Contemporary Media Ecology, Essay Example

Reviewers such as Christian Fuchs, Peter Golding and Dallas Smythe have come out to give their views on the contemporary media ecology in a strong way. They critically present an argument, which states that, in as much as the web is interactive in many ways, it continues to be entrenched in a capitalist class to date. This capitalist class then eventually regulates the social and cultural result that is produced by the web. From this point of Marxist ontological departure, these critics do not agree with the web 2.0; they disapprove it. In their analyses, they clearly argue that web 2.0 applications product users, producers of websites, or platform producers, make good use of users’ participatory practices. Olson and Svensson argue that using websites form groups of possible buyers. These potential buyers in the end turn out to be of great importance to producers, given that they can be sold to advertisers (7).

I have a strong belief that it is dynamic to insist on the significance of more interactive and social-web technology in developing a cultural infrastructure for users’ active use within different aspects of co-production this is regularly demonstrated by applications such as Twitter and social networking applications, for instance, Facebook online. There exists a change occurring as a result of linking media. This development takes account of the formation of a better rapport between media users and producers. Within the developing media ecology, procedures that are involved in the creation and consumption of media have turned out to be entangled in better ways. To be precise, these said methods motivate media users to the extent that they tend to be seen as prod-users rather than simply users of media. As prod-users, the people that were initially referred to as users or even viewers take part in productive relationships with the traditional media producers by means of a capital “P” and other prod-users in joint communications activities. O’Reilly states that when these are combined, they result in an entirely new media bionetwork (8).

The educational and countercultural computing cultures that established the internet and web took in several persons. These individuals were adequately thoughtful to want to come up with an account of great progress in which they could feel to be a part. Contemporary media ecology thus allows access to the method of creating and dispensing information. This is made accessible extensively, and the consumers become cultural creators and distributors, bypassing traditional organizations through peer-to-peer and many to many instead of one to many communication systems. Finally, it results in a new method or model known as produsage, which is known to be a mixture of creation and use (Hesmondhalgh 7). Web 2.0 can never be considered articulately of economic life without differentiating production and consumption. These two are supposed to be clearly seen as unified, overlapping circuits, and the associations between them have the capability of changing over time.

The internet has continually gone through various changes making it more user friendly and has better interactive guidelines. The chances of individuals, who use the internet on a daily basis to act as participating prod-users, have indirectly been termed as a justification for not considering the fact that there exist strategic producers out there. These producers make cautious decisions to give them the capacity to steer the users’ chances to take part (Olson and Svensson 9).

Works Cited

Hesmondhalgh, David. Digitalization and the Internet. The Cultural Industries. 3^rd ed. Los Angeles, Calif: SAGE, 2007. Print.

O’Reilly, Tim. What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software. The Social Media Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Print.

Olsson, Tobias and Svensson, Anders. Producing Prod-Users: Conditional Participation In A Web 2.0 Consumer Community. Javnost-The Public Vol. 19, No.3, P.41-58. 2012. Print.