Produsage?

It’s been a tough day, I have Mondays off from uni and had to tell myself to get this done and stop watching ‘Keeping Up With The Kardashians’ for this weeks blog. But anyway, enough about me,
Today, this blog is about ‘Produsage.’
Whaaaaat the *expletive* is produsage!? you may ask
Yeah, I know.
I had never even heard of this term ‘produsage’ until last week. It’s pretty hard to form an opinion/stance on a topic you barely know about, but lets put it this way. The term produsage is a lot more common than people think, people just aren’t aware that there is an actual term for it. It refers to the way in which people can alter or make their own version of a particular topic or viewpoint. A major example of this is YouTube and Wikipedia. I mean, I could go into Wikipedia right now and say that Barrack Obama is actually a white 60 year-old female who lives in a shoe with 165 cats if I really wanted to. This is basically what produsage is. Or a parody of a song that someone has created, everyone knows about song parodies on YouTube, and if you don’t look them up. For example there are hundreds of ‘Tik Tok’ parodies by one hit wonder Ke$ha (Now that I think about it, what even happened to her?) and here’s one I found about Pokemon,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOQI-YHwvyU

This was taken off from LMFAO’s song ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the singing, not so great but the lyrics and costumes are pretttyyy gewwwd, in my opinion.
Anyway, if you’re still reading this and didn’t watch the YouTube video and get bored and go back and check Facebook, what I’m trying to say Wikipedia and YouTube are both engaged in the act of produsage- as it is productive usage. There are 4 other sub-terms of ‘produsage’ they are;
-Open Participation/Communal Evaluation
-Fluid Heterarchy

-Unfinished Artefacts/Continuing Process
-Common Property/Unfinished Rewards

The example of Wikipedia is relevant to these four terms and all make up the definition of produsage. When you think about editing something on Wikipedia; think of these terms and how they all relate.

But the main concern of this topic is to do more with the ethics and the future of produsage. What would happen if everyone were to change all the Wikipedia pages to false information, or rip off someone else’s ideas and make a YouTube video from it. The question is, where does this all stop? When does it all become too much, and who has a say of how much we can alter or change, as produsage doesn’t work towards the completion of products, but is based on the community and evolving the product. So where will we go next with this? It is something that will never be finished or at an end. It draws a community and like-minded people together and for something this important in the internet world, I feel like there needs to be more awareness and or security on such a big topic.

for more on this check out this website: www.produsage.org