In recent years, there has been an increase in cultural and societal participation in information production. These changes have been facilitated by the emergence of new, participatory technologies which allow information access, knowledge exchange, and content production. Many of these technologies are associated with the Internet, including websites such as Wikipedia and YouTube.
A concept known as produsage has been developed by Axle Bruns to identify this phenomenon. This idea highlights that everyone is able to engage in the collaborative creation and extension of information and knowledge. This participatory environment breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge.
Information created through produsage is the result of a global brainstorming team who have critiqued and extended it. This enables unique, creative and innovative ideas to develop and be shared with the world. Produsage has also been said to minimize the psychological phenomenon known as groupthink. This occurs when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. However, due to the anonymity of internet users and the fact that most of the contributors have never met one another, this idea of 'maintaining harmony' is not an issue. Additionally, the incorporation of a global audience allows for diversity among views resulting in less subjective content.
Henery Jenkins, a key theorist in the area of new media has discussed the idea of 'collective intelligence'. This refers to a situation where nobody knows everything, everyone knows something, and what any given member knows is accessible to any other member through media platforms. This gives rise to a networked culture that creates alternate structures of power which stem from the ability of diverse groups of people to pool knowledge, collaborate through research and debate interpretations. Through such collaborative processing, people are able to refine their understanding of the world. There is no regulation on the content which is created. This means that there is no higher power to oversea collaborations. Although this allows all sorts of ideas to be shared, it does pose an interesting question. Who benefits from the creation of content? Many information sharing websites like blogger.com, wikipedia, or Facebook are free to join and free to publish material. Some individuals have become overnight sensations by posting themselves on social media platforms, however this requires a large volume of views or subscribers. Advertising companies are able to buy screen space on highly viewed sites. This enables their content to gain the maximun audience possible. Therefore they are able to benefit from produsage.
On the other hand, the idea of produsage is not simply based on one persons contribution. It is based on the idea of the global collaboration of information. Therefore there may not be a need to give credit to one person or organization as we are all able to benefit from the readily available information.
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