Produsage

The concept of “produsage” is a prime example of Henry Jenkins’ theory of convergence culture of today’s society. Convergence culture can be further broken down to media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence. Jenkins believes that society is changing with the increasing flow of information across various media platforms, the likes of which we have never seen before. Do to the flow of digital information the public have a lot more influence over media content and decisions made by corporations. The term “produsage” was first coined by the futurist Alan Toffler (1971) in referring to a culture in which we begin to see the role of users of products converging with the role of producers.  It has broken down the barrier between the old industrial age hierarchy of products being passed down the line from producers to distributors then on to the consumers. Jenkins makes a convincing point in drawing attention to the way 20^th century media corporations have ownership over the stories we know and love. Today’s technology and social media platforms have changed the way in which we now share information, videos and music for instance; whether by legal means or not it is now back in the hands of the people as it was many thousands of years ago. This is ever more prevalent in society when we look at a media platform such as YouTube or the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia which is constructed entirely by user written editorials. Dr. Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology highlighted in his paper ‘Produsage: Towards a Broader Framework for User-Led Content Creation’ that fact that “Wikipedia has become a major threat to publications such as the  Encyclopaedia Britannica, and studies suggest that in some areas its content qualitymay be on par with that of its corporate competitors”. Also mentioned in the paper is the practice of collaborative filtering, such as the way Google’s PageRank predictions are based on the web populations content filtering patterns expressed though interlinking and in the way that 90% of the popular life simulation strategy computer game ‘The Sims’ is now user created . So in short I think the future of ‘produsage’ is looking strong. When we look at how easily online user restaurant reviews now alter the success of businesses its clear to see that the power of building collaborative information in a participatory culture is having a lasting effect. Until now I haven’t thought about my own role as a ‘produser’. However, if you can include the time I’ve spent writing and accessorising my page here on blogger as well my contributions to the world of YouTube then I suppose I am a part of this movement.
I believe that in the future we will see a lot more user contribution to products, especially in regard to technology and game based creations. Either consumers will become more tech savvy or producers will design products to be more open to user editing and creation.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJaqXVaOaIhttp://delivery.acm.org.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/10.1145/1260000/1254975/p99-bruns.pdf?ip=136.186.1.81&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&CFID=270271604&CFTOKEN=99114713&__acm__=1359703240_40f813ec2b7ecbcdf055095aa8834defhttp://henryjenkins.org/2006/06/welcome_to_convergence_culture.html