Produsage: a closer look at continuing developments

Abstract

The concept of produsage developed from the realisation that new language was needed to describe the new phenomena emerging from the intersection of Web 2.0, user-generated content and social media since the early years of the new millennium. When hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of participants utilise online platforms to collaborate in the development and continuous improvement of a wide variety of content*from software to informational resources to creative works*and when this work takes place through a series of more or less unplanned, ad hoc, almost random cooperative encounters, then to describe these processes using terms which were developed during the industrial revolution no longer makes much sense. When*exactly because what takes place here is no longer a form of production in any conventional sense of the word*the outcomes of these massively distributed collaborations appear in the form of constantly changing, permanently mutable bodies of work which are owned at once by everyone and no-one, by the community of contributors as a whole but by none of them as individuals, then to conceptualise them as fixed and complete products in the industrial meaning of the term is missing the point. When what results from these efforts is of a quality (in both depth and breadth) that enables it to substitute for, replace, and even undermine the business model of long-established industrial products, even though precariously it relies on volunteer contributions, and when their volunteering efforts make it possible for some contributors to find semi-or fully professional employment in their field, then conventional industrial logic is put on its head. What happens here*in the development spaces of open source software, in the sprawling knowledge bases of the Wikipedia, and in the many other environments examined in the articles collected in this special issue*can no longer be sensibly described as ''production'', then, nor are its outcomes ''products''. Rather, the processes which we are observing here are what results if the barriers between the mere usage of existing content and the productive alteration and extension of such content are lowered to such a degree that it becomes possible for participants to switch easily and effortlessly between these two roles*allowing, ultimately, for the emergence

Researching Transforming Communications in Times of Deep Mediatization: A Figurational Approach

“…This perspective first peaked in the 1970s across different areas, such as audience research (Teichert 1972;Blumler and Katz 1974;Renckstorf and Wester 2001) or cultural studies (Hall 1973;Morley 1980;de Certeau 2002) that no longer considered media users as 'dopes' but as persons acting reflexively with media, being situated in a wider social and cultural surrounding. On such a basis, it became common to consider people as actors who 'deal' with media (Hasebrink 2003;neumann-Braun 2000;napoli 2010;Bonfadelli and Friemel 2014)-no matter whether they come from the side of media production, media use or various kinds of hybrids (Bruns and Schmidt 2011).…”

Active audience?: interaction of young people with television and online video content

“…Users nowadays have a greater ability to interact with the media thanks to the relatively easy use of technology and to advances in technological connectivity. In this setting, in which the audience carries out other kinds of activities that go beyond pure reception, new terms are emerging for concepts such as prosumer (Toffler, 1980), to define a consumer/user who produces content or produser, in the case of collaborative productions (Bruns, 2008;Bruns & Schmidt, 2011).…”

Technologies of choice: The shaping of choice on the World Wide Web

“…Table 5.18 shows the correlation coefficient estimates of the most important categories on Axis 1 (positive estimates), as well as the categories that are estimated to least characterise Axis 1 (negative estimates). On the positive side of Axis 1, sites tend to enable users to 'produse' choice by contributing content (Bruns, 2011), and these sites also present users with a large economy of information to facilitate their decision making. On the negative side of Axis 2 are sites that do not enable users to contribute content, and these sites also present users with a relatively small economy of information to interact with.…”

“…This is an important aspect because it shows how different networked publics (e.g., Pinterest, Facebook) are mediated to converge and assemble within the web space, and have a role to play in shaping choice by providing a relatively persistent indicator of how much attention a particular piece of content has received (e.g., a particular review or a particular good or service). This impacts the scalability of the landscape of choice by opening it up to fluid, 'heterarchical' networked publics (Bruns, 2011) that render it visible -and to some extent mutable -beyond the apparent boundaries of the website itself. For example, a Facebook user might encounter and subsequently respond to a Yelp review without ever having visited the Yelp website.…”

“…ToC sites in Cluster 2 tend to configure users as 'produsers' (Bruns, 2011), who not only use the web spaces but also play an active role in producing them. Although this idea is discussed further in the next chapter, the observations provided in this section will provide a basis for this claim.…”