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PEOPLE WONDER
Academic superkids Jason, Axel and Barry deal with right-wing criticism:
A few lazy ad hominem attacks, cut and paste some ready-made phrases about ‘left-wing academics’, and voila, we have another blog post to, er, maintain the rage amongst the faithful. Whoopee. And people wonder why the conservative side of Australian politics is intellectually bankrupt?
Jason, Axel and Barry - presumably busy doing research and stuff - didn’t get around to answering some questions implied in my lazy, rage-maintaining post. Being intellectuals, and therefore open to debate, they won’t mind that those questions are submitted again:
Dear Jason, Axel and Barry,
You claim to have pointed out that “Australia’s bloggers are overwhelmingly left-of-centre”. Yet the linked piece identified no such thing, and in fact appeared not to be concerned at all with the political allegiences of Australian bloggers. Could you please indicate a specific section of that piece supporting your claim?
You claim that Australia is home to “equivalents to the left-leaning Daily Kos”. Could you please name these sites? (Note: Daily Kos attracts around one million hits per day. Proportionally, an Australian blog would be pulling in around 60,000 daily hits to be of similar local impact.)
Jason theorised that “the left-of-centre blogosphere has prospered in Australia” because “opinion pages only seem to be open to forthright conservatives”. Would Jason classify Catherine Deveny, Richard Ackland, Traceeee Hutchison, Mike Carlton, Kathy McCabe, Phillip Adams, Sue Dunleavy, Richard Glover, Jill Singer, Alan Ramsey, Kenneth Davidson, Anne Summers, Peter Hartcher, Annabel Crabb, Michael Leunig, Michelle Grattan, Tim Colebatch, Martin Flanagan and Adele Horin as “forthright conservatives”?
You claim that “Tom Switzer’s resignation as the editor of the Oz’s opinion pages” is a “clear sign” that “hard-right columnists [are] looking increasingly isolated”. How did you reach that conclusion?
Yours,
Tim
UPDATE. About Axel Bruns:
Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the currently paradigm shift towards user-led forms of content production which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself.
And the English language, evidently.
In 2007, Bruns was a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he further investigated the impact of produsage on democracy, citizenship, and the media.
Please reveal in comments how produsage has impacted on your own lives; try to keep entries below 1000 words.
UPDATE II. Alex tries to answer one question:
In case any of the Blairites are indeed interested in evidence for our claim that the left of the Australian blogosphere is better developed than the right, here’s a study I conducted about a year ago.
And a fine, rollicking read it is, too, if you’re into Technorati cluster-chat. No updates yet on their linking to a piece that provided none of the evidence claimed, local Kos equivalents, the conservative bias of opinion pages, or that “clear sign” of hard-right isolation. Given Alex’s alarm at being visited by “Blairites” - ie, blog readers - isn’t he looking a little isolated?
UPDATE III. “Why stop at produsage?” asks Rich Stadnik:
Bruns coitermed produsage to betscribe the curredigm shiftards usorms of contduction which areving to have an incpact on medeconolaw, soctices, and democracy itself.
That’s some quality Brunschunking there.
UPDATE IV. Huzzah! Jason favours us with a lengthy piece, answering questions and (mostly) clarifying matters. Some minor points in reply:
• Daily Kos is massively popular. It is influential within the Democratic Party, organises conferences, promotes candidates, makes a lot of money and gets a ton of press. Larvatus Prodeo is read by a couple of thousand local lefties and does nothing.
• Alexa is not a serious means of establishing readership; for a start, it is weighed towards US readers. For more accurate data, check my site stats. They’re public. Scroll down.
• Rather than speculate about why someone at The Australian resigned, why not phone them and ask? Works for me.
UPDATE V. Ken Parish makes a good point amidst many good points:
They apparently see commenters at right-leaning blogs as just a rabble of “the faithful” while the left’s audience is a “community”.
BTW, Tim, one of the problems with your less frequent posting is that I have trouble maintaining my rage. When you don’t post, my rage goes off the boil and gets all cold and lumpy, resulting in comments of the consistency of two-day old cream of wheat. Jaxbar is right about that. Lean into it, Old Top. Stoke the rage!
