Picturing Produsage

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage is now at the printery, on track for a release in February - and one of my last tasks for 2007 was to approve the book cover design that Peter Lang had come up with, and to start building this Website. Key to any of this was finding the appropriate graphics and artwork - images that would look good in their own right but could also stand in as a graphical representation of the collaborative, iterative, continuing processes of produsage. I wanted these images to bear some resemblance to the functional graphs of produsage processes which are used in the book, and which feature circular arrows to symbolise the repetitive nature of these processes:

The Information Commons of Produsage

While sitting in traffic a few months ago on the way home from my work at QUT, I realised that I was looking at just such an image, which has now become the logo for this site: Brisbane (and Australia) is full of roundabouts, surrounded with a number of often complex traffic signs which detail the directions available to motorists. But take away that extraneous information, highlight the circular motion with its many possible outcome trajectories, and you're left with a perfect symbol for produsage in action:

becomes

For the book cover, though, we needed something a lot more sophisticated and attractive, of course. I've been very lucky with my past two books: for Gatewatching, my former student Gordon Grace designed an eye-catching cover (though even I don't know what it actually is), and I designed the cover for Uses of Blogs myself, from a photo of a single microphone that was taken by one of Jo's colleagues at ACID - the phalanx of microphones indicating how through blogging so many of "the people formerly known as the audience" have found their own voice.

For the Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage cover, the solution lay a little closer to home - with the work of my partner, Ann McLean. Ann's painting "Externalised 2" now hangs in our living room - and although its original, intended subject matter is entirely different, it turns out to be a perfect artistic reinterpretation of produsage, with its dynamic swirls of action reaching for the sky while remaining grounded in a teeming grassroots movement. "Externalised 2" (its predecessor is still visible on Ann's own site) was painted well before I even started developing the theory of produsage in earnest - so it's a happy coincidence that it's so very well suited as a cover for the book, and as a source of incidental graphics for this site. (Previously, I'd also used Ann's work "Palms" as the cover image for the 'collaborate' issue of M/C Journal that Donna Lee Brien and I edited in 2006.)

The full cover for Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, featuring "Externalised 2", looks amazing, and I wouldn't be very surprised if there are people buying it for the cover as much as for the content. Can't wait to see it in print!

I can't conclude this post without making special mention again also of Julien Beauséjour, a Canadian graphic artist who responded to a request on my snurb.info blog a few months ago and created a wonderful image of what I've described as the gentle slope of cultural participation - an extension of Chris Anderson's 'long tail'.

The Gentle Slope of Cultural Participation

So, the graphics for the produsage book and Website have all turned out very well indeed - I hope that the textual content does them justice! My thanks again to Julien as well as the good folks at Peter Lang for responding so positively to my suggestions for the graphical elements of the book - but first and foremost of course to my partner Ann for allowing me to use her work as the cover.

Technorati : Ann McLean, art, collaboration, graphics, produsage, research, user-led
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