Produsage! There, I said it!

As I sit here typing my Blog, I am one of two things. I am a producer, creating the content that is being streamed and published for you the reader. But at the same time, I am a user, using the medium of Blogs to further my education. The difficultly of classification now prevails, which one am I? And from an audience perspective, can an audience that is active with the content they use still be called simply an audience? The concept of audience implies some sort of passive consumption, a speaker (producer) sending out messages (products) to the masses (consumer), and there the link stops, or at most is reciprocated. So why is everything now more about the experience and interaction? I think the change started with the growth of the services industry, when marketers realised it was not a tangible product craved, but a wealth of intangible experience.

Since the conception of the internet the world has been awed, but what everyone craved was the chance to make their own mark, and now it is possible. The internet as we know it was not pumped out from raw materials by a conveyor belted manufacturer, instead million of users sitting in their offices, their loungerooms, in the park (on WiFi, of course) or in any other imaginable, and occupiable place has (or at least has the opportunity) to add to the building blocks creating the network of information that is the World Wide Web.

So here content in, equals content out. And the producer equals the consumer. The end result is of course the "produser", a term coined by Axel Bruns (2007), which accurately describes the dual functionality of the active consumer. But the process does not stop here. Each and every consumer adds to the content or information, building on and validating information. We are thus creating a collective knowledge base, maintained and improved by the users without centralised control (CSE 2008). The collation and re-communication of information was once thought of as the "bottleneck" that strangled information sharing. No more. The internet and its produsage capabilities have exponentially increased the ways that we can communicate and coordinate information, and at minimum has overcome the physical barriers blocking progress. The intellectual barriers are still to be addressed (CSE 2008).

So where is produsage actually operating in the real world? Take the social networking site that is SecondLife. Users of this software operate under an avatar, and their interactions within this online community build and enrich a virtual society. Effectively SecondLife is a funtioning and by all means legitimate community. The possibilities of what users can do is only limited by their imaginations and what they can actually create. And here lies the beauty of produsage, whilst all users are not equally skilled, they all have an equal opportunity to utilise and add to the community/system/project (Bruns 2007).

So, next time you log onto a web page, and have the chance to modify or add your own content; DO IT. Experience the produsage phenomenon. Chances are you already have. The consumer has always been right (so the saying goes), now the consumer can be king.