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.”

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>.
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