Punk Capitalism

So far I have discussed the use of new media, technology and the internet as tools used in the transfer, collaboration and sharing of knowledge, made up of information, data, bits flying through fiber-optic cables or across the airwaves. New media has begun to change traditional work-flows, words printed on a page have been replaced by words visualised on a screen, but could new media change the way we produce physical goods?

Bruns (2008) ideas of produsage have already conquered the digital world, but it appears the same ideas are being adapted and are steadily making inroads on the physical world too.

Are there natural limits to the applicability of the produsage approach; in particular, perhaps, is it necessarily confined to the informational, intangible, digital realm, or can it be translated also to the produsage of physical products?

We now live in a world where anything can be digitised and represented in a digital form,  building plans, electronic schmatics, blueprints and even the human genome can all be represented digitally, and more often than not, where something can be represented digitally, it can be recreated.

The ideology behing mass collaboration, collective intelligence and open source ethics are being applied to the design and production of tangable goods, physical objects for use in the real world, not just data existing in cyberspace. Armed with plans, designs and specifications assembled collaboritavely online, users are taking DIY far beyond home repairs and car maintenance, into almost every industry and facet of modern life. These ideas cause enormous disruptions to traditional production and manufacturing processes, allowing consumers and (prod)users to all but cut corporate conglomerates out of the process.

Bruns suggests that “Pro-Ams are creating new, distributed organizational models that will be innovative, adaptive and low cost”.

In his book The Pirate’s Dilemma – How youth culture reinvented capitalism Matt Mason describes this application of the principles of produsage to tangable, real life goods as “Punk Capitalism”.

D.I.Y. is about becoming more independent. The more independent we become as a society, the more industries become decentralized. Indeed, we may reach a point where there is no “industry” left at all, in its place many vibrant local markets producing value, but not controlled exclusively by big players. This is already happening to the music industry, and it’s starting to happen with anything that can be transmitted electronically. But soon this may also happen in the world of physical goods.

Today’s music industry would be almost unrecognisable to the music industry heavyweights of just 10 or 15 years ago, perhaps it’s time producers of cars, clothes, houses and furniture reconsidered their future too.

Professionals vs. Amateurs in Citizen Journalism

This week’s discussion on professionals vs. amateurs (Pro-am) sits very comfortably next to one of my own favorite topics of debate – citizen journalism. The era of the citizen journalist is well and truly upon us. In today’s media environment, where news it broken 140 characters at a time, does it really matter if reporter is a trained journalist or simply an observer.

With modern technology, any major disaster or news event can easily be reported be dozens of regular citizens across multiple platforms and  reaching mass audiences within minutes. First hand accounts can be sent via SMS to friends, family and sent to social networking sites like Twitter, video and audio can be uploaded to Flickr and YouTube from mobile phones and posted to social news aggregators like Digg. Meanwhile bloggers have started compiling the facts and posting reports, while others have begun work on a Wikipedia article, all before a single qualified journalist or camera crew arrives on the scene.

So is there any difference between a report filed by a bona fide reporter and a citizen journalist? Well it turns out there are a few. Professional journalists are trained to be objective, unbiased and report both sides of any story, they are also bound by professional codes of ethics and other industry guidelines. But none of this means that a report by a citizen journalist will be any less accurate or insightful.

It all comes down to credibility and trust. While journalists are known to make mistakes from time to time, they have for the most part, earned a high degree of public trust in reporting the news. Citizen journalism on the other hand is relatively new, highly unregulated and open to virtually anyone with a PC or mobile phone. There are obviously some trust issues that need to be overcome for citizen journalists as a group, but also as individuals.

Bruns (2008) suggests that rather than relying on traditional rules for defining what’s credible and what isn’t and who we should call an “expert” or “professional”, we should instead rely on the trust and common sense of the community involved.

Instead of the development of strict and detailed rules for respecting experts, perhaps it is instead more appropriate to retain a degree of trust in the common sense of the community and its efforts at self policing and other contributor socialisation.

Communities across the world are slowly learning who they can trust and who they can’t when it comes to citizen journalists. Obviously any learning process involves making mistakes. When it comes to citizen journalism we’ve been duped before, and it will certainly happen again.

Once again new media platforms reign supreme over traditional work-flow models. “Power in numbers” and “Collective Intelligence” are gaining authority over traditional corporate based work-flows. The fact that people have adapted, and learned to be skeptical about citizen-reported breaking news is a good thing, it turns out, to vet new stories and contributors.

While a university degree or fancy business title may give a “professional” instant credibility in their chosen field, it is still possible for “amateurs” with little or no officially recognised training, but lots of practical experience and community involvement to be highly recognised in their field.

Wikipedia

I would like to address a number of posts by members the KCB201 class who have claimed that Wikipedia is biased and unreliable simply because, as the Wikipedia slogan states, “anyone can edit”. These claims of bias and unreliability are not new, and are the two main criticisms Wikipedia has faced since the site’s launch in 2001. As Bruns (2008) suggests, Wikipedia has attempted to resolve these issues through its own guidelines and policies, notably policies that state that articles must maintain both a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and contain No Original Research (NOR).

Each Wikipedia article and other content must be written from a neutral point of view, by representing all significant views on each topic fairly, proportionately, and without bias.

While striving for fairness and balance may be the intention of the the wider Wikipedia community, and could possibly be achieved by a large number of editors of varying opinions on a topic through the use of the site’s discussion pages , I can easily see how a small article with few editors could contain a large amount of bias. As a journalist I have been trained to find the objective and balanced viewpoint on every situation, and to create an account of events that is free from subjectivity or bias, however I have also begun to question if a situation can every be reported with no bias at all. Can a publication every be truly unbiased, whetherit has been written by one person or collectively produced by one thousand people. It follows then, that claims of bias apply not only to Wikipedia articles, but to all reference material, including material cited in Wikipedia articles.

