Aaron Arias
English 5010
Dr. Devries
Fall 2009
Mirko Tobias Schäfer: Participation inside

“Media art is not only notoriously difficult to define, it’s nearly impossible to sell and it’s a pain in the neck to exhibit. Generally, the term “new-media art” designates artworks that incorporate some form of electronic media, often entail viewer interaction and frequently reflect back on our immersion in a technological world.” Millions of people used the application to search music files and to download them on their computer sharing technologies enabled the global distribution of digital information first and foremost Napster is remarkable because it represents an effective concept of global distribution of artifacts neither developed nor controlled by those industries that have built their business models and economical power on the control of distribution(Mirko). Napster changed the logic for the distribution of digitized artifacts for good as peer-to-peer (P2P) file Napster and its successors tell a well-known tale of computer technology and the Internet, a story of media use as battle royal between consumers and producers. Due to these and other developments, new media have gained the imago of being enabling technologie, the new technologies have led to an emerging media practice where users participate significantly in the production and distribution of the cultural industry’s goods (Mirko) , the emerging media practice constitutes a converging of different participants and old and new media practices into a field where the distinctions between user and producer is increasingly blurred (Jenkins 2006). Axel Bruns has coined the term produsage for the newly emerging practices and labels participants in production communities as both, users and producers (Bruns 2008). this take on new media culture often leads to simplified and rather romanticized interpretation, in popular culture as well as media theory.