Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage - Chapter Outline

We the users turned creators and distributors of content are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's advertising agency of the year. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on?

In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments from open source through blogs and the Wikipedia to Second Life. He shows that what's emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy.

Axel Bruns's far-reaching and conceptually powerful book, From Production to Produsage, captures a shift in cultural logic which is profoundly altering how culture gets produced, how knowledge gets circulated, how reputations get made, and how industry, politics, and education operate. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about Wikipedia, Second Life, eBay, Flickr, Moveon, or YouTube, in short, for anyone who wants to understand the turn towards participatory culture.

-- Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

This is quite simply the book about peer production that we've been waiting for and I have no doubt that it will be considered a classic in the line of Toffler's Future Shock. It is a very well written description and analysis of the most important social change process of our time. Bruns's book represents the coming into awareness of a new social force, that of the communities of produsers directly making what they need, while at the same time inventing new forms of governance and ownership. This is not just a book 'about produsage' from an outsider looking in, but itself a stellar production of the new form of consciousness, written from the inside out, both subjective and objective. The new world is already there, and Bruns will let you see it.

-- Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage was released by Peter Lang, New York, in February 2008.

» read Chapter 1: Introduction
» see four reading samples with excerpts from the book
» see Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage for more information
» order the book from Amazon.com

Chapter Outline

1. Introduction
   
2. The Key Characteristics of Produsage
   
3. Open Source Software Development: Probabilistic Eyeballs
   
4. News Blogs and Citizen Journalism: Perpetual Collaboration in Evaluating the News
   
5. Wikipedia: Representations of Knowledge
   
6. Wikipedia and Beyond: The Palimpsest of Human Knowledge
   
7. Folksonomies: Produsage and/of Knowledge Structures
   
8. Folks and Experts: Beyond the Pro/Am Divide
   
9. The Art of Produsage: Distributed Creativity
   
10. Media and Creative Industries: New Opportunities or Casual Collapse?
    
11. The Produsage Game: Harboring the Hive of Produsers
    
12. Social Produsage: Questions of Reputation and Trust
    
13. Educating Produsers, Produsing Education: Produsage and the Academy
    
14. Produsing Democracy
    
15. Conclusion: Production, Produsage, and the Future of Humanity
    
16. Bibliography

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