site to buy and sell products - a more active form of usage which also leads to the more frequent trading on and trading in of products.

Frankfurt.


We're in the last keynote of the Prosumer Revisited conference, by Kerstin Rieder. She begins by giving an overview of existing research on active consumption - on the societal, organisational, and interactive level. There is currently a fundamental change in producer/consumer relationships, towards consumer labour (or towards 'the working customer', the English translation of the title of her book with Günter Voß, Der arbeitende Kunde). Kerstin notes for example that customers do work for McDonald's by collecting their rubbish and separating it into different waste categories; the value of this labour in Germany adds up to several billion Euro per year.

Frankfurt.


The next speaker at Prosumer Revisited is Patrick Linnebach, whose interest is in trust in prosumption activities. In the first place, however, it is necessary to define markets: they can be described as a group of producers closely observing each other (though not the consumers directly) - this is a form of interaction-free sociality (as competitors do not directly interact, even though they're keenly aware of each other. This is distinguished from direct interactions, for example in cooperation or in financial transactions.

Frankfurt.


From this very interesting keynote at Prosumer Revisited we move on to a presentation by Kai-Uwe Hellmann, who returns us to the bigger picture of trying to understand what this 'prosumer', what this active, productive, consumer figure actually is. He begins by considering Toffler's own work on the prosumer - he noted that the distinction between producer and consumer was a phenomenon of the industrial age, but that this distinction did not exist during preindustrial times and is disappearing again in the postindustrial age. But what does prosumer mean - getting the consumer to do the job, becoming part of the production process, producing goods and services for one's own use?