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DOI: 10.1177/0002764211429368
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George Ritzer, Paul Dean and Nathan Jurgenson
The Coming of Age of the Prosumer

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American Behavioral Scientist
56(4) 379 398
2012 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0002764211429368
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8ABS56410.1177/0002764211429368Ritzer et al.American Behavioral Scientist
1
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Corresponding Author:
George Ritzer, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, 2112 Art-Socy Building, College Park,
MD 20742
Email: gritzer@umd.edu
The Coming of Age
of the Prosumer
George Ritzer
1
, Paul Dean
1
, and Nathan Jurgenson
1
Abstract
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.
Keywords
prosumption, production, consumption, social media, Web 2.0
The concepts of the prosumer, one who is both producer and consumer, and of pro-
sumption, involving a combination of production and consumption, are certainly not
new. They were implied in earlier work such as that of Karl Marx and later by scholars
such as McLuhan and Nevitt, who wrote about the process by which the consumer
becomes producer (Nevitt, 1972, p. 4). However, the terms themselves were created
by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1980. Over the ensuing two decades, some attention
was devoted to these ideas (e.g., Kotler, 1986), but they certainly did not become
Introduction
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380 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
hot. However, the 21st century has witnessed a boom in interest in, and work on, the
prosumer and the process of prosumption, as well as in closely related ideas such as
value co-creation (Humphreys & Grayson, 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2002,
2004a, 2004b; Zwick, Bonsu, & Darmody, 2008); pro-am (Leadbetter & Miller,
2004); the service-dominant logic of marketing (Lusch & Vargo, 2006);
wikinomics, based at least in part on the idea that businesses put consumers to work
on the Internet (Tapscott & Williams, 2006) and do-it-yourself (Watson & Shove, 2008);
craft consumption (Campbell, 2005); the complete collapse of consumption into pro-
duction (Zwick & Knott, 2009); productive consumption (Laughey, 2010); and
Axel Brunss (2008) concept of the produser. This double issue of American Behav-
ioral Scientist is both a reflection of this growing interest and an attempt to stimulate
still greater interest in, and work on, these important phenomena. More important, it
involves an effort to increase our understanding of the prosumer and the process of
prosumption.
When he first invented the term, Alvin Toffler (1980) wrote about the rise of the
prosumer, and over a decade and half later, Philip Kotler (1986) summarized and
built upon Tofflers ideas using the notion of a prosumer movement. Another decade
later, Toffler and Toffler (2006) wrote of the coming prosumer explosion. A few
years after that, George Ritzer (2009) began writing about the age of the prosumer.
Toffler, at least in his initial work, and Kotler were clearly ahead of their time in pro-
claiming the rise of the prosumer movement, but could it be that Ritzer, too, was pre-
mature in declaring that we have now witnessed, as the title of this introduction
indicates, the coming of age of the prosumer? Not only does the expansion of work
on this topic in the last few years (e.g., Beer & Burrows, 2007; Blttel-Mink &
Hellman, 2010; Cole, 2011; Collins, 2010; Comor, 2011; Humphreys & Grayson,
2008; Ritzer, 2010; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) indicate that the declaration is timely
but also that Toffler and Kotler were not only perspicacious but prescient in anticipat-
ing this development decades before its current boom.
The main issue addressed in this introduction is the reasons for the recent explosion
in academic interest in this topic. However, before we get to that, two other issues need
to be discussed. First, as pointed out above, many scholars have dealt with this phe-
nomenon in the past without labeling it prosumption. Second, the phenomenon itself
is not new but is arguably primordial; in fact, it may well be more primordial than
either production or consumption (Ritzer, 2010). That is, humans are by their very
nature prosumers (e.g., those in hunting and gathering societies are best thought of as
prosumers), and the existence of largely separable producers and consumers is, at best,
a historical anomaly. That is, it may be that there were good reasons to contend that
factory workers in the heyday of the Industrial Revolution could be thought of as pro-
ducers, and shoppers in the United States in the 1970s as consumers, but such thinking
is embedded in, and limited to, specific historical circumstances.
At a conference in Frankfurt, Germany, on the prosumer and in a later essay pub-
lished in a book based on the conference, Ritzer (2010) argued that both scholars and
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Ritzer et al. 381
laypeople have made, and continue to make, a historical error in focusing on either
production or consumption in the economy. A related error is the propensity to clearly
distinguish between them, to treat production and consumption as a binary. Nonetheless,
many social theorists have committed and continue to commit these errors.
There were good historical and intellectual reasons for erroneous dualistic concep-
tions of production and consumption. Production was predominant in the classical
period of the social sciences, and it made sense for social theorists such as Adam
Smith and Karl Marx to focus on it. By the late 20th century, consumption, especially
in the developed world, had become more prominent, arguably even dominant (70%,
or more, of the U.S. economy was accounted for, at least until the current recession,
by consumption), and theorists (most notably, Baudrillard, 1970/1998; Bell, 1976;
Galbraith, 1958/1999) came to focus on it rather than production. However, in both
periods there was a tendency on the part of theorists to ignore the fact that production
always also involved consumption, and conversely, consumption always involved
production. In other words, prosumption has always been involved in both production
and consumption, whichever one happens to predominate at any given point in history.
It may well be that instead of shifting their focus from production to consumption,
social theorists should have always focused on prosumption. With such a focus, we
would have had a more sensitive indicator of how much the economy was shifting
toward either the production or the consumption end of a productionconsumption
continuum (in the middle of the continuum, production and consumption are more or
less evenly balanced: pure prosumption).
