Already at the advent of mass media, Walter Benjamin regards, in his essay The Storyteller/Der Erzähler, the task of the writer as well as producer as a mere functional distinction, caused by the shifting of the roles and responsibilities.[1]
The novel role of the former user is the true revolution of the Cyber. Axel Bruns describes this merging of the user and producer to the prod-user and the continuum of texts with the term produsage, which he introduced in his Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage.[2] To speak in the terms of Bruns, prod-users prod-use their own discourse within their own community.
More and more, the community discourse becomes an alternative paraspace to the professional online-media industry. For the first time, the user can re-present oneself in cyberspace with technological means via virtual characters. The cyberstoryteller not only shapes the discourse, but also networks differently.
This former user is simply not (just) a user of provided information, or a recipient within anonymous masses any more. (S)he not only directs the reception of media products in ways that exceeds past media experiences, and, while still remaining a user, (s)he becomes the producer. Both technically as well as personally, a tracing and tracking of usage as well as towards the establishment of a network become possible. I argue that the former mass becomes a connected community network.
The protection of informants has always been a working principle within the journalistic sphere,[3] but the news resource of virtual authorship offers not real, graspable reference and no real-life journalist framer.
Within the Cyber, Barthes' “death of the author”[4] realizes, while the network virtualizes. The individual has gained the most decisive power of all preceding media forms. Former mass media experiences occurred within an anonymous crowd of people and with a limited interaction, such as during a concert or a cinema screening. The internet medium is still available for and geared towards the masses, but is consumed by individuals within a community that (s)he in part determines and (s)he can participate in, making a choice[5] with whom (s)he would like to communicate. The individual chooses the URL cyberpath which (s)he would like to walk on, and the cyber-user picks what (s)he would like to see or hear. Most importantly, the individual decides with what pace (s)he would like to perceive those items.
The internet, while still functioning as a medium for the masses, additionally creates a net(work) of individuals who interact on a constant base and shape their own discourse, intensifying this community experience within the net(work) itself. The character of this community is vital to the cyber discourse, and the dynamics of the community ground in the narrative.
As a consequence of this novel shaping role, the cyber renders the term as well as the concept of the anonymous mass becoming more and more obsolete. I argue that the term community and network describes the users of the internet more adequately, since internet audiences are more connected amongst each other than former media masses.
[1] Benjamin, Walter: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction/Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. In: Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Siegfried Unseld. Frankfurt: suhrkamp 1961.
[2] Bruns, Axel: Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Lang 2008. See also his online platform http://produsage.org/, <15.>.
[3] Peterson, Mark Allen: Getting to the Story: Unwriteable Discourse and Interpretive Practice in American Journalism. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Oct., 2001), pp. 201-211.
[4] Barthes, Roland: Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana 1977, p. 142-248. See also: Foucault, Michel: What is an Author?, Partisan Review 42:4 (1975), Translated by James Venit, pp. 603-614.
[5] One could discuss the notion of “choice” here, since the choice is a carefully generated tool, derived from “real-world” social interactions, “six degrees of separation”, as well as the virtual profile and interests. However, it is a novelty that the community is created, the community creates and reshapes media texts, and that the reception is not a random experience within the masses any more.
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