User - Led Content

The reading for class seven was ‘From Prosumer to Produser: Understanding User-Led Content Creation‘ by Prof Axel Bruns. When I first looked at this I found the content quite confusing and only found out after that the slide show was supposed to have sound with it (for some reason this was not an option for me when I went on to it). As the sound didn't work  for me I decided to research and find out what ‘User - Led Content’ meant as I had never heard of the term before.

What I understood from the research that I did was that ‘User-Led Content’ is a base that the normal consumers become prosumers. A consumer consumes a product that already exist for instance a game player of ‘Halo’ plays the game that has already been programmed to have a set of step by step objective/task/goals to complete the game, therefore they use what is available to them within the software but cannot change this or add to this. A ‘User-Led Content’ allows for a consumer to become a prosumer, ‘Minecraft’ allows for users to add to the already existing software and contribute their own ideas, designs and programming (mods). Similar to Second Life people can build their own spaces and products. This allows the consumer to become involved in designing or customizing products

“the prosumer is clearly not the self-motivated creative originator and developer of new content which can today be observed in projects ranging from open source software through Wikipedia to Second Life, but simply a particularly well-informed, and therefore both particularly critical and particularly active, consumer.”(1)

This ‘User - Led Content’ allows for consumers to become engaged in building and extending pre existing  platforms “These produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage – the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement.”(2). Do this furthering their involvement and perhaps inspires prosumers to further add to the content.

Ending Here 




Footnote 
(1) , Bruns, Axel. "From prosumer to produser: Understanding user-led content creation." (2009).
(2) Bruns, Axel. "Beyond difference: Reconfiguring education for the user-led age." (2007).