It is important to note, however, that the major classical and contemporary theorists
sometime took positions consistent with the idea of the prosumer. Marx, for example,
is generally regarded as the theorist of production, especially industrial production in
the early days of capitalism, but he clearly understood that production and consump-
tion were inevitably, inherently, and dialectically interrelated. For example, he recog-
nized that the means of production, especially raw materials and labor-time, were
consumed in the process of production. He also understood that people alternated
between being sellers (producers) and buyers (consumers). More generally, his dialec-
tical orientation mitigated against dichotomous thinking in general, including the
productionconsumption dichotomy. Many years following Marx, our attention has
once again returned to such processes.
Social Changes and the Coming of Age of the
Prosumer
In the contemporary era, a number of social changes have greatly expanded both the
practice of prosumption and theorists attention to it. First, there is the general decline
in the developed world, especially the United States, in the importance of what we
traditionally think of as production (e.g., material labor in the factory). This has led,
among many other things, to a greater willingness to question the hegemony of the
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382 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
idea of production; we are no longer accepting a productivist bias. Instead, scholars
have recognized that the economies of the developed world have come to be more
dominated by consumption.
Baudrillard is among the most important contemporary theorists of relevance in
theorizing consumption. In his early, heavily Marxist work, Baudrillard accorded
priority to production. Later, he made a notable shift to a focus on consumption
(Baudrillard, 1970/1998). However, still later he came to see the distinction between
production and consumption as an artificial disjuncture (Baudrillard, 1976/1993,
p. 112); in other words, he moved in the direction of thinking in terms of prosumption
rather than either production or consumption.
The intellectual shift that opened greater theoretical space for more serious consid-
eration of both consumption and prosumption was heavily influenced by postmod-
ernism (Firat & Venkatesh, 1995). For example, Pietrykowski (2007) argues that
postmodern theory seeks to destabilize the division in modern economics between
separate spheres of consumption and production (p. 262). More generally, postmod-
ernists are opposed to all modern binaries and are interested in destabilizing them.
While it would be useful to examine academic and theoretical reasons for such inter-
est, our focus here will be on the impact of various social changes on the increasing
propensity to think in terms of prosumption rather than production and consumption
(or closely aligned ideas).
Second, much of the production that occurs is less material and more immaterial,
and it is happening throughout society rather than only in designated settings such as
factories (Hardt & Negri, 2000). One group of contemporary Marxian theoriststhe
autonomist Marxistshave developed a perspective that offers a more integrative
sense of the producer-consumer, albeit without using the term prosumer. This thinking
has its origin in the fact that much production has moved outside of the walls of the
factory and into society as a whole, creating the social factory or a factory without
walls (Negri, 1989). This has been made possible by the fact that a great deal of pro-
duction now involves little or no material labor (Lazzarato, 1996). Instead, we now see
more and more immaterial production. The actual material production of cars by auto-
mobile workers is now of less importance than the immaterial production of ideas to
improve the manufacturing, marketing, or design of the product by those (especially
Reichs [1991] symbolic analysts) who work in and around the automobile industry.
More generally, there are now many industries (software, marketing, and advertising)
that are primarily about the production of ideas. Since immaterial production takes
place in the realm of ideas, and these ideas are part of what is called the general intel-
lect, it becomes increasingly possible (although, as pointed out above, it always was)
for consumers to draw on this general fund of knowledge and information. As they
draw uponor consumethis knowledge, they produce and further contribute to it.
For example, the open-source movement involves the production of computer soft-
ware (e.g., Linux, Firefox) by those who use the software. In addition, consumers have
increasingly been asked to provide ideas for advertisements, and some of them have
been adopted by producers.
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Ritzer et al. 383
This process is also clear in the case of brands where consumers play a major role
in producing the shared meanings that are the brand; they do not simply accept the
brand messages created by marketers and advertisers. Thus, in a real sense, prosumers
produce the meaning that surrounds brands such as McDonalds, BMW, and Nike.
Arvidsson (2005) refers to these prosumer (although he doesnt use this term) cre-
ations as an ethical surplus or as a social relation, a shared meaning, an emotional
involvement that was not there before (p. 237). In the case of brands, that ethical
surplus can involve brand communities (a social relation; see Muniz & OGuinn,
2001), the shared meaning associated with a given brand, and the emotional involve-
ment with a brand (or brand community). In this view, such an ethical surplus cannot
be produced by marketers and imposed by them on prosumers; it must be created by
the prosumers. Not only do they create this surplus free of charge (in a sense, their
labor is free), but they do it free of the direct control of capitalists (they are relatively
autonomous; hence the term autonomous Marxists). However, this process goes far
beyond brands and involves, for example, creating such things as the shared experi-
ence of Starbucks and the trust that exists on eBay (Arvidsson, 2005, 2006; Zwick &
Knott, 2012 [this issue]).
As we will see below, perhaps the ultimate social factories are the Web 2.0 sites
where prosumers simultaneously consume and produce ideas on, for example, wikis,
blogs (Benkler & Shaw, 2012 [this issue]; Chia, 2012 [this issue]) and social network-
ing sites (Dean, n.d.). From a Marxist perspective, capitalist systems are able to extract
value from the unpaid material labor of the prosumers on Web 2.0 sites and elsewhere
(e.g., in the creation of brand meaning). In the view of some, they are able to exploit
consumers and in the process earn even greater profits than they would from the
exploitation of workers (Fuchs, 2010; Rey, 2012 [this issue]; Ritzer & Jurgenson
2010). After all, even the lowest paid workers are paid something; many prosumers
work without any financial compensation.
