Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage explores the nature of content creation and knowledge production in networked cultures, paying particular attention to how the traditional separation between producer and consumer disappears in the context of technologies and practices that foster participation and collaboration.

A range of social, cultural, and institutional paradigm shifts set the stage for this process. These shifts are themselves brought about by the affordances of network technologies that shape, amplify, and reflect the way that knowledge is produced and media artifacts are created. Bruns identifies four key preconditions for produsage: 1) Probabilistic, not directed, problem-solving; 2) Equipotentiality in place of hierarchy; 3) Granular, rather than composite tasks; and 4) Shared, not owned content.

In cultures where these preconditions are met, knowledge production and content creation are characterized by open participation, ad hoc meritocracies, inherently unfinished artifacts, and common property. Bruns provides numerous examples from the late 1990s through the mid-2000s that illustrate cultures in which this paradigm has taken hold, including the open source software movement, citizen journalism and blogging, ‘life caching’ and video sharing services like Flickr and YouTube, and maker-oriented video games like The Sims and Second Life.