Produsage.org - From Production to Produsage: Research into User-Led Content Creation

Blogs und Bürgerjournalismus: öffentliches Nachrichtenforum oder Startpunkt für neue politische Bewegungen? (ZMI 2008)

Snurb — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:40:46 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Blogs und Bürgerjournalismus: öffentliches Nachrichtenforum oder Startpunkt für neue politische Bewegungen?" Keynote at the conference "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung", Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, 24 Oct. 2008.

Blogs, die sich mit politischen Ereignissen befassen, werden zumeist als neue, von Bürgern in Selbstverantwortung betriebene Alternativen zum traditionellen Journalismus dargestellt. Internetnutzer aktieren hier nicht mehr allein in einer Rolle als Informationsabrufer, sondern beteiligen sich in mehr oder weniger großem Umfang als Produzenten von Inhalten - insgesamt also in einer Mischrolle, die als 'Produtzer' (engl. produser) umschrieben werden kann.

Collaborative Local Content Creation through edgeX: An Evaluation (AoIR 2008)

Snurb — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:37:54 +1100

Sal Humphreys and Axel Bruns. "Collaborative Local Content Creation through edgeX: An Evaluation." Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Copenhagen, 17 Oct. 2008.

This paper presents research data and findings from the collaborative content creation project edgeX: Mapping the missing grassroots, which was reported on in the 2007 AoIRs conference (Authors). This project is based in Ipswich, Queensland, Australia and explores the potential for, geographically local communities to enhance their social ties and sense of communal identity through the integration of a Website into their communication ecologies. The Website, http://edgeX.org.au/, allows local users to upload their own content in a variety of formats, and thereby (figuratively as well as literally) to put themselves and their work on the map; a Google Maps-driven geobrowsing interface is a centrepiece of the edgeX site. edgeX has most of the features available to the communities of Flickr, YouTube, and social networking sites, enabling users to publish and share their work and to interact with each other.

'Anyone Can Edit': Vom Nutzer zum Produtzer (Hans-Bredow-Institut, Universität Hamburg, 2008)

Snurb — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:34:09 +1100

Axel Bruns. "'Anyone Can Edit': Vom Nutzer zum Produtzer." Guest lecture at the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Universität Hamburg, 20 Oct. 2008.

Um die kreative und kollaborative Beteiligung zu beschreiben, die heutzutage nutzergesteuerte Projekte wie etwa die Wikipedia auszeichnet, ist ein Begriff wie 'Produktion' nur noch bedingt nützlich - selbst in Konstruktionen wie 'nutzergesteuerte Produktion' oder 'P2P-Produktion'. In den Nutzergemeinschaften, die an solchen Formen der Inhaltserschaffung teilnehmen, haben sich Rollen als Konsumenten und Benutzer längst unwiederbringlich mit solchen als Produzent vermischt - Nutzer sind immer auch unausweichlich Produzenten der gemeinsamen Informationssammlung, ganz egal, ob sie sich dessens auch bewußt sind: sie haben eine neue, hybride Rolle angenommen, die sich vielleicht am besten als 'Produtzer' umschreiben lassen kann. Projekte, die auf solche Produtzung (Englisch: produsage) aufbauen, finden sich in Bereichen von Open-Source-Software über Bürgerjournalismus bis hin zur Wikipedia, und darüberhinaus auch zunehmend in Computerspielen, Filesharing, und selbst im Design materieller Güter. Obwohl unterschiedlich in ihrer Ausrichtung, bauen sie doch auf eine kleine Zahl universeller Grundprinzipien auf.

Produsage and Related Events, Past and Future

Snurb — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:51:57 +1100

This blog has been all too quiet while I've been travelling in Europe to attend conferences in Copenhagen and Gießen, do a guest lecture in Hamburg, and conduct a number of research interviews with the team behind the German myHeimat citizen journalism project. ~~I'll add some more information about these shortly~~ I've now added the slides for the produsage-related presentations in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Gießen (the latter two are in German, and also feature the audio of my talks) - and for my overall reports from the trip, see here (AoIR 2008 in Copenhagen), here (produsage guest lecture in Hamburg), and here (ZMI conference in Gießen).

All the World’s a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation (ARLIS 2008)

Snurb — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:33:13 +1000

Axel Bruns. "All the World's a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation." Keynote presented at the Arts Libraries Society Australia and New Zealand conference, Brisbane, 9 Oct. 2008.

