You now have two, in some ways opposing viewpoints about the importance of user-generated content, or what Bruns calls ‘produsage’, in reading Bruns and Petersen. Let me add two more. The first is Joran lanier, sometimes considered the father of virtual reality, who argues in his new book (excerpted here in the Wall Street Journal) that user-generated content is turning the web into “World Wide Mush.” The second is a response to Lanier by Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, discussing “Participatory Media and Why I Love It (and Must Defend It)” on Huffington Post.
After you have read all four of these readings (the two I just added are short), weigh in on this debate. This does not mean simply agreeing with one of the four, and it does not mean uncritically telling us how you love watching cute kitten videos on YouTube. It means seriously weighing these arguments, recognizing something among them that really strikes you as a compelling way to understand user-generated content, and articulating that.