YouTube, I tube, we all tube..

According to Bruns (2008) “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 (but only temporarily, ready for further development) with content.”

Discuss.

Wow. First of all, this massive chunk of writing makes it hard to grasp the concept of what Bruns is talking about, so I will try and simplify it for you. Essentially, Bruns’ statement relates to idea that users of new media content are no longer passive users; rather they are now taking on active roles in manipulating and re-distributing existing media content to make new media outputs. Yes? Kind of like taking something good, like a ham sandwich, and adding tomato and cheese to make it better. Make sense now? Excellent.

We refer to this as ‘Produsage’, and we call the people taking part in Produsage as “Produsers’. Think of it this way, it’s pretty much a producer and a user merged into the one thing with a merged name. Heaps of merging. The effects of Produsage and Produsers are common in the world of social media such as Facebook, Myspace etc, but no more prevalent than on YouTube.

YouTube gives produsers a great platform to take existing media content, such as a scene from Home and Away, and dub voices over the top to totally produce a new media output that can be instantly accessed and appreciated by people with a warped sense of humour (much like myself) worldwide. If you not following have a look at this (mind the language, bit rude, but good for a giggle)




There are so many videos like this on YouTube so it’s most likely you have been exposed to at least one of them. Some of my personal favourites include ‘Gumby banging horses’ and ‘Hitler finds out Santa is not real’. Well worth a look.



one final giggle...



So where do we draw the line between producer and user? Is there copyright or intellectual property infringements cause by produsage? To answer honestly, yes. Produsers are essentially benefiting from tearing apart someone’s original artwork. Whether it is musical covers, track mash-ups video compilations or re-enactments of movie scenes, there has to be a line between improving and destroying.

So I’ve ranted enough, time to answer whatever it was I came here to answer. Bruns wordy statement begs us to question whether the “value chain of the product begins and ends with content”. Nope. Of course the content is always relevant, but it’s the way the content is produced, or rather prodused, that makes it so.