With the continuing growth in user-led content creation, or produsage, comes an increase in user-led information management, organisation, tagging, classification - in short, a growing trend towards user-led curation of the digital media universe. What Mark Pesce has described as 'coolfinding' is now no longer an isolated activity conducted in small-scale networks of friends, but - through the tools of Web 2.0 - has become an organising principle for the entire Web. Specific social media spaces from del.icio.us through Flickr to the Wikipedia are leading the way, but their increased networking and interconnection is making Pierre Lévy's once utopian vision of the 'cosmopedia' appear more and more like a realisable possibility.

New Impulses for Libraries: Drawing on Second Life and Produsage

Snurb — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 13:24:17 +1000

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

I'm spending the morning at the 2008 Arts Libraries Society of Australia and New Zealand conference, at the Queensland State Library. I'm afraid I'm only here for the opening keynotes (one of which I'm giving) - my hectic schedule for this week between overseas trips doesn't give me any more time to see what else is happening.

The first keynote speaker this morning is Kathryn Greenhill from Murdoch University, presenting on the possibilities of Second Life as a platform. She begins by taking us on a flight around Info Island - the central library island in Second Life - and follows this with a quick explanation of what Second Life is and how it works. The aim here, she notes, is immersion, not just information.

Produsage Research - Further Plans, and Job Opportunities

Snurb — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:36:25 +1000

I thought I'd post a quick summary here on one further direction that my research into produsage will take over the coming years. One issue that has interested me for some time (and that I touch on throughout the book) is the problem of finding ways for 'professionals' and 'amateurs' - as inadequate these terms are - to collaborate fruitfully, rather than stand in inherent opposition to one another.

The oppositional stance is visible for example in the still persistent dismissal of citizen journalists by professional journalists in the industry; in the overly defensive response of Britannica and its commercial competitors to the rise of Wikipedia; or in the lack of engagement with or outright banning of user-generated content by many educational institutions. Against this, we're seeing the emergence of what (following Leadbeater and Miller) we might describe as Pro-Am operations - OhmyNews is a good example here, but so is the harnessing of user-generated content by Amazon or Google.

From Produsage to Produtzung: Upcoming Events in Germany

Snurb — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 09:33:17 +1000

Following on from my post about the upcoming ARLIS keynote, here are some further upcoming events. In a few weeks' time, I'm going to take produsage on the road: after my presentations at the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference, held this year in Copenhagen, I'm scheduled to present a guest lecture at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg on 20 October, as part of their series "Aktuelle Entwicklungen im Web 2.0" ("Current Developments in Web 2.0"), and a keynote at the conference "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung" ("The Internet between Egalitarian Participation and Economic Power") in Gießen on 24 October. My respondents at that conference will be Jan Schmidt (who has also organised the Hamburg gig), Mario Voigt, and Uwe Jun. (Many thanks also to Christoph Bieber and Christoph Neuberger, who made my presentation in Gießen possible.)

Upcoming ARLIS Keynote: Produsage and User-Led Curation

Snurb — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 13:13:21 +1000

There haven't been many updates to this site recently, but in the meantime, the book has done very well - many thanks to everyone who's bought it and/or accessed the reading samples and other articles on this site. Keep spreading the word!

Over the next few months there are quite a few produsage-related events coming up for me, in Australia and Europe - and I'll preview a number of them over the coming weeks. The first one of these is a keynote at the biennial conference of the Arts Libraries Society Australia/New Zealand (ARLIS/ANZ) here in Brisbane on 9 October 2008.

Smart Services CRC Finally Launched

Snurb — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:35:25 +1000

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Produsage Book Officially Launched

Snurb — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:23:14 +1000

It's taken me a while to get back to blogging after the CCi conference a couple of weeks ago - for a full report on the sessions I attended, see my coverage at snurb.info. I'll try to post a little more regularly again now, although I'm still in that post-book slump that does tend to set in for a while after the completion of a major writing project. (I'm actually finding a good deal of my time taken up with projects related to my earlier book on citizen journalism at the moment - there's a certain ebb and flow to these things.)

Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration betw. Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework

Snurb — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 23:42:16 +1000

Axel Bruns. "Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework." Paper presented at the CCi 2008 conference, Brisbane, 25-27 June 2008.