I think we can safely assume those questions are deemed “ad hominem attacks” by our Jaxbar friends, so we shouldn’t expect any answers.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 02 24 at 12:58 PM • permalinkStoke the rage!
Sounds like a good slogan for the blog, I must say.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 02 24 at 01:00 PM • permalink"Bolt just follows what Blair writes"
I know they didnt mean it this way, but I’d count that as praise.
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 02 24 at 01:03 PM • permalinkYo, Jason, Axel and Barry, explain how this might be described as “ad hominem attacks, cut and paste some ready-made phrases about ‘left-wing academics’”.
And, of course, you might want to explain this as well.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 02 24 at 01:15 PM • permalinkOh, and I must say, my rage can barely be contained at having my dissent crushed by Jason, Axel and Barry. But that likely goes hand-in-hand with being “intellectually bankrupt”.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 02 24 at 01:17 PM • permalink#9 T_R_JS
Your suggestion that they sign up probably really harshed their mellow. Shame on you.
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 02 24 at 01:19 PM • permalink#8: No, no, Rinardman. I recognize that the Jaxbar is a primate much lower in the evolutionary scale than Moe, Larry and Curly. It’s just that its intellectual slapstick, which comes naturally to it, puts me in mind of the physical slapstick of the Stooges, which actually represented considerable thought and hard work.
BTW, if the Australian right is bankrupt, when are they having the yard sale?
Thanks, paco. It’s painfully obvious that Winkem, Blinkem and Nod (thanks, yojimbo!) ignored anything in Tim’s post that didn’t fit their version of reality.
“Intellectually bankrupt” is just typical leftie projection on their part.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 02 24 at 01:41 PM • permalinkRe #11, even worse, Spiny, I broke the bubble on their reality, where their “dissent” was being “crushed”, and pointed out that they had only to ask.
If Tim or Andrea said “No”, Winkem, Blinkem, and Nod have a point. If the answer was “Yes”, they were wrong.
Instead, they chose to ignore the suggestion.
As I said, calling us wingnuts “intellectually bankrupt” is just typical leftie projection on their part.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 02 24 at 01:50 PM • permalink#1 paco, are you trying to imply that these clowns have anything close to the wit, intelligence, and philosophical depth of The Three Stooges?
Maybe Curly Joe DeRita, if you add them up.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2008 02 24 at 02:44 PM • permalinkThe three stooges should check out the 2007 record of the “modest blogger” at Catallaxy before throwing more stones.
As for the intellectual quality of left-dominated sections of academia, the rot starts at the top. [Warning that piece contains some long words so dumb right wingers should not try to read it except to impress people]. It raises the question, how can a book of essays by senior academics, supported and workshopped at the Academy for the Social Sciences read like a party political tract?
A few lazy ad hominem attacks, cut and paste some ready-made phrases about ‘left-wing academics’, and voila, we have another blog post to, er, maintain the rage amongst the faithful. Whoopee. And people wonder why the conservative side of Australian politics is intellectually bankrupt?
Not one word of that is not a cliche.
Blair and Bolt. The one two punch of the Australian conservative flank.
One fist of iron (Blair)
The other of steel (Bolt)
If the right one don’t get ya
The left one will.Sung, preferably in a deep voice . Ya know, sixteen tons.
Theme music for the left ? I’m thinking something written for Italian castrati. Or anything from Elton John.
I’m just lazily posting this to maintain the rage grrrsnarrlll
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 02 24 at 06:47 PM • permalinkJason, Axel and Barry - the three twinks.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 02 24 at 06:48 PM • permalinkType slower, Tim. Maybe they’ll understand it this time.
Posted by andycanuck on 2008 02 24 at 06:54 PM • permalink#22 Rafe, this posting will be of interest to all Australians and brits and anyonelse with an interest in Cricket - I’m thinking of the Peripatetic Ardent Cricket Outfielder here.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 02 24 at 07:01 PM • permalinkI dunno, I’ve been stoked up on rage for so long that it’s become boring. Fury just puts me to sleep these days. I rant and throw furniture to calm down before bedtime.
