Prosumption

Prosumption, according to George Ritzer and Nathan Jurgenson, involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). Prosumption involves the blurring of production and consumption. The prosumer is one who consumes that which one produces and/or produces that which one consumes.

The term can be credited to Alvin Toffler, who discusses “the rise of the prosumer” (1980, 265) in his book The Third Wave. Recently, the term and the ideas associated with it (such as “cocreation,” “peer-production,” “wikinomics”) have received much attention. While prosumption is a contemporary term, it would be a mistake to view the blurring of production and consumption as something that has occurred only recently. For example, peasants on preindustrial farms often produced that which they consumed. Toffler and Ritzer argue that the Industrial Revolution divided production and consumption into separate spheres.

Many examples of prosumption can be given. Toffler discusses prosumption with respect to the do-it-yourself (DIY) industry where consumers self-assemble and repair goods on their own. Toffler also discusses the rise of the self-help phenomenon as well as the trend toward self-service in electronic banking and grocery stores—all fueling his view that consumers are increasingly active producers. Since Toffler's writings, there has been a proliferation of ATMs, self-checkouts at grocery stores, and electronic kiosks in hotels, movie theaters, airports, and so on. Colin Campbell wrote about the productive “craft consumer,” and Ritzer (1996) discusses how McDonaldization often means “putting customers to work.”

Another example is of market research, which looks to individuals to help produce the products that they consume (for example, Adam Arvidsson discusses how consumers produce brands). In the realm of media, it can be noted that the popularity of reality TV (e.g., American Idol), amateur pornography (e.g., Girls Gone Wild), “citizen journalism” (e.g., Cable News Network's [CNN's] iReport) and user-created television (e.g., Current TV) all indicate that consumers are increasingly also producers of the content they consume.

Today, it is the explosion of user-generated content online that has made prosumption, as a concept, increasingly relevant. The “user-generated Web”—what has come to be known as Web 2.0—marks a massive proliferation of simultaneous production and consumption. Examples include the fact that consumers are also the collaborative producers of the operating system Linux; web browsers, such as Mozilla Firefox; and other open source software. Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia, is collaboratively produced by those who consume it. The same can be said of the reviews of products on http://Amazon.com and on http://Yelp.com about shops, restaurants, bars, and so on. Social networking sites (SNS), such as MySpace and Facebook, are largely created by the users who consume them, as are blogs and the blogosphere (including the microblogging tool, Twitter). Online digital environments, such as Second Life and to a lesser extent World of Warcraft, are created by those who consume them. This also holds true for the markets on eBay and craigslist and the media on sites such as YouTube and Flickr.

This expansion of prosumption online signals the great relevance of this concept and its potential applications. The concept can be applied usefully when focusing more on consumption than production and vice versa. Thus, Ritzer (2009) argues that prosumption should be seen as a continuum where pure prosumption is the midpoint between pure consumption and pure production. Ritzer also differentiates between the producer as consumer and the consumer as producer. For example, consumers can also, in part, produce a product's design and market and determine how it is used. Consumers can also produce themselves and their identities in the process of consumption (what Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus call “immaterial labor 2.0”). Producers consume raw materials in the production process, and many workers consume their identities and selves while on the job.

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