#prosumption

Small pleasures of everyday life should be possible as long as we protect the environment, benefit other species and Mother Earth gives abundantly. We are allowed to enjoy, as far as our conscience allows it and the common good permits it.

Instead of "I consume, therefore I am", we want to live an "I am, therefore I prosume*".

Dear, TAs, students, Ms. Good, and unfortunately for some of you, other random visitors:

Welcome to my COMM 3P18 Audience Studies blog. Prepare to be amazed. Through this blog, I will be demonstrating my understandings of the course while also relating its content to my personal audience experiences.

The first thing I would like to do is present the concept of audience. As seen in lecture, audiences and their definition have changed multiple times throughout the years. Audience, as defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, takes many forms. It takes the form of: ‘’the act or state of hearing’’, ‘’an opportunity of being heard’’, ‘’a group of listeners or spectators’’, and similarly it takes the form of ‘’a reading, viewing, or listening public’’. As explained by professor Good in lecture, the history of audience, like telling stories around a fire, is not something new. What is brand new, when looking at the timeline of what it means to be an audience, is what we do as an audience now, like social media for example. Social media open a brand new world to audience studies and allows for new definitions of audience.

My point of view as an audience member varies according to the occasion in which I find myself. I used to see myself as member of audiences that was mostly from a consumer point of view. After taking many communication courses, specifically COMM 3P18 Audience studies, I realize that I have been part of different audiences all my life. I am now also able to critically analyze the content I consume. Another main part of my point of view as an audience member is the fact that I do not only consume content, but I also produce content. In our very first class, professor Good talked about the concept of ‘’prosumer’’. According to Halassi, S., Semeijn, J., & Kiratli, N. (2019) in their article ‘’From consumer to prosumer: a supply chain revolution in 3D printing’’, prosumer means someone who participates in the ‘’production as well as consumption’’ (p.201). My blog will be the perfect example of ‘’prosumption’’. As a member of audiences, I consume content, which I then use to produce these blog posts.

A good example of this could be The Seven Deadly Sins, which is a Netflix series that I often watch is a very good example of content that generates a big audience and even prosumption. After watching this series, many fans, including myself, created fan art such as the one below:

In my next blog post, I will be discussing more about John S. Sullivan’s definition of an audience. I will also be further discussing the history and concept of the audience, so make sure you tune in next week!

Authors: Maria Corbett, Christian Devon , Mariam Rija, and Juliana Guyt

Analyze the vision of the technological determinism that frame Minority Report. Does it align with hard or soft technological essentialism?  

Technological determinism is the belief that “changes in technology exert a greater influence on societies and their processes than any other factor,” (Smith, 1994). Smith argues that technological determinism has a strong role in American culture, and this is explored in the popular Steven Spielberg film the Minority Report (2002) and the 1956 short story inspiration for the film of the same name by Phillip K. Dick.   

Traditionally, technological determinism is viewed from a hard essentialist perspective, one that leaves no room for human agency with the rise of technology (McLuhan, 1964). However, this ideology has since been challenged. In contrast with this view, soft technological essentialism holds that “the impacts of technologies are socially and culturally constructed by the ways in which they are employed by humans,” (Taffel, 2013). This is to say that humans do play a role in deciding their own destinies, even in a world that is seemingly controlled by technology.

The ideology of hard technological essentialism is illuminated in the utopian society setting of Minority Report. The challenge to this ideal is presented through the character Danny Whitmore as he points out to the pre-crime department that their system is inherently flawed because it assumes infallibility when this is impossible if humans are involved. Chief Anderton, the head of the department, subscribed to the ideal that humans have no role and therefore cannot taint the perfection of the technology that governed their society. The system is further scrutinized by Chief Anderton’s situation itself, as it begged for a more subjective, soft technological essentialism that considers room for error, change, and humanity interwoven in a society dominated by advanced technology.