Third, the rise of the service industries made it much easier to see the limitations of
the distinction between production and consumption. McDonalds, for example, has
long been a leader in turning consumers into prosumers or, as Ritzer (1993/2011) put
it earlier, in putting customers to work. This was accomplished by, for example,
eliminating employees (e.g., waiters, most buspersons). This forced customers to work
by standing in line to order their food and carry it to their tables. The advent of touch
screens in some fast-food restaurants is the latestbut certainly not the laststep in
leading McDonalds customers to do work formerly performed by employees.
Customers have also been led to bus their own garbage after their meals are finished.
Following the advent of the drive-through window, customers took their garbage-to-
be with them to be disposed of on their own.
Of course, McDonalds had predecessors (cafeterias, supermarkets) that did some
of the same, or at least very similar, things. For example, cafeterias, most famously the
Automat (Hardart & Diehl, 2002) in New York City, employed no waiters or wait-
resses to take orders and to bring food to the table. Instead, customers had to line up
with their trays on a kind of assembly line in order to pick up their food as they passed
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384 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
by a series of stations where various types of food were available and were doled out
to them by employees along the line. A cashier awaited them at the end of line, and it
was there the diner paid for the accumulated food. Even more extremely, the Automat
had not only such a cafeteria line but also a wall of coin-operated compartments where
customers simultaneously chose, paid for, and picked up desired food items. When
they were finished with their meals, the customers at the Automat, indeed in all cafete-
rias, were expected (although not to the degree that they are expected to in todays
fast-food restaurants) to clear their tables and bus their own dishes; that is, they pro-
duced much of their own consumption experience. While cafeterias were important,
they never had the impact either in the United States or globally of fast-food restau-
rants or McDonalds. Hence, the prosumer in the fast-food industry has been far more
widespread and influential than it was in the cafeteria.
Supermarkets also were involved in this process long before fast-food restaurants
(Randall & Seth, 2011), and they, unlike cafeterias, have had a national and global
impact to rival that of fast-food restaurants. Prior to the advent of the modern super-
market in the early 20th century, grocers, greengrocers, butchers, and the like did the
work of obtaining the foodstuffs ordered by customers. A grocer, for example, would
take an order, perhaps even one item at a time, and wander about the store gathering
the requested items. Now, of course, in the age of the supermarket, consumers do
much of the productive work performed in the past by such workers by obtaining their
own groceries, fruits and vegetables, and meat. Rather than, say, the grocer filling a
grocery list, consumers gatherproducethe cart full of food that they intend to
purchase and ultimately consume. However, productive work in the supermarket no
longer ends there. Consumers are increasingly likely to encounter self-checkout lanes
where further productive work is required of them, including unloading their baskets,
scanning each item, inserting a credit card or cash to pay for their order, bagging their
own food, and carting it to and loading it in their cars.
The fourth social change facilitating the rise of the prosumer is that we increasingly
live in an experience economy (Pine & Gilmore, 2011). That is, rather than material
goods, it is the largely immaterial experiences involved in various aspects of our lives,
especially as they relate to the economy (and including consumption), that are of great
and increasing importance. While we do live in a world where others are creating
canned experiences for us (in Hollywood, Disney, Las Vegas, etc.), even in those set-
tings, let alone in much less tightly controlled and structured ones, consumers play a
crucial and active role in producing their own experiences (examples in this issue
include Burning Man [Chen], the art world [Nakajima], and online commemoration
[Recuber]). More generally, when we carefully reflect on experiences, either todays
experiences or those in the past, we realize that they always involved both production
and consumption. Thus, when we eat (consume) a meal, at home or in a restaurant, we
are simultaneously manufacturing (producing) the experience of that meal. To take
another, more contemporary and less universal example, when we wander through a
prefabricated world produced for us by, for example, Disney World, we are simultane-
ously consuming the experiences that the Disney imagineers want us to have and
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Ritzer et al. 385
producing our own unique experiences out of the realities before us as well as out of
our unique histories and present realities. While the experience economy may be
something new, we have always had such experiences and they have always been the
product of a combination of production and consumption. In the case of experiences,
there is no need for implosion of production and consumption since they did, and do,
always involve both. Furthermore, such experiences are always immaterial and are
therefore passed on much more easily from producers to consumers (assuming we can
really differentiate between them).
Fifth, the earlier discussion of self-checkout lanes reminds us of the role of techno-
logical change in the increasing importance of the prosumer. Before this particular
technological development, workers had to perform various tasks for consumers at the
checkout lane. Now, prosumers do almost all of the work themselves. Many of the
workers who remainand there are far fewer of themno longer perform much
material labor but engage in such immaterial labor as advising prosumers on how to
use the still-new technology and to help them with any problems that arise. Similar
technological developments that rely on prosumers are ATM machines and self-check-
in kiosks at airports, movie theaters, hotels, and elsewhere. A key to many of these
technologies is another technologythe credit (and debit) card (Manning, 2000; Marron,
2009; Ritzer, 1995).
Sixth, although it has been touched on already, an absolutely crucial technological
change that needs to be highlighted separately is the increasing importance of the
computer and the Internet for the process of prosumption (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010).
