Produsage
Concept by Axel Bruns.
Description
1. Axel Bruns:
Produsage, and Produsage.org, is an idea whose time has come.
It builds on a simple, yet fundamental proposition: the proposition that to describe the creative, collaborative, and ad hoc engagement with content for which user-led spaces such as the Wikipedia act as examples, the term production is no longer accurate. This is true even where we re-imagine the concept of production as user-led production, commons-based peer production, or more prosaicly as the production of customer-made products: not the adjectives and qualifiers which we may attach to the term production are the problem, but the very noun itself.
To overcome the terminological dilemma which faces us as we attempt to examine processes of user-led content creation, we must introduce new terms into the debate. The concept of produsage is such a term: it highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge that we examine on this site, the role of consumer and even that of end user have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance. In many of the spaces we encounter here, users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role - they have become a new, hybrid, produser.
2.
Produsage is a concept that tries to capture a range of emerging practices that shift away from more traditional understandings about how production and innovation occur in society (Bruns 2008). In a ‘‘traditional paradigm,’’ production and innovation are the province of large corporations, the organization of labor is hierarchical, relatively fixed and structured, thus creating a clear separation between the roles of producers and consumers, managers and managed, and designers and users. Innovation is therefore secluded, top-down, and usually follows a linear series of predetermined stages (Rogers 1995). On the contrary, recent developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and New Media have seen the emergence of new ‘‘produsage’’ practices: these are based on a decentralized and open-ended (often peer-to-peer) organization of labor whereby production and innovation are distributed, bottom-up processes without a predictable path, and that spread among a number of proactive people (e.g. von Hippel 2005)." (http://p2pfoundation.net/Sociotechnical_Skills_in_the_Case_of_Arduino)
Discussion
"Bruns produser differs from Toffler prosumer. Bruns acknowledges that the Internet embodies technosocial affordances that provide the means for a many-to-many, collaborative and communal production process, with the convergence between user and producer (Jenkins 2006). This differs from an ad-hoc participation of consumers in altering the material products they purchase, which was foreseen by Toffler. For Bruns, prosumption ‘‘describes merely the perfection of the feedback loop from consumer to producer’’ (2008, p. 12) without radically altering the traditional production value chain that goes mono-directionally*from the producer to the consumer, and in which are still present the separation of roles and vertical hierarchies. The phenomenon of produsage is, instead, a significant change in which [T]he production value chain is transformed to the point of being entirely unrecognizable*in the absence of producers, distributors, or consumers, and the presence of a seemingly endless string of users acting incrementally as content producers by gradually extending and improving the information present in the information common. (Bruns 2008, p. 21)
Similarly to Tapscott and Williams, the concept of produsage, proposed by Bruns, is based on a list of essential elements and key principles that are supposed to explain the new paradigm. These principles are indeed a sort of necessary condition for the produsage productive process and specifically are: the open participation of people to the produsage, a fluid heterarchy with leadership roles emerging bottom-up, unfinished artifacts always open to modification, and re-appropriation and common property of the final product."
More Information
- Bruns, A. (2008). The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage. Fibreculture Journal, 1. Retrieved from http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue11/issue11_bruns.html
- See also: Axel Bruns on Produsage