Wikipedia does not publish original thought: all material in Wikipedia must be attributable to a reliable, published source.

This policy addresses claims that Wikipedia may contain inaccurate or unreliable information by ruling that all facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas must be attributed to a reliable source such as a published book or journal, however there is no guarantee that published sources are necessarily up to date or accurate either. It seems to me like Wikipedia is simply trying to pass the blame.

But Wikipedia may not be as inaccurate as you may think. Tapscott and Williams (2008) state that in an analysis of 42 sciences entries, Wikipedia’s articles contained four errors for every three found in Encyclopedia Britannica. While this may seem like significantly more at first glance, an error in Wikipedia can be corrected in a number of seconds, while an error in Britannica will exist forever.

All criticisms aside, it is aparant that Wikipedia’s success speaks for itself. There is a reason people contribute to Wikipedia, and a reason many people turn to Wikipedia first when seeking information.

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang.

Tapscott, D. & A.D. Williams. 2008. Wikinomics: Expanded Edition. New York: Penguin Group.

Four practical applications of Citizen Journalism

As a journalism student I have a keen interest in the way new technologies are changing the journalism landscape, especially the how they allow ordinary “citizens” to interact with the news process, a.k.a, “citizen journalism”.
Bowman and Willis (in Bruns 2008) offer a definition of citizen journalism as:

“The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information, [providing] relevant information that a democracy requires”

The idea gets thrown around a lot in academic writing, but in what ways does citizen journalism practically manifest itself for the ordinary “citizen”. Here are 4 of the cost common practices of citizen journalism I have found online:

1. Contributing media to traditional news organisations

Mainstream news organisations have discovered they can mobilise their audience as in-field photographers and tipsters by requesting readers email and sms in breaking news tips, photos and video. While stories are still vetted and written by professional journalists, citizens still play an important role in the collection of news and related media. Most news sites encourage users to post news tips and video, and sites like iReport actively encourage users to post news stories. This type of citizen journalism has played a clear role in the reporting of major news events such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the London underground bombings.

2. Citizen run news sites

As well as contributing to mainstream news sites, citizen journalists have set up a multitude of citizen-run news projects around the world. The Independent Media Centre (IMC, or IndyMedia) is a global participatory journalism project founded on the principles of open publishing. This means that IMCs are open to anyone to report and publish a story. On the other hand, OhMyNews, founded in South Korea is a also a citizen run news site, however it maintains a paid editorial staff to ensure stories meet a certain quality standard. OhMyNews even publishes its own style guidelines for reporters.

3. Blogs

The internet and open publishing platforms like blogs allow anyone to easily publish content online. Blogs have quickly become a major outlet for citizens to publish news and other content cheaply and instantly, in a way not possible before the mainstread adoption of the internet. Blogging has become a vital outlet for citizens to publish news in parts of the world with strict media censorship, such as China and Fiji. Mainstream news organisations have cottoned on to the idea too, with blogs taking the place of the traditional opinion collumn in the new digital media environment.

4.   Social news sharing

Social news sharing and bookmarking services like Digg, Delicious, Technorati and Stumbleupon have become an intricate part of the citizen journalism process. These services add a new layer of democracy to the online publishing process by shifting the editorial power away from major news organisations and placing all editorial control in the hands of the sites users. These services allow users to choose which stories are important to them, rather than relying on the mainstream media to set the agenda, resulting in widespread coverage of stories that would have been shunned by the traditional media.

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production To Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

Produsage – Does it fit?

Axel Bruns suggests that the role of the traditional consumer and producer have long since faded in a post-industrial economy, and that these roles have merged into a new breed of hybrid produser. Bruns suggests that produsage is “a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities,” and will “affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy” . The idea is that in the digital age, consumers, or users play an active role in the creation, or production of information, knowledge and creative works. Bruns suggests that producers, distributors, and consumers no longer exist in their tradition sense, replaced by “a seemingly endless string of users acting incrementally as content producers by gradually extending and improving the information present in the information commons, the value chain begins and ends (but only temporarily, ready for further development) with content.” Bruns illustrates this idea of produser lead content creation in the diagram below.

Obviously this model of produsage does not fit to a traditional media environment, where an obvious producer-consumer relationship exists, separated by the one way broadcast of radio waves. However the internet, on the other hand, consists a multi-directional network of peers, rather than a broadcast system, and Bruns’ ideas of produsage apply specifically to a new media environment where the feedback loop is constantly open, and users have the ability to expand, edit, remix and redistribute content at their will. With this in mind, Bruns’ model of produsage seems to fit well in the new media environment, however I am not convinced it represents a “best fit”, here’s why:

The idea of produsage is unbalanced. By replacing all consumers and producers with produsers, Bruns seems to have assumed that all users produce content at the same rate, or in the same amounts as they consume it. In the diagram above, the arrow representing the content consumed is the same size as the content produced. It’s clear to see that this is not the case in a real world environment.

Some users consume far more content then they participate in producing, while other users are still the primary producers of content which is then distributed to a mass audience. While the internet and new media has begun to blur the middle ground, it is apparent that some consume far more than they produce, and not everyone produces an equal share. I instead propose the following model:

At the end of the day some people will still produce more than others, primary producers, and some will still consumer more than others, primary consumers. As long as there are more views on YouTube videos than the number of videos uploaded, more blog readers than blog writers, more people accessing Wikipedia for information than contributing and more comment readers than comments the idea of produsage will not fit all users. Sure, the line has begun to blur, but a blurring does not mean that the line has washed out completely; there are still distinctions to be made between the levels of production and consumptions of different users.