With no workers immediately present on Internet sites, and it being very difficult, or
impossible, to reach them by telephone, it is left to prosumers on the Internet to do all
of the largely immaterial work needed to find a product (say, a book on Amazon.com),
evaluate it (and perhaps write a review of it), order it, and pay for it with, of course, a
credit card (or through a PayPal account). As more and more traditional consumption
shifts to the Internet, where it is difficult or impossible to find traditional workers, it is
increasingly clear that prosumption is what defines much of the Internet.
Prosumption on the Internet has increasingly occurred through user-generated con-
tent on what has become known as Web 2.0 (in Web 1.0, such as AOL or Yahoo,
content is generated by the producer, leaving little room for prosumption). Web 2.0
includes the social web with sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the blogosphere,
Wikipedia, content-sharing sites such as Flickr and You Tube, and much else where
users not only consume but also produce content. It is in the immaterial worlds of Web
2.0 that it is hardest to distinguish between producers and consumers, where the hege-
mony of prosumers is clearest.
This point is demonstrated by the proliferation of a digital Twitter backchannel at
conferences and events occurring in physical space. At these events, there are speakers
producing talks and there is an audience consuming (in this case, listening to)
them in the traditional sense. The audience simultaneously engages in such productive
behavior as taking notes on the talks (reflecting once again the fact that consumers are
always also producers). However, today, many members of the audience no longer
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386 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
simply consume the talk or produce notes in the traditional manner but also produce
almost simultaneous messages on Twittertweetsabout what is being said (in, of
course, Twitters 140 characters or less). In many ways, what the audience produces in
the form of tweets is more important than the talk being consumed since those tweets
appear instantly on the Web. There, members of a global audience, potentially much
larger than the one physically at the conference, not only consume those tweets but
produce their own tweets in response. Technology has underscored and furthered this
reality in various ways, showing us that the conference audience is not only consumers
(of the talks) or producers (of their tweets) but prosumers who simultaneously con-
sume the lectures and produce their own digital content.
Seventh, the significance of the experience economy and of technological change
in the process of prosumption is very clear in the realm of the media (see, in this issue,
Benkler & Shaw, 2012; Cheong & Lundry, 2012). In fact, a significant amount of
the work on the concept of prosumption deals with its role in the media. The most
notable example of this is Brunss (2008) work on the produser, which is derived from
cultural studies and, in his view, provides a more activea more productiverole for
the consumer (or interpreter) of media. This involves a long-term rejection in media
studies of the audience as a passive consumer of the largely immaterial content pro-
duced by the media and those who work for it and the idea that the audience is always
actively involved in the prosumption of media.
Although the idea of the prosumer has its most obvious relevance to the economy,
the fact is, as evidenced by the abundant work on the media and the prosumer, that the
concept has far broader applicability. That is demonstrated in this special issue by
work on political prosumption (Benkler & Shaw, 2012; Hershkovitz, 2012) and the
prosumption of identity (Davis, 2012) and art (Nakajima, 2012).
Prosumers and Capitalism
Those who prosume on the Internet, especially Web 2.0, are very attractive to capital-
ists. This is the case for a long list of reasons. Most, if not all, Web 2.0 sites could not
function, or at least could not function in the same way, without prosumers.
Crowdsourcing is essential to the success of many Web 2.0 sites (Howe, 2009). In
some cases, sites could not exist without the work done by a crowd of prosumers.
Theoretically, a site could hire enough workers to do the work, but the labor costs
would be prohibitive. This is especially the case for nonprofit projects such as
Wikipedia. Its enormous and ever-expanding entries in a variety of languages could
not be created and constantly revised and updated without input from large numbers
of unpaid prosumers. Since it is a nonprofit, it can only afford to hire relatively few
workers; the site itself would cease to exist without the input from unpaid prosumers.
This is also the case, albeit to a lesser degree, for profit-making websites. While we
could conceive of something like Wikipedia existing with paid contributors, it would
then be closer to a conventional encyclopedia or dictionary; it would no longer be a
prosumer site or an example of Web 2.0 defined by user-generated content (another
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Ritzer et al. 387
way of saying prosumption). Then, there is the important and dramatic rise of social
media; sites such as Facebook and Twitter simply could not exist without prosumers
(see Woermann, 2012 [this issue]). Although paid employees perform many tasks
associated with constructing and maintaining these sites, the production of things like
updated statuses, posted comments, uploaded photos, and tweets would not occur
were it not for the collaborative actions of prosumers. It is literally impossible to think
of paid employees doing these things. Similarly, although Google has a large number
of paid employees, its major source of profit is prosumers, not consumers. In the main,
people do not pay for Google products (e.g., Gmail, Google maps). Rather, Googles
profits come from selling information on its users to advertisers, and it is the prosum-
ers of Google who produce the hits that create the data of interest to advertisers (see
Zwick & Knott, 2009, on using the databases derived from the input of prosumers in
order to earn profits and on databases as the factories of the 21st century); it is incon-
ceivable that paid employees could produce such data. Many prosumers would balk
at being paid for their hits, and in any case, even Google could not possibly afford the
costs involved.
While workers are almost always thought of as unhappy and consumers are at least
sometimes thought of in this way, we almost always think of prosumers (e.g., Facebook
users) as being quite happy with their lot. Does this mean that they are not controlled,
alienated, and exploited? On the one hand, since they combine production and con-
sumption, we can think of prosumers as doubly controlled, more alienated, and
infinitely exploited (Fuchs, 2010). On the other hand, we can think of all of these
things as being moderated in the realm of prosumption. Even more optimistically,
prosumption could be seen as combining the best of production (the power associated
with being a producer) and consumption (the joys of being a consumer) and as being
free of external control and not being subject to alienation and exploitation (Chia,
2012). We need a better understanding of where the prosumer stands relative to the
producer and consumer in terms of control, alienation, and exploitation.
