Prof Axel Bruns

Chief Investigator, Future Fellow

Doctor of Philosophy (University of Queensland)

Dr Axel Bruns is a Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and was a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi). He is the President of the Association of Internet Researchers. Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of Twitter and Society (2014), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012) and Uses of Blogs (2006). Bruns is an expert on the impact of user-led content creation, or produsage, and his current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, especially in the context of acute events. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more details on his current social media research. Bruns has coined the term produsage to better describe the current paradigm shift towards user-led forms of collaborative content creation which are proving to have an increasing impact on media, economy, law, social practices, and democracy itself. Produsage provides a new approach to conceptualising these phenomena by avoiding the traditional assumptions associated with industrial-age production models. His study of these environments builds on his work in the area of participatory or citizen journalism and blogging. For more information about produsage, see Produsage.org. 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. Bruns has served as an Executive Member in the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and as a Project Leader in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. He is a member of the editorial boards of Information, Communication & Society, New Media & Society, and Digital Journalism, amongst others. He also publishes a column on social media at The Conversation. Bruns’s main research interests are in social media, ‘big data’ research methods, produsage, citizen journalism, and online communities.

Projects

• Amplifying public value: Scholarly contributions' impact on public debate
• ARC Centre of Excellence - Australian Creative Innovation System
• Emergent music engagement practices via SoundCloud
• Journalism beyond the crisis: Emerging forms, practices and uses
• Music usage metrics and the future of the Australian music industry
• New media and public communication: Mapping Australian user-created content in online social networks
• Social media and agenda-setting in election campaigns
• Social media in times of crisis: learning from recent natural disasters to improve future strategies
• TrISMA - Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis
• Understanding intermedia information flows in the Australian online public sphere

Additional information