Axel Bruns (born 1970) is a German-Australian
media scholar
Media studies is a discipline (academia), discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media (communication), media; in particular, the mass media. Media studies may draw on traditions from both the ...
. He is a Professor of Communication and Media Studies at
QUT Digital Media Research Centre,
Queensland University of Technology
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a public university, public research university located in the city of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. It has two major campuses, a modern city campus in Gardens Point, Brisbane, Gardens Point ...
in
Brisbane
Brisbane ( ; ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and largest city of the States and territories of Australia, state of Queensland and the list of cities in Australia by population, third-most populous city in Australia, with a ...
, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
Career
Bruns is the author of ''
Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage'' (2008) and ''Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production'' (2005).
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/Cs 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
The Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, is an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that report on political and social issues. Following beginnings during the 1999 Carnival Against Capital and 1999 Seat ...
and
Slashdot
''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...
. 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
Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...
in the context of acute events.'
Bruns was elected a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities
The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia. It operates as an independent not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the Australi ...
in 2023.
Influences
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
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...
, 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."
Bruns' development of gatewatching theory comes out of the work of
Herbert Gans
Herbert Julius Gans (May 7, 1927 – April 21, 2025) was a German-born American sociologist who taught at Columbia University from 1971 to 2007.
One of the most prolific and influential sociologists of his generation, Gans came to America in 19 ...
and his ideas on "multiperspectiviality". He believes that the plurality of media forms currently available may allow for the realization of a Gansian mediasphere. "It is possible to suggest, however, that the news, and the news media, be multiperspectival, presenting and representing as many perspectives as possible – and at the very least, more than today."
Bruns' contemporaries and influences in the fields of citizen journalism, produsage and gatewatching include:
Henry Jenkins
Henry Guy Jenkins III (born June 4, 1958) is an American media scholar and Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School for Communicatio ...
,
Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler ( ; born 1964) is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Univers ...
,
Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky (born 1964) is an American pundit, writer, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism.
In 2017 he was appointed Vice Provost of Educational Technologies of New York University (NYU), aft ...
,
J.D. Lasica,
Alfred Hermida
Alfred Hermida is a British-Canadian digital media scholar, and journalism educator. He is a Full Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, Writing, and Media, where hserved as directorfor five and a half years (June 2 ...
. Jack Lule, Graham Meikle amongst a host of other
new media and
online media
In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic ...
scholars.
Produsage
Bruns' research into user-led content production, or produsage, investigates the "changed content production value chain model in collaborative online environments: in these environments, a strict producer/consumer dichotomy no longer applies – instead, users are almost always also able to be producers of content, and often necessarily so in the very act of using it."
He identifies four key characteristics of these online environments:
[Bruns, Axel (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang]
* User Led Content Production
* Collaborative Engagement
* Palimpsestic, Iterative, Evolutionary Development
* Alternative Approaches to Intellectual Property
* Heterachichal, Permeable Community Structures
Bibliography
* Axel Bruns. Gatewatching and news curation: Journalism, social media, and the public sphere. New York: Peter Lang, 2018.
* Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
* John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns, eds. A Companion to New Media Dynamics. London: Blackwell, 2013.
* Axel Bruns. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
* Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs, eds. Uses of Blogs. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
* Axel Bruns. Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bruns, Axel
1970 births
Living people
Place of birth missing (living people)
Australian mass media scholars
German mass media scholars
German emigrants to Australia
Academic staff of Queensland University of Technology
Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities