I’m getting old.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following post is purely driven by a shower epiphany. As a result this post could be convoluted, retarded, and bad for your health.

So. I turn 20 tomorrow. I dodged the bullet that is teenage pregnancy. I will never be a tragic teenage suicide. And it’s not a full moon outside, so sadly I will never become a Teenage Werewolf.

But what does it mean to be an adult nowadays? I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and give my Nintendo away. I’ve still got a lot of the novels I loved when I was 12. And most importantly, I’m not going to give up all my hobbies in favour of an office job that will suck my soul away. One of the factors of produsage that I see in action all the time on the Interwebs is the simple concept of making hobbies lucrative. And for me, that’s what’s driven my career pathways, much to the distress of my mother.

My mother. Practical. Wizened. Runescape player. I’m one of the less common Gen Y kids who have a pair of Gen X parents. That’s a blessing in many ways, and I’ve always been greatful for my parents. Because they’re not complete shut ins. They understand a lot of what me and my sister enjoy, we share the same humour, and we get along quite well.

But the thing about my mother …well it’s to do with what happens when she asks what I’m going to do when I grow up. She asks me this a lot. And I have given her different answers lately. Essentially though, I tell her that I’m going to blaze my own trail. The top options right now are that I will become a crash hot photographer, or I will create my own form of collectible plastic toys. Both of these answers are met with a raised eyebrow and a “But…who would pay money for that?”

Aside from this being a blow to my precious ego, I can’t help but think nowadays this is a ridiculous question. In this present day and age, e-commerce has exploded all over the place. I can give you bucketfuls of evidence to the fact. Merchants and craftspeople who would have been at home in flea markets fifteen years ago thrive on communities such as Etsy. My favourite example of this is a lovely lady called TwinkieChan. Her knitted scarves and tissue box covers are AH-MAY-ZING, but you may find it amusing to note that Twinkie’s internet fame started when she was a SuicideGirl.

An example more relevant to myself is the growing industry of vinyl collectible toys. If my business partners at Pinin are to be believed, the industry is booming. The two levels of it essentially translate into:

a) People making their own vinyl and painting it up nice and pretty.

b) People painting the blank moulds of others. This is normally done by renouned artists, making the work more valuable.

The fascinating thing about this is that it’s apparently an incredibly easy process to make your own vinyl toy. The information is accessible on numerous online tutorials, and they’re of the opinion that the only thing limiting people from partaking in this exercise is a lack of creativity.

But I digress. I haven’t yet explained why the hell this is all relevant to produsage in the new age, and I’ve already broken the 500 word limit.

In his final chapter of Blogs, Wikipedia and Second Life, Axel Bruns reflects on the future of produsage and new media, and he holds the opinion that the path from artefact to product must run both ways, fluidly, before produsage can reach the peak of its’ evolution. After the discussion that we held in class, I held the firm belief that there was no possible way to know exactly how this fluidity would be achieved. I still stand by this. I know that things like Etsy, cupcake scarves and plastic sheep are on track to such a future.

But to be honest I don’t mind. I like where produsage has taken me over the past nineteen years. But as of tomorrow, it will be twenty years.

As long as I don’t wake up a Teenage Werewolf.

GOODNIGHT LADEES AND GENERAL MEN.

References (in order of use):

Internet Movie DataBase: Teen Wolf (1985), n.d. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090142/ (accessed May 25, 2009)

Collective Works of Bec Randall, 2009. http://witcheemon.redbubble.com/ (accessed May 25, 2009)

deviantart: Mint Chip – RhS Prototype 01 by witcheemon, 2009. http://witcheemon.deviantart.com/art/Mint-Chip-RhS-Prototype-01-121629520 (Accessed May 25, 2009)

Etsy :: Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, n.d. http://www.etsy.com/ (Accessed May 25, 2009)

TWiNKiE CHAN! Eat your cake and wear it too! 2007-2009. http://www.twinkiechan.com/main.php (Accessed May 25, 2009)

The Food and the Fabulous | LCSV4 The Illustration News Portal , n.d. http://thelittlechimpsociety.com/eladear/the-food-and-the-fabulous/ (Accessed May 25, 2009)

Black Forest Cake – Tissue Cozy 2, n.d. http://www.twinkiechan.com/images/misc/Black%20Forest%20Cake%20-%20Tissue%20Cozy%202.jpg (Accessed May 25, 2009)

SuicideGirls – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_girls (Accessed May 25, 2009)

Pinin, tokidoki, mimobots, skelanimals, gloomy bear, anime, n.d. http://www.pinin.com.au/ (Accessed May 25, 2009)

Bruns, A. 2007, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Teen+Wolf+Too.jpg, n.d. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aX17lByymFo/R6eA9BOa2qI/AAAAAAAACf0/6yFrZZv8Kxc/s320/Teen%2BWolf%2BToo.jpg (Accessed May 25, 2009)

My word count is bigger than yours.

