Blogs

We've been meaning to slow down the Club Bloggery series a little while we get busy with other research, but have found this difficult especially at a time when so many new topics present themselves. So, the latest instalment in the series went online about a week ago already, and I'm only now getting around to posting a link to it here - this time, we look at how the U.S. blogosphere is shaping up in its coverage of the current presidential primaries, and the actual election later this year.

Along with the previous one, this latest piece generated some, um, interesting responses from self-styled professional irritators Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, and their respective cheersquads; predictably, where they ascended beyond mere ad hominems the focus of their harrumphing appeared to centre around the fact that it's possible for research into blogging to be funded - in part - by taxpayer money. (Perhaps the logic here is "hey, if even I can be a blogger this blogging business really can't be worth researching"? How refreshingly humble.) Such comments are as common in the debating arsenal of the irrational right as they are stupidly reductive, of course - if the "Surely that money should be given to research for a cure for AIDS or cancer?" argument is taken to its logical conclusion, then 'surely' nothing save two or three major projects should receive all the funding available?

I'm happy to say that Club Bloggery has returned for 2008. Club Bloggery was our weekly series for ABC Online's Opinion pages during the 2007 election campaign - and while the election is now well and truly over, Jason, Barry, and I will continue to track developments in the Australian blogosphere and beyond during 2008 (if at a slightly more relaxed pace). While I was on holidays during the second half of January, the guys already posted an article discussing the mainstream media's feeding frenzy over Heath Ledger's death (and the role of blogs in setting the record straight) - and for our second instalment, we've returned to our old stomping grounds: we're considering what role Australia's political bloggers may be able to adopt now, in the aftermath of the election.

All of our pieces will also be published - sometimes in extended versions - on our group blog at Gatewatching.org, of course, along with other reflections on citizen journalism and news blogging.

Which Way in '08?

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, Barry Saunders

The blogosphere and online independent media certainly proved themselves capable of offering an outstanding alternative narrative of last year's federal election. In several pieces during the campaign, we pointed out how the bloggers had led the way in offering participatory election coverage, and how organs like Crikey and New Matilda had managed to present a refreshing range of opinion that differed from the usual suspects in the MSM.

We're now in the second of today's presentations by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, hosted by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (they're certainly getting their money's worth!). This one shifts our focus considerably, to virtual environments.

Perhaps the obvious question here is how people interact in such environments. Ralph suggests that from current environments, it's already possible to forecast what shape future environments will take; he has created a model called the Connected Presence Cube to describe such environments.

This morning I'm spending time in a seminar by Ralph Schroeder from the Oxford Internet Institute, organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation. There's another seminar this afternoon, but this morning Ralph's talking about e-Research and the development of tools for distributed knowledge production.

He begins by noting the significant interest and investment in e-research - the shared use of digital distributed tools, data, and resources for research; these change the research landscape by globalising knowledge, reconfiguring disciplines, and (perhaps) ultimately advancing science. Knowledge, however, is traditionally understood as being always local, and tends to be siloed in specific disciplines - e-research breaks with such assumptions, and allows scientists to conduct interdisciplinary work which shifts boundaries. Science, at any rate, is drifting gradually towards more team-based research approaches, and the amount of scientific data and information is increasing rapidly.

I'm delighted to see that Uses of Blogs, the collection Joanne Jacobs and I edited in 2006, has been reviewed in this month's book review section at David Silver's fabulous Resource Center for Cybercultural Studies. The reviews are very positive overall, and David has also asked us to respond to their key points, which we've now done. Some great critical comments, too, which we're going to follow up on if and when the time comes to do a second edition...

I'm very pleased to see that a new article of mine has just been published in the energetic Greek online journal Re-Public. Editor Pavlos Hatzopoulos invited me a little while ago to respond to a first wave of articles discussing and critiquing the emergent phenomena of the social Web, and the contributor list already includes a number key thinkers in the field, from Michel Bauwens to Trebor Scholz. In fact, I responded specifically to the opening discussion between Trebor and Paul Hartzog, which revisits the industrial-age question of "Who owns the means of production?" for the new, information-age context.

