Bruns B Moderation

I think the idea of unlimited freedom and control that the terms in my previous post suggest is criticised because of the moderation put on these sites which are meant to allow you to have complete control. Bruns argues that there needs to be a balance between ‘openness and structure’ for these sites to work and gain a large number of participants. This therefore goes against Turkle’s idea of the internet allowing you to have complete freedom, because the participants still need boundaries for them to be guided into the ‘right’ direction. In my opinion, I don’t think it completely defeats the purpose of ‘produsers’ and ‘produsage’ as it does allow a lot more control to be given to the audience, more so than any other mediums. However, there are still limitations and boundaries to which the audience must abide by, which take away the sense of complete freedom. For example, Wikipedia allows the audience to write their own information, but the layout and content styles are similar throughout each individual page, in order to keep the familiarity of a popular website. However, this idea of needing boundaries in order to keep participants and maintain the popularity of the website, raises questions, it seems that keeping a large audience fan base is the most important part of the website, so for commercial gain, they will have to keep some moderation. The focus can be seen to be put on maintain and progressing the popularity of a website, instead of as an innovative way for people to control what they read.