WE NEED JUST A BIT OF FANTASY

Thanks to new media we can expand our knowledge,on Internet we can find everything,young people with a great originality could be found fortune and wealth as well. This the case of the website “ The Million Dollar Homepage”. The Million Dollar Homepage is a website conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for his university education. The home page consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; the image-based links on it were sold for $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks. The purchasers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be displayed on them, a URL to which the images were linked, and a slogan to be displayed when hovering a cursor over the link. The aim of the website was to sell all of the pixels in the image, thus generating a million dollars of income for the creator. The Wall Street Journal has commented that the site inspired other websites that sell pixels. Launched on 26 August 2005, the website became an Internet phenomenon. The Alex ranking of web traffic peaked at around 127; as of 18 December 2009, it is 35,983. On 1 January 2006, the final 1,000 pixels were put up for auction on eBay. The auction closed on 11 January with a winning bid of $38,100 that brought the final tally to $1,037,100 in gross income. During the January 2006 auction, the website was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack and ransom demand, which left it inaccessible to visitors for a week while its security system was upgraded. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Wiltshire Constabulary investigated the attack and extortion attempt.

"From the outset I knew the idea had potential, but it was one of those things that could have gone either way. My thinking was I had nothing to lose (apart from the 50 Euros or so it cost to register the domain and setup the hosting). I knew that the idea was quirky enough to create interest ... The Internet is a very powerful medium."

Alex Tew, 22 February 2006.

There are other examples that we could cite, not so much in wealth but to exploit its own originality and attention to new media in their favor. Perhaps the best example we can cite is the video "Where The Hell Is Matt?" . Matt Harding has filmed a video in a few months has been seen by millions of people and is famous enough to merit an article in The New York Times. Matt one day decided to give up work, commitment, comfort, in short, everything to go around the world. Matt Harding, has done something more, however, decided to make it public on the internet its a little celebratory ritual which originated tribal dance. Matt has not underestimate the fact that the dance even though dilapidated and not comparable to any style is contagious as yawns. The dance, as they know the dance clubs around the world and even the Yanomami, a society of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists living in the north of the Amazon rainforest, is a highly social activity.Matt has created a small video originally published on Vimeo, and then on YouTube. Some well-informed music video was commissioned by the same Matt. In addition, Matt was also found a sponsor Stride, a company that makes chewing gum.Summing up what we have? A good example of user-generated content, which uses a Social Media is able in order to make a viral video. The viral video was spotted by a brand that has finally decided to follow in the footsteps of Matt sponsoring the trip. So we can say that:

a) the User Generated Content is alive and well and can produce quality results especially if you have some form of cooperation between the authors as has happened in this case.

b) The Socia Media are essential for viral videos. This blog is a social media, less powerful than others, but still a Social Media.

c) The most effective viral videos are full of spontaneous passion. Building a table a viral video is very difficult because you need a good dose of creativity and spontaneity.

d) Brand intelligent people know that we must monitor the network for phenomena funny,interesting and that may in any way exploit, appreciate and understand. Stride has not made the video but has only put his hat on the journey of Matt before they do others. What is the effect of this choice? I did not even know existed Stride brand of tires and I think even you. Now you know. Pierre Levy in the "Collective Intelligence" said that when we are on-line, we want to learn, play and communicate with one another rather than to make money. Above all, we want to participate within the "collective intelligence" and i think this is the case of Matt.

And now that the dance begin!

   

 The World Wide Web is an inexhaustible source of discoveries,we can find anything and it is thanks to this incredible media that people could create stories true or false and see how people believe and help to expand these stories in the web. An example of this could be the story of John Titor. I knew about this argument thanks to online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. Vannevar Bush in "As May We Think" believed people would create links between related articles, thus mapping the thought process and path of each user and saving it for others to experience. Wikipedia is one example of how this vision has been realized, allowing users to link words to other related topics, while browser user history maps the trails of the various possible paths of interaction.

