How much is too much?

According to Anne Helman, a New Media Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam as of February this year there were over 112 million blogs sitting in the blogosphere, excluding the 72 million blogs that are fast springing from China. Aggregated, this represents close to 200 million opinions on an infinite number of topics.

As at 8 May 2008 there are 2 363 745 articles hosted on Wikipedia. Articles researched, written, edited and maintained by users. By the time you next log on to Wikipedia, my data will be out of date.

In 2007 there were over 124 million people accessing the content posted on You Tube. As of June 2007 You Tube represented 11.4% of Internet user’s online experience. The population of You Tube is larger than that of most countries in the world.

According to Axel Bruns, leading new media theorist, welcome to the world of produsage. Enabled by the so called Web 2.0 revolution and seen by some as the second Internet goldrush in full swing, the world of the produser is a world where consumer and producers are no longer discrete entities and traditional industrial and commercial frameworks for content production and distribution no longer apply.

Blogs, Wikipedia and You Tube only represent a portion of the produsage iceberg. Lying in wait under the murky surface of commercialism is a whole body of user-produced content. But is this iceberg the unseen foe that will result in the sinking of traditional media outlets?

Don’t count out the Titanic just yet, there are a few hot issues which threaten to melt the potency of the produsage iceberg.

1. Quality

The very nature of produsage allows that all individuals, regardless of their position within and access to commercial entities and resources, are equally able and entitled to produce and distribute content. This content could range from written content such as blogs and pieces of citizen journalism to video footage, films, photographs, cartoons, commercials – the list goes on.

However, the removal of the production and distribution mechanism from the traditional commercial context also removes the necessity for two basic elements of commercial content; training and gatekeeping.

This feature acts as a double-edged sword. For many, this is the pure, idealistic attraction of user created content. It is not censored, restricted, manipulated or influenced in any way by the values and agendas of commercial production. And often, it also isn’t spell checked or produced within copyright, defamation or vilification guidelines either. Participants are also not required to have the ‘expert’ factor, any training or experience in their chosen field of production. This leads to questions as to the accuracy and reliability of information and content produced through produsage.

For interest, discussion of this very problem in relation to Wikipedia was raised in an article by Andrew Orlowski for The Register.

2. Quantity

No longer restricted by the capacity of industry, the sheer volume of content available through produsage has increased exponentially, as demonstrated by the figures in the opening paragraphs. However, arguably, content only holds real value when there is an audience to view it. Traditional production has defined and loyal audiences, established through years of consistent delivery and quality of content.

And while there are various mechanisms, sites and software packages such as rating systems, sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us which aim to sift through the vast quantity of information and present that which is pertinent to particular audiences, I personally have doubts as to how effective they are in evaluating and presenting the sheer volume of content now available on the web.


3. Sustainability

In a traditional relationship, content was produced and distributed in exchange for financial compensation. For example, journalists working for a paper were paid wages or a set fee for each story, and in turn, readers paid for access to the stories these journalists produced.

Produsers are generating content outside of this commercial environment, and generally are not paid for their efforts. The time taken to produce this content is, arguably, time that the produser could be paid for within the workforce. For those producers who are generating large quantities of content, there may eventually reach a point that this approach is no longer financially viable. Commercial entities also, are losing profits from their content as consumers select the free, user generated alternatives.

An example of this on going battle between ideals and financial considerations is clearly seen in the open source software sphere.

So is there a threat of the 'causal collapse' of our traditional media outlets? Is the Titanic sinking? For my money, the iceberg needs to be a little sharper to sink this ship. But watch this space.