Axel Bruns (scholar)

Dr Axel Bruns is a Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Bruns is the author of (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (2006) and the co-editor of New Media Dynamics (2012)

In 1997, Bruns was a co-founder of the premier online academic publisher M/C - Media and Culture, which publishes M/C Journal and M/C Reviews, and he continues to serve as M/C's General Editor. In 2000, he co-founded dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing

After a brief period studying physics in his native Germany, Bruns’ research focus changed to Media and Cultural studies. He completed a PhD at the University of Queensland in 2002 that analysed the emerging Website genre of Resource Centre Sites such as indymedia and Slashdot. Bruns found that ‘Resource Centre Site produsers engage in an adaptation of both traditional journalistic gatekeeping methodologies and librarianly resource collection approaches to the Web environment: in the absence of gates to keep online, they have become 'gatewatchers', observing the publication of news and information in other sources and publicising its existence through their own sites.’

His findings in this formulative thesis have spurred much of his further research into the online media field, including two of his key concepts, Produsage and Gatewatching. Bruns is an expert on the impact of user-led content creation in the fields of produsers and produsage, blogging, gatewatching and citizen journalism and learning and teaching in the digital age. 'His current work focuses especially on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter in the context of acute events.'

Bruns draws on the works of scholars from a number of different fields. Produsage has evolved out of Yochai Benkler's work in commons based peer-production, which Benkler has described as ‘the emergence of a new information environment, one in which individuals are free to take a more active role than was possible in the industrial information economy of the twentieth century.’ Bruns offers the concept of produsers as re-development on Alvin Toffler’s ideas of the prosumer, he believes Toffler's definition of the prosumer is ‘anything but the active, content‐creating, self-directed individual whom we may encounter in the produsage community…they merely consume commercial products rather than actively contributing their own ideas.’

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