"Time Traveller" ... in a forum or a chat might well seem a common nickname of a fan of science fiction and time travel. Actually this nickname with a man named John Titor came in precisely on November 2, 2000, in a U.S. forum claiming to be a time traveler from the year 2036 and coming back in time to the distant 1975 in order to retrieve an IBM 5100. He said that this particular computer was important because of special skills unknown to all but the same engineers at IBM. In practice it would be able to translate languages, UNIX, APL and BASIC with each other. This particular model would be indispensable to the people of his time since around 2036, the year of its origin, a bug should hit the UNIX rendering useless many machines working with the old IBM technology. Of course no one believed him initially believing that his were just the ravings of a madman or a prankster who only wanted to joke a bit . But as the days passed, noting that discussions were supported by Titor quite interesting and detailed above, many were convinced that this mysterious person came in earnest from 2036. As happens in such cases, however, discussions of John Titor divided public opinion into two distinct and separate, we call them "believers" and "non-believers", if possible, and skeptics.

Who of us has not dreamed of traveling through time? However, discussions of Titor were not devoid of logic or scientific rigor, I would say that was very plausible. Before you take one side or the other should analyze different points on John Titor. First, the name John Titor is, according to his statements, his real name. He says he was born in Florida, exactly in the city of Tampa, in 1998. But after careful research demonstrates that Titor was living in Tampa at the time and this detail might lead one to believe that it was only a joke. Many other details instead fueled the idea that his story was true. One of these details is the precise and accurate description of how his time machine, that Titor called C204,course description with photo and leave on the same projects Titor and deemed authentic by several experts.

He said that the means used to mount the time machine was a '66 Corvette, I retrieved a photo of that model to compare with the one representing the laser beam from left Titorand matches. John Titor said that within 18 months the CERN ( European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva will undertake some studies on electromagnetic fields and also the holes on gravitational blacks, experiments conducted to assess the possibility of faster transport. While some of these experiments, he said, scientists accidentally create a small black hole. Differently than you might imagine, this small black hole will not absorb all the matter in its vicinity (in this case the entire solar system) but on the contrary, scientists at CERN using an electromagnetic field ( in the center there is the largest particle accelerator in the world) will help curb the size and, over time, creating holes blacks voluntarily, and even larger sizes. This will make it possible to time travel.

"Project of John Titor's time machine"

 At the end of 2001, after about a year from what he had said Titor, CERN officially confirmed the possibility of creating artificially  of mini blacks holes. Titor also said what should happen in the near future. Talk about a civil war that would erupt in the United States (war in December 2005 but not yet the case), its role as a "partisan" at age 14 in 2011 and many other events that will occur between now and 2036 . Another point in its favor would be the real capacity, described by Titor, IBM 5100. Capacity confirmed by the engineers of IBM. At that time, certainly before the current war in Iraq, said that a war will be waged under the pretext of removing alleged weapons of mass destruction possessed by Saddam Hussein ever ... This should lead us to believe that Titor was telling the truth, would never have known ifshe had not experienced first hand, since the year before that happens he says seriously.

"Pictures of John Titor's time machine"

 In the spring of 2001 John Titor greeted all to return in the year 2036 and he never heard from again.

The end point is its perfect preparation in physics, it exhibits very complex topics with such mastery that it seems incredible. Now will be the events to confirm whether or not what he said is the truth or just another hoax of the century (remember that on theinternet have been many cases of practical jokes, take for example the case "Ianezna",the alleged alien). What we are left in the hands of the various documents that are only Titor left as evidence of what he said.

Reffering to Transemedia Story Telling by Henry Jenkins we can said that transmedia stories are based not on individual characters (John Titor) or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters (all the people who read and commented Titor's blog) and their stories. This process of world-building encourages an encyclopedic impulse in both readers and writers. We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp (In this case could be the future world). This is a very different pleasure than we associate with the closure found in most classically constructed narratives, where we expect to leave the theatre knowing everything that is required to make sense of a particular story.