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The emergence of citizen journalism, and the challenges it poses for the conventional journalism industry, have been well-documented over the past decade. Citizen journalism has been hailed as a new "Estate 4.5" (Singer 2006), acting as a watchdog for a journalism industry increasingly compromised by commercial and political agendas; it has been seen as making possible a return to a more dialogic, deliberative engagement with the news (Heikkilä & Kunelius 2002) in which a broader range of perspectives are represented and engage with one another; it has been described as shifting focus from the global and generic to the hyperlocal and specific.

CCi Conference: Brisbane, 25-27 June 2008

Snurb — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:55:38 +1000

I'll be spending the rest of this week at the inaugural conference of the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) here in Brisbane, and I'll try to live-blog as much as possible from the conference. This should be a great event - keynote speakers include Baroness Susan Greenfield, MIT's Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze (the author of Media Work), and a number of other luminaries in the field. Henry will also be launching a number of books (including my own Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage) on Wednesday evening.

There's a strong citizen journalism stream in the conference, and my own paper operates in that field, too - titled "Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework", it's more of an exploratory rumination on questions which I've found myself coming back to repeatedly over the past few years - from my study of organisational models for the collaborative production of online news in Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production to my work on produsage across various domains of knowledge creation in Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, it seems to me that the great unanswered question remains how to effectively combine broad participatory (i.e. citizen) involvement and enable the recognition of expert ('professional') knowledges.

Henry Jenkins Interviews Axel Bruns

Snurb — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:06:26 +1000

I'm very honoured by the strong support that Henry Jenkins, Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, has given the produsage book. Not only did he provide an enthusiastic endorsement for Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, but he's also offered to interview me on his own blog. That interview has now been published, and your can read it in two parts here and here. I'm also reposting it below.

The Brownian Motion of Collective Intelligence?

Snurb — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:30:39 +1000

Some of my colleagues at QUT are involved in a new project they describe as 'cultural science' - a combination of cultural studies, economics, and other scientific methodologies, in order to arrive at a more rigorous and testable framework for the study of cultural activity. I've posted some more about this over at snurb.info, and there's now a Cultural Science Website which has more information. I've cross-posted the following blog post on the Cultural Science blog.

I was lucky enough to attend part of the Brisbane meeting which officially kickstarted the project of cultural science, and I've been trying to trace the connections from here to my own work since then. I know little about economics, but for a couple of years before switching to media studies, I trained as a physicist, and a recent blog post by Yihong Ding has made me believe that some fields of physics, too, have valuable models to contribute to cultural science. In particular, it might be worth examining the way that particle and fluid dynamics describes the transition from random interaction at a micro level to orderly and predictable behaviour at a macro level.

But first, some background: the focus of my research is on user-led collaborative content creation, or what I've come to call produsage. One of the fundamental challenges in this field is to understand the processes of collective intelligence that arise in large-scale collaborative environments, and the conditions under which they flourish best. What makes Wikipedia work, for example? What would make it work better? What enables The Wisdom of Crowds to emerge, as James Surowiecki describes it?

Nielsen Online: Produsage Trends in Australia and New Zealand

Snurb — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 12:09:25 +1000

Getting into the ANZAC Day spirit here at Produsage.org: there's an interesting news release over at Nielsen Online, detailing results of their research into user-led content generation in Australia and New Zealand. As it turns out, Internet users in both countries are already pretty active in their online participation - but a closer look at the stats released by Nielsen's market researchers also reveals that their activities remain largely limited to sharing profiles, photos and links at present, and to accessing user-led content rather than necessarily generating it.

Mark Scott's Lacklustre Vision for the Future of Our ABC

Snurb — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 09:14:52 +1000

Somewhat overshadowed by the extensive if occasionally perfunctory coverage of the 2020 Summit in Canberra has been ABC Managing Director Mark Scott's own ideas paper, "The ABC in the Digital Age - Towards 2020" which was released last Thursday.

Scott also posted a kind of executive summary of the paper to the ABC's 2020 Unleashed site: here, he resorts to time-honoured platitudes about how in future "we will be saturated with choices about what to watch, listen to and experience; it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom." (Huh?) His solution: more channels - "a suite of six ABC TV channels", plus "at least 15 radio services."

From Production to Produsage: Book of the Week (II)

Snurb — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:35:52 +1000

As I mentioned the other day, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage was chosen as book of the week on the P2P Foundation Website, and Michel Bauwens has kindly posted a few excerpts from the book on the P2P Foundation blog. The last two of these are now up, and I've also reposted the entire series here on this site - please feel free to leave comments here or discuss them over at the P2P Foundation Ning site.