If I didn’t mention it at the end of my previous journal entry, I’m posting the week 3 and 4 entries back to back. Mainly because as I was looking over the draft to week 3, I realised that some of the points I’d made in the week 3 entry covered points made in the week 4 topic. Gabble gabble ramble.

I briefly mentioned Citizendium last entry, a monolith on Wikipedia‘s horizon. However it seems to be a remarkedly small monolith, and it’s severley doubtful it will ever overtake Wikipedia. This idea of a community writing knowledge based on their superior qualifications breeds a sense of elitism that I find rather discomforting. Elitism in general is a really awful cancerous thing. Sure, the information produced would come with a reliability garuntee from Larry Sanger himself. On the downside, it seems more like a digital encyclopedia than a thriving internet database. And it carries more of the downfalls of encyclopedias than the benefits.

The epic faceoff between professionals and amateurs has been going on since gladiators slaughtered slaves in the ring of Rome. As long as there is a solid divide between pros and ams, they will always be disagreement about each one’s place on the internet super highway. By their very nature, professionals can’t become one with the hive mind, because they know something that puts them above the average person. If they exert their status AS professionals they are showing everyone that they are above the hive mind and what they know is more important. if however they simply contribute knowledge and allow others to dispute and mould it, they can wear the moniker of amateur with some honesty.

Citizendium turns the internet into a boy’s club. The atmosphere is relatively unfriendly unless you hold a degree of some description. Amateurs then go running to Wikipedia for a more comfortable environment. Meanwhile the pros would hold up in their Citizendium fort, feeling more at ease in a place where they feel their wealth of knowledge will be appreciated. So as the agreement stands, there aren’t going to be many places where the two get along in harmony.

On the other hand, there are some places that are home for neithers pros nor ams, merely trolls. Encyclopedia Dramatica couldn’t go without a mention in this double Wikipedia smackdown. Masquerading as a wealth of knowledge, it’s more like the putrescent waters of knowledge. I can now say that I know some sick, sick things, courtesy of ED. I wonder what kind of professional you have to be to write for ED…

References (in order of appearance)

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Welcome to Citizendium, n.d. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Citizendium (Accessed May 19, 2009)

Wikipedia, n.d. http://www.wikipedia.org/ (Accessed May 19, 2009)

Larry Sanger – Wikipedia – the free encyclopedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_sanger (Accessed May 19, 2009)

Encyclopedia Dramatica, n.d. http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Main_Page (Accessed May 19, 2009)

I’m too stoopid to contribute to Wikipedia

It causes me great pains to come to this conclusion, especially when you consider the fact that I snorted in front of tutor last week and joked about taking on a one week mission to infiltrate the ranks of the Wiki-army and trash the place for my own amusement. I believe I actually said “How hard can it be to write a Wikipedia entry?”

The answer? Pretty damn hard. If you like your e-reputation the way it is.

In explaining it to my mother last night, I likened the act of vandalising a Wikipedia page to the act of being caught and charged for spraypainting someone else’s dog. Yes, it SEEMS inconsequential now that you’re 15 and forever young, but wait twenty years, then decide you want to live permanently in the U S of A. And you can’t. Why? Because you vandalised the dog, you great dolt! That permanent record everyone threatens you with actually exists. And your Wiki-permanent record will be your undoing. You can in fact be blacklisted for slandering Pauline Hanson on her Wikipage. Or anyone. And say I invented a cure for cancer. I’d never be able to contribute to the Wikipage for the very thing I’ve created. Because I spraypainted the damn dog.

This is a pretty strong example of the effect that Wikipedia has on the internet community as a whole. In fact I’m going to dedicate this whole entry to Wikipedia, and if you’ve noticed already, each link goes back to Wikipedia. The website has been around since 2001 and is a stellar example of Web 2.0 and its capabilities. The concept of Web 2.0 is probably what Bruns based his theories of produsage on. This wonderous fairytale concept of the ever changing product rather than an artefact drove the Web 2.0 video circulating on YouTube several years ago. The idea of the hive mind that mediates itself is tied in with the video again (I would link it, but then I’d spoil my pledge to Wikipedia. Just Google it, it’s more rewarding), where they celebrated the idea that many users would shape the internet.

