Each session in this panel deals in some way with the transition from a traditional mode of production—one in which goods and services are produced by a company and then transferred to the individual user—to a new(er) mode of production here users participate in the production process. This idea, variously called co-creation, co-production, prosumption, and produsage, is increasingly useful for describing phenomena ranging from citizen journalism to customizing one’s Nikes. The papers in this session approach the topic—and this I’m happy to see—from a perspective that views co-production as a process embedded in and integrated with previous institutional structures. They also seem evenhanded when evaluating the consequences of such a shift—neither overly utopian nor dystopian. After all, the question will at some point receive an empirical answer, thus outmoding our high-minded predictions.
First, Jacob Landis will discuss the democratization of news production, and examine the integration of integration of traditional mass media with ‘crowdsourced’ information and other forms of citizen journalism with traditional media sources. Second, EunRyung Chong looks at the emergence of global public sphere that has been facilitated by electronic communication and discuss the implication of this for self-identity. Third, Jonathan Albright will examine co-production via participatory mediation—the use of audience response as a filter for curating news content. Lastly, Chetan Chawla will discuss coproduction as a management strategy, theorizing the firms’ transition from forms of manufacturing-based economic organization to new, service- and information-based forms of value-creation.
Jacob Landis (@jakelandis), “Phases in the Crowd: How Traditional Media Outlets Can Best Use Crowdsourced Data”
Journalism, traditionally, has been defined by the medium through which it is published; Large institutions, scarce due to the cost of publishing but able to reach massive audience were the sources of news. Today, through new technology, scarcity is gone. On the Internet, everyone can publish.
At the intersection of “everyone can publish” and “only large institutions deliver news” a new concept is emerging. Information can now be gathered and curated by traditional media institutions from multiple individual publishers at low cost and high speed.
This gathering practice is crowdsourcing, the “use of technology to foster unprecedented levels of collaboration and meaningful exchanges between people from every imaginable background in every imaginable geographical location.” Twitter, a leading technology in the real-time deliver of information from millions of individual sources, provides numerous case studies of traditional news institutions using crowdsourcing to supplement their reporting.
Considering Twitter’s increasing role as a source of real-time information, how can traditional media outlets best use crowdsourced information from Twitter to supplement their own reporting, parsing out fact from rumor?
This thesis suggests that information created by the aggregation of a diverse, independent, decentralized crowd of individuals can be used by traditional media, but only if traditional media does not impact these conditions before collection. The aggregation of the information under these conditions can provide an emergent point of view, previously unseen by any one party. This emergent point of view is a new resource for traditional media outlets, one that, when correctly curated, can tell a story more quickly and more informatively than previously possible.
EunRyung Chong, “Globalization and Web 2.0 in the Network Society”
It is widely acknowledged that “consciousness of the world as a whole” has been made by modern communicative media such as newspapers and Television. Likewise, “virtual neighborhoods” which are not bounded within territorial borderlines seems to emerge by connections of international computer networks. Recently, it has been argued that new Internet applications such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter facilitate the emergence of a global public sphere. In the paper, I will evaluate the implications of newly emerging communication media systems such as mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications in the context of globalization. In particular, 1) self-identity in the Web 2.0 and “produser” 2) emergence of global public sphere 3) network locality in the Web 2.0 environment will be discussed.
The self has been considered an organizing principle of global informational societies. In the process of forming self-identities, locally contextualized individuals influence global social incidents with the consequences and implications of their acts. While no agreement has been made about the precise definition, recently emerging Web applications such as Wikipedia, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter are collectively called Web 2.0. These applications have more open, collaborative, and participatory characteristics. The vast majority of content of Web 2.0 applications is provided by users. Users and producers are not considered separate identities in the Web 2.0 environment. The shift of roles between producer and user of the self is only varied over time and across tasks. In this regard, Axel Bruns suggests the hybrid concept of self as “produser.”
Barry Wellman argues that the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. In addition to that, Manuel Castells claims the possibility of a global public sphere and global civil society in this personalized and ubiquitously connected network. He premises that international, conational, and supranational issues cannot be solved by nationally-based political systems alone. Recent examples of the movement of public global sphere which use Web 2.0 applications can be found in Anti FARC rallies in 2008 on Facebook. FARC is a Colombian military guerilla group which frequently commits kidnapping and murder for political purpose. Anti FARC rallies, which are confirmed 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world on February 4, 2008, were mainly organized by Facebook groups. In sum, Anti FARC rallies by Facebook groups demonstrate the potential of globally networking people power which is supported by Web 2.0 applications.
