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I spoke with Axel Bruns, Professor of Media and
Communication from the Queensland University of Technology or QUT
who's world renowned for his pioneering work in social media research.
He's developed research methodologies that help us to
understand the role Twitter plays in multiple aspects of society.
Axel also coined the term produsage with his seminal 2008 work.
I spoke with Axel specifically about produsage and
the intersection point of social media and media organizations.
This whole idea of produsage really emerged from the fact that
in an online environment particularly, it's actually quite difficult to
really think of producers and consumers as distinct categories.
It used to be obviously in offline environments that yes,
you couldn't just go and produce a book and distribute it to people and
do all that yourself very easily, or any other other type of content.
So there were people who were producers, there were distributors,
there were consumers and they were fairly distinct categories.
But today that's just no longer quite the same in an online environment.
So I can easily generate content,
text, images, videos, whatever it is.
I put them online myself and promote them online via social media, and
thereby actually become quite active as a content generator.
At the same time other people can then pick up on that,
can share that, use it in some form.
And we see that every day in a sense.
I mean we see this on platforms like YouTube,
we see it on platforms like Flickr and Instagram for images.
We see it of course in generic social media with textual content being shared,
and more traditionally with blogs as well.
So we are at a point where yes,
you produce content, but you're also a user of content at the same time and
in using it, you might even change it.
You might actually add to it or you might add value to it, add context to it.
Put it in a different context, perhaps, as well.
So at the same time, and that's the idea of produsage;
at the same time, you're both a producer and a user of content and
the two really blend into each other, and that's then what I call the produser.
Social media are really universal sort of form of produsage, if you like.
Not everything that happens on social media is produsage.
But around specific themes and topics and interests and ideas and
issues, you get people interacting with each other.
For instance, to share information and together collaboratively kind of build up
their knowledge about something that maybe right now is going on the world.
So when you had the Arab Spring, for example, lots of people from inside
Egypt and inside the other Arab countries that were affected as well as people from
the outside kind of got together in that space to share the latest news and
rumors that were circulating to try and perhaps debunk some of them as well.
Work out what's really going on, what's just rumor and
what's actually confirmed fact.
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To introduce also, external materials like news reports,
and photos, and eye witness video, and all that kind of stuff.
And so all of that kind of circulated and was shared amongst people and
as a community, they tried to work out well, what of that can we trust?
What of that is actually important or
really marks an important part of the development here?
So this is really also about community curation of information,
collaboratively organizing all the information that comes through and
really making sense of it, collective sense making you can call it, as well.
So ultimately that becomes a form of produsage again, because together,
collaboratively, between these people generates a shared sense of knowledge,
a shared understanding of what's going on in the world.
And again, this is a very iterative,
a very sort of small steps process because lots of little bits of
information in Twitter in the form of 140 character tweets come in,
add to what people know or add to the stock of rumors that are floating around,
and then people make sense of that and select what they pass on by retweeting,
for instance, select what they find important,
select what they believe is actually true and is verified.
And so that's again users acting as producers of content,
as developers of a shared set of knowledge.
A lot of what produsage does tends to focus on culture production.
There are forms of produsage, as in open source software development for
instance, which by some definition you could also call a form of cultural
production because what's generated there is also a form of knowledge, but
a form of codified knowledge in a very specific format.
And that really a great deal more of produsage I think happens in more,
what we would traditionally call more cultural areas.
In areas of knowledge, in areas of creativity as well.
And so that certainly is a form of cultural production and
produsage is very closely linked with that.
And I think particularly in social media, really, a lot of it is about information,
is about entertainment as well.
It's about creativity.
And so where it happens in those spaces,
where people are together generating content or collections of content as well,
curating content, I think a lot of that very much is cultural production.
The intersection between institutions and
the sort of produsage communities that I've talked about is really crucial,
because in many ways they complement each other, they work together.
Sometimes they work against one another of course, when they see each other as
competitors, but often they actually work together quite well.
Whereas the broader community, that may be the fan group around a cultural
product for instance, or the group of activists around a particular cause and
then you also have some more official organizations that represent
the production company for whatever the cultural product is or
the official set of advocacy body around that cause.
And in many ways they often work together, they often overlap in some form and
they can both do things that the other one can't so there should be normally a useful
synthesis between the two of them, a synergy between both of them.
But at the same time, sometimes there's conflict as well, because both want to do
something different and in that case of course there may well be a real separation
between the two of them and often some animosity between both of them as well.
What Axel points out in great detail is the significance collaborative
participation can make to content production and knowledge generation.
One might argue, this is incredibly important when commercial and
non-commercial organizations engage in social media and
the creative communities that form in these spaces.
This is a critical point of produsage, where social media users are both
producing content and using that content in a variety of applications.
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