About Axel Bruns

Dr Axel Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008). He is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and has also authored Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005) and edited Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. Produsage provides a new approach to conceptualising these phenomena by avoiding the traditional assumptions associated with industrial-age production models. His study of these environments builds on his work in the area of participatory or citizen journalism and blogging. Bruns has been a visiting scholar at the University of Leeds, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg, where he further investigated the impact of produsage on democracy, citizenship, and the media.

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture, which publishes M/C Journal and M/C Reviews, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. He has published widely on produsage, citizen journalism, and other new media topics, and many of his articles and presentations can be found on his Website snurb.info.

Axel Bruns's general research and commentary blog is located at snurb.info, and he also contributes to a research blog on citizen journalism, Gatewatching.org (with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders), and tweets at @snurb_dot_info.