Knowledge Communities On Pinterest

 As one of my first activities for EME 6414 this semester I read through Axel Brun's  The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage. I thought it was a great way to start the course as it touched on some of the thoughts that I had while writing on the discussion board for this week regarding discussion topic #2 on whether social media and web 2.0 should be used for insruction or for the distribution of information. I felt in that discussion post that social media should not be used for instruciton per se but instead to build upon, and perhaps complicate or challenge, discussions and content learned in the classroom. Burns., similarly talks about a 'collaborative and continuous building of knowledge' which he refers to as "produsage". He notes that the knowledge of Web20 is always unfinished and that the producers and consumers of this knowledge are often the same. While I enjoyed Burns article I couldn't help but think about the first part of that discussion prompt from this week which focused on the spread of disinformation. Because Burns is writing in 2008 he focuses on the success of Wikipedia and even touts Richard Murdoch's purchase of MySpace as evidence of Web2.0's popularity. However, I felt that, while Burns was focused on the accuracy of the information provided by sources such as Wikipedia, he was not able to forsee how disinformation coming through Web2.0 would eventually be used.  At the very end of his article he talks about the ways that participation in social media could eventually translate into increased participation in the democratic process.  I would be curious to hear what he would think of the role of social media in recent elections and in the pandemic.