The Not So Impossible Project

With the advent of cheap and accessible digital photography in recent years analogue photography has tended to fall by the wayside. After all, why pay for expensive film and development for every roll of film taken when you can pick up a digital camera for as little as 1500Kč (roughly €60), allowing you to take as many photos as you like, deleting and editing as you document and share. The accessibility of this technology has revolutionised home photography, according to a study from 2007 77% of American households owned at least one digital camera₁. Besides the increasing ease of use and availability of digital cameras is now almost impossible to purchase a mobile phone without some sort of digital photography application. These advances have been hailed as transforming how we see photography . However these same advances have resulted in some casualties, namely analogue photography. One of the most lamented losses being the Polaroid camera and film. The Polaroid had become synonymous with analogue instant photography, most instant photos were referred to as Polaroids, despite the particular brand of film or camera used.Their brand of camera and style of film was recognised worldwide having first entered the camera market in the 1940s. Following the development of integral film in the 1970s, instant photography was used for work and play worldwide.

Andy Warhol's Polaroids, see more here

That is, until the advent of personal digital cameras. In February 2008 Polaroid announced it would cease all production of Polaroid cameras and film. A move brought about both by the increasing popularity and dominance of digital cameras and in part due to an investment fraud scandal involving the Petters group, the company who had been running Polaroid since 2005₂

So where did this leave the lovers of instant photography? Following the announcement there was a rush on the limited amount of film still available, fans of the film began to stockpile, preparing for the inevitability that there would one day be no more₃. Prices on eBay rose as people scrambled to get their hands on the remaining film before it was no more. However, for some aficionados it was not enough to accept the medium’s demise and move on.

Boseman and Kaps.

The demise of the Polaroid company brought about The Impossible Project, a company run by Polaroid and analogue photography fans who were not content to let the demise of the Polaroid company’s film production mean the demise of instant photography altogether. An Austrian Polaroid lover and entrepreneur, Florian Kaps and André Bosman, an employee of the Polaroid corporation for over 20 years and an integral player in the creation of many types of film during his time with the company met at the closing event of the Polaroid factory in The Netherlands. Following much discussion they decided to join forces in an effort to resurrect Polaroid cameras and film. Their idea was borne out of their love of analogue photography, Kaps had previously been a leading member of the Lomographic Society, ‘a magazine, a shop and a community dedicated to analogue photography.’ as well as this he also organised the web gallery Polanoid, an online gallery of Polaroids, and the growing online fan communities and campaigns to save the Polaroid, one facebook group alone has over 49, 000 members and this is by no means the only group of its kind. Initially their focus was the storage and sale of the remaining stock of Polaroid film, this was done through the unsaleable and polapremium websites. However, their eventual aim was to produce and sell working Polaroid cameras and film. This goal was eventually reached following their purchase of the former Polaroid factory in Enschede, The Netherlands. Though a simple restart of production was not possible as the dyes originally used in the production of negatives for the integral film pack were no longer available and would have taken 2 years to develop they utilised the knowledge of former employees to 'reverse engineer' a new version of the film. Not only this, there was also a web campaign to rally support, whether through the sharing of knowledge from around the globe or simply raising both awareness and finance for the production of film through the sale of t-shirts and other merchandise.

But how does this relate to the concepts of Produsage, Collective Intelligence and Transmedia Storytelling? Many aspects of the Impossible Project and it’s precursors (unsaleable and polapremium) demonstrate Produsage through the use of their website and associated side-projects. Produsage involves the creation of shared content through ‘collaborative and continuous building’₄ between Consumers and Producers. This is demonstrated both through the online communities and campaigns to save the Polaroid right down to the curation of online galleries of Polaroid photographs both on Flickr and Polanoid. And this collaborative curation is encouraged by those running The Impossible Project, the website offers a €5 voucher off any product in their shop to those who upload at least 3 Polaroids to the Polanoid website. This curation is one of the aspects of Produsage mentioned in Axel Bruns’ The Art of Produsage ‘in such streams we can see collaborative community efforts to curate it’s content’₅.

Collective intelligence is manifest throughout many aspects of the project, the online campaigns and networking of those involved in the project led to a pooling of knowledge related to the production of the film as it was a complex process. Former employees of the Polaroid company were hired and those who had knowledge and skill in the area were tapped for their contribution. Without this ‘shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals’ the highly complex process involved in recreating working film for Polaroid cameras is unlikely to have happened due to the high skill necessary to operate and modify the lasting machinery in the Polaroid factory.