Quite frankly, they have shaped the internet. You Wikipedia something in the same way you Google it. The same way you Xerox things. It may be to do with the fact we’re such a capitalist society, but it’s a brand in itself nowadays. And I think the best thing it has going for it is the self regulating hive mind. With that many people contributing, it’s pretty hard to go wrong.

And in a roundabout sort of way, I come back to my initial arguement. The system DOES work very well. People like me don’t bother to try, because the whole process just seems…scary. You have to be willing to admit that you know enough to contribute paragraphs of data, but also willing to concede if someone else decides that only half a sentence from the paragraphs of data is worth using. And if you get haughty about this, then perhaps you’d feel more at home on Citizendium.

And I thought Wikipedia was scary. This is Wikipedia for snobs. They’ve been seeking to usurp Wikipedia for the past three years. I only heard about them a month ago! I couldn’t set foot here, for many reasons. I decided to write this article and the article for the fourth week’s topic back to back, because I’ve now gotten to the point where both of the articles will intersect nicely…

AND I’M PREGNANT WITH YOUR SISTER’S GARDENER’S CHILD!

[musical interlude]

References (in order of appearance):

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Enemy of the State (film) – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_of_the_State_(film) (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Forever Young (Alphaville song) – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_Young_(Alphaville_song) (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Pauline Pantsdown – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Pantsdown (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Web 2.0 – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Google Search – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_search (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Photocopier – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photocopier (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Capitalism – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Arguement – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguement (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Citizendium – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizendium (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Victoria Beckham – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_beckham (Accessed May 12, 2009)

The Bold and the Beautiful – Wikipedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bold_And_The_Beautiful (Accessed May 12, 2009)

Pants on head retarded.

Citizen journalism makes me think of hairy legged lesbians beating the penises off of men who may or may not have been using it properly in the first place. Or eco freaks who haven’t had a bath in a long time because they’re living in tree houses, blogging from their green laptops about the injustices of deforestation in Tasmania.

Boy, if you’re a hairy legged lesbian or an eco freak, I’m going to get some fun comments.

But indeed that is another one of the fun things of standard citizen journalism. As opposed to standard journalism, where the product goes through input of information, output of the product and response from the readers, there can be no definitive end. Readers (or, that magic word again, PRODUSERS) can contribute to a journal entry. But journal entries can be edited. Repeatedly. Forever. Someone gets offended I used the hairy legged lesbian schtick, I can come back and edit it later to be more politically correct. Watch this space.

But I digress. The real definition of citizen journalism to me is the act of taking all forms of journalism and putting it into the hands of the people. Journalism is not just hard hitting political issues. It brings new importance to other things. The paper’s gossip column? Eh, yes but no. Any monkey with a typewriter can write a gossip column. On the internet, it just turns into a massive game of chinese whispers, with copy and paste. So citizen journalism doesn’t really bring anything new to it. Or even the lighthearted rant. That’s where Twitter comes in. Bite sized angst by the average Joe and Joette. Game and movie reviews? That’s the clunky segue I was looking for!

Apart from the fact I find Zero Punctuation a fantastically funny show, it’s a fascinating sort of case study into internet born celebrities. To get a feel for his journalistic integrity, I command you to watch this. Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, born in the UK, runs amok in Brisbane, is described by The Escapist website as a man with a ‘sweet hat and a chip on his shoulder’. Yes, ‘Yahtzee’ does have a day job writing game reviews for Hyper magazine but a couple of years ago he created a five minute flash animation wherin he reviewed a game. I use the term review lightly, he often rips them to shreds, and that’s where the fun lies.

No, I do not have an Xbox. No, I do not know the true pain and suffering that comes with the dreaded quick time effects. But I like to think of myself as a gamer. The point I’m making here is that as a gamer (or any kind of consumer really) you get tired of people trying to cram products down your throat. Trying to tell you what’s cool and what’s good for you. My biggest complaint is with gaming magazines (say for instance, Hyper…) who rate games on a percentage. In the last 18 months I have yet to see any game get a percentage below 89%. So what the hell does that even mean? That everything is awesome and we should buy two copies of each?

Yahtzee has become the industry regulator, which is important. Games are an absolutely HUGE industry. Huge. Look at the most recent releases, such as Vin Diesel’s The Wheelman. They actually cast Vin Diesel! Not just as the voice, but they drafted the main character from his ugly mug too. The new Command and Conquer game has cut scenes with some massive stars, including Jenna McCarthy, Tim Curry and Randy Couture. The gaming industry are making too much money to just sit on their arses and let the masses be unhappy with what they’re churning out. Yahtzee may seem like an average schmo but the truth is development companies value his input. It was Valve (creators of Portal and Half Life) who invited Yahtzee out to California and showed him a good time, to thank him for his positive review. This is a very powerful man, and the Escapist are lucky to have him. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the addition of his segment to the Escapist website has driven up the website’s traffic by four hundred percent.

