Nathan Jurgenson

Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’

This article deals with the rise of prosumer capitalism. Prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption). It is maintained that earlier forms of capitalism (producer and consumer capitalism) were themselves characterized by prosumption. Given the recent explosion of user-generated content online, we have reason to see prosumption as increasingly central. In prosumer capitalism, control and exploitation take on a different character than in the other forms of capitalism: there is a trend toward unpaid rather than paid labor and toward offering products at no cost, and the system is marked by a new abundance where scarcity once predominated. These trends suggest the possibility of a new, prosumer, capitalism.

The Coming of Age of the Prosumer

This essay provides an introduction to prosumption, the topic of this special double issue of American Behavioral Scientist. The term prosumption was coined by Alvin Toffler in 1980 and refers to a combination of production and consumption. In this introduction, the authors first argue that prosumption is not new but is actually primordial. Many scholars have dealt with the issue, at least implicitly, but only recently have they begun to deal with it explicitly as prosumption. Prosumption has always existed, but various social changes (e.g., the rise of the Internet and of social networking on it) have greatly expanded both the practice of prosumption and scholarly attention to it. Prosumption has its most obvious and direct relevance to the economy. As a result, the authors also frame it in terms of contemporary capitalism. Finally, they offer a brief overview of the articles in the double issue, included under the headings Theoretical Contributions to the Concept of Prosumption, The Role of Prosumption in Politics, and Meaning Making Within Prosumption.

Context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions

The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into context collusions and context collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts.

COMMENT ON SARAH FORD'S ‘RECONCEPTUALIZATION OF PRIVACY AND PUBLICITY’

Sarah Fords recent article, ‘Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology’ demonstrates how social media shifts our understanding of privacy and publicity and proposes a continuum model instead of a simple dichotomy. In this commentary, we argue that Fords proposed model does not go far enough to break down the problematic dichotomous thinking and propose a further reconceptualization of privacy and publicity as a dialectic.

Produzione, consumo, prosumerismo: la natura del capitalismo nell’era del "prosumer" digitale

Questo articolo affronta il tema del capitalismo del prosumer. Il prosumerismo coinvolge sia la produzione che il consumo anziche che concentrarsi soltanto su un singolo aspetto. Le prime forme di capitalismo (della produzione e del consumo) sono state a loro volta contraddistinte da forme di prosumerismo. Considerando la recente esplosione dell’user-generated content online, abbiamo ragione di considerare come le forme di prosumerismo siano sempre piu rilevanti. Nel capitalismo dei prosumer, il controllo e lo sfruttamento assumono forme diverse rispetto a quelle del capitalismo tradizionale: c’e una tendenza verso il lavoro non retribuito, piuttosto che quello salariato e verso un’offerta di prodotti a costo zero e il sistema e caratterizzato dall’abbondanza piuttosto che dalla scarsita. Queste tendenze fanno pensare a un nuovo tipo capitalismo, quello dei prosumer.