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)
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