Week Five - Topic 1a: Produsers, Produsage and Intercreativity

What do you understand by the words ‘produser’, ‘produsage’, and ‘intercreativity’? Are they useful in understanding collaborative creation of content online?

Bruns reading

Produser – New media has lead to the digitisation of content, which can now be created, published, edited and broadcast widely. This technology has broken down the traditional production chain of producer > publisher > distributor > consumer creating ‘produsers’ (Anyone Can Edit: Understanding the Produser, http://snurb.info/index.php?q=node/286). Alex Bruns defines a produser as a “break down of the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge”. I understand this as the people who use the information are also the ones who have produced it, the boundaries of producer/publisher and audience/consumer are broken and both are at the same time.

Produsage – Alex Bruns defines Produsage as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement”.
Four key principles apply in all Produsage environments; open participation and communal evaluation, fluid heterarchy and ad-hoc meritocracy (an elite group set up only in response to a specific problem), unfinished artefacts and continuing process and finally common property and individual rewards (Produsers and Produsage, http://snurb.info/produsage). I understand produsage as the continual process that produsers go through, the constant updating of information. Examples of produsage are Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia created by its users, multi-user online games such as the Sims and Second life, and citizen journalism - produsage in news and information sites.

Intercreativity – Tim Berners-Lee defines intercreativity as “it’s what underpins what we can look forward to on the Web. “Intercreativity” can unlock the solutions in our “concoction of half formed ideas”” (http://213.232.94.135/merlinjohnonline/news.php?extend.135). I understand intercreativity to occur when ideas are formed through different people putting together all of their partially formed ideas. People use the web to make their suggestions, which are then read by other people across the globe who in turn add their bit or suggestion, eventually a concept is formed through ‘intercreativity’. I found Berners-Lee’s phrase “one creative process together” helps to understand intercreativity. Basically, everybody helps to create an advanced, thought-through, continually developing idea.

I think that these terms are useful to understand the collaborative creation of content online, produsers create produsage, and the process of intercreativity means that produsers continue updating and advancing the produsage. These terms make the topic easier to discuss and understand, as the definitions also give an insight into the theory of collaborative creation of online content.