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

CFP: Exploring Produsage - Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Snurb — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:26:24 +1100

With my colleague Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, I'm delighted to have been approached by the editors of the Taylor & Francis journal New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia to edit a special issue on produsage. Below is the Call for Papers - we welcome any enquiries and submissions. Please spread the word!

Exploring Produsage

A Special Issue of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia

Call for papers

The concept of produsage points to the shift away from conventional producer/consumer relationships, and highlights the more fluid roles of users and contributors within social media environments. Participants in open source projects, in Wikipedia, in YouTube and Second Life are no longer merely consuming or using preproduced material, but neither are they at all times acting as fully self-determined producers of fully formed new works; rather, they occupy a hybrid position as produsers of content.
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Strategies for Engaging with Social Media: Two Reports for the Smart Services CRC

Snurb — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:06:39 +1100

One of my research gigs for 2009 was to investigate the potential of social media for the Smart Services CRC, a cooperative research centre comprised of several Australian universities and industry partners from the media, finance, government, and IT fields. Ostensibly, the goal here was to translate what we know about the principles and processes of produsage into actionable ideas for organisations and businesses which aim to engage with social media communities, and I'm pleased to announce that the two reports produced from this research are now available under Creative Commons licences. (I mentioned the release of Report 1 in a previous posting in June.)

All of this was in recognition of the fact - and to say this is not a dig specifically at the CRC's industry partners, but speaks to an almost industry-wide malaise - that social media and the communities which use them remain very poorly understood by the organisations which attempt to use them, which has led to a great many failures in working with social media. (For mine, the jury is still out on whether even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg actually gets social media.)

Indeed, it seems like these failures are now used by some corporate planners to argue against engaging with user communities altogether - 'social media' has become a dirty word for them, as ReadWriteWeb reports just today. It's unlikely that such a head-in-the-sand strategy is going to be successful in the long (or even the short) term, of course - much as the music industry has found with filesharers, social media communities aren't something you can contain by ignoring them, suing them, or quarantining them from your own content using paywalls or other protection mechanisms.

So, what our two reports for the Smart Services CRC aim to do instead is to provide an accessible, level-headed introduction to social media which draws substantially on produsage theory but tries to present those ideas in as simple and straightforward a manner as possible (without, hopefully, dumbing them down too much). I've even gone as far as avoiding to use the term 'produsage' itself all too much, in order not to scare any overanxious corporate strategists who might be frightened off by their encounter with new ideas...

Produsage and Politics: Another Article in German

Snurb — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:10:08 +1100

Hot on the heels of the new book chapter that I mentioned in my previous post comes another chapter (though technically this one was indeed published in 2009, while the previous one has been pre-dated to 2010 - such are the mysteries of academic publishing). And this chapter is another one of my German-language articles, too, this time on produsage (or Produtzung) and its implications for politics and political organisations - which may also make it a useful companion piece to my recent interview for Polar Magazin.

The book, Soziale Netze in der digitalen Welt, edited by Christoph Bieber, Martin Eifert, Thomas Groß, and Jörn Lamla, follows on from a conference in Gießen at which I presented in 2008, but my contribution, "Produtzung: Von medialer zu politischer Partizipation", takes a considerably longer view of potential developments in political participation than the more strongly citizen journalism-focussed paper at the conference itself; it explores similar ideas to my 2008 journal article for Information Polity, in fact.

Produsage and Beyond: Exploring the Pro-Am Interface (JMRC 2009)

Snurb — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:52:28 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Produsage and Beyond: Exploring the Pro-Am Interface." Invited seminar at the Journalism & Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 29 Oct. 2009.

The concept of produsage (Bruns 2008) describes the user-led collaborative approach to content creation which is prevalent in open source, citizen journalism, and the Wikipedia, as well as many other social media spaces. While many produsage projects have emerged initially to challenge dominant players in industry, their successful establishment as viable and sustainable alternatives also opens the door for an exploration of manageable cooperative arrangements between industry and community. Many challenges remain for such Pro-Am (Leadbeater & Miller 2004) models, however - not least an often deep-seated sense of mutual distrust -, and successful Pro-Am models may be most likely to succeed when sponsored by trusted third parties (public broadcasters, NGOs). This presentation explores pitfalls and possibilities in the Pro-Am space.