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2008 02 24 at 07:08 PM • permalink#22 Interesting psot, Rafe. Thankls for the “long words” warning.
This guy Hindess is like so many academes in the “Civilizing” part of the university, commies still waging their juvenile war against eevil capitalism.
Fortunately, they will grow old and die.
As my ex-hippy scoialist sister in the UK says: It’s a pity that the modern youth aren’t interested in poltiical struggle anymore. Well, you reaps wot you sows. Kids today have been told by these aging hippy socialists that it is all relative man; therefore they don’t fight or care for anything.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2008 02 24 at 07:13 PM • permalinkThis reminds me vividly of an episode in my college years, when I wrote for an independent monthly student publication that took pleasure in pointing out the blunders of the campus (state-subsidized) daily.
At one point their editor decided to retaliate, claiming that an editorial of mine (on the mythology of heterosexual AIDS) was “so full of errors” they didn’t have space to point them all out.
I fired off a letter suggesting they name two.
They never ran my letter, nor did they take the challenge.
The lesson is, state monopolies have a way of bringing the worst out in people. Next time you’re standing in line for a license or something else you can’t obtain from a non-government source, count the nasty-grams posted on the service counter. “No” this, “no” that, and almost never a please or thank-you amid the directives.
Now count them at almost any private business, and imagine how ugly daily life must have been for people just going about their business in places like the old Soviet Union.
Posted by Rittenhouse on 2008 02 24 at 07:36 PM • permalinkThe Left is always right.
Even when you think the Left is not right, the Left’s right is never to be questioned.Posted by stackja1945 on 2008 02 24 at 08:16 PM • permalinkStop, Tim! Stop cutting and pasting those ready-made phrases!
The phrases you posted yesterday made me go out and beat three lefties to death, and now I open your blog and there are more phrases!
The only way I can quell my rage is to read Jaxbar. Aah, sleep…
#23. Touché.
Posted by arrowhead ripper on 2008 02 24 at 08:43 PM • permalinkAxel! has been a busy boy preparing produsage.org for his upcoming book release. Fortunately for diehard fans he left the site up just long enough for google to cache it. Takes a while to load, but oh so worth it.
In case anyone’s curious about the MIT connection, I asked a friend who’s a Prof there and she doesn’t recognise the name, but here’s what he presented to a weekend MiT5 conference on “Creativity, Ownership and Collaboration in the Digital Age” which was held there.
Don’t know how much further than that weekend conference his MIT “Visiting Scholar” thing went - hopefully Dr. Axel will expand on it for us?
Posted by spot_the_dog on 2008 02 24 at 10:54 PM • permalink#44 P.S. by my friend’s count (I couldn’t be bothered), Dr.Axel used the term “produsage” over 80 times in his MiT5 talk.
Gretchen: That is so fetch!
Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!(Mean Girls, 2004 - apologies to the Blair poster who nailed that one first)
Posted by spot_the_dog on 2008 02 24 at 11:07 PM • permalinkProdusage once affected my life for about a week when I missed the cow and struck myself in the groin.
Posted by dean martin on 2008 02 24 at 11:39 PM • permalinkProdusage affected my life. I found it very useful as an emetic.
#47
In the early days of television an interviewer named Larry Spivak was interviewing the man he most hated, the segregationist Senator Theodore Bilbo from Florida. Spivak asked Bilbo why the very conservative Republican Senator Robert Taft had called Bilbo the worst senator he had ever known in his long years in the Senate.“Don’t you see, Mr. Spivak?” Senator Bilbo replied, “Senator Taft is a Communist.”
(Anecdote by William F. Buckley, Jr., from the tape of “The Buckley Roast.")
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2008 02 25 at 12:04 AM • permalinkWhy insult the Stooges, when you could have Musketeers
or even Amigos ?Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2008 02 25 at 12:10 AM • permalinkProdusage usage example -
I never thought it could happen to me, but it did - I had gone to my job as a warder at the catholic teen lesbian schoolgirls prison, when two of the naughtiest of the inmates, Giselle and Veronica were wrestling and needed to be subdued with baby oil, this inevitably led to a fair bit of produsage.