The Impossible Project's success is a Web 2.0 one, without the collaborative aspects of Produsage and Collective Intelligence I think it is unlikely that they would be producing and selling Polaroid film today, at the very least without the popularity and success they now enjoy. The internet allowed a niche market to make themselves and their demands known. The utilisation of 'long tail demand'₆ i.e. selling a smaller amount of unique products rather than mass sales of popular products has proven that one doesn’t need to cater to a mass audience in order to accomplish success in today’s world of online commerce and community .

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1- Digital Imaging: A Focus on Sharing, Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), 2007

2- ‘Polaroid files for bankruptcy protection’ Andrew Clark, The Guardian, 19-12-2008 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/dec/19/chapter-11-corporate-bankruptcies-corporatefraud?INTCMP=SRCH)

3- http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2008/02/14/polaroid-film.html

4- http://produsage.org/produsage

5- Axel Bruns: The Art of Produsage, p.235

6- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson

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Human stupidity 2.0

»Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the the universe.«

Albert Einstein

A couple of days ago various media could tell the story about two robbers being arrested after bragging about their newly achieved money on Facebook. The story is, though pretty entertaining, not very surprising compared to what other stupid human Internet behavior the new media has documented during the last couple of years. The new media gave us new possibilities to make fools of ourselves and news ways to destroy our careers, relationships and remaining dignity. With Web 2.0 came Human stupidity 2.0.

The expansion of the public sphere

Human stupidity has without any doubt existed for just as long as human beings on earth. Through thousands of years humans have thought, said and done stupid things and even though some of it has been kept for further generations to experience, most historical stupidity will remain undocumented.

With the arrival of the new media came new possibilities for storing stupidity. During the last couple of decades the borders between private and public spheres have gradually moved in the western world. One of the first indications of this trend was the emergence of TV reality shows that recorded and broadcasted human interaction and behavior of non-media trained humans in a way that only fiction could previously have predicted.

The big difference between these reality shows and the later development was the presence of media cooperations editing and angling the material before publication. With the arrival of the new media this was taken to a new level. Now people could record and post videos of themselves doing and saying stupid things on YouTube or post stupid pictures or status updates on Facebook. And the only thing keeping these stupidities from being published was the creators themselves or the regulations of the new media platforms.

Human stupidity as material for new media produsage

With Web 2.0 the users became producers. People around the world shared material for others to use, respond to and further develop through YouTube, Flickr, Ourband etc. and with Wikipedia this developed into more structural cooperation build on collective intelligence. Along with this development came also produsage build on critical approaches to the new media and the way people are using them. One of the best examples of users sharing experiences of human stupidity on the Internet is Lamebook.com.

The concept of the page is pretty simple. It relies on user participation in shape of people capturing and sending screen shots of Facebook members posting stupid pictures, status updates or comments which are then anonymized and published on the blog for other users to share and comment. The typical examples of the captured human stupidity on Lamebook are people posting private informations on their walls which are usually followed by consequences in form of reactions from other Facebook members. Among these kinds of stupidities is public fighting on private matters, people dissing their employers (with whom they of course share Facebook friendship) or people revealing extremely private informations or pictures without any awareness of the possible consequences.

With about 400 million native English speaking world citizens, of which a great part with a profile on Facebook, the material of the blog is being constantly produced and prodused and in such an amount that there´s material for everyday publication.

YouTube: Not a playground for (stupid) kids

One of the new media that gave users the possibility to create, share and recreate material is YouTube. The website is stuffed with videos of people spreading stupid statements or doing stupid (and sometimes dangerous) things. Some of these videos becomes viral Internet phenomena that quickly spreads and leads to new produsaged material in shape of responses and different kinds of remixes.

When I was kid I had a great time recording stupid conversations, ideas and even songs with my friends on my tape recorder. Even though this was surely pretty harmless I would never want any of these recordings to be published today. Luckily we had no possibilities for publishing our recordings at the time and our play with the medium therefore stayed as entertaining and educational experiences for only us to know about.

Today it´s different. An example of this is The Food Reviewer; a welfed child posting videos of himself eating and reviewing varous types of candy and fastfood on his Youtube channel. These harmless videos did not only lead to responding videos and parodies, but also inappropriate comments, suggestions and even threads which shows that the new media are not just innocent playgrounds of creative produsers sharing and developing material in constructive ways.

