Media Democracy: Produsage

Produsage replacing consumerism? A wonderful concept, although doubtful reality.

What is produsage I hear you ask? The idea of user-lead creation rather than mass production. A good definition comes from Professor Alex Burns “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.” The emergence of Produsage has been made possible by the existence of user communities and their networking through many-to-many communications media.

Examples of produsage are-

Þ   Wikipedia

Þ   Blogs

Þ   Second life

Þ   Youtube

and other types of social media that are created by ‘the people’.

Problems with produsage?

Some of the predictions of the impact Produsage will have on society are-

Þ   Grassroots activism

Þ   Civic participation

Þ   Democratic engagement

Þ   Less importance of traditional media eg. Radio, Newspaper

Þ   Citizen journalists

Þ   Issues with intellectual property rights

From visiting Axel Bruns site, I don’t think he is trying to make the claim that produsage is going to replace conventional production/consumption. However User-Led Content Production and Collaborative community Engagement is defiantly ever-increasing. For example as a Social Media student I do a lot of reading of blogs and other types of ‘citizen journalism’ rather than traditional forms of research. Bruns says “For the last half-century or more we have applied physical production concepts to our understanding of and engagement with information, with increasingly unsatisfactory results. Today, we're seeing that alternative approaches are possible - and produsage as a concept is designed to think through these alternatives.