Most prosumers, online and off-line, often seem quite happy about prosuming; fur-
ther, it is quite clear that not only do they gain emotionally but they also gain in a wide
variety of quite material ways. To begin with, some (e.g., a small percentage of blog-
gers) profit economically from their prosumption through sales and ad revenues. It is
also possible that prosumers gain by getting lower prices for various things because
they are doing some of the work involved at no pay. For example, it is possible that
drivers who pump their own gas pay a lower price for it than if someone was paid to
pump gasoline for them. Similarly, the price of books at Amazon.com might be lower
because the prosumer is doing much of the work. Alternatively, it may be that Amazon.
com is more profitable than brick-and-mortar bookshops because more is gained from
exploiting prosumers than employees and (largely) consumers.
It is on Internet sites that prosumers experience the greatest material gains mainly
because of the fact that their willingness to work for no pay is met with, perhaps even
induced by, the availability of a series of products offered free of charge (Anderson,
2009). Among the many examples are the reviews on Amazon, Googles many free
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388 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
services (Maps, Gmail, Documents, etc.), news and punditry on the blogosphere, and
the socialization opportunities provided by social media sites. Long accustomed to
getting these services, and many more, free of charge, users would be outraged if they
suddenly had to pay for them. Of course, they, at least collectively, do pay for them by
(a) buying the products that are increasingly advertised in association with these free
products and (b) providing these sites with a digital gold mine of personal data that
these sites use to target advertisements.
Advertisements on the traditional media are not, and cannot be, targeted at indi-
vidual users. They are aimed at everyone, or a particular demographic, who might be
watching a given TV show or reading a particular newspaper. They are not and cannot
be aimed at a specific individual since the advertisers do not have information on spe-
cific users and do not have the capacity to reach them. However, Web 2.0 sites have
both this information and capacity, and they are increasingly refining them through
more and more sophisticated algorithms. These targeting mechanisms are famously at
the base of the success of sites like Facebook and Google but are important to all Web
2.0 sites. Of course, as a particular person, you are not being targeted, but you, as part
of a data assemblage (Zwick & Knott, 2009), are targeted. This is because in one
way or another some choices you made on Web 2.0 have made it clear that you are
associated with a number of other people who are at least potential users, or buyers, of
goods or services related in some way to those choices. Thus, if you change your rela-
tionship status on Facebook to engaged, you will soon be confronted with adver-
tisements for wedding products. Similarly, when you buy a book on Amazon.com, that
fact is registered instantaneously and you are immediately confronted (and will be for
some time to come) with ads for books that Amazon.coms statistics indicate people
who bought that book were also likely to be interested in purchasing. At the very least,
it could be said that your presence on Amazon.com and the fact that you purchased a
book there indicates that you are open to such blandishments. However, on more gen-
eral sites such as Yahoo, all sorts of ads appear, many of which have little or nothing
to do with your expressed interests on that website. However, it is increasingly the
case the ads you see there are the result of Internet sites that you visited in the (recent)
past (Google does this, and currently, Facebook is looking to do the same). The greater
cost associated with all of this to you as a prosumer is that an array of businesses now
knows a great deal about you and your preferences. The more content you produce and
the more choices you make, the more these sites know about you, especially the vari-
ous assemblages to which you can be associated.
Much of the above makes it clear that we must look at prosumption in the context
of the capitalist economic system in which it is embedded. In the end, McDonalds,
IKEA, Amazon.com, eBay, Google, and Facebook (Wikipedia is an example of an
exception) are all capitalist businesses oriented, as is true of all such businesses, to
maximizing profits. In this context, Chia (2012) is quite helpful in her discussion in
this issue of the prosumer on the Internet, who is seen as existing
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Ritzer et al. 389
between mediated lifeworlds and corporate pocketbooks. This is the scene of
contestation and complicity, where subjects consumptive energies on discrete
social media platforms are milled through a digital ecosystem to be repurposed
through a variety of monetization schemes, for which contextual advertising is
only a small part. This is the scene of ambition and ambivalence, where subjects
in post-Fordist and post-crunch economies engage in a (rigged) game of cyber-
entrepreneurship and feel empowered to sell their productive energies in the
digital marketplace. (p. 424)
While the Internet is still contested by cyber-libertarianism and is not yet domi-
nated completely by capitalist interests, it is very difficult in this day and age to bet
against capitalism and the likelihood of its control over the Internet and over the pro-
sumers who operate in that domain. If this is the case in the digital world, it is certainly
much more the case in the more material domains in which prosumers are increasingly
prevalent.
Overview of this Special Double Issue
The articles in this special double issue can be organized under three broad headings
(although each essay deals with various other issues as well). The first set makes
mainly theoretical contributions, beginning with Reys work from a Marxian perspec-
tive, Chias discussion of whether blogging is exploitative, and Zwick and Knotts
application of Webers theory of rationalization (as well as Ritzers on McDonaldization)
to eBay. The second set deals with political issues and includes Benkler and Shaw on
political blogs, Cheong and Lundry on prosuming state-disseminated messages in
Singapore, Hershkovitz on using Israeli citizens to improve the countrys public
image, and Recuber on the prosumption of online commemorations that limit the role
of collective action in shaping the messages. The third set deals with meaning and
includes Nakajima on the way it is prosumers, and not individual artists, who produce
artistic meaning; Davis on the online achievement of identity by the transabled; and
Woermann on the way freeskiers create meaning, at least in part, through document-
ing what they do through the creation and viewing of videos. Brief summaries of each
of the essays in this volume follow.
