Produsers and Produsage. The concept of produsage highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge that we examine on this site, the role of consumer and even that of end user have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance.
In many of the spaces we encounter here, users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role - they have become a new, hybrid, produser. Four key principles apply across all produsage environments, regardless of the specific object of their collaborative efforts: Open Participation, Communal EvaluationFluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc MeritocracyUnfinished Artefacts, Continuing ProcessCommon Property, Individual Rewards Technorati : collaborative, produsage, produsers, user-led Del.icio.us : collaborative, produsage, produsers, user-led. Welcome to Produsage.org. Produsage, Generation C, and Their Effects on the Democratic Process. Idc_texts: Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage. « Working On and With Eigensinn | Main | The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence » Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage Dr Axel Bruns Introduction In recent years, various observers have pointed to the shifting paradigms of cultural and societal participation and economic production in developed nations.
These changes are facilitated (although, importantly, not solely driven) by the emergence of new, participatory technologies of information access, knowledge exchange, and content production, many of whom are associated with Internet and new media technologies. Re-public : re-imagining democracy - english version. The conversation between Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz that frames this issue of Re-public begins with a discussion of whether the traditional critical focus on who owns the means of production still means anything in a networked world driven by user-led content creation, or what I would call produsage . What’s curiously absent from the debate, though (and of the other authors included here, only Michel Bauwens engages with it in detail ) is any consideration of who controls the means of distribution – a question which, I think, is crucial to any understanding of power structures in the social Web.
Of course ‘distribution’ in a networked world no longer means what it used to in the industrial age, when we dealt mainly with commodities in physical form. So without disagreeing with Michel, let us consider the role of these tools as the means of interaction.