What was missing from this, from my point of view, was a concern not so much with the means of production, but with the next step in the chain - with the means that connect producers and users, the means that facilitate the interaction, collaboration, and ultimately the produsage that takes place when the producer/consumer dichotomy diminishes. This, I feel, should be the main starting-point for critique now - the question should be "Who controls the means of produsage?" In fact, its claim to exclusive ownership and control of the means of produsage within its gated community is one of the reasons why I am so concerned about the rise of Facebook, as I've noted previously.

Anyway - the article is now available on Re-Public, and reprinted below. A special thrill for me (having studied ancient Greek at school) is that Re-Public also published a (modern) Greek translation of the piece: Ποιος ελέγχει τα μέσα παραγωγής/κατανάλωσης; Cool...

It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I'm also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I've written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler's Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I've mentioned here previously, my chapter deals mainly with the question of what citizen journalism may become, beyond the short-term tactical pleasures of stirring up the mainstream journalism industry.

Meanwhile, the launch of e-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media, edited by Kiran Prasad for the Indian scholarly community, is still a few months away, but I've received permission to make a pre-print of my chapter "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" available here. It weaves together a few of the threads that I've followed over the past few months - it presents gatewatching as a practice that is fundamental to citizen journalism, outlines citizen-journalistic practices of news produsage beyond gatewatching itself, highlights the role of citizen journalists as providing an important corrective to media bias in covering the 2007 Australian federal election, and sketches potential pathways towards a greater symbiosis of citizen and mainstream approaches to journalism, beyond any initial antagonism, beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative media structure outlined by Herbert Gans. Towards the end, therefore, I return again to that crucial question of "What next?":

Happy new year, everyone - I'm glad we've made it. In this first post for 2008, I'm delighted to announce the launch of a new Website to accompany my forthcoming book and track further research: Produsage.org will be a central space for anything that relates to the concept of produsage - for now, I've already posted up some introductory definitions and background information about produsage, excerpted from the book, a few articles about the concept, and some more details about Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage itself. This doesn't mean I'll discontinue this site, of course - but Produsage.org is now the key site for all produsage information, and I'll cross-post material here as appropriate.

The election may be over, but our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online continues unabated for now (if perhaps at a pace more commensurate with the impending summer holidays). This week, we take a look back in some degree of anger at the 'just kidding' defence for political stunts gone wrong, which was employed several times during the campaign. Barry, Jason, and I have now posted the article at ABC Online and on our group blog Gatewatching.

Not Funny

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

One of the most prominent recurring features of the long election campaign we've just put behind us were our politicians' and journalists' usually ill-fated moves to attempt the humour defence whenever some political stunt or statement didn't pay off.

We saw this first with Labor's star recruit Peter Garrett, who was reported to have said "once we get in, we'll just change it all" in what he was later at pains to describe as a "short and jocular" conversation with Channel Nine personality Richard Wilkins and talk radio shock jock Steve Price.

As we get closer to the release date for my upcoming book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I'm now starting to deal with the tail end of the production process - finalising the cover image and organising the back cover text. Having featured comments from John Hartley and Geert Lovink on the back cover of my last monograph, I aimed high with this one as well, and I'm very pleased that both MIT's Henry Jenkins, one of the most eminent scholars in the field of user-led participatory culture, and Michel Bauwens, the driving force behind the inspiring Foundation for P2P Alternatives, have agreed to endorse the new book. And what endorsements they are - I'm very flattered, and I hope the book lives up to these plaudits.

Axel Bruns's far-reaching and conceptually powerful book, From Production to Produsage, captures a shift in cultural logic which is profoundly altering how culture gets produced, how knowledge gets circulated, how reputations get made, and how industry, politics, and education operate. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about Wikipedia, Second Life, eBay, Flickr, Moveon, or YouTube, in short, for anyone who wants to understand the turn towards participatory culture.

-- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide