Producer or Prouduser

I am a producer, a creator – You are my audience, my reader.

I am solely creating the content that is being streamed from my blog, to my readers.

I am a user – using the means of blog to further my understanding, my education

I am creating content that is being streamed from my blog to my readers – to further my understanding of Blogging, tagging – The World Wide Web – to further my education.

So am I a producer, a creator or a user? Can I create and use simultaneously?

The difficulty of definition is that the concept of audience suggests a passive consumption of a message and a creator is an inventor who preaches to an audience. As Livingstone explores (2008) a ‘consumer’ has changed over many years, no longer are they a passive audience who sits back without engaging.

The world has been in awe since the invention of the internet, but what society has always craved is their own 15 minutes of fame, a chance to make their mark, and now that is all possible. People can now create their own online communities allowing them to post their opinions, share their thoughts, and collaborate with peers (Flew, 2005)

The internet is not a tangible product, it is a wealth of untouchable, indefinable experience. It is a medium to be explored by consumers and users, one and the same, sitting in offices, at home, on the bus, on a mobile phone who can add to the building blocks who can create networks, publish thoughts and information and much more.

So there is no single creator, there is no owner or boss there is a mass of equals uploading content and downloading content. Producer equals Consumer. Alex Bruns (2007) coined these producers “produsers” a term which accurately describes their dual functionality. The process does not stop with dual functionality however, every producer adding information is helping to build the knowledge base, thus creating collective knowledge, maintained and improved only by the users themselves, not a central control base (CSE 2008).

At a minimum the internet has overcome the barriers blocking progress and its produsage capabilities have exponentially increased the ways we can organize information and effectively communicate.

Banks, J. (2002) "Gamers as Co-Creators: Enlisting the Virtual Audience - A Report From the Net Face," in M. Balnaves, T. O'Regan and J. Sternberg (eds) Mobilising the Audience. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press

Flew, T. (2005). New media : an introduction. Melbourne: OUP