my reaction to Axel Burn's lecture

Mr. Burns seems to very adamant that it is not accurate enough to use the word "prosumer" to describe the hordes of people online nowadays that both contribute and use content on websites such as wikipedia and envoirments such as second life, and to be totally honest I must agree with this view. The fact is that a " prosumer" as you would have it is simply to broad a term and also more importantly we are all deffinatley not prosumers. To take wikipedia for example, the online content there relies entirely on user submissions, but there are high ranking contributors who create thousands, possibly millions of articles (through editing and flagging). Theese are the people who keep websites and online communties running, there is no such thing as of yet of a true uptopian website where are content is user created in a form of free media by all users. It is not neccessary to contribute to either wikipedia or second life in order to use or enjoy their content and diehards of internet are still keeping the ship of wikipedia above water really. I found it very interesting that Burns was talking about a total rethinking of the tradditional chain of commerce manufactorer-distributor-consumer this is the chain of commands that we are told from the time we are children, but increasingly the lines are becoming more and more blurred. I think that overall it's premature to say that we are living in the age of the prosumer, it's certainly good theory on the way things are heading since the global downturn but theese blurred lines I think will hurt the distrubutor more than anyone in future. We can already see rise of cheap alternatives to tradditional distrubitors such as supermarkets in the food sector such as lidl, aldi and tesco as opposed to superquinn, dunnes and marks and spencer. The very same companies that once apoun a time caused the part downfall of the local shop as the main means of distribution for the local community. So my main thought really is that the distributor will either have to change drastically or die in the near future.