In Alienation, Exploitation, and Social Media, P. J. Rey applies and calls into
question basic Marxian concepts by asking, Can Facebook users be considered alien-
ated and/or exploited when they happily provide free labor to the for-profit website?
Rey acknowledges that social media users are indeed exploited in the Marxian sense
because they produce value for the various sites without being directly compensated
with wages. However, users are not alienated on social media because they are not
disconnected from the content they produce on the site and they are free to create what
they choose. In the factory, people work because of necessity, whereas on social media
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390 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
people do so by choice. The factory coerces workers into accepting exploitative condi-
tions, whereas social media are able to exploit users (and user-generated content) for
profit precisely because they do not overtly coerce and alienate them.
Aleena Chia, in Welcome to Me-Mart, analyzes the politics of user-generated
content in the increasingly commercialized space of personal blogs. The blogosphere
is rife with the rhetoric of empowerment and the cyber-libertarian messages of choice,
power, and agency. But, as Chia puts it, beyond this vibrant vision of blogging as a
surefire ticket to fame and fortune is a sobering structural reality of obscurity and
tedium (p. 427). Despite attempts to translate their blogging into financial reward,
most bloggers do not earn enough advertising income to pay the costs of Internet
access or even domain and registration fees. As a result, many bloggers fall back on an
economy of attention where their rewards lie in hits on, links to, and comments about
their blogs. However, behind this lies a political-economic reality that allows corporations
and advertisers to extract profits from bloggers while offering little compensation.
Chia argues that the socioeconomic logic of prosumption facilitates the extraction
of economic value from the blogosphere in an increasingly precise fashion. In autono-
mist Marxist terms, the blogosphere is a social factory where social life itself is put to
work for capital. Like Rey, she notes that by finding rewards in hits, links, comments,
and other attention, bloggers do not experience blogging as alienating or exploitative.
In the attention economy (Davenport & Beck, 2001), they are more worried about
being ignored than being alienated or exploited.
Detlev Zwick and Janice Denegri Knott, in Tracking Prosumption Work on eBay:
Reproduction of Desire and the Challenge of Slow Re-McDonaldization, offer a dis-
cussion on how prosumption online relates to Webers process of rationalization.
Users of eBay initially saw the site as a place for spontaneous creativity and sociality.
However, over time, eBay was transformed for these users into something increas-
ingly routinized and habitual. The site became disenchanting for the users as it grew
increasingly formalized and bureaucratized.
Zwick and Knott link the microlevel phenomenological experience of the eBay
user with the macrolevel structure of the eBay website. In doing this, they enter into
an emerging discussion about how to conceptualize rationalization in digital space.
Sites like eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, and others attempt to build human sociality,
spontaneity, and enchantment within the framework of a highly rationalized website
driven by formal computer code. Zwick and Knott agree with Jurgensons (2010)
argument that social media de-McDonaldizes the Internet, but they argue that this de-
McDonaldization may only be a temporary state before an inevitable re-McDonaldiza-
tion. The reader is left to wonder whether this process is unique to eBay or whether it
is a contradiction built into digital prosumption. Can the underlying rationalization of
computer code exist in harmony with the spontaneous irrationality often found on
social media? Or, will other sites like Facebook or Twitter face the same fate as eBay
in becoming increasingly bureaucratized and thus disenchanted for their users?
In A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices of the Left and Right,
Yochai Benkler and Aaron Shaw extend the study of prosumption into the political
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Ritzer et al. 391
sphere. Through an analysis of leading political blogs, they examine how ideology
shapes prosumption practices in blogging. Benkler and Shaw find that blogs on the left
are more likely to adopt technical platforms that enhance participation among their
users. Left-leaning blogs also have significantly fewer sole-authored sites, tend to link
more to other user blogs, and differentiate less between self-generated content and that
submitted by users. Blogs on the right tend to be controlled by a small group of elites
and to have shorter narratives and discussion posts that are more clearly set apart from
the main discursive space, thereby giving priority to established voices of authority.
Left-leaning blogs also tend to be more egalitarian in their opportunities for participa-
tion, whereas right-leaning blogs are more individualistic and hierarchical in framing
political issues and priorities.
Contrary to deterministic arguments that suggest the technology itself determines
forms of democratic deliberation (McLuhan, 1967), Benkler and Shaws study high-
lights how political ideology mediates technological opportunities for prosumption
practices in the political sphere. While social media creates greater opportunities for
prosumption in democratic participation, such technologies can also be structured to
reproduce political activity more characteristic of the mass-mediated public sphere. In
this context, the left has been more successful at blurring the boundaries between news
production and consumption in the political realm.
