Tag Archives: prosumption

Nov
27
2012

Traditional and New Media: Can They Play Nicely Together?

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Right off the bat, two things mentioned in Marshall (2004, chapter 6) made me pause and reflect. The first is that film is actually a series of still images that give the viewer the effect of motion. I knew this already, but sometimes, movies can be so compelling that it is very easy to forget. Secondly, I thought about the way Toy Story made me feel when I first saw it in theaters. Digital animation was unlike anything I had ever seen before – it looked so real! It’s true that most animated films are now assisted by computer imaging and while I think it’s visually very appealing and realistic, I have to say that I am happy that I knew a time before digital animation, so that I can better appreciate how far filmmaking has come.

It’s interesting that The Blair Witch Project cost only $45,000 to make, but made $145 million at the box office, while Titanic cost $250 million to make and generated $1.3 billion at the box office. The handheld camera techniques used in The Blair Witch Project were unfamiliar to many viewers at the time, yet it captured the essence of the storyline well. However, if filmmakers had tried to produce Titanic on a small budget, it wouldn’t have been worth it. The special digital effects, the digital animation, and – let’s face it – James Cameron, are what made the movie great and did justice to the dramatic story.

Marshall (2004, chapter 7) connects new media with the evolution of television in an interesting and succinct way. As he points out, “new media is very much connected to the development of something beyond the active audience into various forms of cultural production.” Television has attempted to embrace this new media culture by incorporating the audience into television programs – thus, reality television shows were born. If anything, the popularity of reality television shows indicates that new media and prosumption are, indeed, what interest many consumers.

von Lohmann (2012, chapter 12) clearly distinguishes between the ways that traditional media and Internet intermediaries handle copyright laws. For traditional intermediaries, the expectation is that permission must be obtained for every copyrighted work that appears in a video. On the other hand, Internet intermediaries do not have to be consulted before a video is uploaded; they only need to get involved if complaints arise. In this way, von Lohmann likens traditional intermediaries to “doormen minding the velvet rope”, while Internet intermediaries are like “bouncers at the bar.” This is a great analogy that represents the differences between the more bureaucratic ways of traditional media and the faster-paced ways of new media. As traditional and new media stake their claims and evolve in modern society, it is certainly an exciting time to be a scholar or practitioner of new media technologies.

Oct
04
2012

Prosumption and Ethical Dilemmas

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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?

Oct
03
2012

User, not Loser, Generated Content!

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Service-dominant logic has certainly made a striking impression on marketing academia. It focuses on viewing a customer as an operant resource, or a collaborative partner who co-creates value with the firm (Vargo and Lusch 2004). In short, it is a market with orientation, as opposed to a market to orientation, in which a market and customer were analyzed and products were produced to meet customer needs (Vargo and Lusch 2007). When we studied this concept that is now very popular in the marketing literature, I was surprised to learn that the term service-dominant logic was not coined until 2004. Upon reading Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson (2012), however, I learned that researchers such as Toffler and Kotler have been studying the idea of presumption for over thirty years, which set the stage for related ideas such as service-dominant logic. One of the most unique examples of prosumption offered by Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson is the Twitter backchannel at conferences. I have tweeted about various sessions at academic conferences and have found the process to be engaging because it allows me to participate in the session even if I did not give a formal presentation. Furthermore, by offering my opinions on the presentation, I am able to connect with other conference attendees who are also tweeting.

Willemsen et al.’s (2011) finding that the negativity effect occurs for experience products whereas the positivity effect occurs for search products is quite useful for marketers who maintain companies’ online presence. For instance, if a restaurant was concerned about the effect of online reviews on the patronage of the restaurant, it would be extra careful to monitor negative reviews, whereas a computer manufacturer should pay attention to whether consumers are bothering to write positive reviews about their products. However, I felt that the study should have included the number of reviews as a control variable. If there is only one positive review of a product, I tend to feel more skeptical about it than if there are many positive reviews. Additionally, if there is one scathing review among multiple positive reviews, I tend to consider the angry reviewer to be a “nitpicker”, or someone who is generally difficult to please. This would be an interesting future consideration for online review studies.

Chia (2010) mentions that some scholars believe that people who create UGC are being exploited because they are not compensated for their work. Peterson even goes so far as to say that UGC should be termed “loser-generated content” instead of “user-generated content”. While I agree that companies and marketers can make money off of user-generated data, I do not think that the people who create this content are being exploited. They are creating this content willingly, and no one (besides the authors of books that teach people how to capitalize on their blogs) is promising that they will earn any monetary compensation from it. I found it interesting that so many bloggers consider reader comments to be a form of compensation. However, as mentioned by Chia, social compensation does not translate into actual compensation. But perhaps bloggers who do not get many hits on their blogs realize that blogging is not a realistic means of substantial income. In other words, they see it as more of a hobby, in which case, social compensation may suffice.