Produsage Communities

Brisbane.


The final speakers for this ANZCA 2009 session are Sherre Delys and Marius Foley fromthe ABC Pool project. Sherre, its Executive Producer, comes from ABC Radio Arts, and one of the motivations for starting the site was in maintaining a space for radio arts as well as providing one for other forms of (especially collaborative) multimedia work. The overall idea was to open up public media as a conversation, to address the people formerly known as the audience. Part of this was also to partner with Creative Commons Australia and to use open source technology (Drupal is used as the platform for Pool).

Brisbane.


The next ANZCA 2009 presentation is a group affair which starts off with Nicole Matthews. This paper focusses on the use of Facebook by Deaf young people (some of whom jokingly use the term 'Facehook' for the site). There are possibilities as well as threats in young Deaf people using such rich social media sites - often, such users have been early adopters of such sites, but there also remain barriers to their use, not least because of the significance of sign language for such communities (especially for politically oriented Deaf communities).

Brisbane.


The last ANZCA 2009 session for today begins with a paper by Fiona Martin (and my laptop seems to be dying, so I'm not sure whether I'll capture all three papers successfully...). She notes the role which identity definition plays especially for teenagers, and is part of a Prix Jeunesse research project investigating how young people are using research tools to represent themselves visually, how this can be understood in terms of diversity, and how this can be related to educational television.

This has been prompted to some extent by TV producers' interest in social media, partly because they are concerned that social media will steal their audiences (even though there is no clear evidence for this). TV producers also need more information on what users are doing in social media in order to develop effective cross-media strategies, especially for educational television.

Brisbane.


The final speaker for this ANZCA 2009 session is Alison Henderson, who focusses on the organisational use of social networking sites. Such sites (Facebook, Bebo, MySpace) provide a space for the communication of 'friendship' through the creation of online profiles and friendship networks, as well as for the sharing of information, audiovisual materials, and other personal material. They provide a space for networking and for creating connections. (There is a slight difference here between social network - representing and maintaining friendship - and social networking - making new friends - in some of the literature, too.)

Brisbane.


The next speaker here at ANZCA 2009 is Sal Humphreys, presenting on the knitting Website Ravelry as a social network market. Discussions of intellectual property, distributed participation, and user-generated content have struggled to keep up with these developments: social economy is intertwined and interconnected with commercial economy, and there are serious questions about when participation becomes exploitation.

Social network markets characterise these ideas as emergent, and provide a useful basis for their theorisation. Mass media theory also fails to align effectively with these new interactive environments. HOw is power distributed, who has agency, what is the role and impact of institutions in relation to these environments?

Brisbane.


The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with Lelia Green, presenting on the practices of a small affinity group (a LAN clan) of year 11-12 students in suburban Perth. None of these young men could quantify what amount of time they spent online each day; they used the Net extensively during their non-school time, at any rate. The study focussed especially on the use of Bittorrent, which was invented in 2002 and has been especially used for sharing movie and television content. Bittorrent use becomes more effective the more users are sharing the same file, of course, and there were some 4 million users online at any one point by 2006. By February 2009, some 160 million users had downloaded Bittorrent softwares.

Hamburg.


The next speaker at the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 conference is me, speaking about produsage and appropriate approaches for business to cooperate with produsage communities. Here's the Powerpoint with audio soundtrack; audio to come as soon as possible:

Technorati : Alcatel-Lucent 2009, business, collaboration, community, pro-am, produsage, user-led

Del.icio.us : Alcatel-Lucent 2009, business, collaboration, community, pro-am, produsage, user-led

Leuven.


The final paper at EuroITV 2009 is by Liesbeth Huybrechts and Niels Hendriks. He notes the growth in user-generated content and citizen reporting of news events; increasingly, this also involves photos and videos, of course. Such user-generated content is also being explored and exploited by commercial interests, of course - ranging from projects such as the lonelygirl15 hoax to Christopher Allbritton's independently user-funded "Back to Iraq" investigative journalism blog.

Overall, at any rate, this creates opportunities for dispersed creativity that questions existing media authority. There is also a need for 'strange' methods to move beyond the mainstream/new media dichotomy, to make the familiar unusual and treat media as ready-made materials available to use in new and unfamiliar contexts. For example, experience design now needs to be approached as participatory design, and must involve a range of disciplines as well as the users themselves.

Leuven.


I'm afraid I missed out on blogging part of Alessandro Basso's presentation at EuroITV 2009 as I had to reboot my machine again - something's not quite right here. His project is an interesting exercise in datamining folksonomies: his team examined usage patterns for the Italian online PVR system VCast Faucet, which enables users to set up recordings of Italian TV programmes.

The recording periods set up (including a user-selected name for the recording, and their channel and time choices) provide rich information on what discrete television events are of interest to users, and it is possible to evaluate these also to provide future recommendations for programmes of interest - a kind of user-generated electronic programme guide. Not least, the titles given by users to the broadcast sections they choose to record can be evaluated to identify what the content of these periods is.