From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation

Dr Axel BrunsAssociate Professor

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and InnovationCreative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technologya.bruns@qut.edu.au

http://snurb.info/ – http://produsage.org/

User-Generated Content

• Widespread trend in media practice:– social media, social networking– Web 2.0 technologies

– new, collaborative forms of content creation

– across many interests and practices

• Has Toffler’s ‘prosumer’ arrived?– “The word is a combination of producer

and consumer that perfectly describes the millions of participants in the Web 2.0 revolution.”(Techcrunch, 2007)

(Image: http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/93136022/)

Tofflers 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)

The Professional Consumer?

• What do we mean by ‘prosumer’?– On-demand production initiated by consumers?

– On-demand production of customer-submitted / modified designs?

– Involvement of customers in design processes?

• Or simply conventional high-end consumers? E.g.– Hi-fi fanatics

– Car enthusiasts

– Computer nerds

– Individual ‘lead users’ (as described by von Hippel)

• Prosumers remain dependent on industry production• Is that all there is?

(Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwenke/3022767703/)

(Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/topherous/93506030/)

Beyond Production

• decline of the traditional value chain:

producer distributor consumer

(producer advised by consumer distributor consumer)

(customer-made ideas producer distributor consumer)

What’s Happening Here?

• Trends towards:– Commercial interests ‘Harnessing the Hive’ (J.C. Herz)?– Pro-Am Production (Charles Leadbeater & Paul Miller)?– Citizen-Consumer (John Hartley)?– User-generated products, created by a new ‘Generation C’ (

Trendwatching.com)?– Commons-based peer production (Yochai Benkler)?– P2P Production (Michel Bauwens)?

– Is production still an appropriate term?

A New Value Chain?

(as producer)

produser

(as user)

content content

Produsage

• emerging in various domains:– open source software

development– online publishing

• blogs• open news – e.g. Slashdot,

Indymedia, OhmyNews

– knowledge management• wikis – e.g. Wikipedia• social bookmarking – e.g.

del.icio.us, digg• geotagging – e.g.

Google Earth, Frappr

– multi-user gaming• e.g. The Sims, Everquest,

Second Life, Spore

– media sharing and creative practice

• e.g. Flickr, ccMixter, YouTube, Jumpcut, Current.tv

– reviews and viral marketing• e.g. Epinions, IgoUgo

– automatic aggregation• Google, Amazon, Technorati

Common Characteristics

• shared across diverse 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

(http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/capitalism1.htm)

(http://jpgmag.com/issues/19/full)

Produsage

• beyond production:– ‘anyone can edit’ – users become producers of content– outcomes are no longer distinct products – they are temporary

artefacts of a continuing process– usage and production are increasingly, inextricably intertwined– strict distinctions between producers, distributors, and

consumers no longer apply– a new “Generation C” of content produsers?

this is produsage

(http://freebeer.org/blog/archives/134)

content development space

set up by community or company to

harbour produsage

(e.g. Wikimedia Foundation; Google;

SourceForge)

commercial / non-profit harvesting of user-generated content

(e.g. The Sims, Wikipedia on CD-ROM)

commercial / non-profit services to support produsage

(e.g. Red Hat, SourceForge)

commercial activities by users themselves, harnessing the hive

(e.g. support services, consultancies, content sales)

initial IP contributions from

individuals, the public domain, or

commercial sources

collaborative, iterative, evolutionary, palimpsestic user-led content development

valuable, often commercial-grade content is created

Produsage Environment(populated by produsers)

Breaking the Chains

Further Extensions of Produsage Logic

• From intangible to tangible processes:– collaborative design innovation in the kitesurfing community (cf. von

Hippel, Democratizing Innovation)

– Open Source Beer

– social lending: Zopa, Prosper

• From community to Pro-Am collaborations:– citizen journalism: OhmyNews, myHeimat

– NASA’s Clickworkers, and Pro-Am astronomers (cf. Leadbeater & Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution)

– open biology?

– crowdsourcing of innovation: e.g. Innocentive

Viral Marketing

Axel Bruns

Associate Professor

ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

Brisbane, Australia

a.bruns@qut.edu.au

http://snurb.info/

http://produsage.org/

http://gatewatching.org/

Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond:From Production to Produsage (Peter Lang, 2008)

Uses of Blogs, eds. Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs (Peter Lang, 2006)

Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (Peter Lang, 2005)