ABSTRACT
The proliferation of new media technologies and applications continues to pose challenges for those who are eager to make sense of the complexities embedded in, and generated by, the Internet. New terms have also been coined in this sense-making process. For example, “wikinomics” describes the impact on business that mass collaboration in the new media has had, as exemplified by Wikipedia (Tapscott and Williams, 2008). Although the term “prosumer” can be attributed to Toffler (1980, p. 275–288), it has more recently entered into common usage to denote the convergence and participatory culture of the new media. In a similar vein, such terms as “produsage” (Bruns, 2008), “co-creation” (Banks and Deuze, 2009), and “peer production” (Benkler and Nissenbaum, 2006) are all now used to account for the shifting nature of media production and consumption.