In Prosumption, Transmediation and Resistance: Terrorism and Man-Hunting in
Southeast Asia, Pauline Cheong and Chris Lundry find not passive consumption but
active prosumption among civilians in Singapore in their relationship to state mes-
sages. The authors deal with how state-disseminated information about the escape of
a key terrorist and the subsequent year-long manhunt were disseminated across old
and new media. In addition to civilians consuming this information via old media, they
utilized new-media opportunities to remix old information and create new informa-
tion. This blending of old and new media is what the authors call transmediation,
something that provided civilians with an opportunity to critique a state that often
harshly punishes public criticism. Between a full-on rebellion and passive acceptance
of the status quo is a sort of middle-ground resistance via engagement with online
content. This was done by spreading rumors that often were inherently critical of the
state, creating political parodies that were a pastiche of official government informa-
tion. People also developed infotaining play that uses videogame objectives tied to
ideological messages and often has the player take on the role of the fugitive. This
study provides a non-Western analysis of the interaction of new media sites of pro-
sumption and old-media, top-down, state-centric information dissemination. The
Internet is shown to have the radical potential to counter political regimes that require
a strict separation of production and consumption.
Shay Hershkovitzs article, Masbirim Israel: Israels PR Campaign as Glocalized
and Grobalized Political Prosumption, looks at the campaign to recruit individuals
into a massive effort to improve and maintain Israels global image. Executive author-
ity, something that citizens typically consume, has been outsourced (better, crowd-
sourced) to the Israeli citizenry. Citizens are asked to be prosumers of content typically
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392 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
produced by the state. As one popular saying goes, Every Israeli citizen is an
ambassador.
Hershkovitz not only situates the topic of prosumption in the political sphere (as do
Cheong and Lundry) but also locates this prosumer activity at the intersection of glo-
balization and localization. He discusses how this process is glocalized (i.e., the
combination of the global and local) as part of the larger neoliberal project to shift
government responsibilities into private hands. This has the effect of overrepresenting
a nationalistic Jewish majority and crowding out alternative voices.
In The Prosumption of Commemoration: Disasters, Digital Memory Banks, and
Online Collective Memory, Tim Recuber investigates the nature of commemoration
and collective memory in online memorials. By focusing on content submitted to the
September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, he observes
the convergence of two forms of prosumption: therapeutic self-help and social media
practices. This online prosumption has implications, he argues, for how commemora-
tion and collective memory unfold in the physical off-line world (assuming that it can
ever be clearly separated from the online world), especially in terms of its pedagogical
and political implications.
Recuber argues that emergent online commemorations, like the memorials that we
find throughout the online and off-line world, are motivated in part by the therapeutic
ideal ingrained in American culture. The therapeutic ideal, which accords great impor-
tance to the restoration of ones mental health after experiencing great tragedy and
loss, has been newly assigned to processes of commemoration and collective memory.
In the context of social media, and their potential for infinite digitization, Recuber
notes that online commemorations may avoid the usually highly political processes of
filtering content. Memorialization is stripped of centralized control and an overarching
narrative around the broader meanings of the events. Prosumers simply contribute
content, and through this therapeutic ideal of online commemoration, we see a shift
away from the pedagogical objectives of commemoration that seeks to frame and edu-
cate consumers about tragic and catastrophic events. Through a politics of individual-
ism that emphasizes personalization and nostalgia, the prosumption of therapeutic
commemoration may serve to channel energies away from collective mobilization and
more toward addressing the social structural causes of disaster and emphasizing indi-
vidual healing.
Seio Nakajima, in the article Prosumption in Art, examines how art can be under-
stood from the perspective of prosumption, both historically and in the digital era.
Artists consume tools and materials to produce art, and artists influence on other art-
ists (via styles and ideas) can also be forms of prosumption. Nakajima challenges the
romantic myth that artists are a uniquely creative force who, independent of their
audiences, create and interpret art. Rather, Nakajima situates the artistic process within
a theory of prosumption.
By acknowledging that art is an inherently social activity, Nakajima identifies pro-
sumption processes in several forms of art. In readymade art, both artists and their
audiences evaluate whether or not an object qualifies as art. They are made equals in
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Ritzer et al. 393
artistic interpretation where the artists consume existing products to produce art and
viewers consume art to produce judgments of the art. Similarly, pop art blurs the line
between mass consumer commodities and original artistic creations; artistic prosum-
ers consume objects to produce art. Through the use of simulations and appropriations,
artists use parody, collage, sampling, remixing, and other techniques to challenge the
privileged position of the artist. Through the consumption and selective reproduction
of constituent elements, artists construct new meaning to be evaluated in innovative
ways with their viewing public. Finally, relational art asserts that art is not a static or
independent object but is a dynamic process through which the art is produced in the
context of viewers participation within artistic communities of interpretation.
Meaning in art is achieved not by an independent artist but through social dialogue and
discussion around an object. In other words, relational art casts the process of pro-
sumption itself as an art where artists produce relations between artists (i.e., produc-
ers) and viewers/audiences (i.e., consumers), as well as relations and discussions
among the viewers/audiences, with the art object being a kind of catalyst (p. 559).
Katherine Chen, in her paper Artistic Prosumption: Co-Creative Destruction at
Burning Man, looks at the week-long annual festival held in the Nevada desert. The
article shows how the inclusive community logic of Burning Man teaches new
attendees to become more than passive consumers of art but to be active, inspired, and
artistically expressive prosumers of art. This logic, which is always debated internally,
centers on expanding access to arts as well as notions of who can create art (everyone),
what is created, and how it should be consumed.
One particularly interesting aspect of the institutional logic of Burning Man is
hinted at in the articles title, a play on Schumpeters work on creative destruction. The
prosumption of art at Burning Man is seen as an act of co-creative destruction. That is,
it is co-created in a process of prosumption and what is created is not meant to endure
but to be enjoyed in the moment and destroyed by prosumers at the end of the
festival.