As mentioned above, technology rules D.C. and the surrounding areas in the year 2054. It is inescapable and omnipresent; embedded in newspapers, in malls, and most importantly, in the criminal justice system. People have come to worship the “pre-cogs” as deities, especially since their lives are at their mercy. While this scenario points to hard technological essentialism, it is important to note the human aspect in this system before the protagonist challenges it. Human police with no special abilities are the ones utilizing this technology to find the supposed murderers and stop them before they happen, and it is human input that advertising relies on to make suggestions for future purchases to customers. Despite this, I believe that due to this community’s acceptance and reliance on technology as infallible and integral to their lives, a hard determinism frames the Minority Report before the flaws in the system are exposed. Because people have accepted the narrative that “technology knows best” and have allowed it to control their lives, it is evident that the film presents and then questions the validity of hard technological essentialism.

Contrast this with the social shaping of technology approach:

Social Shaping of technology is the concept that there are choices in both the design of individual artifacts and systems and in the direction of programs.As Robin A. Williams says, “If technology does not emerge from the unfolding of a predetermined logic or a single determinant, then innovation is a 'garden of forking paths'. Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes.” Minority Report suggests that there are no other possible outcomes to the future, what happens in the future is and will always be going to happen. No matter if the person ends up doing it, if you stop them, they have the justice to arrest them because it is going to happen. “Different routes are available, potentially leading to different technological outcomes. Significantly, these choices could have differing implications for society and for particular social groups.”(Robin A. Williams and David Edge (1996). People are too quick to accept technology and may assume that it is always right, but by challenging this like the protagonist did in Minority Report, it show that it can make flaws and the future may be able to change, while others thought that it couldn't.

Situate your cluster of theories in the social shaping of technology approach:

This data has become very meaningful, both when looked at individually as well as when looked at along with other pieces of data. This has occurred because of the fact that instead of forcing all the pieces of data to rely on each other to come together in order to create meaning, each of the individual pieces of data have their own meaning, which then provides various pieces of information to the economy. Because they are able to continuously provide information, the economy is continuously receiving and gaining new information. People have taken power in creating their own statuses via social media networking sites as well as the important component : the ability to regenerating new statuses over and over again, whenever they please and whenever they have an update to make. This is also a social platform for producers to sell their products, finding more and more consumers, and therefore, making more and more profit. For example, advertisements promote their products through various social media platforms, such as Facebook, in an effort to convince more people to purchase their products, providing them with a greater amount of profit. These advertisers can also be referred to as “Sharing Subjects”. Sharing Subjects are those that continuously share the media, making sure that the different media forms are “spreadable”, as it is referred to in this particular text.

What elements of the movie do your cluster of theories illuminate and/or help you appreciate?

Prosumption is the production and consumption of material online. I think that the movie showed this idea well when the woman credited with the creation of the precogs scoffs at the idea that she was truly the creator. She talks about how she was able to keep only three of the children affected by drugs alive and so condemned them to serve a purpose that seemed to be more mechanical than human. The idea that these people were property was evident throughout the movie and further supported the idea of a creative work, keeping the people alive, becoming a form of economy, living only to serve a purpose of predicting and in effect preventing murders from ever happening.

Neoliberalism has a political orientation and supports the idea that everything should be run as a business. Lives begin to be seen as projects and as something that should be shared for the benefit of the community. This idea is also prevalent throughout Minority Report in that, again, the precogs are seen as tools to reach the goal of a murder free society. They are seen as being part of a business who makes it their job to predict and prevent homicide. The precogs are not offered a choice in the matter and are forced to do the government’s bidding for the overall safety and security of the people.

Sharing subject often is supported by the theories of Henry Jenkins, who believed there is “spreadable” media and “sticky” media. It also revolves around the idea that there is a certain moral economy that is in play when people post online or create something. It is then a matter of opinion who should be allowed to monitor and collect data regarding the populous. Some would say it is an infringement on freedom, while others would say that the monitoring is for the people’s protection. This idea can be found in the movie in relation to the privacy of people’s actions. Some might say that having a being see your future is an invasion on your right to live your life in the way that you see fit. However, others would argue that when an individual goes against the laws set in place to protect them and others that freedom is revoked. As Lupton said “the ideal subject, according to neoliberal principles, is self regulated and takes responsibility for his or her own destiny” (page 77). So if the people in the movie self regulate and do not attempt to kill, they would not be at risk of being exploited. Once again, Lupton supports this view by saying that, “technologies may be used in the interest of promoting self-management...over state regulation and intervention” (page 77). This means that because the people being monitored have free will and a choice, they can avoid the situation altogether by choosing moral actions. The technology should deter people from behaving immorally instead of just punishing people when they disobeyed, and it did in the movie. In the movie there was practically no premeditated murder while the precogs were functioning.

Sources: 

Lakakis, Ari. 2014. “11 Signs You’Re A Precog.” EarthUnchained. Retrieved January 12, 2016 (http://www.earthunchained.com/signs-precog).

Lupton, Deborah. 2015. Digital Sociology. London: Routledge.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill. 

Smith, Merritt Roe and Leo Marx. 1994. Does Technology Drive History?: the Dilemma of Technological Determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Taffel, Sy. 2013. “Technology And Agency.” Media Studies 101 ~ A Creative Commons Textbook. Retrieved January 27, 2016 (https://mediatexthack.wordpress.com/tag/technological-determinism/).

Thompson , Paul. 2014. “MLQ Minority Report Trivia.” moviepilot.com. Retrieved January 26, 2016 (http://moviepilot.com/posts/1332153).

Anon. n.d. “Minority Report (Page 5 of 14).” Minority Report. Retrieved January 12, 2016 (http://pyxurz.blogspot.com/2015/08/minority-report-page-5-of-14.html).

A sociology of the Reddit revolt.

By Britney Summit-Gil

For many Reddit users, these are dark times indeed. With the banning of r/fatpeoplehate and other subreddits that did not curtail harassment and vote brigading, followed more recently by the sudden dismissal of Reddit employeesincluding Victoria Taylor, many users are criticizing the increase in top-down administrative decisions made under the leadership of interim CEO Ellen Pao.  Alongside these criticisms are accusations that the “PC” culture of safe spaces and “social justice warriors” has eroded the ideological foundations of Reddit culture–freedom of speech, democracy, and the right to be offensive under any circumstances. Meanwhile, Reddit’s biggest competitor voat.co is having a hard time keeping their servers functioning with the massive influx of traffic.

The abrupt and unexplained dismissal of Victoria Taylor has become a particularly vivid rallying point for disgruntled users. Many moderators set their subreddits to private or restricted submissions, effectively making Reddit unusable and invisible for a vast majority of visitors. “The Blackout” (aka #TheDarkening) lasted from late Thursday (7/2) until Friday afternoon when most subreddits came back online; it is one of several tactics used so far in the “Reddit Revolt.” At this time a change.org petition calling for Ellen Pao to step down is nearing 200,000 supporters.

One of the more confusing elements of the revolt is the target of redditors’ anger. Who is to blame for this perceived assault on liberty and the free exchange of ideas? For now, two seemingly opposed forces are bearing the brunt of accusation. These are Ellen Pao, under the influence of commercial interests, and social justice activists who criticize Reddit for tolerating and perpetuating hateful discourse. No one is speaking up on the cause of Taylor’s dismissal, which has led to speculation that she was fired for refusing to comply with the increasingly commercial motivations of Reddit admins, that she would not relocate from New York to San Francisco, or that she did not sufficiently manage the controversial Jessie Jackson AMA. Without more information, and in the context of other recent changes to Reddit, users alternate between blaming encroaching corporatism or PC freedom police who are finally ruining the internet.

So, how can these two forces both be responsible for the changes taking place on Reddit, and in other media such as television and gaming? Consider that a cornerstone of the Gamer Gate fiasco has been the assertion that market forces, not SJW activism, should determine the content and character of video games. Opposition to greater inclusivity in games, such as more central female, minority, and queer characters, has often been justified through free market rhetoric; the assertion is that men are the primary consumers of games, and that their demographic preferences do – and should – determine content. Any other force driving game design is perceived as ideologically motivated, propagandizing, and an assault on liberty.

If video game production companies are acquiescing to the demands of activists, they have not been forthcoming about it. Instead, they claim to be adapting to a marketplace in which women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals occupy an ever increasing consumer base. Perhaps the activist/consumer dichotomy is more distracting than useful, given that the voices most critical of capitalism’s ability to turn identity into a commodity are also the ones advocating to see a bit of themselves in their beloved games. Here again, people are caught between wanting to see their values and identities reflected back at them in the media that they love, and coming to terms with what capitalist logics do to those values and identities.

On its face, the simultaneous blame directed at SJWs and commercialization seems at odds. But given the ability of neoliberal late capitalism to commodify identity and the self, and to turn nearly any element of culture into a profitable enterprise, this muddiness is a logical outcome of the contradictions of capitalism that Marx believed would be its downfall. Instead, neoliberalism and identity politics send capitalism into overdrive as the need to colonize ever expanding markets and commodify even the most absurd abstractions turns anti-capitalist ideology into easily packaged products. Rather than disturbing the supposed working-class false consciousness, the contradiction has accounted for it and marketed it back to the very people it exploits. It’s only a matter of time before Walmart starts selling a t-shirt that reads “Social Justice Warrior!” in yellow glitter.

Also central to the Reddit Revolt are discussions of labor and exploitation. Many on Reddit have remarked on the betrayal of moderators by the admins. Mods develop and manage Reddit content on their own time and for no compensation, a service admins rely on for the site to function and be profitable. In exchange, mods have historically been given relative freedom within the subreddits they moderate. Now that this freedom is being restricted or, as in the case with Victoria Taylor, decisions are made at the admin level without consulting or even informing mods, mods and users are taking the opportunity to air more general grievances, like the lack of investment in the site’s infrastructure.

Here is the centerpiece of the Reddit Revolt paradox: what is a redditor relative to the admins, or to the site itself? Redditors perceive themselves as members of a community, or perhaps as customers of the site. In many instances they even see themselves as workers generating content for the site to the benefit of the admins. But redditors are not customers, nor are they simply workers — they are the product.

To complicate this further, the Reddit Revolt requires all of us to grapple with digital and affective labor, and its tendency to blur the categories of workers, products, and consumers. Ellen Pao’s job is not to make Reddit a happy community, it is to sell the attention of redditors to advertisers. And even as users begin to understand that Reddit is less like a community and more like a factory, they seem less clear on their position within this factory. Redditors are not so much customers engaged in a boycott or even laborers on strike, they are products. As products, the only effective protest movement redditors could possibly engage in would be to remove themselves from the market. Hence, the blackout.

But the fact is, Reddit admins can shoulder the brunt of a couple of blackout days. Given how quickly the front page returned to normal it seems unlikely that any sustained movement will take hold. And while they may make promises to users about changes to come, Reddit admins will continue to do what all successful corporate entities require — turn a profit, often at the expense of those who use, make, or evenare the product.

It’s to be expected that redditors feel betrayed by the powers that be for undermining the perceived ethos of Reddit as a community in which ideas — any ideas — can be freely exchanged. But there is perhaps a deeper betrayal that has not been articulated in the dominant narrative of the Reddit Revolt. That is the betrayal of western rationalism itself, and the notion that free markets and free speech are two articulations of a deeper, natural order that ultimately works in favor of the masses. The rhetorical relationship between freedom of expression and freedom of markets performs key ideological work for the perpetuation of an American-flavored narrative that capitalism is the great equalizer. While events like the Citizens United Supreme Court case occasionally highlight the absurdity of this argument, it is pervasive and often unseen. That cornerstone of western rationalism that so many redditors love is playing out in ways that they really really do not love. And the rupture will require more than dank memes and mental gymnastics to reconcile.

Cross-posted at Cyborgology.

Google bombing: That frothy mixture of power and discourse.

By William Yagatich

On the February 21, 2011 edition of The Colbert Report, there was a humorous but still telling segment about former Congressional Senator and Representative Rick Santorum (R-PA). The segment detailed the effects of Dan Savage’s appeal to readers and followers to “Google bomb” then U.S. Senator Santorum in 2003 as a response to some of Santorum’s comments about homosexuality. In April of 2003, the Senator made several controversial statements that essentially compared homosexual acts to bestiality and incest, and stated he believed such acts to be a threat to society and the institution of the family (read excerpts from the interview).

