According to Axel Bruns article “Produsage, Generation C, and Their Effects on the Democratic Process” Produsage is “the collaborative and iterative content creation practices within many user-led environments as a hybrid and often inextricable combination of production and use”.
Now to me this is very academic and hard to comprehend... so in my own words and after reading numerous sources produsage can be seen as-a term to define users of the internet who act as a mixture of both producer/users virtually throughout the production process of the internet. Axel Bruns makes mention of 4 core characteristics of produsage:
• Community-Based – produsage proceeds from the assumption that the community as
a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, can contribute more than a closed team of
producers, however qualified they may be.
• Fluid Roles – produsers participate as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests,
and knowledges, and may form loose sub-groups to focus on specific issues, topics,
or problems; this changes as the produsage project proceeds.
• Unfinished Artefacts – 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, adaptation, and further development of their intellectual property, and
are rewarded by the status capital they gain through this process. (Axel Bruns)
These 4 core characteristics of Produsage help to understand the basis of which this concept. There is a virtual culture online called Second Life which is a 3D virtual world where users can socialise, connect and create using voice and text chat. This online world Second Life is a prime example of the concept Produsgae.
Second Life is all 4 of the core charaterisitcs of Produsage- Community based the community of Second Life is a community form the offline world. The producers of Second Life are also users of the virtual game. This also links into Fluid Roles- The producers participate in Second Life and they are able to become involved and find out what is working for the virtual world and what is not. The world of Second Life is continually changing and the developments in the world are evolutionary and iterative. There is also indiviual merit and common property in Second World. Actual business can tarde in this world and these business make money which can be seen as merit. There is also common property which is used by the indivduals in this virtual world.
Second Life in my opnion and in others is an interesting and perfect example of Produsage. This concept of a virtual world and people living a life online just like offline is really inertesting and only makes the concept of Produsage seem more interesting to me.
I thought i would add some photos of Second Life so you could see how real this online world really looks to the offline world.
All 3 of these pictures show the realness of the places which are shown ... The Effiel Tower, a beach and a garden.
1 comment:
I too find the idea of produsage interesting, and yet mindboggling at first. I find that I always have to think it through fairly slowly before I fully understand what I am even thinking about! I like to think about produsage and Second Life as though it's like The Sims. This is probably a very loose example but it does help me to put it in perspective- in the sense that I was creating outfits and lives for the characters and producing miny city on the computer- a fairly basic model but it helps me remember. The issue I find most fascinating regarding produsage though is why we are all so interested in it and how we all got to be so involved without really knowing what we have in fact been producing. With the introduction of sites such as MySpace, Facebook and YouTube, a large majority, well everyone I know has been affected by this new phenomenon. So many of my friends, myself included have produced a profile and use MySpace and Facebook, and have uploaded self produced videos on YouTube to broadcast to not only the friends that were probably the target audience, but have now the ability to reach individuals all over the world; all this without even really acknowledging our own produsage. It’s quite fascinating really
Post a Comment