Another example is the story of an 11 years old girl who became an Internet phenomenon after her (pretty stupid) reply to the negative reactions on her YouTube videos. During 4 days the girl fought a viral video battle against her YouTube enemies which escalated with a video of the crying girl assisted by her angry father threatening with Cyber police.

Who is responsible for the new media stupidity

Even though these examples can be seen as priceless entertainment even better than the most well produced TV reality shows on the market they still leave some unanswered questions. Were people really ready for the new media and all the possibilities they gave for exposing stupid behavior? Is it fair that children are being humiliated on the Internet for just exploring and playing with the new technologies? And who is responsible for educating people in proper ways of dealing with the potential consequences of inappropriate behavior on the new media platforms?

And how will future generations look at these years and the emergence of Web 2.0? Will people in 100 years see it as an example of technology developing faster than human beings being able to fully understand and adapt to them in comprehensive ways. Or will it just be seen as the first natural step of the total dissolve of private spheres; an old fashion way of dividing human behavior and interaction that modern technology had to destroy?

No matter what human stupidity will most likely continue to exist for just as long as human beings on earth. Whether it will transform into 3.0, 8.0 or 120.0.

Literature and New media: a love story

The last 18^th November, at Prague’s National Gallery in Holešovice, there was a discussion entitled “Are books dead?” supported by The Prague Post in order to talk about the changing nature of the print media in the last years and the influence of new digital media on the newspaper industry and even in the literature.


Regarding the latter, the relationship between literature and new media could be observed specially since the late 80s, when hypertext fiction appeared thanks to the invention of software such as links and the development of the Internet. Afternoon, a story (1987), written by Mychael Joyce, and Victory Garden, de Stuart Moulthrop, are some of the most important books published by Eastgate Systems, a pioneer company in hypertext narrative. There have been authors that created this kind of literature before, such as Julio Cortázar (Rayuela is the best example of his work), Jorge Luis Borges (with Fictions) and other writers, but the characteristics of the knowledge space that Lévy describes in his work (the speed, the mass and the tools that makes us able to do connections in a bigger scale) have done that electronic literature seems something new. “We are leaving in exponential times”…

With this kind of books, story development is up to the reader: he never knows if he has read all the pages or if he has reached the closure. Because probably you will feel that you need it (as I felt once), I will tell you that you can follow the links to know something else of these books/games on Wikipedia and how they work, but let me give you an advice: relax; take it easy, getting lost is part of the magic of these readings.

If transmedia texts are an example of how fan fiction can be an unauthorized expansion of the plots of these stories, in electronic literature the possibilities are not just up to the more loyal followers, but to everybody that take a look for the first time to these books. They have also different platforms to get the reader (some of them have their own online version, a CD-ROM or even the printed book). However, if there is one point where they may diverge, this is about the coordination and the co-creation.

While transmedia storytellings are textual activators that makes the users participate in the fictional words as a group, all together, gathering the dispersed information that the author gives them, electronic literature doesn´t seek the collectivity. The hunting is an individualistic one. Here is where hypernarrative differs from the collective intelligence. It is more related with the art postmodernist theories that relativize the power of the individual reader over the text. Maybe it is because this literature is still presented, as I said before, in closed packages, not always in a website. A user can have fun with these readings but we have to realize that is completely different from projects of peer- production. The interaction is between you and the different parts of the text that the author has dispersed for you. We cannot say that the reader of Afternoon, a story, is creating something itself. Ok. His taking part in a more participative way than with an ordinary narrative, but his work is just ordering pieces that, sooner or later, like a Rubik cube, will make sense.

Leaving aside the issue of the historical relation between literature and new media, it is even more important to see how the print media manage with the new digital one, whatever it would be (hypertext narrative, newspapers and so on). The first assumption to take in account is that Internet lets writers to show easily their work. Because who cares about the produsers work if its distribution doesn´t get the crowd? The most famous example is the self-publish website Lulu.com, where writers can upload their creations and receive the 80 % of the benefits thanks to the absence of intermediaries. Here I let a video with the instructions of how to exploit the author that you have inside.