Posted by Harry Buttle on 2008 02 25 at 12:18 AM • permalinkRichS
Why stop at produsage?
Bruns coitermed produsage to betscribe the curredigm shiftards usorms of contduction which areving to have an incpact on medeconolaw, soctices, and democracy itself.
Now I have a headache. Thanks.
:^þ
Posted by Spiny Norman on 2008 02 25 at 12:19 AM • permalinkAm I the only one to think that overusage of the ‘word’ produsage is a prime example of assclownage?
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2008 02 25 at 12:37 AM • permalink#24, Greene,
If the right one don’t get ya
The left one will.Shouldn’t that be:
If the Right one dont get ya
The Far Right one will ?#31, Wimpy, Please dont do that, its WAAAY too early to start on about “behaviourism and psychoanalysis”. I havent even had a cuppa yet.
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2008 02 25 at 12:38 AM • permalink"Produsage” hasn’t impacted my life at all, and probably never will.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2008 02 25 at 12:47 AM • permalink10/10 to Alex for providing the evidence.
It shows that Left-wing blogs link to other left-wing blogs very strongly, and other blogs hardly at all. They are cohesive, but that doesn’t mean strength, it means weakness. They are an echo-chamber of monoculture. Right-wing blogs tend to be more eclectic, diverse, and multi-cultural.
Instead of showing strength in terms of driving debate, it shows ghettoisation and marginalisation. The “medium authority” diagrams, those showing mainly Australian sites rather than the usual FoxNews, CNN, BBC etc are particularly useful for showing this.
So good marks for gathering the data Alex, but your interpretation appears to need a little work. Nonetheless, the fact that you gave a link to your evidence, thereby allowing informed critique puts you way ahead of the game, and allows a rational and informed debate to be conducted.
I know neologisms, neologisms are friends of mine. “Produsage” is no neologism.
Posted by mythusmage on 2008 02 25 at 04:44 AM • permalinkWith apologies to Iowahawk: I lifted this definition of prodspewage from Whatshisface without accreditation:
The social, collaborative basis of the content creation communities engaged in produsage also indicates this; in produsage projects, the object of the communal effort is almost always as much the development of social structures to support and sustain the shared project as it is the development of that project itself. As Eric von Hippel notes in Democratizing Innovation, the object of such produsage is not simply information, but an information commons; in its full form, the information (knowledge, creative work) prodused by the community therefore exists not in abstraction from the social contexts of its development, as a stand-alone product, but exists only as directly embedded in such contexts, as a temporary artefact of continuing social processes of developing, extending, negotiating, and evaluating this shared content. Just as we do not speak of ‘producing’ our social networks (we build, extend, maintain, improve them), in collaborative content creation much the same observation applies: here, too, content creation is an act of maintenance and construction (of both content and the social relationships among participants) at least as much as it is one of production. Most participants in content creation communities will therefore see themselves exactly as that: as participants, not as producers. Although their behaviour in these communities may be ‘productive’ as their acts of participation accumulate, for some participants this may be only a corollary to their social use of the communal spaces, and to their engagement in the community.
It contains all my favourite buzzwords and fad phrases:
- engagement in the community
- collaborative
- social structures
- information commons
- abstraction
- social contexts
- temporary artifact (???!!!)
- social processes
- developing, extending, negotiating and evaluating
- social relationships
- acts of participation accumulate
- corrolary to their social use of the communal spacesIs this a long, wanky way to say:
I have a few drinks and write stuff, and read stuff that other people have written, and they write stuff about what I have written; and we all have a laugh.
Someone - give me a taxpayer funded grant. Or you’ll all be $orry.
Posted by mr creosote on 2008 02 25 at 07:07 AM • permalinkI think I had an impacted produsage once. The worst part wasn’t tha pain, but the disorientation.
Posted by Steve Skubinna on 2008 02 25 at 07:09 AM • permalinkAs for Daily Kos’s political influence, last time I heard it was 0 wins for 20 losses. What are the stats now?
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2008 02 25 at 01:50 PM • permalink
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Jason, Axel and Barry continue to patrol the internet, in search of evidence to support their claims.