Todd Cecutti

New Media and Writing

Dr. Sergey Rybas
February 18, 2017

Reddit and Bruns

If asked to identify the neutral hub of the internet, many people would point directly to Reddit.
Seemingly protected against techno-panics by being a playground for all people, the site
allows users to interact with specific, user-driven content regarding countless topics. If one
wants to see content related only to Apple products, they may; woodworking, too; and any kind
of deviance can be indulged in on the site as well. There are even specific spaces for the sort of
fan-fiction that Jenkins noted in How Content Gains Meaning and Value in a Networked
Culture. The remainder of this response will focus on Axel Bruns (2006) Common
Characteristics of Produsage and the ways in which Reddit aligns with his characteristics of
produsage.

1. User-led content production

In some spaces on Reddit, original content is king, such as in creative writing subreddits, which
may contribute little to the new media landscape but is valuable to that specific community, or
video game modification subreddits, in which community members share their
creations/modifications so that they may be used and reviewed by others. In this way, that
particular subreddit has the potential to be a part of what Bruns (2008) calls harnessing and
harvesting the hive, where the video games creators can take those modifications and integrate
them into future iterations of the game.

In addition to the sorts of communities that are built around original content creation, much of
the action on Reddit happens in the Comments sections of particular threads, where the
exchange of ideas, opinions, and wit is paramount. Many of the threads created on Reddit are
reposted content from news organizations, academic journals, other internet-aggregator sites,
etc., so the content production occurs through response to them, which leads to a blurring of
the lines between production and collaborative engagement.

2. Collaborative engagement
As previously mentioned, collaborative engagement is easily found on Reddit in the
Comments section of any given primary thread. User engagement, if judged by the amount of
comments on a particular post, ranges from 1 user engaged to over 10 thousand on the most
popular posts of the day or week.

A low-consequence example of collaborative engagement on Reddit is the Tiny Trump trend

that swept over the community, prompting users to edit photos of Donald Trump to make him
look tiny in increasingly humorous scenarios, and evolving to the point of editing unrelated
archival photography to mock the President.
An instance of high-consequence collaborative engagement in Reddits past is their involvement
in the search for the Boston Marathon bombing suspect(s). The Reddit hive-mind came together
immediately following the bombing and created a now private/defunct subreddit devoted to
aiding the authorities in their search for justice. Ultimately, Reddit users collaboratively and
decidedly accused a man who had been missing for a month of the attacks, only to find out after
the actual suspects had been apprehended that the man had likely committed suicide when his
body was found -- the debacle was traumatic for the mans family, leading to a public apology by
Reddits general manager. The Reddit search became news around the world, exposing the
danger of an unrestricted hive mind -- a collaborative community gone wrong.

3. Palimpsestic, Iterative, Evolutionary Development

One of the clearest (and least useful examples) of users engaging with existing content and
improving upon it within the Reddit community would be memes, which exist all over the
internet (primarily social spaces) but often originate on Reddit. In some ways, it seems that
Reddit is the proving ground for digital wit and humor, with users remixing each others
creations until the crowd-favorite iteration occurs and it can be released to Facebook and Twitter
for eventual use by grandparents and corporations everywhere.

Reddit does archive all of its posts, allowing users to dive back into its past. While there are
websites devoted to archiving Reddit, a Google search on a specific topic with the word Reddit
attached to it will likely lead one to an archived Reddit post accessible through Reddit itself.

4. Alternative Approaches to Intellectual Property

Every subreddit has moderators whose job it is to create and/or enforce the rules of that subreddit
as well as the rules of Reddit as a whole. For many substantial subreddits with detailed codes of
conduct, intellectual property is in some way addressed, and even if a moderator does not catch
improper use of intellectual property, another user certainly will; the community is known for
self-policing.

Most of the content on Reddit, though, is links to other websites or documents, so the user is
simply a conduit or finder for a specific news article, for example. An apt example of this could
be what was revealed by a query through Reddits search engine of Axel Bruns. The user
matt_miles certainly did not write Axel Bruns From Production to Produsage, he just
wanted to share it with the Reddit OpenEd community.

5. Heterarchical, Permeable Community Structures

Reddit makes a point of being an open community where there is no ultimate moderator, but a
collection of subreddit specific, unpaid moderators. These moderators can be thought of as user
advocates, for they hold the power over Reddit as a company to control the individual nodes of
the site, which has been shown in past controversy.

Because of this structure in which shows neither purely hierarchical organisational traits, nor
operating simply as a leaderless anarchy, users feel as though they create the community rather
than join a rigid community structure (Bruns, 2006). This model has attracted millions of
individual users per year to the site.

References

Bruns, Axel. "The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage." Paper

presented at PerthDAC conference, Perth, Western Australia, 15-18 Sep. 2007.

Bruns, Axel. "Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production." In Proceedings:

Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006, eds. Fay Sudweeks,

Herbert Hrachovec, and Charles Ess. Perth: Murdoch University, 2006. 275-84.

Jenkins, H. (Writer). (2012, May 24). How Content Gains Meaning and Value in a

Networked Culture [Video file]. Retrieved February 14, 2017, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAffkJpYnPI