When the audience stops consuming and starts making. And who benefits when it does.
Unit B: How do they behave?
Jay Rosen called them "the people formerly known as the audience." But are they really free? Or just a different kind of worker?
Participation looks like power. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is the platform finding a cheaper way to produce content. Today we learn to tell the difference.
By the end of today
What you will walk out knowing
01
Distinguish participation types
Separate participation in media from participation through media, and explain why the difference matters for power and ownership.
Reveal
02
Define produsage
Apply Bruns' produser concept to contemporary platforms and explain how it differs from and connects to Smythe's audience labour argument.
Reveal
03
Evaluate the empowerment debate
State the strongest argument for UGC as democratisation, and the strongest counter-argument for UGC as free labour for platforms.
Reveal
04
Apply across sectors
Trace how participation and produsage work differently in news, OTT, games, music, and the creator economy, with Bangladesh examples.
Reveal
Not as new as it looks
Participation has a long history
Web 2.0 did not invent audience participation. It scaled and datafied practices that have always existed.
Amateur radio (1920s). Hobbyists built their own sets, produced their own broadcasts, and formed communities before broadcasting became industrialised. Carpentier notes this is early produsage in almost unaltered form.
Letters to the editor (19th century). Readers actively shaped newspaper content and public discourse through contributions that editors curated and published.
Community and alternative media (1960s onwards). Pirate radio, zines, guerrilla television: audiences taking over the means of production.
What changed. Not participation itself, but its scale, speed, visibility, and datafication. Uploading a video in 2025 is structurally similar to making a home film in 1955. The reach and the data trail are incomparably different.
In Bangladesh: community radio stations operating since the 2000s are a local precedent for participatory media that precedes the smartphone era entirely.
Carpentier's distinction
Participation in media vs. participation through media
01
Participation in media
Taking part in the production and decision-making processes of media organisations themselves. Editing Wikipedia. Co-managing a community radio programme. Sitting on a citizen editorial board. This is genuine participation in the production system, with some real power over what is made.
Reveal
02
Participation through media
Using media as a tool to participate in wider social, political, or cultural life: signing a petition, joining a protest organised on Facebook, posting political commentary. The media is the channel, not the site of participation. The audience has no power over the media production itself.
Reveal
03
Why the distinction matters
Conflating the two overstates media democratisation. Leaving a comment on Prothom Alo's website is not the same as joining an editorial meeting. Social media activism is powerful in some ways, but it leaves the platform's production process entirely in corporate hands.
Reveal
04
The flattery of participation
Platforms actively encourage the feeling of participation. The comment, the like, the share all feel like acts of contribution. They are also acts of data production. The invitation to "participate" is partly a business model.
Reveal
Axel Bruns · 2007
The produser
In many online communities, the distinction between producer and user has collapsed. The participant is simultaneously consuming and producing. Bruns named this the produser and the practice produsage.
Always already producing. Wikipedia editors, forum moderators, GitHub contributors: they use the resource and extend it at the same time.
Fluid roles. In produsage communities, the roles of producer and consumer are not fixed. A user who is a lurker today is the community's main wiki editor tomorrow.
Unfinished artefacts. Produsage output is never finished. A Wikipedia article, a Minecraft world, an open-source codebase: always a work in progress, extended by any participant.
Not entirely new. Nightingale notes amateur photography, home film, and community media all pre-figure produsage. What is new is the scale and the platform's ability to capture the resulting data.
In Bangladesh: Bangla Wikipedia editors, Prothom Alo comment section regulars, and game modding communities on Facebook are all practising produsage.
Branching scenario
Branching scenario
Empowerment or free labour?
Nadia runs a Facebook page dedicated to Bangladeshi street food. She posts daily reviews, photos, and videos. She has 180,000 followers. Brands begin paying her for sponsored posts. She earns enough to make this her full-time work. Facebook, meanwhile, uses her content and the engagement it drives to sell advertising to other brands. She never receives a share of that advertising revenue.
A is too simple. While Nadia has genuine autonomy and income, she is also building an audience on land owned by Meta. Her content drives engagement and ad revenue that she never sees. Empowerment is real, but so is extraction.
B is too simple. Nadia has real economic benefit from brand deals. Calling this pure exploitation erases her agency and the genuine opportunities the platform created. The binary misses the actual situation.
C is the most accurate. Hesmondhalgh, Skeggs, and Fuchs each describe this tension from different angles. Empowerment and extraction can coexist. A binary either/or misses what is actually happening to Nadia and millions like her.
Hesmondhalgh · Wood · Skeggs & Yuill
Is it exploitation? And does it matter?
01
Fuchs: total commodification
All digital activity produces surplus value for platforms. Every click, post, and share is exploited labour in a Marxist sense. The creative autonomy of the produser is the cover story for unpaid work at global scale.
Reveal
02
Hesmondhalgh: not all labour is the same
Free labour requires more precision. Physical exploitation in hardware supply chains is not the same as the identity-work of posting a selfie. Applying the same label to both obscures more than it reveals.
Reveal
03
Skeggs and Yuill: data as property
Facebook's use of your social network as data to be sold resembles land-banking: capturing future value from assets users created and platformers now own. Not classic exploitation but a new form of extraction.
Reveal
The key insight: empowerment and extraction can occur simultaneously. A binary either/or misses what is actually happening.
Drag & place
Drag & place
Participation: empowering or exploitative?
ExploitativeEmpoweringIn mediaThrough media
Fan-cam editingWikipedia editingInfinite-scroll commentingOpen-source code contributionReaction videoSponsored post for a creator
Drag each chip onto the grid. Position it on the empowering/exploitative axis and on the in-media/through-media axis. Defend your placement.
Produsage across five sectors
What participation looks like in practice
01
News
Citizen journalism, comment sections, user-submitted photos and videos. At best: grassroots accountability. At worst: unpaid content production for a legacy outlet that lays off staff.
Reveal
02
OTT
Fan wikis, subtitle contributions, community clip compilations. The platform benefits from a self-maintaining knowledge base it does not pay to produce.
Reveal
03
Games
Mods, maps, skins, community-created missions. Minecraft's user-generated content is indistinguishable from official content for most players. Modders receive no revenue share.
Reveal
04
Music
Covers, remixes, TikTok duets, lyric annotations on Genius. Fan-made content drives streaming discovery for original artists. The annotation labour on Genius is uncompensated.
Reveal
05
Creators
The audience itself produces community content: transcripts, fan-subtitles, compilation edits, Reddit threads analysing each video. This extends the creator's reach without the creator's effort.
Reveal
06
Platforms
Every platform depends on user content. Facebook without user posts is an empty interface. YouTube without creator uploads is a video player with nothing to play. The platform's value is almost entirely produced by unpaid participants.
Reveal
Knowledge check
Knowledge check
A Bangladeshi gamer creates a popular mod for a mobile game. The game company features it in their official store. The modder receives no payment. According to Bruns and Carpentier, what is this an example of?
C. This is the produsage model exactly: the modder is a produser, simultaneously using and extending the platform's content. The company's featuring of the mod and extraction of value without compensation is the free-labour dynamic Fuchs, Hesmondhalgh, and Skeggs each describe from different angles.
Participation in media and participation through media are the same thing: both give audiences real power over media production.False. Carpentier's distinction is precise: participation in media means genuine involvement in the production process. Participation through media uses media as a tool for wider social activity, leaving the production process in corporate hands.
User-generated content and produsage are not new phenomena invented by Web 2.0: amateur production has a long pre-digital history in radio, photography, and community media.True. Carpentier and Nightingale both note this. What changed is scale, speed, and the platform's ability to monetise the resulting data.
Your turn · 15–20 min
Activity: Produser Audit
Step 1
Find three kinds of participation
On one platform you use, identify three distinct acts of audience participation: one where you or others produce content, one where you curate or moderate, one where you only react or signal.
Step 2
Classify each
For each: is it participation in media or through media? Is it produsage? Who benefits economically from this act? Does the producer receive any share of that value?
Step 3
Take a position
Based on your three examples, write two sentences: one making the strongest argument that this participation is empowering, one making the strongest argument that it is free labour for the platform.
Print the one-page worksheet. This is Brick 06 of your Bangladesh case study.
Today in five lines
Recap
01Participation is not new: amateur production has a long pre-digital history that platforms scaled and datafied.
02Participation in media (real power over production) differs fundamentally from participation through media (using it as a channel).
03The produser simultaneously consumes and extends the shared resource. Roles are fluid. Artefacts are never finished.
04Empowerment and extraction can coexist. The binary empowerment-vs-exploitation framing misses what actually happens.
05Platforms' entire value is produced by unpaid participants. The data trail they leave is the commodity sold to advertisers.
Next class: Taste, Genre and Expectation. How audiences navigate abundance using the genre contract, and how streaming is reshaping it.
Digital Audience · Lecture 06
You made the platform.
This week’s reading
Reading list
PrimaryHill & Lunt (eds.) — Ch. 28, “What’s Labour Got to Do with It?”
PrimaryNightingale (ed.) — Ch. 9, “New Configurations of the Audience?” (Nico Carpentier)
SupplementaryFalero — Ch. 2, “The Industry: A Brief History of Audiences In and Out of Control”