In the internet age, it is easy to think of ourselves as living in a time when everything is new. Ritzer, Dean and Jurgenson give us a little perspective when they assert that we as humans have been prosuming since our earliest days (2012). Prosuming seems built in to our everyday lives. By simply going to the grocery store and then making a meal from what I have bought, I’ve played the role of both consumer and producer. However, I do think this term is a good one to use to frame our understanding of a time when so much of what we use digitally is interactive. Again, Wikipedia comes to the forefront as a perfect explanation of prosumption. Without constant and varied user input into the site, it would fail to be a real time touchstone for information on almost any topic.

From “Highly recommended!” The Content Characteristics and Perceived Usefulness of Online Consumer Reviews, I liked that the authors separated experience products from search products in their experiment. I did not expect that the negative reviews of experience products would be more useful than the positive ones, as attested by Willemsen, Neijens, Bronner and de Ridder (31). However, after some reflection, and even catching myself doing so while online shopping last weekend, I do gravitate toward the negative reviews of a product when it has those “intangible attributes that cannot be known until purchased” (23). Additionally, I did find it humorous that in contrast to last week’s reading, Peer or Expert, that the authors of this piece found a weak, but present correlation between the expert written reviews and usefulness (31).

Going forward in this week’s readings was a study in blogs and bloggers, how they see themselves and the ethical dilemmas that have arisen from their own actions and corporations trying to appropriate the platform as a sales tool. After reading through these three articles on the topic of blogs, it became painfully aware to me how short the distance is between a genuine (non-corporately created) blogger and their audience. Without the filter of editors and peer review that other writers have built in, these bloggers’ mistakes are made in real time. There is a sense that when a newspaper columnist publishes an article that then becomes criticized, the paper itself bears some of the reputational damage. A blogger has no such shield. As a relatively new medium, today’s bloggers are making the mistakes required to prompt a structure of regulation, such as the proposed FTC regulations discussed in Blogola, Sponsored Posts, and the Ethics of Blogging.

Some of the numbers listed in our readings were staggering. For example, in Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities, the authors quote from a 2007 survey that “50% of all internet users are regular blog readers” (73). Despite checking of 15-20 blogs a day myself, that is still a massive number that I would never have expected. It is no wonder they are being targeted by advertisers. I have followed several blogs from being part of the 99% of “lonely roads” that Chia references in Welcome to Me-Mart, to full blown “probloggers” able to take blogging from hobby to career on sponsorships from corporations using them for advertising.  That being said, for those blogs not generating a profit, I’m not sure that I agree with the view that blogs as user generated content are exploitive just because the user bares the cost of maintenance. I buy supplies for my hobbies all of the time and what I create from the supplies doesn’t generate funds enough for me to be profitable. But that is not the point of a hobby, is it?