Prosumer Revisited: From Prosumer to Produtzer

Snurb — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:15:24 +1100

I'm very happy to announce that my latest article on produsage has now been published, in the (German-language) reader developed from the Prosumer Revisited conference which I attended earlier this year. Obviously, I argue in the book chapter that the 'prosumer' is no longer a useful term to describe the changes in participation and content creation which are occurring today, and the chapter provides a concise overview of produsage, or Produtzung, as an alternative. Probably a little more clearly than I did in my conference presentation itself!

New Reviews of the Produsage Book

Snurb — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:44:30 +1100

I'm delighted to note that three new reviews of my book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - by Verena Laschinger, Alan Razee, and Erin Stark - have been published over at the Resource Centre for Cybercultural Studies. RCCS editor David Silver kindly also asked me to provide a response to these reviews, which point to a number of further avenues for research into the produsage phenomenon that I hope many of us who work in this field will pursue.

Produsage and Democracy in German(y)

Snurb — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:57:28 +1000

Looking back, my stay at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg during May and June this year was exceptionally productive. In addition to the various conferences at which I presented, I also conducted a range of interviews with German media - and the latest of these, for Polar, the voluminous twice-annual magazine for political philosophy and culture, has now been published. I was interviewed for the magazine by Jan Engelmann of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is aligned with the German Greens party.

Here's an extended version of the interview, slightly longer than what was published in Polar. It's in German, of course - try Google Translate for a rough translation to other languages?

"In der Open-Source-Demokratie wartet man keine Einladung ab"

Bloß zuschauen war gestern. Im Web 2.0 entwickeln Leute gemeinsam freie Software, redigieren Texte in Wikipedia oder beraten auf Blogs die Sicherheitslücken von Windows. Könnte diese Beteiligungslust auch der Politik zugute kommen? Ja, wenn man die Philosophie der Netzkulturen ernst nimmt und schrittweise in das institutionelle System integriert, sagt der in Australien arbeitende Medienforscher Axel Bruns in einem E-Mail-Interview mit Jan Engelmann.

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Produsage on the Road Again

Snurb — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:38:12 +1000

Conference season is upon us again: I'm shortly flying out to Europe to present a number of produsage-related papers at conferences in England, Austria, and Wales. The first of these is likely to be the most immediately interesting one for Produsage.org readers: at Transforming Audiences in London, I'll be presenting a paper that is more or less an English-language version of my presentation at Prosumer Revisited in March; I'll be critiquing Alvin Toffler's concept of the 'prosumer', and suggesting produsage as a more appropriate replacement that takes into account the very different affordances of today's participatory online technologies. In preparation for the conference, I've now made the Powerpoint available on this site, and ~~all things going well I'll also add the audio of the presentation soon after the conference.~~ the audio is now online, too.

Citizen Journalism and Everyday Life: A Case Study of Germany's myHeimat.de. (Future of Journalism 2009)

Snurb — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:08:54 +1000

Axel Bruns. "Citizen Journalism and Everyday Life: A Case Study of Germany's myHeimat.de." Paper presented at Future of Journalism, Cardiff, 9-10 Sep. 2009.

Much recent research into citizen journalism has focussed on its role in political debate and deliberation, especially in the context of recent general elections in the United States and elsewhere. Such research examines important questions about citizen participation in democratic processes - however, it perhaps places undue focus on only one area of journalistic coverage, and presents a challenge which only a small number of citizen journalism projects can realistically hope to meet.

