Invited paper presented at the Uses across Media symposium, Copenhagen, 31 Oct. 2013.

1. Produsage Revisited
Axel Bruns
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
a.bruns@qut.edu.au
@snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

2. PRODUSAGE
•
Where it started:
– Gatewatching: Collaborative
Online News Production
(Peter Lang, 2005)
– Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life,
and Beyond:
From Production to Produsage
(Peter Lang, 2008)
•
Where it‟s going:
– Mainstreaming, adaptation,
cooption, atomisation?

3. THE PARTICIPATORY TURN
• From the industrial value chain…
producer  distributor  consumer
• …to the participative Web:
(as user)
content
produser
(as producer)
content

4. PRODUSAGE
• Key principles of produsage environments:
– 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; this changes as the produsage project proceeds

5. Image by barjack

6. KEY PRINCIPLES
• Key principles of produsage environments:
– 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; this 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 Merit:
contributors permit (non-commercial) community use of their intellectual property,
and are rewarded by the status capital

7. Image by zota

8. PRODUSAGE AND BUSINESS
• Professional? Amateur? Both?
Pro-Ams work at their leisure, regard consumption as a
productive activity and set professional standards to judge
their amateur efforts. (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004)
• Connectors between produsage communities and business interests
• Alternatively:
– Lead users (von Hippel, 2005)
– Community leaders
– Prosumers? (Toffler, 1970)

9. Image by topherous

10. BEWARE THE PROSUMER
• Dreams of a “customer-activated manufacturing system”:
– In the end, the consumer, not merely providing the specs but punching
the button that sets this entire process in action, will become as much a
part of the production process as the denim-clad assembly-line worker
was in the world now dying. (The Third Wave, 1980: 274)
– Producer and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are
reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the customer contributing
not just the money but market and design information vital for the
production process. Buyer and supplier share data, information, and
knowledge. Someday, customers may also push buttons that activate
remote production processes. Consumer and producer fuse into a
“prosumer.” (Powershift, 1990: 239)

11. Image by Chris Devers

12. TOWARDS PRO/AM COLLABORATION
• Establishing the „netarchist firm‟:
They are „acceptable‟ intermediaries for the actors
of … participatory culture. (Bauwens, 2005)
–
–
–
–
Breaking down corporate boundaries
Working with the community, but for profit
Establishing heterarchical governance structures
Transcending copyright as the central business model

13. Image by V31S70

14. JOINING PRODUCTION AND PRODUSAGE
• Requirements for Pro/Am Projects:
– Shared Responsibility and Control:
neither side controls the project outright, and each must respect the other‟s
interests; governance mechanisms must support a sharing of responsibility
– Mobility between Community and Corporation:
participants – especially Pro-Ams – must be able to move between the two sides
with ease; this also creates incentives for staff and community to participate

16. JOINING PRODUCTION AND PRODUSAGE
• Requirements for Pro/Am Projects:
– Shared Responsibility and Control:
neither side controls the project outright, and each must respect the other‟s
interests; governance mechanisms must support a sharing of responsibility
– Mobility between Community and Corporation:
participants – especially Pro-Ams – must be able to move between the two sides
with ease; this also creates incentives for staff and community to participate
– Redesign of Products as Evolving Artefacts:
disruptions of the ongoing, incremental produsage process in order to package
outcomes as complete „products‟ are disruptive and unacceptable
– Acceptance of Non-Exclusive Corporate Use of Content:
corporations cannot expect to gain exclusive rights to user-created content, but
neither can communities fully rule out commercial use

18. CANARIES IN THE COALMINE
• Journalism in transition:
–
–
–
–
Current models failing – badly
Silver bullet solutions doubtful (paywalls, iPad delivery)
Credible participatory models emerging
Global crises amplify interest in the news
• Will we see new Pro-Am frameworks develop here?

19. Image by Yea I Knit

20. SOCIAL MEDIA AND REAL-TIME NEWS
• Key news-related uses of social media:
– First-hand news reports:
• Hudson River emergency landing; Arab Spring; crises and disasters
– Continuing news discussion:
• Information sharing, commentary, story curation
– „Ambient‟ news coverage (Hermida; Burns):
• Early indicator of breaking stories; trending topics, themes, URLs, etc.
• Ad hoc formation of online communities:
–
–
–
–
Drawing on available tools and platforms
Driven by current themes and problems
Para-journalistic research and commentary – “working the story”
User-driven data journalism as journalistic produsage

22. „WORKING THE STORY‟ ON TWITTER
• Journalism as a distributed effort:
–
–
–
–
Large number of contributors performing „random acts of journalism‟
Network of „sleeper sources‟, on the scene well before journalists
Collaborative curation of stories, ad hoc but self-organising
Journalists and news organisations participating as equals with users
• Journalism in the open:
–
–
–
–
Information sourcing, sharing, verification, curation as it happens
Separate, uncontrolled, third-party spaces for ambient journalism
Sharing of individual news items, disembedded from the brand
No scoops, no embargoed knowledge, no controlled releases
• Journalism as a participatory sport:
– “the news may be too important to leave to the journalists alone”
(Gans, 1980)

23. VIDEO
http://youtu.be/4V81s5sAiqM

24. PRODUSAGE AND / IN SOCIAL MEDIA?
•
Atomisation of produsage activities:
– Small, individual, random acts of participation
– Overlapping private groups / privately public networks / personal publics / issue
publics:
• E.g. @mention, follower, hashtag networks on Twitter
– Are unconsciously swarm-like behaviours still produsage?
• … and does it matter?
•
Produsage curation as a new professional role:
– Journalists employed to be / assuming roles as “social media reporters”
• Reporting through social media, not about
• E.g. Andy Carvin (NPR), Latika Bourke (ABC)
– Managing and guiding unfolding social media produsage processes
– Organisational imprint secondary to activity in social media space
– Curational / gatewatching approaches in imprints: outlinks to competitors

25. Image by Maproom Systems

26. TWITTER AND SOCIETY
•
Richard Rogers:
–
–
–
•
Needs:
–
–
–
–
•
From “studying the Internet” to “studying
society with the Internet”
Social media issue publics as indicators of
current concerns, topics, trends
Social media as a first draft of the present
More comprehensive theories of social
media communication
More flexible and powerful research
methods (e.g. beyond the Twitter hashtag)
More interdisciplinary research teams and
approaches
Better research infrastructure for
accessing, processing, analysing,
visualising „big data‟
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess,
Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann,
eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter
Lang, 2014.

27. http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
@snurb_dot_info
@jeanburgess
@dpwoodford
@timhighfield
@lena_sauter
@_StephenH
@quods
@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/