Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage
Dr Axel Bruns
Introduction
In recent years, various observers have pointed to the shifting paradigms of
cultural and societal participation and economic production in developed
nations. These changes are facilitated (although, importantly, not solely
driven) by the emergence of new, participatory technologies of information
access, knowledge exchange, and content production, many of whom are
associated with Internet and new media technologies. Already in the 1970s,
futurist Alvin Toffler foreshadowed such changes in his coining of the term
Πprosumer1 (Toffler, 1971): highlighting the emergence of a more informed,
more involved consumer of goods who would need to be kept content by
allowing for a greater customisability and individualisability of products;
this indicated the shift from mass industrial production of goods to a model
of on-demand, just-in-time production of custom-made items. Going further
beyond this, Charles Leadbeater has introduced the notion of Œpro-am1
production models (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004) alluding to a joint effort
of producers and consumers in developing new and improved commercial goods.
Similarly, the industry observers behind Trendwatching.com speak of a trend
towards Œcustomer-made1 products (2005a), while J.C. Herz has described the
same process as Œharnessing the hive1 (2005) that is, the harnessing of
promising and useful ideas, generated by expert consumers, by commercial
producers (and sometimes under ethically dubious models which appear to
exploit and thus hijack the hive as a cheap generator of ideas, rather than
merely harnessing it in a benign fashion).
Such models remain somewhat limited still, however, in their maintenance of
a traditional industrial value production chain: they retain a producer ->
distributor -> consumer dichotomy. Especially where what is produced is of
an intangible, informational nature, a further shift away from such
industrial, and towards post-industrial or informational economic models can
be observed. In such models, the production of ideas takes place in a
collaborative, participatory environment which breaks down the boundaries
between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be
users as well as producers of information and knowledge, or what I have come
to produsers (also see Bruns 2005a). These produsers engage not in a
traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in
produsage the collaborative and continuous building and extending of
existing content in pursuit of further improvement. Key examples for such
produsage can be seen in the collaborative development of open source
software, the distributed multi-user spaces of the Wikipedia, or the
user-led innovation and content production in multi-user online games (some
90% of content in The Sims, for example, is prodused by its users rather
than the game publisher Maxis; see Herz 2005: p. 335). Further, we also see
produsage in collaborative online publishing, especially in news and
information sites from the technology news site Slashdot to the world-wide
network of Independent Media Centres, the renowned and influential South
Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews, and beyond this in the more
decentralised and distributed environments of the blogosphere (Bruns 2005b).
While there are elements of boosterism in its coverage of such trends,
Trendwatching.com1s identification of the participants behind such produsage
phenomena as a new ŒGeneration C1 is nonetheless useful (2005b). In this
context, ŒC1 stands in the first instance for Œcontent creation1, as well as
for Œcreativity1 more generally (and Generation C appears closely related to
Richard Florida1s idea of a creative class, therefore; see Florida 2002); if
the outcomes of such creativity are popularly recognised this can also lead
to another ŒC1-word, Œcelebrity1. But Trendwatching.com also notes that
Generation C poses a significant challenge to established modes and models
of content production, and importantly, therefore, the ŒC1 can also refer to
issues associated with both Œcontrol1 and the Œcasual collapse1 of
traditional approaches.

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