Produsage.org - Produsage: Basics

Social Media: Understanding Online Communities (SSCRC 2010)

Snurb — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 16:13:32 +1000

Axel Bruns. "Social Media: Understanding Online Communities." Presented at the Smart Services CRC Participants Meeting, Sydney, 21 April 2010.

Social Media: Understanding Online Communities

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

Technorati : collaboration, communities, produsage, smart services, social media
Del.icio.us : collaboration, communities, produsage, smart services, social media

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 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.

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.

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.

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.)

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

| View | Upload your own

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.'

Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation

Snurb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:39:30 +1100

Axel Bruns. "Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation." Paper presented at Creativity & Cognition Conference, Washington, DC, 14 June 2007.

This paper outlines the concept of produsage as a model of describing today's emerging user-led content creation environments. Produsage overcomes some of the systemic problems associated with translating industrial-age ideas of content production into an informational-age, social software, Web 2.0 environment. Instead, it offers new ways of understanding the collaborative content creation and development practices found in contemporary informational environments.

The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage

Snurb — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:34:23 +1100

Axel Bruns. "The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage." Paper presented at PerthDAC 2007 conference, Perth, 16 October 2007.

In the emerging social software, 'Web2.0' environment, the production of ideas takes place in a collaborative, participatory mode which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as much as producers of information and knowledge, or what can be described as produsers. These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage - the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement. This paper examines the overall characteristics of produsers and produsage, and identifies key questions for the produsage model.

Produsage: Necessary Preconditions

Snurb — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:25:21 +1100

The collective and networked approach of produsage is able to draw on four key affordances of the networked technosocial environment within which it exists, each of which profoundly affects and shapes the model of collective content creation which we describe as produsage:

1. Probabilistic, not directed problem-solving:

As Michel Bauwens has put it, "participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole." This enables the identification of solutions to current problems through probabilistic rather than predetermined approaches: where in a top-down panoptic model, only project leaders have a full overview, and must therefore specifically direct staff to take on required tasks, in the bottom-up holoptic model participants can self-nominate as contributors to specific problem-solving activities as their interest is triggered; the more participants do so, and the more such activities run in parallel at the same time, the more likely it is that a solution is found. The probabilistic approach is thus a direct result of the redrawn boundaries to participation in the networked model as it builds on the greater range of individuals able to participate, and the improved ease of access for such users to the community and its existing content.

Produsage: Key Principles

Snurb — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:23:27 +1100

In the online, networked, information economy, participants are not simply passive consumers, but active users, with some of them participating more strongly with a focus only on their own personal use, some of them participating more strongly in ways which are inherently constructive and productive of social networks and communal content. These latter users occupy a hybrid position of being both users and what in traditional terms would have to be described loosely as producers: they are productive users, or produsers, engaged in the act of produsage. In addition, we also see an increasing trend to make productive (overtly or covertly) even those forms of participation which we may traditionally have considered to be strictly private 'consumptive' uses: the very acts of using Google to search for information, of traversing the Amazon online catalog, or indeed of browsing the Web itself, now create data trails which when analyzed and fed back into the algorithms of search engines and content directories contribute to subtly alter the browsing experience of the next user. Not only are we all users, then - the more such tools for all of us to affect one another's experience of the shared online knowledge space become commonplace, the more do we all become produsers of that knowledge space itself (whether we know it or not).

Produsage: A Working Definition

Snurb — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:19:32 +1100

In collaborative communities the creation of shared content takes place in a networked, participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge - frequently in a hybrid role of produser where usage is necessarily also productive. Produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage - the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement. Participants in such activities are not producers in a conventional, industrial sense, as that term implies a distinction between producers and consumers which no longer exists; the artefacts of their work are not products existing as discrete, complete packages; and their activities are not a form of production because they proceed based on a set of preconditions and principles that are markedly at odds with the conventional industrial model.

Launching Produsage.org

Snurb — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:44:58 +1100

As I write this, the launch of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage may still be a couple of months away, but Produsage.org is already up and running. This is a space to collect thoughts, comments, and research related to the growing phenomenon of user-led content creation across such a large range of intellectual domains - a phenomenon which I've attempted to define as produsage. For the moment, I'm necessarily still the main proponent of this concept, but I hope that, in time, many more voices will join in as we celebrate and critique developments towards a wider acceptance both of the term, and of the produsage model itself - so, welcome, and please consider making your own contributions to this site.

But let me start at the beginning: why 'produsage'?