American Behavioral Scientist-2012-Ritzer-379-98.pdf

8/10/2019 American Behavioral Scientist-2012-Ritzer-379-98.pdf

1/21

http://abs.sagepub.com/AmericanBehavioralScientist

http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379Theonline version of this article can be foundat:

DOI: 10.1177/0002764211429368

2012 56: 379American Behavioral ScientistGeorge Ritzer, Paul Dean and Nathan Jurgenson

The Coming of Age of the Prosumer

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:American Behavioral ScientistAdditional services and information for

http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://abs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Mar 21, 2012Version of Record>>

at Gothenburg University Library on September 24, 2014abs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at Gothenburg University Library on September 24, 2014abs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379http://www.sagepublications.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://abs.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://abs.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.refs.htmlhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.refs.htmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.full.pdfhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.full.pdfhttp://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtmlhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.full.pdfhttp://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379.refs.htmlhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navhttp://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navhttp://abs.sagepub.com/subscriptionshttp://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertshttp://www.sagepublications.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/content/56/4/379http://abs.sagepub.com/


2/21

American Behavioral Scientist

56(4) 379398

2012 SAGE PublicationsReprints and permission: http://www.

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0002764211429368

http://abs.sagepub.com

ABS429368ABS56410.1177/0002764211429368Ritzer et al.American Behavioral Scientist

1University 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: [email protected]

The Coming of Age

of the Prosumer

George Ritzer1, Paul Dean1, and Nathan Jurgenson1

Abstract

This essay provides an introduction to prosumption, the topic of this special doubleissue ofAmerican Behavioral Scientist. The term prosumptionwas coined by Alvin Toffler in1980 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. Manyscholars have dealt with the issue, at least implicitly, but only recently have they begunto deal with it explicitly as prosumption. Prosumption has always existed, but varioussocial changes (e.g., the rise of the Internet and of social networking on it) have greatlyexpanded both the practice of prosumption and scholarly attention to it. Prosumptionhas its most obvious and direct relevance to the economy. As a result, the authorsalso frame it in terms of contemporary capitalism. Finally, they offer a brief overview ofthe articles in the double issue, included under the headings Theoretical Contributionsto the Concept of Prosumption, The Role of Prosumption in Politics, and MeaningMaking Within Prosumption.

Keywords

prosumption, production, consumption, social media, Web 2.0

The concepts of theprosumer, one who is both producer and consumer, and of pro-

sumption, involving a combination of production and consumption, are certainly notnew. 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

at Gothenburg University Library on September 24, 2014abs.sagepub.comDownloaded from
http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/


3/21

380 American Behavioral Scientist56(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 ofAmerican Behav-

ioral Scientistis 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 ofprosumption.

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 introductionindicates, 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 itprosumption. 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

http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/http://abs.sagepub.com/


4/21

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 productionalways 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 alwaysfocused 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 thetheorist 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 theproductionconsumption 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 wetraditionally 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



5/21


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 intheorizing 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 thatpostmodern 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 allmodern 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 asfactories (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 termprosumer. 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 toimprove 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.



6/21

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 mustbe 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 relativelyautonomous; 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 theAutomat (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



7/21


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 wherecustomers 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 topurchase 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 greatand 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 bothproduction

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 takeanother, 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



8/21

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 muchmaterial 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



9/21


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 tweetsappear 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 ofthe 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 theconcept 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 wecould 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



10/21

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 likeupdated 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 thesethings 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 mainlybecause 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



11/21


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 throughmore 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, thatfact 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 greatercost 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 inthis issue of the prosumer on the Internet, who is seen as existing



12/21

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 isonly 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 certainlymuch 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 Knottsapplication 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 whatthey choose. In the factory, people work because of necessity, whereas on social media



13/21


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-generatedcontent 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 corporationsand 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 eBayin 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



14/21

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 linkmore 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 thestate, 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 individualsinto 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



15/21


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 mediapractices. 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 andmore 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



16/21

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 whocan 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 theydo 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 withuncommon 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



17/21


18/21

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.