Reading Sample 4 - Produsage and Democracy

Snurb — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:12:34 +1000

Below is the final of four reading samples from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. These samples were first published as part of a series on the P2P Foundation Website, where the book was honoured as Book of the Week.

In this series:

Produsage: An Introduction

Folks and Experts

Produsage and Technology

Produsage and Democracy

4 - Produsage and Democracy

A crucial step in the advance towards a more participatory, active, monitorial form of citizenship is the embedding of such practices into everyday life, and blogging and other forms of participation in continuing, produsage-based, deliberative models for discussing and debating the news provide a useful model. As Jenkins points out, this is a question of moving beyond participation in political processes only in the lead-up to elections and in the context of major political issues; "the next step is to think of democratic citizenship as a lifestyle." [1] This does not necessarily provide an argument against the necessarily limited issue-based action coalitions we have discussed already, however; instead, it encourages citizens to participate in a variety of such coalitions, to join a number of the communities of political produsers whose interests and concerns match their own. Much as elsewhere in produsage, to do so will give rise to loose and fluid heterarchies of participation, and ad hoc alliances organizing specific actions and coordinating the development and evaluation of new policy initiatives.

Reading Sample 3 - Produsage and Technology

Snurb — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:57:48 +1000

Below is the third of four reading samples from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. These samples were first published as part of a series on the P2P Foundation Website, where the book was honoured as Book of the Week.

In this series:

Produsage: An Introduction

Folks and Experts

Produsage and Technology

Produsage and Democracy

3 - Produsage and Technology

The emergence of produsage itself can be seen simply as a symptom of a wider informationalization of all aspects of our everyday lives, our economy, our society. With the help of technological advances, information is being embedded ever more deeply into all aspects of life, but this is not a process driven by technology as such; indeed, perhaps it would be more correct to say that our networked information and communication technologies have helped merely to make more notable, more visible, more explicitly extractable and usable, the information and knowledge which was already always, inherently, necessarily embedded in all aspects of human existence, action, and interaction. Technology, in this view, is merely a support mechanism serving to connect and amplify processes of information use and knowledge generation which have always been a fundamental aspect of human life; it helps address what Lévy describes as a central problem for collective intelligence,

Reading Sample 2 - Folks and Experts

Snurb — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:44:13 +1000

Below is the second of four reading samples from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. These samples were first published as part of a series on the P2P Foundation Website, where the book was honoured as Book of the Week.

In this series:

Produsage: An Introduction

Folks and Experts

Produsage and Technology

Produsage and Democracy

2 - Folks and Experts

Wikipedia, and the environments of produsage more generally, can serve as vehicles for moves beyond established and increasingly ossified structures of knowledge and expertise; they pay respect not to abstract certificates of expert accreditation, but to the active display and embodiment of expertise through constructive participation in their communities of content and knowledge creation. At their best, therefore, they are by no means anti-elitist, but instead openly invite elites and experts to share their knowledge with the wider community so that the community overall is able to gain knowledge; they are opposed, however, to any tendency to take established expertise for granted and to use one's status as an accredited expert to refrain from answering legitimate questions and challenges, wherever they may originate. Thus, for example, in journalistic produsage the lack of special prestige accorded to experts "does not mean, however, that deliberative journalism should reduce all discussion to common sense. Rather, the perspectives of 'ordinary people' should be allowed to transform the analytical distinctions of established experts as well as define new questions." [1]

Reading Sample 1 - Produsage: An Introduction

Snurb — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:21:41 +1000

Below is the first of four reading samples from Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. These samples were first published as part of a series on the P2P Foundation Website, where the book was honoured as Book of the Week.

In this series:

Produsage: An Introduction

Folks and Experts

Produsage and Technology

Produsage and Democracy

1 - Produsage: An Introduction

Users are able to involve themselves flexibly and fluidly in the tasks confronting the collaborative, 'hive' community; they collaborate not by performing only the monotonous, repetitive, predetermined tasks of the production line, or by contributing fully formed new ideas to the information commons, but instead engage in an ongoing, perpetually unfinished, iterative, and evolutionary process of gradual development of the informational resources shared by the community. Such "communality is powerful: It effectively eliminates the need to predict in advance who may benefit from one's knowledge; it provides information and expertise gained by others, thus eliminating the need to experience phenomena firsthand; and it highlights the advantages of aggregated information resources, whose value can greatly exceed the sum of the parts." [1]

From Production to Produsage: Book of the Week

Snurb — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:58:00 +1000

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage has been chosen as book of the week on the P2P Foundation Website, and over the next few days a number of selected excerpts will be published on Michel Bauwens's P2P Foundation blog. The first two of these have now gone up - check them out, and feel free to leave a comment on the blog or discuss them over at the P2P Foundation Ning site.

