P2P Foundation

We continue our excerpting of an upcoming essay in Audience 2.0, which continues our last entry on social innovation, but applied to the media landscape:

The various quotes are from Umair Haque at Bubble Generation.

“Application of social innovation to the Media field

The above general peer production model, in its 3 scenarios, can easily be applied to the media field. We can expect traditional media organizations to open up to user-generated content, but within a severely controlled context that has been a priori set by the media institution. Think of the CNN or the BBC opening up to user-produced pictures and videos of major events.

Second, we can expect a new wave of intermediaries to ride on the user-generated content wave. Here we want to present a number of concept that can be of interest to understand the new players in the media landscape. We can expect a gradual weakening of the role of mass media, but a reconstitution of the mediasphere around the Audience 2.0. user-generated content.

The Audience 2.0 Mediascape

For insight into how this new media landscape looks like, we are heavily indebted to the analytical work of Umair Haque at Bubblegeneration.com.

What he describes is the emergence of new types of enabling companies, which we described in the second scenario, involving the peer production of content as individuals.

1. Aggregators

Umair Haque defines aggregation as: the ‘Rebundling of content from fragmented platforms & formats, repurposing, & delivery across new platforms & standards’

He distinguishes between ‘Dumb Aggregators’, which simply bring material together., and Smart Aggregators therefore try to add intelligence to the process. We recently discovered Veotag, which allows to slice video and podcast material, and to finely tag the segments so that they can be re-used and recombined.

Umair Haque writes that “A Smart Aggregator “allows consumers to navigate complex media landscapes by efficiently allocating scarce attention according to preferences and expectations. They leverage deep information about content to predict utility derived by consumers, slashing search and transaction costs of consumption. They use technologies like Collaborative filters, Recommendation & rating systems Similarity & difference filters. Smart aggregation is aggregation of content plus … i.e. aggregation of information, expectations, and preferences about content.”

2. Microplatforms and Edge Platforms

Users are not just generating formal texts, audiofiles and videos, i.e. macroformats, but increasingly are formulating and expressing their creative output through microchunks or thought capsules. Think of a blog entry, a 2-minute podcast production, etc… Technology enablers, the microplatforms, are creating tools for such microcontent to be more easily produced, unbundled, and re-used.

Microformats could also be called Edge Platforms, as they are showing the efficiency of the new edge competenties. Based on this insight regarding the new competencies, he concludes that:

“Edge platforms have a numer of key features. The most familiar are that they’re often massively distributed, and open-access. These two features alone make edge platforms often hugely disruptive to the economics of traditional, pre-network industries. Why? Because, strategically, they are enormous sources of leverage: they can usually almost completely vaporize the fixed costs of production from most of the resources that are necessary and sufficient to compete in those industries. ”

What he is hinting at, and it is the key to the competitive advantage of these new types of companies, is that they are able to externalize much more costs and value creation that the companies involved in the first scenario.

3. Reconstructors and Mash-Ups

Reconstructors, says Umair Haque, combine both Smart Aggregation and the Micromedia Platforms.

“The Reconstructor is the aggregator 3.0. It makes media truly personal by leveraging plasticity They deconstruct micromedia by altering, remixing, and filtering microchunks … enabling users to reconstruct ‘casts of personal media. They unbundle microchunks from micromedia … i.e. they render the data independent from their human and technological source.”

The latter process has been called a Mash-Up. A mash-up is a recombination of chunks of material which have been made independent of both the original human creator, and of the data format in which it was originally produced, thereby allowing a new creative unit of both the remixed material and the original input of the new author.

Umair Haque has a realistic prediction of where the companies involved in these efforts are heading: “”Smart Aggregators, Micromedia Platforms, and Reconstructors will consolidate horizontally and then fragment vertically. They will consolidate across media, as this realizes economies of scope, as Google has done, gradually encompassing different media formats, BUT, they will fragment and specialize by industry or market space, because this realizes specialization gains. For example, Google’s dominance is challenged by Become (product reviews), Mobissimo (travel search), FindWhat (article search), Technorati (blog search).”

Conclusion: from Audience 2.0 to Audience 3.0

The Audience 2.0 Mediascape, undoubtedly represents progress compared to the Audience 1.0 Mediascape. Indeed, it enables the autonomous production, by individuals, of media, creating platforms for their production, and diffusion. But the whole field is dominated by companies which have the dual nature that we have described: part for-profit companies, i.e. sharks, part dolphins, relying on the user-generated content. As individuals, we are still dependent on the goodwill of such companies, which can devise myriad ways to control and profit from such content, but as we are relatively disconnected through ‘weak links’ with each other, our power is also relative.

This problematic increases dramatically in a third scenario, Audience 3.0, situation, where we have collectives consciously producing common goods, requiring the 3-fold process of open/free content, participation, and Commons-based legal forms. In such a more pure peer production environment, the private control of the platforms may be seen as much more problematic, while the community is characterized by ‘strong links’. Hence, in this context, which we cannot describe in detail here, an important series of struggles for open infrastructures, open standards, etc… In such a context, the privately-owned media platforms will be severely challenged. To the degree that Audience 2.0 individuals are increasingly participating in pure peer production, they also become more sensitive and demanding about the new demands for freedom, openness, and the creation of a free Commons of knowledge. When this happens, we can perhaps envisage a move towards a more radical bottom-up control of the mediascape. At such a moment, the Audience 3.0. and the Mediascape 3.0 will have been born.”