We - the users turned creators and distributors of content - are TIME's Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge's Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what's really going on? In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what's emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy. We ¿ the users turned creators and distributors of content ¿ are TIME¿s Person of the Year 2006, and AdAge¿s Advertising Agency of the Year 2007. We form a new Generation C. We have MySpace, YouTube, and OurMedia; we run social software, and drive the development of Web 2.0. But beyond the hype, what¿s really going on? In this groundbreaking exploration of our developing participatory online culture, Axel Bruns establishes the core principles which drive the rise of collaborative content creation in environments, from open source through blogs and Wikipedia to Second Life. This book shows that what¿s emerging here is no longer just a new form of content production, but a new process for the continuous creation and extension of knowledge and art by collaborative communities: produsage. The implications of the gradual shift from production to produsage are profound, and will affect the very core of our culture, economy, society, and democracy. Acknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 Produsage in Context 2 Notes 7 2 The Key Characteristics of Produsage 9 From Industry to Internet, from Consumption to Usage 13 From Usage to Produsage 15 The Key Principles of Produsage 23 Open Participation, Communal Evaluation 24 Fluid Heterarchy, Ad Hoc Meritocracy 25 Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process 27 Common Property, Individual Rewards 28 Impacts and Implications of Produsage 30 Notes 34 3 Open Source Software Development: Probabilistic Eyeballs 37 Scratching the Itch 39 A Community of Equ(ipotenti)als 44 From Plausible Promise to Tangible Outcomes 53 Open Source Effects 60 Notes 65 4 News Blogs and Citizen Journalism. Perpetual Collaboration in Evaluating the News 69 Beyond Gatekeeping 70 Towards Gatewatching 73 Gatewatcher Community Heterarchies 76 Unfinished Artefacts, Continuing Process 80 Individual Rewards from News Produsage 83 New Spaces for Journalism 86 From Casual Collapse to Renaissance 90 Towards the Inevitable 93 Notes 96 5 Wikipedia: Representations of Knowledge 101 Creating Wikipedia 103 Wikipedia as Produsage 107 Controlling Wikipedia 113 Criticizing Wikipedia 118 Disrupting Wikipedia 124 Educating Wikipedia Users 130 Notes 133 6 The Palimpsest of Human Knowledge: Wikipedia and Beyond 137 Governing Wikipedia 140 Accrediting Wikipedians 148 Beyond Wikipedia 152 Non-Encyclopedic Knowledge Spaces 156 Beyond the Encyclopedia? 161 Notes 167 7 Folksonomies: Produsage and/of Knowledge Structures 171 Tagging, Linking, Browsing 172 Curating the Cosmopedia 178 Folksonomies 181 Folksonomies and Taxonomies 187 A Casual Collapse of Taxonomies? 191 Notes 196 8 Folks and Experts: Beyond the Pro/Am Divide 199 Restoring the Expert? Citizendium and Beyond 204 A Continuum from 'Pros' to 'Ams' 209 The Long Tail of Expertise 214 Layers of Knowledge, Lines of Desire 219 Notes 223 9 The Art of Produsage: Distributed Creativity 227 Sites of Creative Produsage 232 Text: Universes of Fan Fiction 232 Images: Flick,- and Collaborative Curation 234 Music: Asynchronous Collaboration on ccMixter 236 Video: Mashups on YouTube 238 Distributed Multimedia Creativity: OurMedia and Beyond 239 The Produsage of Creative Distribution Systems 243 The Culture of Sharing Culture 247 Industry Impacts 250 The Audience Is Dead 254 Notes 256 10 Media and Creative Industries: New Opportunities or Casual Collapse? 259 Copyright, Users' Rights? 262 From Produser to Producer? 266 The New Creative Industries 273 Detaching Authorship from Ownership 275 Communities as Copyright Holders 279 Shifting the Balance 285 Notes 287 11 The Produsage Game: Harboring the Hive of Produsers 289 Produsing the Space 290 Produsing in the Space 294 New Internal and External Economies? 300 Imagining a Produsage-Based World 303 Produsing Sociality 307 Notes 311 12 Social Produsage: Questions of Reputation and Trust 313 From Social Networks to the Internet of Things 319 Produsing Society? 321 A Networked Society of Produsers 325 Merit, Reputation, and Trust 329 Notes 334 13 Educating Produsers, Produsing Education: Produsage and the Academy 337 From Literacies to Capacities 338 A Casual Collapse of Conventional Education? 344 The Tip of the Iceberg 350 Reopening Academia 353 Notes 356 14 Produsing Democracy 359 From Industrial to Produsage Politics 361 Moving towards Molecular Democracy? 367 Demodynamicss vs. Democracy 373 Towards Renaissance? 376 Notes 383 15 Conclusion: Production, Produsage, and the Future of Humanity 387 Turning Artefacts into Products 389 Turning Products into Artefacts 392 Produsage Futures 395 Produsing the Global Renaissance 400 Notes 406 16 Bibliography 409