While it is widely admitted that the mobile communication and individualized information networks decrease the significance of place, the substantive nature of physical space in the context of globalization has not been denied. On the one hand, traditional local groups including families and friends have restructured their communication networks with electronic media. Family members living in different countries can use electronic media such as Facebook, Skype in order to feel a “connected presence,” although it is an imagined proximity. On the other hand, geopolitical issues are still in service while the need of global interdependence for solving world problems is increasing. Both trends demonstrate the substantive nature of physical place of communicators cannot be disregarded even when technological information means guarantee the deterritorialized communication. Considering the significance of place, Eric Gordon suggests the concept of “network locality” in current globalized communication systems. In this concept, Gordon attempts to wed ubiquitous individualized communications network to the place or the local. He argues that local situations cannot be out of the influence of physical space, however, the structures and boundaries can be restructured by the flow of information. Because of the connectivity of mobile communication system, people can store their information in placeless global networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and You Tube instead of individual local drives on a personal computer. When people put their information on global framework, their specific location does not add any meaning or modification to themselves. However, the information which people place in the global network contributes the local knowledge to the global information network. In this regard, “space of information flows” and “space of places” do not replace each other.
To conclude, the importance of human actor as “produser”, placeless ubiquity, mass-to-mass communication, interaction between local knowledge and global information network call for the attention that substantial nature of globalization should be studied in the context of Web 2.0 environment.
Jonathan Albright (@nzews), “Participatory Mediation: audiences as meta-cast filters for online news content”
It is widely acknowledged that “consciousness of the world as a whole” has been made by modern communicative media such as newspapers and Television. Likewise, “virtual neighborhoods” which are not bounded within territorial borderlines seems to emerge by connections of international computer networks. Recently, it has been argued that new Internet applications such as YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter facilitate the emergence of a global public sphere. In the paper, I will evaluate the implications of newly emerging communication media systems such as mobile phones and Web 2.0 applications in the context of globalization. In particular, 1) self-identity in the Web 2.0 and “produser” 2) emergence of global public sphere 3) network locality in the Web 2.0 environment will be discussed.
The self has been considered an organizing principle of global informational societies. In the process of forming self-identities, locally contextualized individuals influence global social incidents with the consequences and implications of their acts. While no agreement has been made about the precise definition, recently emerging Web applications such as Wikipedia, You Tube, Facebook and Twitter are collectively called Web 2.0. These applications have more open, collaborative, and participatory characteristics. The vast majority of content of Web 2.0 applications is provided by users. Users and producers are not considered separate identities in the Web 2.0 environment. The shift of roles between producer and user of the self is only varied over time and across tasks. In this regard, Axel Bruns suggests the hybrid concept of self as “produser.”
Barry Wellman argues that the developing personalization, wireless portability, and ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet all facilitate networked individualism as the basis of community. In addition to that, Manuel Castells claims the possibility of a global public sphere and global civil society in this personalized and ubiquitously connected network. He premises that international, conational, and supranational issues cannot be solved by nationally-based political systems alone. Recent examples of the movement of public global sphere which use Web 2.0 applications can be found in Anti FARC rallies in 2008 on Facebook. FARC is a Colombian military guerilla group which frequently commits kidnapping and murder for political purpose. Anti FARC rallies, which are confirmed 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world on February 4, 2008, were mainly organized by Facebook groups. In sum, Anti FARC rallies by Facebook groups demonstrate the potential of globally networking people power which is supported by Web 2.0 applications.
While it is widely admitted that the mobile communication and individualized information networks decrease the significance of place, the substantive nature of physical space in the context of globalization has not been denied. On the one hand, traditional local groups including families and friends have restructured their communication networks with electronic media. Family members living in different countries can use electronic media such as Facebook, Skype in order to feel a “connected presence,” although it is an imagined proximity. On the other hand, geopolitical issues are still in service while the need of global interdependence for solving world problems is increasing. Both trends demonstrate the substantive nature of physical place of communicators cannot be disregarded even when technological information means guarantee the deterritorialized communication. Considering the significance of place, Eric Gordon suggests the concept of “network locality” in current globalized communication systems. In this concept, Gordon attempts to wed ubiquitous individualized communications network to the place or the local. He argues that local situations cannot be out of the influence of physical space, however, the structures and boundaries can be restructured by the flow of information. Because of the connectivity of mobile communication system, people can store their information in placeless global networks such as Facebook, Flickr, and You Tube instead of individual local drives on a personal computer. When people put their information on global framework, their specific location does not add any meaning or modification to themselves. However, the information which people place in the global network contributes the local knowledge to the global information network. In this regard, “space of information flows” and “space of places” do not replace each other.
