POPPING THE SEAMS

The term, participatory culture, contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers and consumers as occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact with each other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands. Not all participants are created equal. Corporations – and even individuals within corporate media – still exert greater power than any individual consumer or even the aggregate of consumers. Ans some consumers have greater abilities to participate in this emerging culture than others.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture p. 3

I found this video as part of my research into auto-destruction in rock-n-roll. The artist here (Ted Riederer) has people smash the instruments, then he rebuilds them, then has a band write and perform songs with the re-constituted instruments. Photos on the website show a guitar with pins holding it together like a nasty fracture case. Reiderer describes himself as a survivor of a punk rock youth and this feels like a portrait of the long recovery.secretshape.com

A short blurb in the New York Times (Why Yelp Works As a Review Site NYT 5/19/2008) explains how Yelp has become successful as a restaurant/bar/local business review site because it works to “motivate people through the praise and attention their reviews receive from others.” User-submitted reviews are not second place to professional reviews and there are social networking features that let reviewers track the work of other reviewers. The co-founder and chief executive is quoted as saying “We put the community first, the consumer second and businesses third.”

By community he means the dedicated users who write reviews and comments. By consumer he means the regular users who might make a dining decision based on the site reviews. By businesses he means the restaurants.

The community is primary because it is both part of the product (the audience to be sold to advertisers) and the workforce (creating the site content that brings the regular users). The restaurants are a potential customer (if they buy adds) but not the site’s only customer (insert banner ad for Axe cologne here).

Brain Bress – “Wait” More Brian Bress via the website at brianbress.com.

Rupa Huq writes about the 30-year anniversary of Rock Against Racism.