Produsage: Tomorrows content here today - comment

My produsage blog was created for the complete opposite reason to any of the other blogs i posted. With the other blogs, it was usually a personal interest that drove me to discover more about the topics themselves. But when Dr Axel Bruns covered Produsage in his lecture, i realised that i had no real knowledge of the area. This lack of fundamental knowledge made me curious to learn; not only more about produsage, but also how Dr. Bruns quantified the term and what history produsage had prior to his validation. So it was more about creating a blog that taught me something; something i could in turn pass on to my wider online community.

To ensure i met all of these objectives, i researched as widely as i could on all topics relevant to produsage. I read through every piece of literature, old, new, article, book, journal and lecture slide to try and gauge an insight into firstly what produsage was, and secondly where the ideas behind it came from.

It was at this point that i hit my first hiccup. For although i understood that Bruns had himself coined the term produsage, it was unusual to see that very limited sources of wider academic research had been conducted on the theory. It wasn’t until i came across an exploratory article entitled, ‘’ (Bruns 2005), that i realised that i couldn’t find wider research because it didn’t exist yet. The article states that produsage was a fairly new web 2.0 phenomenon. Also highlighting that it was not the original term, rather an evolutionary trend noted and created by Bruns on the back of prior research in the area.

With this in mind, I started my blog with an introduction into the history of user-generated content production. Noting first the ‘prosumer’ term coined by Alvin Toffler, moving then to how this evolved with user participation habits to Charles Leadbeater’s Pro-am theory. I was interested to see how these terms evolved, not so much with time, rather with user behaviour. Their growth seemed to be timeless, instead focusing on where consumer behaviours, user content generation patterns and web development was heading.

In saying this it was probably a downside of the article that i spent so much time commenting on the growth of user-generated content production theories, that i may have missed the focus of produsage. However i overcame this in some way by also commenting on how produsage had been applied to current online behaviours, focusing directly on how it has been taken up by Generation C (Trendwatching.com 2005), and incorporated into web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2006).

I guess i was a little disappointed that the produsage trend coined by Bruns hadn’t been researched by a larger academic audience. It almost surprised me that of all the useless information you can found on the internet, wider research on produsage could not be found. I guess this, just like everything else will eventually be questioned as the most relevant theory, and at that time will be torn to shreds, but i look forward to see further research conducted on this area. I can gladly say that from not knowing anything about this area of learning, i certainly very interested now.