You Would Be Wacky Not To Love Wiki!

Prousage expert Alex Bruns defines prousage as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.” Technology has allowed us, like in the pre-industrial times, to become more involved in producing content. 

The emergence of  Industrialisation in the 18^th century took us away from agrarian self-sufficiency, as we relied more on mass production, leading to mass consumption. Already in the 1970s, futurist Alvin Toffler foreshadowed such changes in his coining of the term 'prosumer': highlighting the emergence of a more informed, more involved consumer of goods who would need to be kept content by allowing for a greater customisability and individualisability of products. Certain websites on the internet allow the user to produce, use or both. Wikileaks is a good example of this as it “seeks to involve the visitor in an ongoing process of creation and collaboration that constantly changes the Web site landscape.” One of the down sides according to Homelinux.org is ,” vandalism can go unnoticed for a period of time and wiki’s by their very nature are susceptible to trolling.” So at this juncture in time it seems that our material goods are still under the industrial umbrella, but our informational goods are a combination of traditional consumption and prousage. It has almost gone full circle. For primitive man to get to the wheel, they worked communally. One had the idea for the wheel; another man was good with tools, another with basic maths and physics and so on. With prousage a concept, idea or ideology is announced, and then it is added to, improved, shaped or rejected. The first wheel was a log, then a sledge, then a sledge on a log, then a groove was added, then an axle. In today's modern world, prousage is just another step in our evolutionary ladder.

 Alex Bruns comments that there a four preconditions to prousage, they are;

Open Participation/Communal Evaluation – the more people using and adding the better the quality of content. It is inclusive, not exclusive. This underpins the whole idea of prousage. This is an area where bloggers and citizen journalists battle with, not to mention prousers that wish to add to blogs but can’t because it might be rub the author the wrong way.

Fluid Hierarchy/Ad Hoc Meritocracy- no boss here, it’s based on merit, not status. As it evolves different people take over and the project leaders pass on from one to the next. This concept works well because it allows for an open playing field and the strongest content provider at the time temporarily takes charge.

Unfinished Artefacts/Continuing Process- no end, not trying to finish the content, but grow the artefacts. This means content will be continually worked infinitely, much like civilisation itself. For intellectual evolution to precede, group contributions are necessary, not just individual ones.

Common Property/Individual Rewards- content created in this process will continue to be available to all future participants just as it was available to those participants who have already made contributions. I like this concept as it is like the wheel example used earlier, people keep adding to the original idea making it better and better. I am sure Leonardo Da Vinci would not be bitter that his helicopter design is where it is at today.

One thing that Bruns and myself agree on is that the prouser world is more honest and effective in an amateur context. When money is involved it increases the chance of bias. An example of this is the first commercially run blog, The Huffington Post. Since its inception in 2005, it has never been secretive about its leftist/liberal approach, but when its professional democratic staff block commentators from the political right, that goes against the openness of blogs." Representatives of the Republican Party have indicated that they believe The Huffington Post headline writers, bloggers, and commentators are hostile to their views and tend to negatively spin articles, and especially headlines, about Republican Party candidates. When money enters a volunteer environment is might try to control the environment with its own ideologies. Agenda and money seem to run the same gamete. It would please me more if bloggers and citizen journalists would refrain from paradoxical behaviour and allow more freedom of speech, the very thing a lot of them are fighting for in the first place.

Bruns says this new world belongs to generation C (which stands for content and creativity, according to Trendwatching.com) which is using the developing technologies of a Web 2.0 environment to make collaboration the new mode of production. But you've got to be quick to stay up with these new worlds.
YouTube has announced plans to share advertising revenue with produsers. But some users appear to be happy to provide the web content gratis, even if it is then commercially exploited. Learning lessons from the popularity of TV viewer voting systems in shows such as Big Brother, companies have begun to invite people to create ads about why they like eating pizzas or burgers, the winner to become their new ad. Many of the entries are posted on YouTube, so the site provides a quick, free, widespread ad campaign and the advertiser doesn't even have to make the ad.

On a lighter side an ideal mashup, (a song created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs), for me occurred in the 80s when disenfranchised African Americans in the ghetto took their parents jazz records and started rapping over the top of them. Hip Hop mashup pioneer, working under the name Steinski, DJ Steve Stein, began the next chapter in the evolution of illicit pop by producing a trio of underground 12" singles (entitled "The Payoff Mix" (1983), "Lesson 2 (The James Brown Mix)" (1984) and "Lesson 3 (History of Hiphop)" (1985)) which exerted a powerful influence on an entire generation of "samplists".

Here is an example of such a mashup:

References

Homelinux, 2009, http://m3m.homelinux.org/wikiMC/index.php/Security

Wiki, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki 

Prousage.org, from production to Prousage:Research into user-lead content and creation, http://produsage.org/node/9

Jenkins, H, 2009, From Production to Prousage; Interview with Alex Bruns, http://henryjenkins.org/2008/05/interview_with_axel_bruns.html

The Huffington Post Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Huffington_Post

Images

1.  https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRV0IfrKeH-ghYtNwy3ihDdoBQBgmJceK7-wI4wpQe0CEYGuflI0g

2. http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_543/12858075650q3AQZ.jpg

3. http://www.publiusforum.com/images/huffpostalert.gif

4. http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02112/wikipedia_2112303b.jpg

Video

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlUKRy3mkH8