[-empyre-] Reply to Anna's questions...

[Yvonne Martinsson]

Hi Anna et al,

Since Barthes is a pet subject of mine, I'd like to chime in here  
with a few thoughts about the prosumer I wrote about in my blog the  
other day. It's a blog post and not necessarily well thought through.

The prosumer is at once a consumer of internet content - for  
instance, in consuming videos at YouTube - and a producer of content  
- for instance, by uploading content to YouTube. Prosumers are no  
longer passive recipients of information but users who interact with  
data and social media. Still, they are users who produce user- 
generated content. Produsers, maybe, but still users.

Many see the prosumer as harking back to Barthes, the death of the  
author and the birth of the reader as a producer of texts rather than  
as the passive recipient of the voice of the master/the author. In  
Barthes, the text is the interface where we as readers interact with  
a given text which today translates into internet terms as user  
interface, interactivity and user-generated content. The great  
difference is of course that reading takes place on the inside, it's  
invisible, user-generated content is visible and need not include  
reading. In fact, the internet obsession with immediacy and  
instantaneity may make the prosumer forget all about reading,  
reflection and interpretation to the benefit of instant action. As  
such, the prosumer is a naive produser and a sitting duck for product  
developers and theme designers, the real authors of the internet of  
which the user is a product.

Another difference is that there in Barthes is an ongoing engagement  
and wrestling with language and a desire to the escape the doxa  
(ideology), both of which find their expression in his fragmentary  
writing. Form is in other words definitely part of the content of  
language in Barthes. On the internet, language is not just a question  
of 'natural' language but of the programming language and the way its  
implemented at the interface, and we need to engage and wrestle with  
that language, or else we are produsers, not (co-)producers of the text.

The prosumer as produser, then, is a user and a product of theme  
designers and product developers. True, it is a new kind of consumer  
- a consumer with the right to customize interfaces and to share  
content -  but still a consumer. The author(ing tool) is elsewhere.

See also my post http://freewheelin.nu/blog_etc/networked_redefined/  
for some thoughts on where the author(ing tool) is in networkedbook

Best
Yvonne

22 okt 2009 kl. 06.17 skrev Anna Munster:

> Hi Patrick, Thanks for a very thoughtful reply. One issue that I  
> wanted to raise in relation to the Barthes text I quoted was not so  
> much about whether he should be there genealogically or not but  
> rather what we might have forgotten about him. So, in the below  
> quote what I think is also important but tends to get overlooked  
> when we make him the precedent for the open 'e-text' (in the  
> prosumer context at any rate), is the sense of temporality embedded  
> in his ideas.
>>
>> 'the goal of literary work (of literature as a work) is to make  
>> the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text' S/Z,  
>> 1994p.4)
>
> For me, in Barthes, the text is open because it is open to a  
> futurity of readership as well, to possible ongoing but future- 
> dated productive readings as well. There is not so much a collapse  
> of author-audience functions as a displacement at work. Whereas, as  
> Kazys has also written about in his chapter, the networked author/ 
> producer/reader/consumer network can very much be about collapsing  
> this deferred-to-the-future of reading-writing in a frenzy of  
> immediacy/nowness. That's an over-generalisation of course and  
> there are many careful and beautiful instances of networked writing- 
> reading that re-insert deferrals and lags...but I get a bit tetchy  
> when Barthes gets lined up with the 'open work' when the open work  
> is now conceived in 'prosumer' terms...
>
> I was wondering whether your use of 'vector', then might not just  
> bear a sense of direction (which way the flow and for what reasons  
> - access, permissions and what form etc) but also a temporal  
> dimension?
>
> cheers
> Anna
>
>
> A/Prof. Anna Munster
> Director of Postgraduate Research (Acting)
> Deputy Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> School of Art History and Art Education
> College of Fine Arts
> UNSW
> P.O. Box 259
> Paddington
> NSW 2021
> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> 612 9385 0615(fax)
> a.munster at unsw.edu.au
>
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