Jenny Davis, in her article Prosuming Identity: The Production and Consumption
of Transableism on Transabled.org, describes a group of people who believe they are
born incorrectly into able bodies. They have a self-image as being disabled, but they
do not possess impaired bodies. Transabled individuals want, or, better, need, to be
disabled. Transableism is so rare that there is no full agreement on its definition and
little recognition from academics and health practitioners as to its existence. The fact
that the meaning and existence of transableism might be in question for many high-
lights the importance of prosumption in creating and maintaining this identity. One
cannot passively consume an identity this uncommon; instead, prosumption becomes
integral to creating, associating, and experiencing life as transabled.
Davis does a content analysis of the website Translabled.org as an important space
for the creation and maintenance of this identity. The Internet allows for those with
uncommon identities to find each other online. There would be little hope to find other
transabled persons off-line, even in a large city. In addition to allowing transabled
individuals to congregate, the Internet, the great proliferator of prosumption, allows
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394 American Behavioral Scientist 56(4)
for the prosumption of identity and identity categories. This analysis is of special
importance in that it applies the concept of prosumption to identity. Davis finds that
the distinction between the prosumers of content from the content that is prosumed is
sometimes false. Because the content that is prosumed can signify the identity of the
prosumer, there is often a high degree of integration between the objects and subjects
of prosumption.
Finally, in On the Slope Is on the Screen, Niklas Woermann examines the pro-
sumption practices of the freeskiing subculture. Freeskiing is a lifestyle sport similar
to snowboarding and involves creative and eye-catching aerial tricks while skiing very
steep and dangerous slopes. Although individual freeskiers personally experience (or
produce) only two to three minutes of pure action on any given day, they spend
much of the rest of the day watching (or consuming) the skiing of others in their group.
Through careful video documentation of these practices, they translate these offline
experiences into high-quality videos to be uploaded online and viewed around the
world. In many instances, less meaning is attributed to the athletic skill or merit in a
trick than to the photographic skill used to capture a trick and the organizational ability
needed to present it in the most visually attractive manner. Freeskiers go out of their
way not only to experience the sport in the moment but to capture it in a very calcu-
lated way at specific times of day, in certain weather and light conditions. Through a
deeply integrated and culturally shared prosumption experience, the goal is to produce
an aesthetically appealing video.
Woermann argues that prosuming freeskiing is hedonic in that it provokes longing
and daydreaming through imagination of aesthetic achievement. The deployment of
social media practices is also reflexive in that it encourages self-observation through
the construction of ones digital identity. By carefully selecting their clothing, loca-
tions, website designs, and of course the freeskiing practices themselves, freeskiers
experiment with their self-presentations informed by, and adapted to, the feedback of
others through off-line and online comments and reactions. Finally, through these
social media practices, freeskiers spread knowledge by sharing news stories; offering
updates on new products and locations; learning of others opinions and experiences;
and exchanging tips, tricks, or advice. This facilitates not only the documentation of
freeskiing experiences but their embeddedness in both online and off-line subcultural
communities of practice.
Taken together, the articles in this special issue demonstrate both the larger signifi-
cance and the great diversity of prosumption. It seems clear that the future will bring
with it ever more prosumption and that we will be spending an increasing amount of our
lives as prosumers. This is an extremely important development in itself, but it will also
cause us to reexamine age-old ideas in the social sciences (e.g., alienation, exploitation,
rationalization) and in the process both revise them and, more important, create new
ideas and larger theories not locked into the old and increasingly outdated production
consumption dichotomy.
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Ritzer et al. 395
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
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Bios
George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. Among his
awards are an honorary doctorate from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia; an honorary
patron award from the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin; and the
American Sociological Associations Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Award. He has
chaired the American Sociological Associations Section on Theoretical Sociology, as well as
the Sections on Organizations and Occupations and History of Sociology; he was also the first
chair of the Section on Global and Transnational Sociology. Among his books in metatheory
are Sociology: A Multiple Paradigm Science (1975/1980) and Metatheorzing in Sociology
(1991). In the application of social theory to the social world, his books include The
McDonaldization of Society (6th ed., 2011), Enchanting a Disenchanted World (3rd ed., 2010),
and The Globalization of Nothing (2nd ed., 2007). His most recent book is Globalization: A
Basic Text (2010). He was founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. He edited the
Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (2000) and The Blackwell Companion to
Globalization (2008) and coedited the Handbook of Social Theory (2001). He also edited the
11-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007) and the 2-volume Encyclopedia of Social Theory
(2005) and is currently editing the Encyclopedia of Globalization (forthcoming). His books
have been translated into more than 20 languages, with over a dozen translations of The
McDonaldization of Society alone.
Paul Dean is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland. His research focuses
on social inequality and social change. From his research on stratification to his dissertation
work, which examines social responsibility movements, he is interested in understanding
mechanisms of inequality and how they are contested through collective efforts. He has pub-
lished in the areas of inequality, corporate social responsibility, and globalization. He is also an
award-winning teacher and cocreator/coeditor of the teaching website The Sociological
Cinema: Teaching and Learning Sociology Through Video (www.thesociologicalcinema.com).
Nathan Jurgenson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of
Maryland, where he is writing a dissertation focusing on self-documentation and social media.
He is also interested in how social media has triggered the rise of the digital prosumer (those
who produce that which they consume and vice versa). With George Ritzer, he has published
on the topic and has founded the Prosumer Studies Working Group. Finally, with P. J. Rey, he
created and runs the Cyborgology blog and the Theorizing the Web conference.
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