Charles Leadbetter and We-Think

Wikinomics

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams published Wikinomics in 2006. Along with Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, this is the other big idea about businesses and commerce in the online age. 

Wikinomics is a term invented by Tapscott and Williams to describe the impact of web 2.0 on economics as well as media. These ideas are useful for us because they take us beyond the media text or the study of media products into the realm of economics. The subtitle of Tapscott and Williams' intervention is how mass collabortion changes everything. So we could just as easily use this material for the We media and Democracy theme. These arguments are to do with media  including distribution, but also about consumption and exchange, and about human behavior. So maybe for the first time, web 2.0 has bought cultural studies and economics together, and that is important for media studies, as noticed buy Tapscott and Williams ( 2006).

The Long Tail

what is `the long tail`? In 2006, Chris Anderson, editor of the wired magazine, published his theory- a description of the way that the internet has transformed economics, commerce and comsuption. Anderson was not setting out to write a book for media academics and students, but because his most significant examples include Itunes, you tube and social networking sites like facebook, interest in the book spread quickly, via world of mouth in academic circles, which Anderson calls Viral marketing, and references to the long tail have been a feature of much writing about the changing nature of the media since- including what you are reading now.

The theory of the long tail can be boiled down to this:
Our Culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of phycical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Postmodern

Postmodern describes an approach to culture which sees all texts as being intertextual, and meaning as mediated rather than representative of a state of original reality. Postmodernists believe that its no longer sensible to describe media texts in terms of how they represent real life or events, and that instead we should see reality as increasingly mediated, so the boundaries between reality and media- reality are blurred. A good example of postmodern is Disneyland as its a blurring of reality and simulation.

Meme

Meme is an idea or an creative item that is passed on virally from person to person, to the point where lots of people know about it and are talking about it.

For Example,

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is the next generation of the internet. It allows you to create your own media product on to the internet. Examples of web 2.0 include, Facebook, Myspace, You Tube and this website, Blogspot. I think You Tube is the best example of Web 2.0 because it was set up for people to create their own media product for other people to watch. Social networking sites are also examples of Web 2.0 because it allows you to create your own web page.