Cosumer, Producer, Prosumer, Produser.

In a world were internet sites such as youtube, wikipedia and Second Life exist, can we still call ourselves 'consumers'? I don't feel that that term justifies the way in which users are "acting incrementally as content producers" (Bruns, 2008). At this very moment, by blogging online, I am utilising the internet to produce the content of this blog. Luckily for me, Alex Bruns coined the term "produser" to define my actions as a producer, distributor and consumer. According to Bruns, produsers actual help to improve the content available online over a period of time and numerous contributions. So is this the case? and does the "value chain begin and end with content", even if it is only temporary - waiting to be updated once again?

In the case of the improvement produsage generates over time, it is important to remember there are some limitations. Wikipedia, for example, appears to monitor its content rigourously. It seems that no longer do I hear from a friend that they have made some incredibly witty change to a Wikipedia page, that I jump online to be astounded only to find that said change has been removed. Youtube has also released - surprisingly only this year - a "Safety Mode" the opt-in setting allows the viewer (or the young viewer's parents) to "filter out videos which may be too graphic or contain objectionable content which you may not want to see" (Parfeni, 2010) . From what I've seen, Second Life appears to not really care what people see. However, during 2009 Second Life did make changes to the way in which adult content was dealt with. Similarly to Youtube, these changes are a choice made by the produser, they include: maturity ratings (A=Adult, G=General, M=Moderate), search function censoring and a password system to access the adult regions of the game. As well as the updating of the "Terms of Service, Community Standards, Knowledge based articles, etc" to coincide with the the new content filtering.

I attended a lecture last year that had a journalist as a guest speaker. She had held a long standing position of authority at a prominent newspaper and had recently changed jobs to work for an online publication. It was so interesting to hear her talk on the topic of technology and the effect it has had on the print newspaper industry. She spoke vividly of phoning in stories minutes before the paper went to press and reminisced about the smell of molten metal at 1 o'clock in the morning. To me, it all sounded so exciting - a thrilling career on the front line of journalism. Until she explained that those times and those practices barely existed anymore. People can get their information so readily these days. And yes, large newspapers still print but they also publish online.
Furthermore, the online publication she now works for, she explained, is a subscription based news service. She still gets paid to write news articles for them, however, everyday when it is emailed to thousands of recipients who hold a subscription, those people forward it on to thousands of non-paying people and those people forward it on again. After all that, there is nothing to stop someone copying and pasting this information into their own blog or email, editing it as much or as little as they like and putting it into cyberspace for anyone to read.