A greater opportunity for broad-based citizen involvement in journalistic activities may lie outside of politics, in the coverage of everyday community life. A leading exponent of this approach is the German-based citizen journalism Website myHeimat.de, which provides a nationwide platform for participants to contribute reports about events in their community. myHeimat takes a hyperlocal approach but also allows for content aggregation on specific topics across multiple local communities; Hannover-based newspaper publishing house Madsack has recently acquired a stake in the project.

myHeimat has been particularly successful in a number of rural and regional areas where strong offline community ties already exist; in several of its most active regions, myHeimat and its commercial partners now also produce monthly print magazines republishing the best of the user-generated content by local contributors, which are distributed to households free of charge or included as inserts in local newspapers. Additionally, the myHeimat publishing platform has also been utilised as the basis for a new 'participatory newspaper' project, independently of the myHeimat Website: since mid-September 2008, the Gießener Zeitung has been published as both a twice-weekly newspaper and a continuously updated news site which draws on both staff and citizen journalist contributors.

Drawing on extensive interviews with myHeimat CEO Martin Huber and Madsack newspaper editors Peter Taubald and Clemens Wlokas during October 2008, this paper analyses the myHeimat project and examines its applicability beyond rural and regional areas in Germany; it investigates the question of what role citizen journalism may play beyond the political realm.

Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective (EDEM 2009)

Snurb — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:02:51 +1000

Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson. "Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective." Paper presented at EDEM 2009, Vienna, 7-8 Sep. 2009.

In Australia, a range of Federal Government services have been provided online for some time, but direct, online citizen consultation and involvement in processes of governance is relatively new. Moves towards more extensive citizen involvement in legislative processes are now being driven in a "top-down" fashion by government agencies, or in a "bottom-up" manner by individuals and third-sector organisations. This chapter focusses on one example from each of these categories, as well as discussing the presence of individual politicians in online social networking spaces. It argues that only a combination of these approaches can achieve effective consultation between citizens and policymakers. Existing at a remove from government sites and the frameworks for public communication which govern them, bottom-up consultation tools may provide a better chance for functioning, self-organising user communities to emerge, but they are also more easily ignored by governments not directly involved in their running. Top-down consultation tools, on the other hand, may seem to provide a more direct line of communication to relevant government officials, but for that reason are also more likely to be swamped by users who wish simply to register their dissent rather than engage in discussion. The challenge for governments, politicians, and user communities alike is to develop spaces in which productive and undisrupted exchanges between citizens and policymakers can take place.

From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation (Transforming Audiences 2009)

Snurb — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 16:58:13 +1000

Axel Bruns. "From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation." Paper presented at Transforming Audiences, London, 3-4 Sep. 2009.

Alvin Toffler's image of the prosumer (1970, 1980, 1990) continues to influence in a significant way our understanding of the user-led, collaborative processes of content creation which are today labelled "social media" or "Web 2.0". A closer look at Toffler's own description of his prosumer model reveals, however, that it remains firmly grounded in the mass media age: the prosumer is clearly not the self-motivated creative originator and developer of new content which can today be observed in projects ranging from open source software through Wikipedia to Second Life, but simply a particularly well-informed, and therefore both particularly critical and particularly active, consumer. The highly specialised, high end consumers which exist in areas such as hi-fi or car culture are far more representative of the ideal prosumer than the participants in non-commercial (or as yet non-commercial) collaborative projects. And to expect Toffler's 1970s model of the prosumer to describe these 21st-century phenomena was always an unrealistic expectation, of course.

Produsage and Business: Interview in Page Magazine (in German)

Snurb — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:45:07 +1000

Another outcome from my participation in the next09 conference in Hamburg in May this year - an interview with Ilona Koglin for the German design, advertising and media industry magazine Page has now been published, in their August issue. From their story:

Neue Wege

Der Markt ächzt unter der internationalen Finanz- und Wirtschaftkrise. Das ruft nicht nur die Globalisierungs- und Konsumkritiker auf den Plan, sondern scheint auch diejenigen zu bestätigen, die schon seit Jahren neue Gechäftsmodelle à la Crowdsourcing propagieren. Dr. Axel Bruns, der an der Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane zu Smart Services und Social Media forscht, gehört dazu. Er spricht von creative destruction: "Im Untergang von Modellen steckt immer auch die Chance für die Entstehung neuer." Auch wenn keiner genau weiß, welchen Verlauf unser Wirtschaftssystem in den nächsten Jahrzehnten nehmen wird - Bruns glaubt daran, dass Marken und Unternehmen in Zukunft nicht mehr Produkte verkaufen, sonder nur mehr die Plattformen, Tools, Produktionsstätten, Basistechnologien liefern und die Distribution übernehmen. Zukünftig werde die Community die Produkte online entwickeln.
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Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond Review in Screen Education

Snurb — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:03:24 +1000

Another very positive review of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond has been published, this time in issue 53 of the quarterly Australian magazine Screen Education. (Full disclaimer: the author, Michael Dezuanni, is a colleague at QUT, though in a different faculty.)

Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage

Peter Lang, New York, 2008

At the 2006 ATOM National Media Education conference, Queensland University of Technology's Axel Bruns gave a very well received presentation called Teaching the Produsers: Preparing students for User-Led Content Production, which can still be accessed in digital form on his blog at <http://snurb.info/node/604>. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the presentation that Bruns' new book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, provides an excellent theorisation of what is increasingly being referred to as participatory culture - the cultures and affordances of Web 2.0 that allow individuals to be producers as well as users of media content.
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Peer Governance in Wikipedia (in Spite of the Experts)

Snurb — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:08:10 +1000

There's a nice series by Vasilis Kostakis on peer governance in Wikipedia over at the P2P Foundation blog at the moment, starting with a double interview with P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens and me. Parts two and three are here and here.

Much of this focusses on the interminable debate between 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists'. For the most part, I love Paul Hartzog's statement that they "strike me as if they were two rival groups of musicians, sneering at and insulting one another, while they pluck at their lyres as Wikipedia burns down all around them" - yes, the debate really couldn't matter much less, but at the same time I also really don't see much evidence of Rome/Wikipedia burning. Certainly compared to, say, Encarta...

Smart Services CRC "Social Media: State of the Art" Report Released

Snurb — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:05:26 +1000

Over the past few months, I've been busy exploring the potential for sustainable corporate approaches to engaging with produsage - this is what I've discussed for example in my recent presentations at next09 (in English) and the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / Hans-Bredow-Institut conference in Hamburg (in German), for example. Too many businesses still seem to believe that they can simply scoop the cream off the top of the various spaces for user-led content creation, without understanding the inevitable negative repercussions which result from any perception by users that they're just being exploited as cheap labour.

Quite a few of the ideas presented in those conference papers (and the associated interviews) draw substantially on my work with Mark Bahnisch in the Smart Services CRC, and so it's very timely that our first report for the CRC has now also been released. The report provides an overview of the state of the art in social media, and focusses especially on the dynamics of user community participation in social media sites; as part of this, we're also looking at a number of leading social media sites (and one or two 'interesting failures'), particularly in three key areas: news and views, products and places, and networking and dating.

User Generated Content als Qualitätsmedium? Alternative Anreize für Qualitätscontent (Alcatel-Lucent 2009)

Snurb — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:15:15 +1000

Axel Bruns. "User Generated Content als Qualitätsmedium? Alternative Anreize für Qualitätscontent." Paper presented at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation conference "Finanzierung von Qualitätscontent", Hamburg, 9 June 2009.

Angetrieben und unterstützt durch Web-2.0-Technologien, gibt es heute einen Trend zur Verbindung der Nutzung und Produktion von Inhalten als Produtzung (engl. produsage). Um dabei die Qualität der erstellten Inhalte und eine nachhaltige Teilnahme der Nutzer sicherzustellen, müsen vier grundlegende Prinzipien eingehalten werden:

Produsage (and Business) in HD

Snurb — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:42:52 +1000

The next09 conference last week was very interesting (but, at one and a half days, too short!), and very well organised - one of the benefits of a PR company organising a research/industry conference, I guess. A particularly welcome addition was the participation of German video sharing platform Sevenload , who are now also beginning to post videos of presentations and interviews during the conference. For the full stream, check out Sevenload's next09 channel (or search for 'next09') - but feel free to skip right over Andrew Keen's rant...