Of course, this is if Wikipedia is to be believed…to be continued, next journal entry.

References (in order of appearance):

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Croshaw, B. 2007. The Escapist: Video Galleries: Zero Punctuation: Console Rundown. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/3-Console-Rundown (Accessed May 5, 2009)

Croshaw, B. 2007. The Escapist: Yahtzee Vists Valve, a Travelogue. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/videos/zeropunctuation/2655-Yahtzee-Visits-Valve-a-Travelogue (Accessed May 5, 2009)

Zero Punctuation – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Punctuation (Accessed May 5, 2009)

But I digress.

Okay, my first official blog entry. To be perfectly honest I don’t know how I’m going to go about writing this. I could just rattle on about Wikipedia, but isn’t that what everyone else is going to do? You’d think I’d be able to think of SOMETHING, I’ve been bantering around the internet and community hopping since I was about 11. One of the first things I fell into was fanfiction, and of course my nose for trouble found me on some questionable websites that have probably shaped me into the sick individual I am today.

I guess it would make sense to make a brief mention to the living and breathing cult that was Kenji Kotaro. Believe me, I’d link this if I could but that was the biggest problem here. I discovered him on Fanfiction.net and got swept away by his (what was probably) bad writing. Very quickly I discovered his little corner of the internet, which lived on an internet hosting service called Crosswinds. Very old. And while the community were strong and tight like a rubber band, it simply fell to nothing once Crosswinds shut down. He no longer even keeps his fanfiction profile anymore, so the only thing I have left of him were memories. Not even good ones. Naive me simply took him at face value. To me he was simply an author. And from my experience, authors were almighty demi gods, who if you sent them a letter would never reply. They were too busy to spend time on the likes of you, their fan.

But I digress.

Me not really communicating with anyone on the forums established what has now become my typical ‘lurker’ status. I have trouble connecting with anyone, digital or fleshy. And being the slightly self absorbed person that I am would go quite far in explaining why I stare at terms like produsage with a confuzzled look. In particular I am referring to the utopia that Axel Bruns seems to carve produsage into. It’s all very well to talk about the hive minded, self regulating community that forge an everchanging artefact for the future generations to see and contribute to, and how they do it for the greater good of the others.

But where the bloody hell does that leave the selfish minded such as myself? I like to think that I’m intelligent enough to contribute to at least one entry on Wikipedia. I hardly see the point though in contributing to such a thing when I would get no recognition. For me, the greater good is not enough. Tangible rewards are better. So perhaps I should go to Twitter, land of the self obsessed if social commentary is to be believed. Interestingly not a bad leap to make. For instance, I would be interested in comparing the Wikipedia page on Swine Flu with this little gem of an observation from one of my favourite web artists. I mean seriously, if there’s one thing I love, it’s watching drama unfold over the Internet. Nothing makes me chuckle more than a media panic, especially when it travels at the speed of approximately forty tweets a minute. Historians will wonder what pipe we were smoking.

References (in order of appearance):

Bruns, A. 2008. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc.

Fanfiction.net, 2009.  HYPERLINK “http://www.fanfiction.net/” http://www.fanfiction.net/ (accessed April 27, 2009)

Bruns, A. Produsage: Key Principals, 2007.  HYPERLINK “http://produsage.org/node/11″ http://produsage.org/node/11 (accessed April 27, 2009)

Twouble with Twitters // Current, 2009.  HYPERLINK “http://current.com/items/89891774_twouble-with-twitters.htm” http://current.com/items/89891774_twouble-with-twitters.htm (accessed April 27, 2009)

Wikipedia – ‘Swine Flu’, 2009.  HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu (accessed April 27, 2009)

Xkcd – ‘Swine Flu’, 2009.  HYPERLINK “http://www.xkcd.com/574/” http://www.xkcd.com/574/ (accessed April 27, 2009)

I am ready for the floor

First post. *tags*

So over the next few weeks I will be writing tasty tidbits about my understanding of new media. My posts will be deliciously lacking in references (probably) as I cannot afford textbooks. You can thank the shits that vandalised my car for the gaping hole in my finances. Will probably start at digital communities (or folksonomies even) for the first official entry, but for now I shall simply sit and stew.

But as always I will take advantage of this opportunity to whore out my photography. http://witcheemon.redbubble.com

Clickitclickitcliiiiickiiiiit. >_>