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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Web 2 + 2020 Summit « Previous | |Next »
March 31, 2008

I missed out in being one of the 1000 participants to Rudd's 2020 Summit that was meant to facilitate the fostering of creativity in the form of the generation of breakthrough ideas. In fact two of the groups I applied for --those on cities and a digital world -- disappeared into the ether. The digital economy was to be a separate strand, now it is slotted along side education and innovation under productivity.

What does that say about Rudd Labor? I don't really know apart from it being a turning away from the Web 2 is a part of the knowledge society. Is it all about experts and technocrats? Is the core of the summit idea the elimination of dissent, by presenting political questions as technical ones as solvable as a mathematical equation, as Guy Rundle argues?

That doesn't mean we have to leave the issues global warming, public ownership, indigenous Australia, more livable cities, the creative economy etc) to others. The others are the best and brightest selected for 2020 and they are tasked to come up with Australia's next big ideas, help sort out Australia and indicate the way that the internet and information technology underpins the information economy.

We can explore things by have a look at what is happening in the salon des refuses. In The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage published in Fiber Culture Axel Bruns argues that a unique type of media experience has emerged from the user-led Web 2.0 environment – that of produsage. He notes, the boundaries between media producers and consumers are currently breaking down to enable ‘the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement’.Bruns understands Web2.0
as the technological framework for a notable (if perhaps more gradual than implied in the ‘2.0’ version numbering) shift from static to dynamic content, from hierarchically managed to collaboratively and continuously developed material, and from user-as-consumer to user-as-contributor.
He uses Wikipedia to illustrate this but the content creation and development processes also apply in open source software development and multi-user online games:

a description of Wikipedia (or even of any of its pages) as a ‘product’ in the traditional sense is no longer appropriate, if by product we understand a distinct, defined, fixed entity which is packaged and distributed to its users as we have discussed it above. Instead, Wikipedia pages and the encyclopaedia in its entirety are at any one moment simply artefacts of their continuing and continuous content development processes, temporary outcomes which are likely to be revised again soon. It is no more appropriate to describe these artefacts as products than it is to describe a single television image as a complete programme. At the same time, however, in spite of its continuing provision of content over time, Wikipedia content is also not a service similar to broadcast content, since the temporary artefacts of the continuing Wikipedia content development processes can be used in much the same way as the products of traditional encyclopaedia production. Thus, Wikipedia content constitutes a continuing process just as much as, when isolated from the process and thus frozen in time, a product-like artefact. Wikipedia content development itself is therefore neither production nor service provision, then, but a hybrid process which – as it is carried out by users who are also producers – can be described as produsage.

Bruns says that the growth of Web2.0 as a general model will certainly help generate a broader technical understanding of how Web-based produsage environments work, and those produsers who are already members of Generation C are likely to have a working understanding of the motivations for Web2.0 and produsage environments in opposition or as an alternative to Web1.0 and traditional industrial content production


| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:42 PM |