Blogging from next09

Snurb — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:44:30 +1000

Hamburg.
Readers of the Produsage.org blog - you might be interested to know that over the next couple of days I'm liveblogging from the next09 conference - a major media and creative industries conference in Germany. I'm also presenting some early results from my research in the Smart Services CRC here tomorrow, under the title "Produsage and Business". Tune in - we've just started with a keynote by Jeff Jarvis!

'Produsage and Business: Sharing Your Brand with Users (next09, 2009)

Snurb — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:49:51 +1000

Axel Bruns. "Produsage and Business: Sharing Your Brand with Users." Paper presented at next09, Hamburg, 6 May 2009.

Relations between brands and their users continue to be affected by a traditional perspective that sees the producers and consumers of goods and services as inherently different animals. In the emerging information and knowledge economy, and especially in online contexts, this model is no longer sustainable. Instead, spearheaded by the Web 2.0 phenomenon, there is a trend towards the fusing of production and usage as a new, hybrid process of produsage.

Beyond Toffler, beyond the Prosumer

Snurb — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:45:45 +1000

I'm briefly back in Brisbane before heading back to Europe for the next round of conferences and a good month as a visiting scholar and Alcatel-Lucent Fellow at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. My time here at home has given me an opportunity to reflect on the conferences I attended on the last trip: WebSci '09 in Athens and Prosumer Revisited in Frankfurt.

Prosumer Revisited in particular, which I blogged about here, was an interesting experience - probably my first opportunity to reconnect in detail with the work being done in the overall area of produsage (and some way beyond it) in German academic research. A number of the keynotes at the conference were excellent, and it'll be interesting to follow some of the trajectories they explored.

I remain very much unconvinced about the attempt to make Alvin Toffler's term 'prosumer', now a good quarter-century old, do all the work of carrying this research, though - and not just because with the produser I have my own neologism to offer as an alternative. To begin with, the term 'prosumer' has never been satisfactorily defined, and is now regularly used to mean whatever a particular speaker wants it to mean - that tendency, I'm afraid, was also in evidence in some of the presentations at the Prosumer Revisited conference itself. (Put another way - perhaps we've never properly visited the prosumer when the term was first coined; 'revisiting' it today can therefore inevitably only add to the confusion over how to understand it.)

For Toffler himself, as far as I can make out (and even here, the definition shifts over the decades), the prosumer was for the most part simply an extension of the conventional production line: a way to involve consumers in better reporting their needs and wants to producers, and thus to enable a process of mass customisation. More active, independent customer, consumer, or user agency seems to be denied by this model, though - the prosumer, as I read Toffler, very much remains a (professional) consumer, and fails to make the more towards becoming an active producer in any real sense of the word.

Produsage at the Frankfurt School

Snurb — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 03:40:55 +1100

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

Frankfurt.

From WebSci '09 in Athens (conference blogging here), I've arrived in Frankfurt (where it actually snowed this morning...), for the Prosumer Revisited conference over the next few days. My first official engagement today was a guest lecture for Cultural Science stalwart Carsten Herrmann-Pillath at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, though - not the kind of audience I usually speak to, but a very relevant one for a guest lecture on produsage nonetheless. My presentation is below - when I have a chance, I'll also add the audio from my talk.

Organisation in Open Source and Social Media: A Response to Chris Anderson

Snurb — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:18:06 +1100

My colleague Julien Vayssière at the Smart Services CRC sent me a link to a post on Chris Anderson's The Long Tail blog today, which seeks to draw a distinction between the organisational paradigms of open source and social media. The key point:

What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions. The best projects are the ones with the best leaders.

Social media, on the other hands, doesn't exist for a shared purpose. It exists to serve the individual. We don't tweet to built Twitter, we tweet to suit ourselves. We blog because we can, not because we have signed on to a blogging project.

There's some truth underlying this, but I'm sorry - as far as I'm concerned, that description is way too simplistic. Anderson goes on:

Vom Prosumer zum Produser: Ein neues Verständnis nutzergesteuerter Inhaltserschaffung (Prosumer Revisited 2009)

Snurb — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:55:15 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Vom Prosumer zum Produser: Ein neues Verständnis nutzergesteuerter Inhaltserschaffung." Presented at Prosumer Revisited: Eine Tagung zur Aktualität der Debatte, Frankfurt, 26 Mar. 2009.

