Gary Hall in his Digitize this Book makes an interesting argument about user generated content. The shift from critique to creation, is commonly argued for many academics in media studies, and they understand this in terms of digital technology enabling people to shift from passivity to activity, to the point where producers and consumers are one and the same. This idea is fairly common in contemporary culture and is often expressed in idea of the “prosumer.”

It is a narrative that I accept. I see it as part of the tremendous cultural transformation that we are living through with the shift into the digital age.

Hall says that the story here is as follows:

Previously, society was structured in terms of two more or less separate and distinct groups. On the one hand there were the professional producers, who could create, copy, and distribute media and cultural objects such as books, films, and TV programs. On the other there were the domestic consumers who could not. They could only use the media and cultural objects created for them by the professional producers; and they could only do so relatively passively. They could not reproduce, copy, alter or circulate them, or change them into something new, at least on a large scale. At the most they could only do so with regard to their own individually purchased and owned copies.

The result is that now the consumer no longer needs to occupy a predominantly passive relation to media and cultural objects. They, too, can not only consume such objects, but also actively create, reproduce, copy, change, and circulate them on something approaching a mass-produced, professional scale in the guise of the prosumer.

Okay. So where do the problems lie?

Hall argues that one problem with the concept of the prosumer lies in the way in which prosumer maintains and reinforces certain notions of production and consumption—even as it claims these distinctions are being “broken down”—that I would argue new media have helped to undo.

For far from blurring these categories, the whole idea of the prosumer depends for its very existence on quite fixed, and somewhat unsophisticated conceptions of “production” and “consumption,” as well as the relation between them. After all, production and consumption can be brought together like this in the guise of the prosumer only if they are positioned as having somehow been separate and distinct in the first place—which they generally are in narratives of this kind.

Secondly, is the problem of what is called the digital dialectic. This means that writing on the new media, if it wants to be innovative, has to be enriched with a critical involvement in both technical, user-related matters and content matters.This writing needs to go beyond examining what is happening to our visual and intellectual cultures as the computer recodes technologies, media, and art forms to grounding the insights of theory in the constraints of practice. Hall's is with the emphasis on practice and the way that it positions theory as a a potential threat to, or distraction from, the real job of “net criticism.”

The real job .. tends to be very much “grounded in the constraints of practice” and presents itself as “practice driven.” As a result, the concept of practice continues to function as something of a fetish, similar to the way politics, activism, and “the street” do in other media and cultural studies–related discourses ... where it is important to talk about being practical, about engaging with those who make policy decisions, about getting involved with political activists, relating to the kids on the street, and so on, because all this is held as having to do with actual, concrete, political materiality. So talking about practice feels, you know . . . well, really real.

Halls argument is that media theory is a productive discourse: creates and defines (rather than simply
reflects) the practical, and simultaneously renders it available as an article or aim for practice.