Consume and produce and consume and produce

Week 6 Lecture: In the lecture this week, Josh talked about the nuts and bolts of consumption and production. We are consumers of content. The mundane world we live in slaves on consumerism and this is broken down into the 'big' and the 'small' screens of life.

The big screens can further be broken down as:

- Cinema (shared with public)

- TV (shared privately within our own homes)

- PC (both personal and shared use)

And the small as:

- Personal media players (iPods and on-the-go devices)

- Mobile phones and smartphones (iPhones etc that are on-the-fly)

Consumption is more and more becoming 'personal', which can be especially noted with the boom in mobile phone use. Thick and thin, anyone who owns a mobile phone is a consumer.

Josh then went on to describe consumers becoming producers within a 'niche-market'. The classic example is Star Wars fans producing 'TROOPS' for other Star Wars fans (Where storm troopers are paralleled as cops). Its a vicious cycle.

This video is "Troops" which we actually watched in the week 4 lecture.

So consumers are then increasingly involved in the production of products, producing their own identities in this vicious cycle. This market is seen primarily in the dimensions of social networking sites like Facebook etc.

*** I interacted with a few websites from the NCT blog and came across a list of social networking sites on Wikipedia. So much for freezing out the use of Wikipedia! I guess this list is a good indication of the amount of social networking sites there are on the net and the amount of people that succumb to sheer depressive acts of communication. A shit load! Click here to catch the tail of my meaning.

Mashable - The social media guide also follows the rise and fall of social networking sites. It has comprised a list of 350 time thieves.

The future of social networking websites will be to narrow down into 'selective' areas to target 'specific' groups of people with common interests.

Here is a hierarchy ranking social networking sites in order of monthly visits. Not surprising, Facebook is number one, closely followed by Myspace and Twitter. Myspace though, in the not too distant future will surely waver, as its users are dropping like flies and crossing over to the dark side with Facebook. Then twitter is just another short fuse, it will stumble too when people get bored.

On Lifehacker, this guy called Daniel is planning to take a photo of himself every day before he turns 30. This is an example of a social networking website for all things useful on the net under the umbrella heading of 'design'. Personally I don't really get 'why' people have nothing better to do with their time.

And this site called Turbulence is an art portal for commissions and support for net art. I had a quick look through Michael Takeo Magruders work and it was pretty sweet.

Just a nice summary of this weeks lecture and a further study into the areas of what was talked about. Until the next eclipse...

(All website viewed on September 3, 2009)