Organized producers of net culture : Actors. practices, ambitions

• Ever since its breakthrough in the 1990s, the internet has inspired numerous theoretical discourses to analyse “the Net’s” significance: What will it mean to the world we once knew? Within these debates a number of conceptualisations have been especially significant, notably the early ideas of an “Internet Culture”, and later on analyses connecting the internet to a “Participatory” or a “Convergence Culture”.   Even though these conceptualisations differ in-between one another, they share a number of important features. One such feature is their preference for understanding the internet as a sphere that is dominated by everyday users, who act as active but “disorganised producers” on the internet through practices such as blogging, face-booking, website production, social networking etc.   This preference has given the theoretical discussion a problematic bias. Among other things, it has effectively discouraged research to really take on and analyse the many and very often powerful “organised producers” of internet content, who make use of economic power, discursive resources, and marketing strategies to reach out to everyday users (and curiously enough also offering them to “participate”).   This paper presents the theoretical foundation and describes the empirical design of an ethnographic research project* aiming to start compensating for this bias by analysing and theorising “organised internet producers”. The paper also illustrates the approach through initial analyses from one of the five case studies within the project.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Internet

organized producers

net culture

Media and communication studies

Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)