Thursday, 6 February 2014

Are you a Produser ?


We are living in a user led age where marketers are now letting consumers develop their own flavours and websites are getting their followers to update their sites with their own content and opinions. These people are termed as Produsers which is a blend of two words – drumroll please...Producers and Users.
 Australian media scholar Axel Bruns of the Queensland University of Technology describes the definition of produsage as
“the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.”

In 2006 Time Magazine awarded their ‘Person of the Year’ accolade to ‘You’ by recognising the birth of a collaborative user-led community on the Internet – the Produsers. Internet users were no longer just ordinary people home alone with their computers. They were being recognised as citizens now empowered to engage and create media content.

As TIME observed car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux.
 Some examples that I have experienced are the obvious ones such as You Tube, Blogs, online games such as Halo and of course Wikipedia. I have also seen Help Desks and even Apple Geniuses Bars using user blogs that build from one another’s knowledge and experiences. Not one size fits all so the more updates there are on each other’s experience/problems the more breadth you have to find your solution.
However one problem that has arisen with Produsage and that is around the inaccuracies caused from too many fingers in the pie. Although Produsage.org reassures us that the more participants there are using and contributing the stronger and more accurate the quality will be. They are relying on a communal evaluation ("given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow")
Henry Jenkins was all for this collective intelligence. In his interview with Axel Bruns he refers to the notion of produsage allowing communities to have equality because it is producing and consuming at the same time. This way the consumers are not passive but more engaged with the content and therefore become actively involved with a vested interest.
This can also be observed in citizen journalism. Everyone has a camera on them at all times and when they see an opportunity they have the ability to become the producer, freely interacting, communicating and sharing their ideas. Others feed off these ideas and add their opinions whilst building a strong collaborative and true community. I think the future of Produsage is in our own hands.
As the Time article pointed out you can learn more about how people live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television. 


REFERENCES
Bruns, A 2005, Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage, Snurblog, viewed 15 January 2014, <http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/329>.
Grossman, L December 2006. You-Yes, You – Are TIME’s Person of the Year. Time Magazine, viewed 15 January 2014, <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570810,00.html>
Jenkins, H 2008, From Production to Produsage: Interview with Axel Bruns (Part One), Confessions of an Aka-Fan, viewed 19 January 2014, <http://henryjenkins.org/2008/05/interview_with_axel_bruns.html>.


No comments:

Post a Comment