Bob Young, the creator of Lulu.com, doesn´t care about the talent of the users. According to the line of the long tale theory, he prefers one thousand authors who sell one hundred copies each year as his model of business. Like in the transmedia storytellings, expanding the potential market for the property by creating different points of entry for different audience segments is the key of the success. Contrary to what Walter Benjamin, quantity has not been transmuted into quality. The rest of the users are there to create metadata about all the stuff published in Lulu and to discern between that what is worth and that what´s not.

As we can see, the proliferation of new technologies has given rise to the appearance of new genres of literature and new publishing companies. We cannot doubt about the effects of this love story in journalism field, but what happen with the ending? It would be a happy one? In the past, sometimes newspapers talk about the fashionable writers in their pages. Now, this function of the newspapers is over. Actually, the future of books and printed newspapers maybe is not clear yet, but what it is sure is that the patronage is died and writers don´t need good references anymore, at least, to publish. There is nothing to say about the readers. They don´t want to pay for a something that maybe they will dislike. In my opinion, the only exit is publishing literature, in books or journals, in a new digital way. It is time for the produsage of information, open codes and projects like Born Magazine, pairing poets with artists who make a digital presentation for each poem published in the journal, or Dreaming Methods, a fusion of writing and new media exploring imaginary memories.

Amalia Paloma González Jiménez

fan communities, more important than ever

From the fifties with Elvis Presley’s arrival to stages, a new phenomenon appeared: fans. At that time, most fans were young girls who longed for the bones of the King of Rock. Nowadays, sixty years later, fans are still as important or even more than before, but with one difference: today they are also content creators. Not only that, but they are also very active, creative and socially connected. In fact, without this new concept of fan, the great success of media products such as Lost, Harry Potter, Matrix and Twilight would not have been possible.

As the professor Henry Jenkins says, “We are living in an age when changes in communications, storytelling and information technologies are reshaping almost every aspect of contemporary life –including how we create, consume, learn and interact with each other-. A whole range of new technologies enable consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content”.

So, according to Henry Jenkins, we are living in a co

nvergence cultural time where the audience generates contents and the industry responds to these contents. As Jay Rosen says, we are anymore in front of a passive audience, we are now faced with an active audience that wants to join, discuss, create and communicate. We are living in a society where people stay together on the Internet and create fans communities where they can share their passions about what is important for them. Nowadays, we are in front of the Web 2.0 where people can create their own information because they have access to the tools which were for traditional media in the past.

People join communities where can listen, share, collaborate and tell their enthusiasm and passion for something, share plot details and tips on completing game missions. In fact, in these new fan communities, people can create new stories around some characters of their favorite series, produce fan videos or change the content of a show or a game. Just keep in mind that fans have been able to adapt to new technologies which have appeared. Indeed, they have been pioneers in bringing out the best in new media. So, at this point, we should not regard them as a bunch of freaks but as a new way to connect producers and consumers.

Fan communities are very active in the construction of groups that use these new tools: web pages with photos, videos, music, creating radio programs, blogs… They create so much content on the Web that they can be considered not only as content distributors but also as content creators. At the same time, fan communities are also responsible for gathering information on everything related to their series, movies, bands… A clear example occurred with Harry Potter. The fans of the magician, which was invented by J. K. Rowling, wrote hundreds of thousands of alternative stories about the young wizard. On the other hand, Lost fans have created huge communities where they discussed about possible endings of the story. There are some other examples of community fans. For instance, the Rolling Stone magazine published a ranking with the biggest fans communities of musicians. There we can see that at the top of the ranking there are Justin Bieber, Clay Aiken and Katy Perry.

Moreover, fan communities allow the audience to interact directly with media producers and with each other. We are in a new culture of convergence which is a networked culture that connects producers and consumers in increasingly complex ways. Thanks to these communities, cultural industries have found new ways to determine their economic success. Nowadays, the role of the production has been spread to different production areas. And not only that, but also industries can control better what they produce. For example, they are able to know the success of some chapters, some plots or some characters even before the premiere of the chapter. They can find it out asking to the thousands of fans they have in the communities or even better.

