
Produsage
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Produsers and Produsage
The concept of produsage highlights that within the communities which engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge that we examine on this site, the role of consumer and even that of end user have long disappeared, and the distinctions between producers and users of content have faded into comparative insignificance. In many of the spaces we encounter here, users are always already necessarily also producers of the shared knowledge base, regardless of whether they are aware of this role - they have become a new, hybrid, produser . Four key principles apply across all produsage environments, regardless of the specific object of their collaborative efforts: Open Participation, Communal Evaluation Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process Common Property, Individual Rewardsidc_texts: Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage
The conversation between Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz that frames this issue of Re-public begins with a discussion of whether the traditional critical focus on who owns the means of production still means anything in a networked world driven by user-led content creation, or what I would call produsage . What’s curiously absent from the debate, though (and of the other authors included here, only Michel Bauwens engages with it in detail ) is any consideration of who controls the means of distribution – a question which, I think, is crucial to any understanding of power structures in the social Web.

