Posts

What do you mean? "Produser"?

 Before reading Bruns, I had been thinking about the words we usually use to describe people on social media: “creator” and “consumer.” These words make sense, but they also felt a little incomplete to me. In reality, many of us are both. We scroll, watch, and read, but we also like, comment, share, repost, save, curate, and sometimes create our own content. I wondered why we often talk as if there are only two separate roles. Bruns’s concept of the “produser” helped resolve that tension for me because it combines these roles into one term. A produser is both a user and a producer. In Web 2.0 spaces, people do not only receive information; they also respond to it, modify it, remix it, comment on it, share it, and sometimes improve it. Even small actions, such as leaving a comment or sharing a resource, can become part of a larger process of knowledge-building. This idea is useful for thinking about learning. In traditional educational settings, students are often positioned as rece...

How My Social Media Detox Became a “Demitox”

 I used to be a heavy Instagram user. I liked checking what my friends were doing, replying to DMs, and casually scrolling whenever I had a few minutes. Over time, though, I started to feel that my attention span was getting shorter. As a PhD student, I often need long stretches of focused time, so Instagram began to feel less like a fun social space and more like a constant interruption. Because of that, I have developed a repeated pattern of social media detox. At the beginning of a semester, I usually delete Instagram to reduce distraction. After a month or so, I sometimes reinstall it for one or two weeks. Then, when I need to write a major paper or focus on a big deadline, I delete it again. During the recent break, I used Instagram a lot while attending a conference in Bergen, Norway, and traveling with my family in Vienna. But as soon as I returned to Tallahassee, I deleted it again. However, I realized that my detox is not really a complete detox. Maybe it is more of a “d...