Savage, author of the sex advice column “Savage Love,” appealed to his readers to come up with a definition of “Santorum” to memorialize the Senator’s comments as an act of protest.

After settling on a definition, Savage created the website Santorum to promote the newly coined sexual neologism that meant a “frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.”

Over time, and many searches later, Savage’s website is to this day at the top of the results list when you Google “Santorum.” 

As funny as the story is, it raises important questions about the power over discourse given the new possibilities presented by the web. In order to Google bomb, or to inflate the ranking of a site under a particular query, you rely on people clicking on a specific link in the search results list and you rely upon other websites linking to a particular page using a specific anchor text. In this case, other websites linked to Savage’s site using the anchor text “Santorum” and many people clicked on his site when Googling the term.

Much is to be said for a crowd-sourced means of discourse. In a very general way, it can be likened to subvertising (see AdBusters) where popular advertisements are parodied or spoofed to illustratively and critically question the meaning of the original advertisements and the discourses they are selling to the consumer.

In a more specific way to Santorum’s case, using a Google bomb can be likened to muckraking. Not only did Savage make a successful attempt at a large-scale practical joke, he successfully drew attention to Santorum’s comments about homosexuality. Further, the result of the Google bomb would make it difficult for Santorum to promote his own website and the discourse he would wish to produce about himself on the web.

Yet, each of these strategies that combat dominant narratives are traditionally produced by the few and the privileged, and the same was true of the dominant narratives. Ultimately, what I wish to highlight with this post is that the web is fostering challenges to existing power relations over the production of discourse. The Google bomb presents an interesting case for the democratization of discourse production, and it provides evidence for possible strategies of altering what discourses become visible in the mainstream.

Verify out these sourcing businesses images:

prosumption dilemma Image by Will Lion …here’s the prosumption dilemma: A business that provides totally free reign to hack risks cannibalising organization model and losing control of its platform. A organization that fights its customers soils its reputation and shuts out a potentially valuable supply of innovation.

Don Tapscott and Anthony D.…

Today, I was on a panel on interactive and immersive fiction media environments as part of a film conference at Johns Hopkins University. I just wanted to post my speaking notes here rather than close the file and forgetting about it.

Interactive media of the sort Mark Harris describe and create are a prime example of “prosumption”, that portmanteau of “production” and “consumption” capturing how the two processes are increasingly enmeshed. [read more about that here]. Project Rant, the Facebook film idea, meme generators, and comment-sections as their own entertainment product are all great examples of content being at least partly produced by those who consume it.

As always, though, more dualisms can be imploded. Much of this discussion about digital fiction rests on at least two additional, and perhaps unnecessary dualisms, between the so-called “real” versus “virtual” as well as between fiction and fact. “True” and “real” are highly related as we enact the power of those terms. What if we thought of technical immersive and interactive environments as not just those on a glowing screen but also the layout of a city (“Haussmanization”), a building (the Globe Theater or the “Panopticon”), a room (this room, lights dimmed, chairs facing me)? What about social norms, identity, or even language as a highly immersive and interactive technological atmosphere? What about Disney World or Las Vegas as the same? A shopping mall? This campus? Burning Man?

How do we delineate a world as “virtual”? And how do we delineate where the “fiction” starts? Who gets to be the arbiter, given that they will have their own particular interests and politics? And do we need to arbitrate this so tightly as has been done today? Might we come to more creative projects through troubling rather than reinforcing these dualisms?

This brings me to the good sociological question to ask of any topic: immersive, interactive environments...for whom? Some interactive, fictional environments, such as comment boards as mentioned by Mark, are often unmoderated and unwelcoming to many ultimately creating bland, homogenous, and morally problematic spaces and stories.

But: Stories, play, and fiction, especially when not shoved in its own box but seen as itself a type of fact, are always always potentially radical and subversive. Play can mean play with traditions, existing divisions and as such the opposite of conservative. It can mean queering these categories around race, sex, sexuality, species, ability, embodiment, social class, indeed, anything.