Axel Bruns- The Key Characteristics of Produsage
Key Term: Produsage- combination of Production and Usage, “The collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.”
Key Characteristics of Produsage:
1) Open Participation, Communal Evaluation.
Everyone can help solve the problem or achieve the goal, and the more people that help the more likely it is they’ll get it right.
2) Fluid Hierarchy, AD Hoc Meritocracy:
Users all have equal potential to contribute. Most communities have loose leadership, but individual users standings change depending on the quality and frequency of the their contributions.
Key Term: Equipotentiallity- skills and abilities of users vary, but they have equal ability to make a worthy contribution to the project.
3) Unfinished Artifacts, Continuing process.
Projects are continuously being critiqued and improved. Therefore they can never be finished products, so they are referred to as artefacts. An artefact is a snapshot of a project in that moment, which is likely to change and eventually improve.
4) Common Property, Individual Rewards.
Community and belonging rather than money drives participation. Instead of focusing on monetary rewards, participation in the produsage is motivated by contributing to a communal purpose. Individual rewards come in the form of social capitol and community standing, occasionally leading to outside benefits like professional recognition and even employment.
Impact and Implications of Produsage
Commercial embrace of produsage is broken down into models:
- Feeding the hive- intellectual contributions from public domain to support produsage.
- Helping the hive- services aimed at the produsage community
- Harboring the hive: hosting services to the produsage community. (like Flickr or Youtube)
- Harnessing the hive: non commercial ways to use the produsage artefacts
- Harvesting the hive: using produsage artefacts for commercial purposes.
- Hijacking the hive: focused only on financial gain, attempting to strip users of their rights to the artefacts.
Jay Rosen- The People Formerly Known as the Audience
The people formerly known as the audience, defined as those who were on the receiving end of a formerly one-way media system who today are not. Now called “former audience”- defined as owners and operators of tools that were once exclusively used by media people to capture and hold their attention.
Examples: Freedom of the press is distributed to the people through blogs, radio is now accessible through podcasts, video shooting and editing is more accessible, the people can now edit and choose the news most important to them, and spread the word horizontally amongst ourselves as efficiently as big media.
Edit:
Discussion Questions:
What do you think the most important characteristic is of Produsage? Least Important?
Do you consider yourself a member of the “former audience”? How do you participate in active use of media tools?
mdeseriis is discussing. 
robtayl are discussing. 
NEW MEDIA RESEARCH STUDIO 
mdeseriis 1:07 pm on February 26, 2013 Permalink |
Cara, thank you for writing this travelogue on Reddit and the Boston-area universities subreddits. You do a good job in introducing Reddit to the uninitiated, but you remain pretty much on the surface. I understand that this is partly due to the fact that the subreddits you researched are not very active and some of the moderators did not get back to you. However, it is not just a matter of producing substantial original research. It is also a matter of employing the concepts we have explored in class in an accurate manner.
For example, you claim that Reddit is the ultimate example of “produsage.” To begin with, you should explain what this concept means and attribute it to an author (I see no reference list). Second, Axel Bruns describes produsage using four distinctive features. While Reddit meets the first three criteria, it does not meet the fourth one (“common property, individual rewards”). As a matter of fact, Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Condé Nast–i.e., it is all but owned by its users. While Advance Publications has decided (for now) to let the community manage and drive Reddit in its own way, it could step in at any time and, for example, delete content or introduce rules that are not approved by Redditors. If we had to stick to Bruns’ definition of produsage only a site such as Wikipedia and few open source software projects are truly owned and controlled by their produsers. Of course, this does not mean that Reddit has nothing to do with produsage, only that such a statement needs to be qualified.