With this newfound sense of rebellion, my opportunities were endless.

Did I pierce my nostrils with rusty safety pins?
Did I start my own all-girl band and scream angry, angry songs about politics, the status quo of feminism or how much boys suck?
Did I spray paint anarchy signs all over the city and spit in the face of police officers?

No, not really, I just read a lot. I learnt that a huge driving force behind punk rock is DIY.

Although DIY has been around since man first picked up a hammer and renovated his bathroom, I mainly associate the term with the punk rock movement – particularly zines. The term “Punk” initially came from a zine of the same name. Similarly, in the 1990s, the term “grunge” to describe alternative rock music at the time came from a zine review.

These words are now staple genres of the music industry, proving how powerful an influence zines have.

A zine is basically a homemade magazine. Without publishers and editors, the discerning zine maker creates their publications and distributes them personally to the public. Professional-looking or just a cut ‘n paste job, the whole concept of a zine is to convey independent idea and thought. You can still buy them at places like RockingHorse Records.

According to Stephen Perkins on his webpage about Punk Zines, the zine movement came about from a lack of alternative media.

“The initial vacuum caused by punk’s lack of empathetic coverage in the established music press, combined with its antipathy to the whole industry, opened up a new and exciting space for a homegrown or ‘insider’ coverage of this rebel music.”

Punk DIY is still very much alive today, but instead of paper zines, people are turning to the internet to publicise their creative work.

Author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage and our very own New Media lecturer, Axel Bruns, took notes at a conference called Prosumer Revisited in Frankfurt.

On the topic of “From Prosumption to DIY Culture”, Bruns notes that the movement that started off as some kids cutting and pasting bits of paper together to make a zine is now “a brand in its own right. And this ‘DIY brand’ may be the most important brand of the 21st century.”

It’s everywhere. Blogging, citizen journalism, t-shirt customisation, and even the relative ease of making your own website is rooted in the concept of DIY. The difference is that in the technology age, more people than the punk kids hanging out at RockingHorse can access it.

Another major aspect of DIY culture is customisation.

In the New Media age, we can see this through open source software projects.

“Another example for such trends is hacking, of course – not hacking as computer hacking in a narrow sense, but the user modification of products such as the iPhone, for example. This is a kind of deliberate misuse of products that vastly improves the usability and use range of such products.”

To find out more, I had a chat to Ili Tulloch who hosts “Paper Scissors Glue” on community radio station 4ZZZ (102.1 FM) – a show all about living by DIY. Listeners can hear about the finer tips of dumpster diving, bicycle repair, clothing alterations and more.

What is DIY?

For me I like to think of it as subverting consumerism while being fun and creative… It’s about doin’ it yourself…  as most underground culture is. DIY has evolved in the last few years and is now a craft movement, but really stems from the punk ethos of questioning the supposed uniqueness of an ‘expert’s’ skills, and promotes the ability of the ordinary person to learn to do more than he or she thought was possible.

I think the DIY craft movement has opened up the possibility of making money from your art, so making something useful out of recycled and junk materials, then selling them to people in order not to have to work a boring office job, and you’re using your artistic practice for something much more.

What potential does the internet/new media/Web 2.0 have for people passionate about DIY?

Blogging! Everybody has rad blogs. Photoshop is awesome for making posters and cool zine pages… email, forums, facebook and twitter are ramping up self-promo possibilities, and also the ability to go global aka Microcosm Publishing, etsy.com…

An awesome thing people are doing now is organising their own world tours. Zinester David Roche just visited Brisbane a couple of months ago. He got in touch with us via the net, and we set up some zine readings for him, he stayed at our house and we showed him koalas. We know a Brissy guy Jeremy Staples (Bizoo), who is doing the same thing and is off on the VansWarped tour. It’s just awesome all the shit you can do..

And there’s also the great DIY tech-heads who are creating free-ware versions of everything so those with less money can still participate online, like hosting sites, neooffice, gimp, etc…

Has the introduction of this new technology changed the face of DIY?

To a certain extent yes, in that it’s easier to do some self-promotion, and networking – there’s a new and somewhat awesome opportunity to make some money to survive with… I think this is a challenge to old DIY ideals that you don’t need money.

The reality is, people will make money off your ideas if you don’t figure out how to do it first, and the internet is helping people step up and accept their art has real value.

But, at the same time, I can’t help but hold on to the ideal that the really fun stuff is still happening in bins out the back of supermarkets, under houses and in squats with stolen paints, homebrew and some really dedicated activists, musicians and artists.

On a personal note, I’m all for DIY. As I mentioned in my previous entry, I’m working on my own website to publish my own work and get my name out there. You can check it out now but it’s still in its very early stages yet.

