Apparently it's a logical question.
Even the person writing this particular article is aware that something unsustainable
might be going on here. After all, only slightly later in that same article he
writes:
If everyone is busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and veg out? Who will be a consumer?
But then he answers:
No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter.
I beg to differ. It does. As someone who can pretty confidently write that a great
deal of my own writing is for an almost non-existent audience, I can also admit
that I certainly don't write just for myself. Yes, we can get by with only a very
limited readership, but only very few will write (and post their writing to the
web) if they think that nobody at all is going to read what they write.
And actually, that should be rather obvious - not because it fits us as social
animals, though of course it does, but because it accurately reflects our own
experience in cyberspace. Large chunks of the blogosphere are made up of blogs
quoting other blogs. People get ideas that they want to relate to - either to
support or contradict, or simply jump off from - from reading other blogs. The
audience matters because our writing is a reaction to our reading, an active reaction
(if a term such as that is permissible), but most certainly a reaction. We write
in order to make sense (first to ourselves) of what we've read, and in the process
not only clarify things for ourselves but for others who might be reading us,
who then, through their own blogging, clarify things for themselves. We can be
both audience and performer, but without audience, there would hardly be a performance
at all.
Go to: Who's going to watch?, or
Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head of cyberspace?