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Crowdsourcing and Prosumption
One recent example of crowdsourcing- found on the travel search site Flightfox- points up the close relationship between crowdsourcing and prosumption. While some members of Flightfox’s “crowd” of 900...
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No, No, Corporations are Responsible for Increasing Prosumption and Growing...
While people, in the role as prosumers, certainly are a cause of unemployment, focusing only, or even mainly, on their role in this is a form of “blaming the victim”. The fact is that it is various...
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You, Yes You, Cause Unemployment
As a prosumer (one who more-or-less simultaneously produces and consumes), you cause others to lose their jobs- or not to get one in the first place- when you bus your own trash at McDonald’s, cart...
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A More Satisfying, Less Alienating, Future for “Makers”?
In his analysis of the makers, Anderson is focused not only on production, but also on saving American capitalism through a new class of maker-entrepreneurs. As a result, he ignores some of the other...
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“Makers” are Better Seen as Prosumers
Chris Anderson’s Makers: The New Industrial Revolution reveals its productivist bias in both its title and subtitle. Makers is, of course, a term that is synonymous with producers. The Industrial...
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Postmodern Theory and Internet
Our understanding of the Internet, social networking, and the role of the prosumer in them is greatly enhanced by analyzing them through the lens of a number of ideas associated with postmodern theory....
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Exploiting the Makers
The increase in the number of makers is enabled by the fact that many people have an array of largely untapped skills; they are part of what Anderson calls the “long tail of talent” (127). New...
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Using Games to Motivate Makers
Allowing and even using games to motivate paid workers has a long tradition (see Donald Roy’s [1960] famous paper on “banana time”). Such games are used to motivate poorly paid workers to continue to...
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Makers: The Promise of “Something” Rather than “Nothing”
In the Globalization of Nothing2 I have distinguished between nothing and something. Nothing is any social form, in this case a product (such as a Big Mac or an IKEA book case), that is centrally...
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Are You a Digital Drone?
George Ritzer, Introduction to Sociology. Sage, 2013. Chapter 16, Pages 666-667 Are You a Digital Drone? Most people, especially young people, view the Internet as a “playground” and much of what they...
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The Rise of the Prosuming Machines
The Decline of the Prosumer and the Rise of Smart Prosuming Machines The concepts of prosumption (the interrelated process of consumption and production) and the prosumer were introduced by Alvin...
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The Resilience of Capitalism and the Demise of the Sharing Economy?
Many observers, especially Alvin Toffler and, more recently, Jeremy Rifkin, have seen the rise of the prosumer and of the sharing economy (or the “collaborative commons”) as harbingers of a hoped for...
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Prosuming Machines and the Internet of Things
Many prosuming machines interconnect, and will do so more and more, on what has been termed the Internet of Things (IoT). A recent Pew Research Center Report sees IoT as encompassing a wide range of...
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Customer Service or Disservice?
Consumer Reports (September, 2014) offered a revealing analysis of the accelerating trend toward customer self-service, or one aspect of what, in my terms, is “prosumption as consumption”. Customers...
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E-Games and Prosumption
People have long played e- (or virtual) games, especially those involving many players. They have traditionally consumed multi-player games by buying them and by observing the actions of others...
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The “Sharing” Economy, Uber, and the Triumph of Neo-Liberalism
Ride-sharing is a form of prosumption- those who are using (consuming) their cars provide (produce) rides for those in need of them. Ride-sharing can also be seen as part of the sharing (of cars in...
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The Selfie as a Form of Prosumption
As is the case with most recent forms of prosumption, the selfie is made possible by a series of technological innovations including cellphones, their front-facing cameras, the computer and the...
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“Shadow Work” and Prosumption
Shadow work is defined by Craig Lambert (Shadow Work, Counterpoint, 2015) as “all of the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations” and as work we do “outside our jobs” and...
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Snap’s Spectacles: Another Small Advance in the Development “Prosuming Machines”
In 2015 I published an article in the Journal of Consumer Culture on prosuming machines. Snapchat’s sunglasses fitted with a camera (“Spectacles”) are such a machine. They enter a market that was...
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Amazon.Go: New Heights of McDonaldization
Not that I can take any credit for it, but Amazon has unwittingly managed to wrap up much of what I have been thinking and writing about for the last three decades in one nice little material world...
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