I also helped set up the MySpace page for my boyfriend’s band, Crystal Stairway [/shameless plug], using some basic layout coding trickery, adding photos and a bunch of local music contacts I know, for the purposes of networking and publicity. Rolling Stone may not know who they are yet, but maybe they’ll be able to get a few gigs from it. There’s a lot of potential.

EDIT: Fixed HTML fail for Tiara’s website. Please check it out!

On Thursday last week I attended the Walkley MediaPass Student Industry Day. It was an opportunity for journalism students to talk to working journalists, freelance writers and news editors of major news networks.

I learnt a lot from that day. As I sat with what I called “The QUT Journalism Student Twitter contingent” (we organised to meet up for the day via Twitter, oh how geeky), I noticed a heavy emphasis on the role of the internet and new media in journalism right from the get go.

• Journalists must now be able to demonstrate multimedia skills and work across a variety of platforms. Not only do we have to know how to write a story, but be able to document it for audio and video, edit and upload it online. ABC Online News is a great example of multimedia journalism.  Their swine flu page shows a feed of related news stories, video, audio and a photo slideshow at the bottom – a comprehensive guide to a newsworthy topic.

• There are certain economic implications of online news media – apart from advertising revenue, how will future online journalists make money? Fox news media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently proposed to start charging people for reading his (otherwise free) online newspapers. His fears of online media dominating others accurately reflect its phenomenal impact.

• But Clare Fletcher from the Walkley Foundation said there also exists new opportunities for future journalists, like myself, who have grown up with internet technology and know how to use it. Aging journalists who aren’t up with using new media pave the way for new ones who do.

• And with those opportunities, an industry full of new media-savvy journalists just might create a new business model.

It also pays to have your own website. Hence why when I get a spare moment, I’m going to “renovate” my blog. It’s currently a fairly basic blogspot affair full of random rantings and ravings, but I plan to get a more professional WordPress-based online resume/portfolio/blog happening soon. I really like QUT student and creative extraordinaire Tiara Shafiq’s website which should give you an idea of what I’m thinking about.

Watch this space!

As soon as Wikipedia wormed its way into the consciousness of school and university students alike, so too did criticism.

Website evaluation suddenly became part of the school curriculum, with the firm principle of “Use Wikipedia for general background information and by all means, use their source list. But don’t cite from it.”

Quite simply, the open-source nature of Wikipedia is not a sure-fire guarantee that every contribution is accurate or credible, so it would be unwise to treat Wikipedia as an academic work.

Technology writer for The Guardian Simon Waldman says Wikipedia seems like “anarchy”.

Encyclopedia Brittanica’s editor-in-chief Dale Hoiberg criticises Wikipedia for not giving emphasis to “important” topics.

“People write on things they’re interested in, and so many subjects don’t get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese art, and the entry on Coronation Street is twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.”

I personally like this about Wikipedia. For example, my favourite video game is Final Fantasy VI. The extensive entry in Wikipedia has obviously been put together by die-hard fans. The extensive plot and long cast of characters is written in great detail.

In comparison to Encyclopedia Britanica, academic writers are not likely to be interested in old-school RPG video games and dismiss it as irrelevant – despite the fact that there are many fans out there who are interested in the topic.

I would show you an example but apparently you have to pay to use Encyclopedia Britanica! What a rip off. I can access Wikipedia for free, you know.

I’ll look at Citizendium instead, who is trying to be the anti-Wikipedia: “Our growing number of editor-approved articles are reliable and of world class quality, rivaling the best printed encyclopedias.” Instead of random Internet users under a cyber-pseudonym, Citizendium claims that their articles are written by experts under their real names.

But upon searching, there is no such article for Final Fantasy VI. I did, however, find a general article for Final Fantasy. It lists the barest minimal knowledge of the game – that all the games have airships, a character named Cid and fictional animals chocobos and moogles. A series with over thirteen storyline-rich games with characters and their backstories, hundreds of towns, battle abilities, bosses and monsters, and that’s all they have to say? There are only two separate articles for individual games – the two most popular of the series, FFVII and FFX. Both of which, again, are very short despite the many complexities in the game.

There is no such thing as being an “expert” on video games. You can’t get a Bachelor of Video Games. In the video gaming community, the nerdiest nerd who has spent hours playing over a video game and noting the details has more authoritative knowledge than, say a professor who has studied video games from an academic point of view. But obviously video games and merely being a fan who knows them very well isn’t good enough for Citizendium.

So if I want to know about the extensive backstories of the Final Fantasy VI characters, I guess Wikipedia is the place to go.

