A Night In the Life Of A Prosumer..... based on a true story

Friday night has fused with the early hours of Saturday. Close to five hours earlier 8 tickets printed off from an email were clenched tight in the 8 hands of a group of friends waiting in a long and winding line. Now the show was over and the ticket had been exchanged for a small stamp on the back of the wrist with “ML” on it. The ears still ringing, and street sounds numbed the crowd trickle on to the cobbled road, saucer eyed and smiling. Across from the Academy the local alternative fm and internet radio station which sponsored the event has projected its logo its frequency and site address.

Two garda high-vis sentries have clearly been assigned to watch over the crowd as they depart the club, however they move on soon enough driven away by an over enthusiastic and self medicated 18 year old who insists on talking the ear off them. The groups slush around and intermingle haphazardly. At the moment talk is of the gig, the song that blindsided them, the song that never came and where to continue the night now?

You would not believe that soon this collective of people would have loaded up more than 14 different digital videos of their experience, which in less than 72 hours will have collectively been seen by more than 276 people, rated by over ten and commented on by 6. Right now, what direction to point the taxi in is the height of organisation that can be mustered.

Seven hours later the group of friends are finally back in familiar settings, five of them sit and slouch on the sofa set of a friend, the trek home had consisted of an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome detour to a house party of a friend’s acquaintance. They all shift their weight into the folds of the chair getting in to comfortable positions that would suggest their bodies were mostly water. They slouch and wait for sleep. Sleep does not come and sleep won’t come for a while yet. They put on a DVD of Family Guy it’ll be at least three episodes in before the first of them dozes off.

In the corner one of them powers up the laptop and logs in to his YouTube account within minutes the footage on his digital camera, and after asking around the footage on two of his friends phones is loading onto the web. The ease of which this was done does not surprise him nor does the fact that he is not even the first person to have loaded up material. This is just another weekend for the prosumer. He leaves a comment and rates a video, then sleep finally washes over him.