Well, now we are in a situation where it is easier than ever to find out what the audience wants. However, at the same time, it is also harder than ever to please this audience as they have more information and a great knowledge of communication tools. Furthermore, they have Internet, such an important tool that let them criticize everything that they dislike. Thus, cultural industries should consider a joint effort between audience and producers to be more successful and operate new stories because fan communities will be more and more important.

Antònia Pozo

Thank you, produser!

Advertising companies and marketers used to have clear goals: build a brand image, get your target group interested in your product, make them desire it and eventually try to sell it to them (also known as the ‘AIDA’ principle).

These days, this simple goal and strategy approach is no longer so effortless and the term ‘consumer’ is not as relevant anymore. Instead, consumers have become users and the distinction between users and producers is fading. Users become ‘productive users’, resulting in what we call: ‘produsage’.

Produsage is the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement (produsage.org). Here all participants become users and producers of informa

tion and knowledge in the many-to-many communications media. A good example of a site on which this happens is Digg.

A first consequence of this constant content creation is selection and evaluation. This means that it helps producers, marketers and advertisement companies by informing them about (the qualities) of their products.

Another consequence is that the users help advertising companies by forming groups, which are way easier to target.

And the last consequence is that there emerge attractive profiling communities for advertisers, forming marketing niches (Van Dijck – Nieborg – Manifesto’s).

Of this phenomenon, I could give you an ever-long list of examples, however I picked out the most obvious ones, which we all can relate to.

The first one is Facebook; we all have seen the advertisements on the right hand side of profiles, giving us information on products, which should be relevant to us (however, it doesn’t always work out that way…). There we can find a ‘like-button’, which - if you click on it - ads a person to the amount of likes and also ads a topic in your ‘interests’ list. This is a good example of helping the marketers out: all they have to do is make a facebook page, advertise it, and cross their fingers, hoping people are going to like it. If they do, they are helping you spread the word, for free!

Another way of helping the marketers out is just by posting a comment, a picture, a video… on your own or someone else’s wall, adding free advertisement.

The same goes for Twitter, in posting a tweet about some product. Whether it is positive or negative, it is giving attention to the product, spreading the name. Moreover, if the comments are exclusively positive, people will become suspicious. It is better to have a negative comment once in a while to make the comments more credible.

The world famous Wikipedia is also an excellent way in which users (or better, ‘produsers’) add value to a product, here by collective intelligence. A good example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola where you can find information about the products, the history, criticisms and campaigns.

Furthermore, Amazon provides us with a good example of produsage: the users add information to a book in the form of reviews, which other people can read. According to the amount of views and the ratings of the review, this book will get higher rankings in the search results of other users, making certain books more and more popular.

Youtube is another great example of produsage in action. People post videos containing products, referring to products or even about products. A famous example of this is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM where people show what great effects you can achieve mixing Coca-Cola with Mentos, indirectly advertising both products.

A last example of how produsage helps the marketers out, we can find in search engines like Google. Every query you make gets remembered in the form of metadata. This way search engines can find out which websites are relevant and good and which are not. According to the amount of clicks, the websites will score higher in the rankings when someone types in the same keyword. In this way every person’s pattern of searching changes the outcome of searches of other people.

Produsage, as talked about above, has many advantages. However, we must not forget that there are also disadvantages attached to the phenomenon. People can give you free advertisement, but can also talk negative about your product. The advantage is that there is room for discussion and even though it’s negative attention, it is still attention. However, it can have disastrous effects too, as seen last year with Kit Kat. More information on the messages being posted on social network sites about Kit Kat you can find on http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/nestle-kit-kat-palm-oil-facebook-what-happened/ and on http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/nestle-kit-kat-palm-oil-crisis-greenpeace-uses-facebook-youtube-2595022.html.

A final remark on produsage, which we need to remember, is that it is all done for free. People add content on the Internet and advertisers, marketers and search engines like Google make money out of them. Furthermore, it is mostly the white-collar intellectuals who add content, the people who are not so rich and are bored behind their computer at work. This means that the information we get is mostly coming from the same segment of people, which implies that the Internet is not as democratic as it seems to be.

VanDijck and Nieborg, Wikinomiks and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos.

Produsage.org

http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm