Produsage

No it’s not a typo …

Producers are involved in user-led content production or produsage.

Henery Jenkins defines produsage as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement”.

Axel burns States that produsage process itself is fundamentally built on the affordances of the technosocial framework of the network environment, then, and here especially on the harnessing of user communities that is made possible by their netwroking through many-to-many communitcations meadia.

http://produsage.org/node/9

What emerges is that in the online, networked, information economy, participants are not simply passive consumers, but active users, with some of them participating more strongly with a focus only on their personal use, some of them participating more strongly in ways which are inherently constructive and productive of social networks and communal content. (Axel Burns)

 “ Fans and other consumer actively participate in the creation and circulation of  new content… involving audience engagement that are shaping cultural and social protocols” (Fuchs C 2011, P.266)

Axel Burns and Henery Jenkins also believes that there are for major principles to produsage

Open Participation, Communal Evaluation: the community as a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, can contribute more than a closed team of producers, however qualified;

Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy: produsers participate as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and knowledges, and their level of involvement changes as the produsage project proceeds;

Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process: content artefacts in produsage projects are continually under development, and therefore always unfinished – their development follows evolutionary, iterative, palimpsestic paths;

Common Property, Individual Rewards: contributors permit (non-commercial) community use and adaptation of their intellectual property, and are rewarded by the status capital gained through this process.

The collective and networked approach of produsage is able to draw on four key pre conditions of the networked technosocial environment within which it exists:

1. Probilistic, not directed problem solving   
2. Eqipotentially, not hierarchy
3. Granular not composite tasks

4. Shared not owned content

Examples of Produsage:

Open news, open source of content  Wikipedia, Flickr 

Collaborative knowledge communities like Google earth

Produser communities around commercial products. the Sims

Other examples are second life, YouTube 

Sims is an example of produsage as a player creates a character with specific features and enters a world where they can interact with others. The section in which you alter your character, create new items and share it with the other characters is called the exchange.

Youtube is also another good example of produsage as it allows people to share, watch and discover videos from anywhere in the world. Consumers can watch videos and even change them.

Produsage matters because it offers people the opportunity to be part of the media they consume. We all have contributed, shared and connected within networks through photo sharing, blogging, tweeting, and making videos, this allowing anyone to be a produce, a distributor and a consumer of content.