YouTube, Wikipedia and the produsers

Watch this......

OK, so you might not be laughing at it as hard as I am but I still find it as hilarious as I first came across it, and that has been as long as since the video has been around. In fact, I watched this one before I watched the original "Nobody" video by ‘Wondergirls’, which made it even funnier for me, now that I understood the joke in context.

This one is the original. Take your time watching it, because the introduction is quite long.

My point here is that, you will find many videos similar to this on YouTube, as Axel Bruns explains, where the creation of shared content takes place and breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers. They now can be called 'produsers', who not only engage in traditional forms of content production, but are instead involved in the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement, also known as, 'produsage'.

The increasing availability of media technologies of networks like the Internet has allowed consumers to be producers as well. But the term ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ no longer exists when the trend in social media is to create these artful, clever, or simply funny mashups, that may now attract as much more attention as the original source material, which they draw from and are spread on the Internet.

Think about Wikipedia, for example. People become more reliant on it and prefer to extract the information from there, rather than from the Encyclopedia. But the information from the Wikipedia is in fact the combination of inputs from pamphlet writers, amateur software authors, or independent enthusiasts for the specific area of knowledge.

So the information we find on Wikipedia are not just products, but exists as temporary artifacts as others build, extend, maintain and improves it. This justifies Axel Bruns’s theory.

“There is an absence of producers, distributors, or consumers, and the presence of a seemingly endless string of users acting incrementally as content producers by gradually extending and improving the information present in the information commons, the value chain begins and ends.”

Only, since it is a ‘never-ending’ chain that goes around in a cycle, we may never be quite sure that the ‘value chain’ will ever end.

image - Produsage.org/

Produsers and produsage do not only exist on the Internet. It is a shift that has been going on for decades. I remember the first time I heard “Ghetto Superstar” by Pras Michael featuring Ol’Dirty Bastard and Mya. The chorus is actually a reworking of Bee Gees’, “Islands in the Stream”. At first I thought it was creative, but after a while, it seemed as though more and more artists were using the same ideas. It was as though these rappers had just run out of creativity and decided to borrow the ideas of artists who initially borrowed the idea from another artist.

And so we can see from back in the late 90’s, that the acts of participation of these ‘gangsta rappers’, or their produsage are part of an ongoing stream, that constitutes a never finished process of content development, improvement, and redevelopment.