LIBR559A/Ritzer, G., & Jurgenson, N. (2010)

Citation

Ritzer, G., & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, consumption, prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10(1), 13-36. doi:10.1177/1469540509354673

Annotation

According to Ritzer and Jurgenson, it is considered that capitalism has shifted from factory production dominance, to consumption dominance. In this sense, the shopping mall has overtaken the factory as the “centre of the economy.” The authors, however, argue, that prosumption (both production and consumption) dominates current capitalism. Prosumption is the concept that the producer and the consumer are the same person. This is exemplified by things such as ATM machine, self-pumping gas, electronic kiosks at gas machines, and social media. With regard to social media, this can be seen by the user adding content to Facebook that, in turn, is used to develop advertising, or having Wikipedia readers add, and update, content. Their suggestion here is that prosumption represents a dynamic shift in capitalism which is contrasted by the idea that social media, and other from prosumption, produce only temporary workers, who have existed in all forms of capitalism. According to the others, what is unique about social media, or Web 2.0, prosumption is that there is very little quality control. For instance, YouTube does not really moderate much of the content that is upload, nor does Facebook, for the most part, vet the content that users add to the site.

I am not entirely certain that this distinction is particularly important or enlightening. Certainly, social media and the Internet create new forms of labour exploitation, but that is a consistency throughout capitalism. Instead, I would argue that social media is a recent modality that labour is exploited through. The goal of all capitalism, almost by definition, is to create the most with the least, while maintaining a stable number of consumers. Free labour, by any means, has only been inhibited by the need to produce consumers for what is being produced. Shifts in technology have always occurred, and something like social media is a new arena for the same form of exploitation.