It seems that the text is written from a producer perspective, in which the consumer is traditionally portrayed as being silent. The traditional media channel perspective being mainly TV, and yes this was the case, the consumer can be viewed has being silent. Therefore in this context it is not an overstatement. However New Media re-writes the rules, and now we don’t only have noisy producers but also noisy consumers, whom will not be resting, but will build a wave of collaboration, to influence change. If one moves away from the marketer perspective, and look from the shoes of the buyer, he is indeed a more powerful force, and the internet magnifies the consumer strength through online societies (eg facebook, twitter, blogs etc). We are in the era of the prosumer. The art of this transition is to enable a co-creation environment/economy, which the new web is doing. As per Wikinomics,”we will witness the rise of an entirely new kind of economy where firms coexist, with millions of autonomous producers who connect and co creates value”. The internet is a major economic revolution. Will individuals be able embrace constant change in all aspects of their life, in this ever changing market, created by the web?
The art of with talks of a dual effort from Consumer and Producer. The internet has indeed open and enabled dual communication for us as consumers and producers to express our feelings, thoughts and ideas. There will however be a level of openness depending on the industry. This is the challenge to all organizations going forward, the level of intellectual property disclosure to users in the online community. We have seen the success of Linux. But this organizations has managed to fit the sharing and peering concept as part of the original business strategy, or even by chance, when the concepts was in their infancies. But the question now is how do companies like Sony and Apple, whom comparatively are closed organizations, able to decide on the amount of disclosed Information given, knowing very well that this Information could give consumers more control, and then the line between consumer and producer could be non existent?
From the above arguments I agree with the statement that the media landscape is changing fundamentally and with it society has to rethink the fundamental relationship of companies and consumers. There are many challenges for companies whom were not traditionally into peering and sharing with consumers. In an attempt for radical innovation and breakthrough with the help of users online, could companies risk their core business practices?