The first excerpt provides a general outline of and motivation for the produsage concept - it outlines the decline of the conventional production chain as we were familiar with it during the industrial age, and the corresponding rise of produsage as a hybrid model of content creation which involves users as producers: in other words, produsers. Necessarily, this also fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the outcomes of such processes: produsage generates only temporary artefacts which themselves remain up for further development, not fixed and finished products - even though many such artefacts (from open source software to the Wikipedia, and beyond) can be used to substitute for the products of industrial processes.

Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook

Snurb — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:04:23 +1000

As I've said before, I'm no fan of Facebook - in fact, I think that ultimately, it is no more than a poor caricature of what social networking can be and do. Clearly, that's not stopped the site's rapid growth, but as Facebook users themselves have had more time to come to terms with the environment they're now operating in, I think it's in good part responsible for the fact that in some key territories, Facebook usage numbers have now plateaued and even declined.

The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook handles what should be its central asset - the social networks that its users belong to. Social networks are defined in the first place by the term 'friend', but being friends with someone on the site is no more than a binary decision: you either are, or you're not. There's no opportunity to do what we do in our lives outside of Facebook every day - to distinguish between different types and levels of friendship: work colleagues, old school friends, family members, neighbours, ex-lovers, casual acquaintances must all be classified simply as either 'friend' or 'non-friend'. What's the use of that?

On my Facebook profile page (which I hardly ever visit), there are now some 30 friend requests waiting for me - some are genuine friends, some are students and colleagues, some are casual acquaintances or friends-of-a-friend. Overall, they have nothing more in common than that they - somehow - know (of) me. In no context other than within the artificial sociality of Facebook would anyone consider all of these people to belong to the same category. And I have no means to properly qualify the level of friendship which connects me to another person - I can't distinguish between people I've known for 20 years and people whom I've never heard of, but who may have read one of my books; I can't tell family members from colleagues at work whom I occasionally exchange ideas with.

This fundamentally ignores some of the basics of how we as humans understand the social networks we're embedded in. We don't just see everyone as our 'friends', but instead have social ties with others that are more or less strong - and for most of us, there's a pretty low upper limit on the maximum number of really close friends we have. (Perhaps it's just me, but I don't know that I'd even say that I have 30 extremely close, 'through-thick-and-thin' friends - so who are those 30 who want to befriend me on Facebook?) Which highlights the absurdity of the Facebook 'friends' system: any social network that enables any of its members to claim that they have 10,000 or more friends doesn't deserve to be called 'social network'; what the tag 'friend' in Facebook really means is no more than 'here's someone I know (of)' - and what good is that if I can't also say 'but here are my very best mates'?

Beyond Broadcasting: TV as a (Deficient) Form of Streaming Media

Snurb — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:47:34 +1100

Continuing the streaming media theme on snurb.info from Wednesday: the latest issue of the journal Media International Australia has now been released - "Beyond Broadcasting", edited by Graham Meikle and Sherman Young. I've contributed an article and have received permission from the editors to re-publish it here. In the article, I try to take a fresh look at television in an increasingly Internet-driven media environment.

Traditionally, the Net's equivalents to television (mainly, streaming media) have been viewed through the lens of the older technology; to some extent, streaming media has tried to mimic television's feel and format - this is visible in the user interfaces of media players like Windows and Real, and even (though perhaps with some irony intended) in brand names such as YouTube, Current.tv, or Democracy TV, the original name for the podcast feedreader Miro. I would argue that this is a case of what we could call a paleomorphising process: the tendency to shape new media technologies in keeping with older technologies. (In much the same way, it's taken decades for the mobile phone to look and feel like a mobile media and communications device, rather than simply like a wireless handset.)