Alvin Tofflers Bild des Prosumers beeinflußt weiterhin maßgeblich unser Verständnis vieler heutzutage als "Social Media" oder "Web 2.0" beschriebener nutzergesteuerter, kollaborativer Prozesse der Inhaltserstellung. Ein genauerer Blick auf Tofflers eigene Beschreibung seines Prosumermodells offenbart jedoch, daß es fest im Zeitalter der Massenmedienvorherrschaft verankert bleibt: der Prosumer ist eben nicht jener aus eigenem Antrieb aktive, kreative Ersteller und Weiterbearbeiter neuer Inhalte, wie er heutzutage in Projekten von der Open-Source-Software über die Wikipedia bis hin zu Second Life zu finden ist, sondern nur ein ganz besonders gut informierter, und daher in seinem Konsumverhalten sowohl besonders kritischer als auch besonders aktiver Konsument. Hochspezialisierte, High-End-Konsumenten etwa im Hi-Fi- oder Automobilbereich stellen viel eher das Idealbild des Prosumers dar als das für Mitarbeiter in oft eben gerade nicht (oder zumindest noch nicht) kommerziell erfaßten nutzergesteuerten Kollaborationsprojekten der Fall ist. Solches von Tofflers in den 70ern erarbeiteten Modells zu erwarten, ist sicherlich ohnehin zuviel verlangt.

'Anyone Can Edit': From Users to Produsers (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, 2009)

Snurb — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:37:48 +1100

Axel Bruns. "'Anyone Can Edit': From Users to Produsers." Guest lecture at the Sino-German School of Governance, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, 26 Mar. 2009.

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.

Produtzung in Frankfurt

Snurb — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:36:34 +1100

I've posted some more detailed information about this over at snurb.info, but visitors here might be interested to know that I'll be speaking at the (German-language) conference Prosumer Revisited at the end of March. No prize for guessing that my contribution to the event will be to offer the concept of produsage as an alternative to Toffler's prosumer, which in my view acknowledges consumers' knowledge about the products they're using but doesn't offer them sufficient agency as users and content creators. (And of course Toffler introduced his concept in the early 1970s, so he couldn't possibly have foreseen what forms of user participation well beyond prosumption today's technological frameworks would make possible.)

Spore at 70

Snurb — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:46:11 +1100

70 million user-generated content assets, that is. Readers of the produsage book will know that I'm very interested in Eric von Hippel's model in Democratizing Innovation of providing users with toolkits that enable them to participate in design and development processes. "Toolkits for users", he writes, "change the conditions potential innovators face. By making innovation cheaper and quicker for users, they can increase the volume of user innovation. They also can channel innovative effort into directions supported by toolkits" (147).

Produsage and Emerging Talent

Snurb — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:40:45 +1100

Following up on my last post with another answer to a really sharp question from a reader of the book, in what I hope may become an occasional feature of this site: one of my LinkedIn contacts asked

Does produsage create emerging talent, or does it merely point it out? Okay, probably not a "quick" question, but my study of produsage makes me wonder if there has been any case studies on this topic. Any thoughts?
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From User to Produser: The Continuum of Participation

Snurb — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:48:47 +1100

The other day, I received a very insightful question from somebody reading Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - pointing to a line in the book which states that

participation in these social spaces a continuum stretching evenly from active content creation by lead users ... to the mere use of content by users who perhaps do not even consider themselves as members of the community (18)

and asking, in essence, where mere usage ends and real produsage begins. In particular, what about the differences between spaces such as Second Life, where usage and content creation are necessarily part of the same process, and Wikipedia, where content creation and usage can remain separate, but individual users are free to move between the two? I thought it might be worth posting my reply here, to further explore this issue.

And We're Back...

Snurb — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:08:01 +1100

My apologies for the site outage - the recent electrical storms in Brisbane took out our server. Everything should be back to normal now!

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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.