References

Anderson, C. (2009).Free: The future of a radical price. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Arvidsson, A. (2005). Brands: A critical perspective.Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(2), 235-258.

Arvidsson, A. (2006).Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. London, England: Routledge.Baudrillard, J. (1998). The consumer society. London, England: Sage. (Original work published 1970)

Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death. London, England: Sage. (Original work

published 1976)

Beer, D., & Burrows, R. (2007). Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some initial consider-

ations. Sociological Research Online, 12(5). Retrieved from http://www.socresonline.org

.uk/12/5/17.html

Bell, D. (1976). The cultural contradictions of capitalism. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Blttel-Mink, B., & Hellmann, K.-U. (Eds.). (2010).Prosumer revisited. Wiesbaden, Germany:

Verlag fr Sozialwissenschaften.Bruns, A. (2008).Blogs, Wikipedia, second life, and beyond: From production to produsage.

New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Campbell, C. (2005). The craft consumer: Culture, craft and consumption in a postmodern soci-

ety.Journal of Consumer Culture, 5(1), 23-42.

Chen, K. (2012). Artistic prosumption: Co-creative destruction at Burning Man. American

Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 570-595.

Cheong, P., & Lundry, C. (2012). Prosumption, transmediation, and resistance: Terrorism and

man-hunting in Southeast Asia.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 488-510.

Chia, A. (2012). Welcome to Me-Mart.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 421-438.Cole, S. (2011). The prosumer and the project studio: The battle for distinction in the field of

music recording. Sociology, 45, 447-463.

Collins, S. (2010). Digital fair: Prosumption and the fair use defense. Journal of Consumer

Culture, 10(1), 37-55.

Comor, E. (2011). Contextualizing and critiquing the fantastic prosumer: Power, alienation and

hegemony. Critical Sociology, 37(3), 309-327.

Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The attention economy: Understanding the new cur-

rency of business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Davis, J. (2012). Prosuming identity: The production and consumption of transableism onTransabled.org.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 596-617.



19/21


Dean, P. (n.d.). Theorizing the social factory: From mass worker to web-based prosumer.

Unpublished manuscript.

Denegri-Knott, J. & Zwick, D., (2012). Tracking prosumption work on eBay: Reproduction of

desire and the challenge of slow re-McDonaldization.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4),439-458.

Firat, A. F., & Venkatesh, A. (1995). Liberatory postmodernism and the reenchantment of con-

sumption.Journal of Consumer Research, 22(3), 239-267.

Fuchs, C. (2010). Class, knowledge and new media.Media, Culture and Society, 32(1), 141-150.

Galbraith, J. K. (1999). The affluent society. New York, NY: Mariner Books. (Original work

published 1958)

Hardart, M., & Diehl, L. (2002). The Automat: The history, recipes, and allure of Horn and

Hardarts masterpiece. New York, NY: Clarkson Potter.

Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000).Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Hershkovitz, S. (2012). Masbirim Israel: Israels PR campaign as glocalized and grobalized

political prosumption.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 511-530.

Howe, J. (2009). Crowdsourcing: Why the power of the crowd is driving the future of business.

New York, NY: Crown.

Humphreys, A., & Grayson, K. (2008). The intersecting roles of consumer and producer: A

critical perspective on co-production, co-creation and prosumption. Sociology Compass, 2,

963-980.

Jurgenson, N. (2010). The de-McDonaldization of the Internet. In G. Ritzer (Ed.),McDonaldization:

The reader(3rd ed., pp. 159-171). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.Kotler, P. (1986). The prosumer movement: A new challenge for marketers.Advances in Con-

sumer Research, 13, 510-513.

Laughey, D. (2010). User authority through mediated interaction: A case of eBay-in-use.Jour-

nal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), 105-128.

Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial labour. In M. Hardt & P. Virno (Eds.), Radical thought in

Italy: A potential politics(pp. 133-147). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Leadbetter, C., & Miller, P. (2004). The Pro-Am revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our

economy and society. London, England: Demos.

Lusch, R. F., & Vargo, S. L. (2006). Service dominant logic: Reactions, reflections, and refine-ments.Marketing Theory, 6(3), 281-288.

Manning, R. (2000). Credit card nation: The consequences of Americas addiction to debt.

New York, NY: Basic Books.

Marron, D. (2009). Consumer credit in the United States: A sociological perspective from the

19th century to the present. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

McLuhan, M. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York, NY: Random House.

McLuhan, M., & Nevitt, B. (1972). Take today: The executive as dropout. San Diego, CA:

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Muniz, A., & OGuinn, T. (2001). Brand Community. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4),412-432.

Nakajima, S. (2012). Prosumption in art.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 550-569.

Negri, A. (1989). The politics of subversion. Malden, MA: Polity Press.



20/21

Ritzer et al. 397

Pietrykowski, B. (2007). Exploring new directions for research in the radical political economy

of consumption.Review of Radical Political Economics, 39(2), 257-283.

Pine, B., & Gilmore, J. (2011). The experience economy (Updated ed.). Cambridge, MA:

Harvard Business Press.Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2002). The co-creation connection. Strategy and Business

27(2), 51-60.

Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004a). Co-creation experiences: The next practice in

value creation.Journal of Interactive Marketing, 18(3), 5-14.

Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. (2004b). The future of competition: Co-creating unique

value with customers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Randall, G., & Seth, A. (2011). The grocers: The rise and rise of the supermarket chains(3rd ed.).

Dover, NH: Kogan Page.

Recuber, T. (2012). The prosumption of commemoration: Disasters, digital memory banks, andonline collective memory.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 531-549.

Reich, R. B. (1991). What is a nation?Political Science Quarterly, 106(2), 193-209.

Rey, P. J. (2012). Alienation, exploitation, and social media. American Behavioral Scientist,

56(4), 399-420.

Ritzer, G. (1995).Expressing America: A critique of the global credit card society. Thousand

Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Ritzer, G. (2009). [Keynote address]. Conference on Prosumption, Frankfurt, Germany.

Ritzer, G. (2010). Focusing on the prosumer: On correcting an error in the history of social theory.

In B. Blttel-Mink & K.-U. Hellmann (Eds.), Prosumer revisited (pp. 61-79). Wiesbaden,Germany: Verlag fr Sozialwissenschaften.

Ritzer, G. (2011). The McDonaldization of society(6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge

Press. (Original work published 1993)

Ritzer, G., & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capi-

talism in the age of the digital prosumer.Journal of Consumer Culture, 10, 13-36.

Shaw, A., & Benkler, Y. (2012). A tale of two blogospheres: Discursive practices of the left and

right.American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 459-487.

Tapscott, D., & Williams, A. D. (2006). Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes every-

thing. New York, NY: Portfolio.Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York, NY: William Morrow.

Toffler, A., & Toffler, H. (2006).Revolutionary wealth: How it will be created and how it will

change our lives. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Watson, M., & Shove, E. (2008). Product, Competence, Project and Practice. Journal of Con-

sumer Culture, 8(1), 69-89.

Woermann, N. (2012). On the slope is on the screen. American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4),

618-640.

Zwick, D., Bonsu, S. K., & Darmody, A. (2008). Putting consumers to work: Co-creation and

new marketing govern-mentality.Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 163-196.Zwick, D., & Knott, J. D. (2009). Manufacturing customers: The database as new means of

production.Journal of Consumer Culture, 9, 221-247.



21/21


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 honorarypatron 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: ABasic 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-volumeEncyclopedia of Sociology(2007) and the 2-volumeEncyclopedia 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 Societyalone.

Paul Dean is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Maryland. His research focuseson 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.