Response to Producer + Audience Readings

Jenkins’ “Interactive Audiences” piece was most useful in thinking about the ways that social technical writers form or make-up the collective intelligence of software products.  According to Jenkins, “fandom was already a knowledge culture well before the internet” where members could engage in shared knowledge and collective intelligence of a specific community.  I believe that social technical writers are a type of fan – of a specific technology product – because most social technical writers are not likely to write about a technology product that they do not own.  Instead, they will often document or blog about a product that they own (and don’t want to get rid of), so they instead show others how to get the product to work for their own specified uses.  In this way, the Internet serves as a database, of sorts, of the collective intelligence of social technical writers who document Blackberry or iPhone capabilities.  “CrackBerry.com” or “GoogleTutor.com” are two such sites where fans participate and share their knowledge with the community through the use of the Internet.  In this way, these fans help other fans to incorporate third party software plug-ins to improve the user experience.  And sometimes, such plug-ins become indirect suggestions to software companies about upgraded features, that are almost always incorporated in future product revisions.