This tendency for Wikipedia to place emphasis on human interest rather than what academics think we should be interested in has led to a game invented by users at satirical entertainment website SomethingAwful: Wikigroaning.

Quite simply, Wikigroaning is comparing the length of an article about serious topic with another similar, but “frivolous” topic.

If the “frivolous” topic’s article is longer, we have a Wikigroan.

There are many examples on the site you can have a look at.

Today’s featured article on Wikipedia is on Irish rock band U2. The article has almost 10,000 words (9,772 to be exact).

A more academic topic  – Celtic music – is only a meagre 1,695 words…

Ladies and gents, we have a Wikigroan.

One of the major elements of Web 2.0, new media or whatever you want to call it is the ease of communication. In my earlier blog entry I talked about produsage. When the material produced relates to the news, it is called citizen journalism.

Bowman and Willis (in Flew, 2008) call citizen journalism “participatory journalism.” They define it as “the act of a citizen…plaing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information.” The purpose is to produce “independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant” news. 

It’s a simple concept  – journalists can’t be everywhere all the time whenever something happens. It’s taking eye-witness accounts one step further, with powerful results. Who would you rather hear information from – the journalist who heard about it or the guy who was actually there, filmed it and put it on the internet?

Korean online news service OhMyNews is often cited as the best example of citizen journalism. OhMyNews writer Claire George talks about the advantages of citizen journalism in her article Reporting at First Hand. Although I don’t agree with everything she says in the article (journalists most certainly do NOT sit around in their offices all day), I do agree that “newspapers do not have infinite resources”. The material citizen journalists produce are resources that can help make news stories more comprehensive.

ABC News Online has fully embraced citizen journalism by adding a contributions section their site, where people can send in tip offs, photos and videos. You can also follow and communicate with radio station 612brisbane on Twitter. Radio host Spencer Howson was a guest lecturer in my Radio and TV class and confessed that he was a “Twitter addict”. 612brisbane provided great local election coverage by getting people to tweet about what was happening at different polling booths and RT (retweeting) that information for others.

So maybe the strongest use for citizen journalism is for local citizens to provide, well, local news.

With that in mind, I interviewed David Manson, who runs a blog called Brisneyland. Brisneyland posts about interesting art, music and other events going on in sleepy old Brisbane town. He also runs a Brisneyland Twitter account.

Q: How did [the Brisbane Blog] get started?

I first tried this idea at the end of 2006, when someone advertised on the Problogger site for people to become “city bloggers” in an international network that would work together. I applied and was accepted, but became ill with depression in mid-2007 and couldn’t continue. Eventually the site brisbaneishome.com was sold by the network to another Brisbane blogger, who hasn’t kept it up to date.

I was feeling frustrated that my illness had stopped me doing this properly, and I’d always thought (ever since I’d had regular access to the Net at home in March 2006) that using the Net to bring people together in a city was a good idea. I still liked the idea of a city blog and decided to start the Brisbane Blog and see if I could keep it running as a “What’s On” guide.

Q: Where do you get information to put up on the blog?

Hundreds of places! To be honest I couldn’t tell you how I first heard of most of the places I check for information. I listen to 4ZZZ to hear local bands and write about their upcoming gigs, and I also check Rave Magazines “newswire”, where pretty much anyone can submit a media release, so there’s lots of info there.

I have a friend who’s fairly busy in the arts scene and she sometimes sends me emails about new events that are coming up. I’ve found out about a couple of good galleries from her (including one in West End that hires itself out for one-week shows for $700, which I like because it’s a bit grass-roots).

About a year and a half ago I got seriously into networking on Twitter, following pretty much everyone I could who was in Brisbane. I had an idea that people on Twitter would turn out to be quite creative and that was right – I’ve got several ideas for stories recently directly from stuff people I’m following have said on Twitter.

Some of my source material comes from photos people have published on Flickr or videos they’ve made and put on YouTube. For instance, the night The Who were in town recently-ish, there were photos and videos of the performance up very quickly, and I was able to republish them together as a story. I want to do this sort of thing more often, showing my readers and followers on Twitter what other people are doing.

I also have lists of nine film festivals, seven art galleries, various festivals and all sorts of events from the Redcliffe KiteFest to what people are doing on the day of the Superbowl. All these things I need to check every so often and write a story on are stored in an online to-do list manager called Remember The Milk, which I find useful for managing the amount of info I need to publish once a weekday (which is my goal).

Q: What kind of response have you gotten from visitors?

Mostly, they have been pretty quiet. The blog’s had maybe 7 000 visitors but since January this year there’s been 39 comments on the blog (inlcuding ones from me replying to people).

