Benefits of Produsage Communities

In the previous blog, I briefly discussed the definition of Produsage and the how the concept is illustrated in collaborative-shared online communities (eg. Wikipedia). But let’s take a quick look back to the definition of produsage as outlined by Bruns: produsage is based on the collaborative engagement of ideally large communities of participants in a shared project, where product + usage = production. In today’s blog, I would like to outline the factors of produsage, the benefits and disadvantages.

Benefits

Outlined in Produsage, user-led creations and gaming, is an argument that discusses how the produsage concept works well with gaming to benefit both the gaming industry and users worldwide. It explains in games such as The Sims and The Movies, there is a sharing community of ideas that are continually being improved – such as user-led content of created characters and items. These games encourage users to come together to share and upgrade each other’s content and ideas amongst each other. This is a prime example of how produsage is used, and illustrates why games that employ the community produsage concept are successful by utilising collaborative communities of active participants.
There are numerous reasons as to why participatory users will engage in these sorts of produsage communities. Firstly, produsage communities provide fast and frequent updates to content that already exists; there are as well fewer delays caused by approval processes. All this updated user-led content is freely accessible to all, which leads to great involvement of the community – which therefore means users of produsage communities will be able to locate problems and keep improving their shared content.
There are also individual rewards to be gained by participatory users in regards to their quality and usefulness of their contribution. In Produsage: Key Principles, Status gain (also known as social capital) is one common reward, where popularity and credibility of users will sore based on the level of contributor’s user-led content. In the produsage on gaming industries, people will strive to gain some renown in the virtual communities. There are often cases of tangible rewards as well, usually on employment outcomes of producers with a positive track record of contribution.

Disadvantages

It is not surprising that Produsage communities also bring forth many potential disadvantages, generally because community knowledge may be limited in its diverse opinion. As Bruns explains, produsage communities need to avoid the ‘group-think’ situation, where all members think alike and do not recognise their own faults due to lack of individuality. A very direct example could be a KKK community website which shares a same particular fault - (well, it shouldn’t even exist!), Or here’s a more subtle example: where 10-year old students of the same math class post blogs on a collaborative website based on what they’ve learned from a teacher’s flunked understanding of trigonometry – who will be there to correct them in this community if all members are the students of the same class?