“Prosumer”

The concept of the “prosumer” fuses the practices of production and consumption and recognizes that individuals often perform both roles simultaneously. Those who produce also consume (e.g., raw materials or labor). Those who are primarily consumers are also engaged in acts of production (the creation of brand meaning and performing [Page 718]tasks within ever-increasing structures that put the consumer to work: self-checkouts, product ratings, the creation of customer data, etc.). Although the term prosumer itself is not new—it was coined by the American futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980—it has become the subject of increasing academic and popular interest, particularly in the world of Web 2.0.

An attendee at the seventh annual international Wikimania Conference in Haifa, Israel, demonstrates devotion to a favorite Internet realm, August 6, 2011. Axel Bruns, who studies aspects of Web 2.0 such as blogs, citizen journalism, Wikipedia, and social networking, defines “produsers” as those Internet users who engage with Web sites as consumers and producers, often in both roles simultaneously. In the immaterial worlds of Web 2.0, it is difficult to distinguish between producers and consumers.

The prosumer phenomenon is also connected to a number of related terms and ideas from a variety of disciplines, such as “value co-creation,” coined by business professors C. K. Prahalad and Venket Ramaswamy; the “service-dominant logic of marketing” of marketing professors Stephen L. Vargo and Robert F. Lusch; “wikinomics,” based in least in part on the idea that businesses put consumers to work on the Internet by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams; DIY (do it yourself) as examined by sociologists Elizabeth Watson and Matthew Shove; craft consumption, as studied by sociologist Colin Campbell; the collapse of consumption into the realm of production, written about by business professors Detlev Zwick and Janice Denegri-Knott; media theorist Dan Laughey's “productive consumption”; and the notion of the “produser,” created by media and cultural studies scholar Axel Bruns. The intensifying interest in prosumption and the variety of efforts to define and label it indicate the general concept's pervasive influence and application across many facets of both the economy and social life.