But the roller-derby post I put up last week has got 7 comments apart from mine, and a fair bit of traffic. That’s shown me that I need to keep on pushing with interesting stories and I’ll come across other ones that are popular and get people commenting.

Q: What do you like about blogging?

Most of all, I like the chance to compete in the same league as major media outlets like the Courier Mail and the Brisbane Times – certainly not on equal terms, but on terms that give me a chance of making a living out of this. My ad revenue so far is laughable – I’ll need to increase my traffic several hundred times to even be close to making a living – but I have the chance to either do that, or get myself employed under conditions that suit me, because my blog demonstrates my skills and experience.

The other thing I really like is finding out just how many creative and interesting people there are in Brisbane who like making things happen. I was sure these people were out there from the day I started blogging, and I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to shape the world right here, right now.

On a personal note, I find Brisneyland to be much more refreshing than other local “what’s on” publications. There’s definitely a niche market for locals who are bored to death of being told by glossy magazines to go drink overpriced lattes, eat obscure French food made by a world master chef by the river or buy ridiculous-looking designer clothing that no one around here can actually afford to wear. Some people’s idea of “culture” actually includes art, music, history and actually having fun when you sip your reasonably priced cup of caffeine instead of boredly staring at the poo-green river and wishing you were in Melbourne instead.

Sorry about the rant there, but what I’m trying to say is that Brisneyland shows the strengths of citizen journalism – providing information that media producers lack. If citizen journalism is ”independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant”, then Brisneyland ticks all the boxes.

Reference:

Flew, T. 2008. New Media: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

You’ve probably heard of “Web 2.0″, “social networking” and maybe, if you have to read the Terry Flew textbook like everybody else in my KCB201 class – “cyberbole”.

Well, here’s another one for the buzzwords book – “produsage“. Axel Bruns’s definition of “produsage” has many aspects in its definition:

•  Linguistically, it is the amalgamation of the words “produce” and “user” (or “usage”). Bruns says there is no longer a division between consumer and producer. “Produsage” is the blurring of lines between makers of content and those who consume it. Because the internet is so versatile and easy to use in the age of Web 2.0, consumers no longer take the passive role of consuming but can actively participate in the process of producing content.

•  Bruns also describes it as the “collaborative and continuous building and existing content in pursuit of further improvement.” Produsage can potentially expand upon “collective intelligence” by utilising the features new media brings. According to Terry Flew, “collective intelligence” is the process of  information passed through a variety of different sources to create new knowledge. The end result of the content produsers make can easily be shared amongst others thanks to the Internet, and new knowledge  is created.

• Bruns says “produsers” do not necessarily create complete works, but rather carry out activities based on an ever-changing set of principles. Social software like Facebook and Twitter provide an interface for people to create and publish content (text, images, application software).

My interpretation is that “produsers” are a collective of people who publish, share and find new information and are ultimately working towards the goal of a finished product – a compendium of knowledge. But most of the time, there is no finished product – new ideas are constantly being generated to improve on existing knowledge.

Let’s look at a real-life example of new knowledge being created through produsage.

  A few weeks ago, a group of Brisbane residents made a fan group for “Brisbane’s Marilyn Monroe”, using the Groups function on Facebook.

Brisbane's Marilyn Monroe. Source: Arlene Foster, via Facebook

The purpose, from what I can gather, is to find out more about the mysterious “Marilyn Monroe” in Brisbane – a woman with blonde curls, wears fashion reminiscent of the famous blonde’s era and occasionally breaks out into a rendition of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”. 

People use the Wall and discussion boards to speculate on the information they have gathered. Some post their visual observations (“I saw her eating a pie in the Queens Plaza toilets!”) or conversations they have had with her (“She told me her name was Dian”) . Most of the discussion comes from rumours that people want cleared up, or posted in the hope that it may be truth (“I think she’s a prostitute” “She’s really a man!”).

Another feature in Facebook groups is to add photos to the group. Some people have taken photos of “Marilyn” so people can identify her (and can admire her dresses). 

BrisbaneTimes.com.au reporter Katherine Feeney came across the group, which inspired her to pursue “Marilyn” herself and find out more to write into an article.

The legitimising of certain information in the article has helped the group ascertain more truth about “Marilyn”. After the article was published, they changed their name to “Dian O’Connell: Brisbane’s Marilyn Monroe”. 

But the story is not complete and the group has not finished. People still continue to join and contribute to the group, hungry for more information and eager to share more.

Here is a diagram showing the result of produsage:

Facebook, Marilyn Monroe and Produsage

Produsage is letting information flow freely between people with different roles by utilising new technology, allowing both user and producers to work together in order to create new knowledge

Reference:

Flew, T. 2008. New Media: An Introduction. 3rd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.