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Prosumer

Prosumer refers to one of two possible portmanteaus formed by contracting either the word producer or professional with the word consumer.¹ Further, prosumer has taken on conflicting spins: the business sector sees the prosumer as a means of offering a wider range of products and services whereas activists sees the prosumer as having greater independence from the mainstream economy.

In the 1980 book The Third Wave, futurologist Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer when he predicted that the role of producers and consumers would begin to blur and merge. In particular, Toffler envisioned a highly saturated marketplace as mass production of standardized products began to satisfy basic consumer demands. To continue growing profit, businesses would initiate a process of mass customization, that is, the mass production of highly customized products. However, to reach a high degree of customization, consumers would have to take part in the production process especially in specifying design requirements.

More recently, the cluetrain manifesto noted that "markets are conversations" with the new economy "moving from passive consumers ... to active prosumers."² For instance, Amazon.com:

emerged as an ecommerce leader -- partially due to its ability to construct customer relations as conversations rather than simple, one-time sales. Amazon ... supports exhange [sic] of information among customers; it provides spaces for customers to add to the site, in the form of reviews.²

However, mass customization has not taken place in most areas of the economy. Most consumption continues to be passive as critics of television, recorded music, and fast food would argue. Indeed, people are generally uninterested in going to the effort of customizing the myriad products that comprise modern consumer culture. In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz argues that diminishing returns from a confusing abundance of consumer choice is producing stress and dissatisfaction.³ Still, one key area of high-customization is taking place: highly-involved hobbyists.

With customization focused on leisure pursuits, Toffler's initial combination has been largely supplanted by a second pair of blurring roles: that of the professional and consumer. In particular, hobbyists have become ever-more demanding in the pursuits of their hobbies, often rising above the level of dilettante to the point of commanding skills equal to that of professionals. Key examples of such hobbies are:

• home improvement as illustrated by the rise of hardware stores such as Home Depot
• cooking as illustrated by creation of entirely new cable television channels entirely dedicated to the culinary arts
• photography as illustrated by cameras and camcorders that, often, are on a par with equipment used by professionals
• Free Software and collaborative software as illustrated by Linux and BambooWeb which are claimed, by some advocates, to be challenging established products like Microsoft Windows and Encyclopædia Britannica

This professional slant of the prosumer term is most common in photography which is a field that highlights prosumer disposable incomes by some sectors of the population

• increased leisure time, again, for some sectors of the population
• continuously falling prices of ever more advanced products (especially electronics)
• media geared towards for amateurs and hobbyists:
  • beginning in the 1980s with the advent of desktop publishing, a growing profusion of magazines to satisfy specialized interests
  • beginning in the mid-1990s with the advent of the internet, an even wider range of websites with online forums to pool experience

Yet a third meaning or usage of prosumer is springing up, especially among some activist groups. That is, the producer and consumer roles are being combined so as to exclude (or at least diminish) the role of the corporate producer; thus, rather than generating higher corporate profits from value-added products, producers would, at best, be reduced to supplying lower-profit commodity inputs. Indeed, the more consumer-oriented prosumer spin is irrelevant to many people with diminished disposable income caused by various economic trends such as globalization, automation, and wealth concentration. Identifiable trends and movements outside of the mainstream economy that have adopted prosumer terminology and techniques include:

• a Do It Yourself (DIY) approach as a means of economic self-sufficiency or simply as a way to survive on diminished income
• the voluntary simplicity movement that seeks personal, social, and environmental goals through prosumer activities such as:
  • growing one's own food
  • repairing clothing and appliances rather than buying new items
  • playing musical instruments rather listening to recorded music
• use of new media-creation and distribution technologies to foster independent media (see Indymedia); many involved in independent media reject mass culture generated by concentrated corporate media
• self-sufficient barter networks, notably in developing nations, such as Argentina's RGT have adopted the term prosumer⁴