ABC Digital Media Forum 2008 - Beyond Public Service Broadcasting: Produsage at the ABC

Snurb — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:16:48 +1100

This time next Friday, I'll be attending the 2008 ABC Digital Media Forum, an internal strategy conference that aims to develop innovative approaches to engaging with digital media (and importantly, digital media users) for our national broadcaster. I won't be blogging the full conference itself, as much of what will be discussed there will remain confidential for the moment, but I'm sure I'll be able at least to post my overall impressions. For some years now, the ABC has taken a markedly proactive stance towards exploring the potential of participatory new media models; it will be exciting to see what's already in the pipeline for the near future, and what may be possible a little further down the track.

I was invited to the conference by Tony Walker, Manager of the ABC's Digital Radio division (and the driving force behind the ABC Digital Futures blog), and will provide a few thoughts for a session titled "Content Production in the Age of Participation". Below is a draft of my remarks - any comments, especially from current or potential users of the ABC's services, would be very welcome...

Beyond Public Service Broadcasting: Produsage at the ABC

By Axel Bruns

read more

Re-Public: Who Controls the Means of Produsage?

Snurb — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:05:38 +1100

I'm very pleased to see that a new article of mine has just been published in the energetic Greek online journal Re-Public. Editor Pavlos Hatzopoulos invited me a little while ago to respond to a first wave of articles discussing and critiquing the emergent phenomena of the social Web, and the contributor list already includes a number key thinkers in the field, from Michel Bauwens to Trebor Scholz. In fact, I responded specifically to the opening discussion between Trebor and Paul Hartzog, which revisits the industrial-age question of "Who owns the means of production?" for the new, information-age context.

What was missing from this, from my point of view, was a concern not so much with the means of production, but with the next step in the chain - with the means that connect producers and users, the means that facilitate the interaction, collaboration, and ultimately the produsage that takes place when the producer/consumer dichotomy diminishes. This, I feel, should be the main starting-point for critique now - the question should be "Who controls the means of produsage?" In fact, its claim to exclusive ownership and control of the means of produsage within its gated community is one of the reasons why I am so concerned about the rise of Facebook, as I've noted previously.

Anyway - the article is now available on Re-Public, and reprinted below. A special thrill for me (having studied ancient Greek at school) is that Re-Public also published a (modern) Greek translation of the piece: Ποιος ελέγχει τα μέσα παραγωγής/κατανάλωσης; Cool...

Teaching the Produsers: Preparing Students for User-Led Content Production

Snurb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:53:48 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Teaching the Produsers: Preparing Students for User-Led Content Production." Featured Speech presented at ATOM Conference, Brisbane, 8 October 2006.

My talk at ATOM2006 outlined the produsage concept, with a view also to how educators can aim to enable students to engage in produsage through the development of their critical, collaborative and creative ICT and media literacies.

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Powerpoint

'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser

Snurb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:04:00 +1100

Axel Bruns. "'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser." The Mojtaba Saminejad Lecture, for the Institute for Distributed Creativity. Presented at SUNY Buffalo, 28 Sep. 2005; New School, New York City, 11 Oct. 2005; Brown University, Providence, 12 Oct. 2005; Temple University, Philadelphia, 14 Oct. 2005.

Recent decades have seen the dual trend of growing digitization of content, and of increasing availability of sophisticated tools for creating, manipulating, publishing, and disseminating that content. Advertising campaigns openly encourage users to 'Rip. Mix. Burn.' and to share the fruits of their individual or collaborative efforts with the rest of the world. The Internet has smashed the distribution bottleneck of older media, and the dominance of the traditional producer > publisher > distributor value chain has weakened. Marshall McLuhan's dictum 'everyone's a publisher' is on the verge of becoming a reality - and more to the point, as the Wikipedia proudly proclaims, 'anyone can edit.'

Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age

Snurb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:10:10 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age." Paper presented at ICE3 conference, Loch Lomond, Scotland, 23 March 2007.

If produsage is an increasingly significant element of intellectual, economic, legal and political processes within society, then educational institutions must pay more attention to developing produser capabilities in their graduates - focussing on learners' collaborative, creative, critical, and communicative capabilities (or C4C, for short). Indeed, they must lead by example and base more of their teaching and learning frameworks on produsage models. Social constructivist approaches to education already call for a greater role for learners in the educational process, but even pedagogies based on this framework often still retain a strong role for the teacher, and standard tertiary education practices continue to allow for innovation only within the confines of otherwise persistent and immutable institutional structures.