To brag is (still) to brag about communication

The union of functions between producers and consumers. Technological developments have generated new forms of consumption, production and circulation of content. A system of quasi-communication that continues in the space of diffusionism since it does not guarantee forms of communication such as construction of meanings. Socio-digital networks connect, but do not necessarily communicate.

By Adalid Contreras Baspineiro* Published on page 12 May 21, 2024 -

 

 

As if foreseeing the transformations that the disruption of digital technologies would cause in the field of communication, already at the beginning of the eighties of the last century, when access to the Internet separated the world between the information-rich and the information-poor, Alvin Toffler proposed the term prosumers to highlight the union of functions between producers and consumers. Currently, this prediction has become part of the recomposition of the field of consumption, open to mixed production spaces and which has imploded the characterization of audiences. Prosumers develop remix and/or post-production processes, as well as fandom-type resubmissions, without resignifications, and the production of new narratives, either as arrangements, accommodations, retouching or reconfigurations of already established messages, or also with others. stories or new characters or stories.

As can be seen, digital technologies have established not only new forms of consumption, but also other forms of production and circulation in real time and through countless platforms that are based on the binary technological conditions provided by algorithms. For some authors, these communicative processes imply the adoption of a system of real interaction and communication participation, because everyone (connected with some device to the digital world) can freely say, or reproduce, whatever comes to mind, even without verifying whether What he says is true or not.

For this last reason, at odds with responsible journalism, and others, contravening the participationist enthusiasms that are attributed to prosumers, I maintain that in reality it is a renewed informational form with a particular system of quasi-communication , because its devices, which are Generous for access and connectivity, they do not guarantee, per se , spaces and forms of communication as the construction of meanings. They are experiences that not only continue to move in the dynamics of fragmented diffusionism , but have renewed it with a return to the belief in the omnipotence of technologies, media and now networks, leaving behind the paradigm of mediations. , which led us to understand communication in the twists and turns of everyday life. Socio-digital networks connect, but do not necessarily communicate.

What has changed is the centrality of the broadcast that resided in the media, and that has been fragmented insofar as the user has access to some digital device in which, in addition to being informed, he is a player of information and an informant with dissemination/consumption schemes with messages that circulate in bubbles that connect with other bubbles, expanding ad infinitum. Manuel Castells says that these experiences are forms of self-communication, due to the unlimited capacity to receive, reproduce and generate messages as bursts of multidiscursive creations, reflecting beyond the technological possibility, the compulsive need of prosumers to express and become protagonists, signing with identity or anonymously cumulative creations of memes, videos, posters, photographs, songs, graffiti, infographics, emoticons, tiktoks and articles that circulate and are reproduced at the same speed as events

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In reality, they are forms of quasi-communication that are not comparable with the legitimized modalities of participatory communication that, by promoting the democratization of communication, vindicates the right to access, participation, dialogue and, we add, coexistence. Participation in communication is not just making a presence , it is fundamentally an alternative for the inclusion of citizens in history with a voice, with identity and with power. In this sense it is inseparable from the collective task of dispute of powers and expression of the word. It is not an exercise of expansion or rearrangement, but essentially of alteration of an unequal order presented as natural and legitimate and of inclusion with prominence not only in the digital environment, but in the meanings of the world and in decisions about the horizons of society. .

Lest we be mistaken then, prosumers are not (yet) participatory systems in themselves, but, as John Thompson says, they are systems of quasi-interaction. Participation implies the capacity for expression, visibility, the articulation of the parties in collective projects, and the capacity to convert the community into a space for the transformation of what restricts democracy and life in coexistence . Participation is also individual and social responsibility following deontological norms. Until this is activated in the possibilities that digital communication has, its capacity for mobilization by weaving and acting in a network with tweets or WhatsApp that multiply the numbers of participants by thousands, they will continue to be subjected to unfinished schemes of "social reassembly", because they are even more encounters of solitude than articulations of individualities in community complementarities.

So, to prosume is, still, to presume communication, because the processes as they work are viralizations of messages and searches to make a trend with a sense of entropy that means loss of energy, and of communication. There is a confusing notion of participation confused with a self-congratulatory illusion effect through which each prosumer believes they are deciding the colors of the world. The debate on quasi-communication is open to continue walking from these spaces in the inalienable legacy of the right to speech for the democratization of communication and society.

 

* Bolivian sociologist and communicologist