To conclude, the importance of human actor as “produser”, placeless ubiquity, mass-to-mass communication, interaction between local knowledge and global information network call for the attention that substantial nature of globalization should be studied in the context of Web 2.0 environment.
Chetan Chawla (@ChetanChawla), “Unweaving the Web: Prosumption as Strategy – The Case of User Generated Content”
The goal of a firm is to create value; all strategies have this aspiration as an implicit assumption. However, the chief arbiters of value are customers (Priem, 2007) who have traditionally received inadequate attention in strategic management (Brief & Bazerman, 2003). Borrowing from the literature on services co-production (Skaggs & Huffman, 2003; Vargo, Maglio, & Akaka, 2008) and the “consumer benefits experienced” (CBE) perspective (Priem, 2007), this paper traces the importance of customers in the process of value creation and posits that all firms can use insights from services co-production to gain sustainable competitive advantage.
In order to explicate the growing importance of value co-production, this paper focuses on value co-production in the form of user-generated content in online services. The phenomena of consumers being part of the production process in the information age led Toffler, Longul, & Forbes (1981) to coin the term prosumer. Nonetheless, the extent of value co-production or prosumption has accelerated in recent years with the advent of the World Wide Web. Originally conceived as a combination of hypertext and computer networks to enable Berners-Lee to remember linkages between projects, labs and people at CERN (Berners-Lee & Fischetti, 1999); the web has evolved into a complex socio-technical system with reflexive generative properties that are always under the threat of Balkanization (Zittrain, 2009) and political intervention (Gonsalves, 2011).
In their seminal paper on evolving a new dominant logic in marketing, (Vargo & Lusch, 2004) argue that the extant paradigms in marketing have been derived from economics and have a focus on the exchange of “goods”. This manufacturing centric worldview is also the dominant logic prevalent in strategic management. This is contrary to the reality of the U.S. economy in which the non-manufacturing sector contributes as much as ninety percent of GDP (Chandra, 2011). One side effect of the dominant logic of manufacturing has been the exclusion of the demand dimension from our theories (Priem, 2007) such as transaction cost economics (Williamson, 1973), positioning (Porter, 1980) and the resource based view (Barney, 1991). Instead, the focus has been on carving the value pie with the intention of capturing the biggest slice for oneself, the underlying assumption being that value creation is a zero sum game.
This manufacturing centric logic with its focus on tangible resources, embedded values and transactions is in stark contrast to the services dominant logic that incorporates intangible resources, co-created value and relationships. This unbalanced approach is also reflected in the theoretical neglect of prosumption, especially in online businesses, in management research. This neglect is unfortunate as it impedes one of the key expectations from management researchers – real world relevance (Okhuysen & Bonardi, 2011). As pointed out by (Brief & Bazerman, 2003), the increasing demands on businesses to create net benefit for society is concomitant with a need for research to understand the mechanisms by which firms can accomplish this goal. This paper concurs with (Brief & Bazerman, 2003: 188) in their assessment that action needs to be moral and for such moral action to occur, people need to be treated as ends in themselves. This echoes one of stakeholder theories (Evan & Freeman, 1988) central tenets: a customer’s right to not be treated by a firm as merely the means to an end. Thus, an inclusion of a more services oriented logic in strategic management also allows firms to address issues of legitimacy, environmental responsibility, social benefit and ethical behavior that have been on the rise since the 1960s – 70s (Ansoff, 1977). This may be accomplished by looking at customers as prosumers, i.e., as important partners in value co-creation and not simply as end consumers of a firm’s output.
This paper contributes to our understanding of the changing face of capitalism in the face of increased consumer involvement in the production process (Shirky, 2010). The rise of social network sites (Boyd & Ellison, 2008) has further accelerated information flows outside the domain of firms. These long term socio-economic trends driven by new technologies (Beniger, 1986; Carr, 2008) suggest that new theoretical paradigms are needed to unweave the web and grasp the complexity we confront. It is clear that the dominance of the manufacturing paradigm within strategic management and allied disciplines has outlived its utility and needs to be supplanted by a more inclusive value co-creation approach more apposite for the global information society (Beniger, 1986) we inhabit. Successful companies are already adopting the new ethos of value co-creation (Ramaswamy, 2008); it is up to researchers to now incorporate this new reality of business with the goal of “bringing in consumers” (Brief & Bazerman, 2003).