Prosumption (In Press)

3/22/15, 7:29 AM
Prosumption
Contact Radhika Gajjala for citation details - this is in-press and is a pre-proof
version.
Radhika Gajjala, Jeanette Marie Dillon, Samara Anarbaeva

School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University
Email: radhik@bgsu.edu
Word count: 3446
Abstract
One of the key tenets of cultural and critical approaches tomedia audiences is that they are active users and
interpreters of content. Digital and online technologies has enabled audiences to transform such
interpretative activity into actual media practice: users have become producers, as the term prosumers
suggests. This entry examines do-it-yourself videos and podcasts as a form of presumption. It sho how a
discourse that defines prosumption as a particular form of audience activity that testifies to the absence of
media effects, successfully obscures how more fundamental social inequalities are evolving here,
especially with respect to prosumers providing free labour.
Main text
One of the key tenets of cultural and critical approaches to media audiences is that they are active users and
interpreters of content. This is articulated for instance in the common expression that the question is not what
media do with people, but what people do with media. This reversal of the traditional media-effects approach
laid the groundwork for uses and gratifications theory in the 1970s and also inspired a wealth of cultural
studies about peoples media-activities rather than approaching them through the more passive concept of
media-consumption. One can consider the 1970s and 80s research about subcultures and youth cultures as
foundational examples of this focus on active audiences. A project especially relevant for this entry was
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/LongRequest/ieme?DOWNLOAD=hxuD4bC3VnfsrUgr1zB9unfxyFVjbrvzdkzyMZETy4nmxuiUyeXFMjEMNn
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Janice Radways 1984 ethnography of readers of romance novels, in which she found that fans of the genre
got together in a local bookstore, organized discussions with other fans and, in some exceptional cases,
became writers themselves (Radway, 1984). While in that time the activity of audiences was mainly
envisaged as taking place through interpretation, talk, everyday practice and style, the emergence of the
internet and especially its Web 2.0 and social media varieties allowed audiences to do even more and create
their own versions of their favorite texts, genres and media.
Such current activity goes under a range of terms which all indicate that the distinction between
making and using media has disappeared: production and consumption hence become prosumption, or
similarly production and usage become produsage; co-creation, co-production and participatory culture
are other current terms that capture similar phenomena in which people make their own media content, as
engaged amateurs instead of paid professionals. A new generation of researchers have examined various
forms of fan fiction (Jenkins, 2006), amateur music production (Baym, 2007), consumer marketeers ((Pitt et
al., 2006), and co-creation in the game industry (Hong, 2013). According to Gauntlett (2011), however, most
research in this area has tended to focus on political and civic participation, for instance through clickactivism, civic journalism or Wikipedia. Ratto and Boler (2014) have categorized some of these activities as
do-it-yourself or DIY and contend they are critical in disrupting usual power relations between makers and
consumers, often conflating them and democratizing them so that lines are blurred and domination is
usurped. DIY culture can be seen as one that moves the definition of culture and the approach to cultural
studies forward by identifying the power of production by those who also consume. These prosumers
(Miller, 2014) create and share commodities in arenas perhaps monitored but not completely controlled by
persons associated with the status quo.
Less spectacular instances of everyday Web 2.0 creativity have been taken less seriously, according
to Gauntlett (2011). He points specifically at making and sharing our own media culture via low-fi
YouTube videos, eccentric blogs, and homemade websites (Gauntlett, 2011, p. 12). As his choice for the
term homemade suggests, he puts such digital making and sharing on par with traditional craftwork,
through which things were made and communities of makers were maintained. Hence the title of his book
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Making is connecting. Aragon (2008) similarly identifies a relative bias in research about participatory
culture towards politics and public affairs, this time in studies of young girls:
There is a dearth of research examining girls and young womens unconventional political
participation. In looking only at conventional political participation we miss other types of political
or quasi-political participation. Historically, we have witnessed that womens activities such as
volunteering and charitable work are often categorized as apolitical rather than political. This
gendering influences the manner in which we think of political participation (Aragon, 2008, p. 2).
The claim we make here is not that gender has been ignored in research about participatory culture; most
research about fan fiction, for instance, acknowledges that this is a largely female pleasure, with Fifty Shades
of Grey as the controversial pinnacle of its success. It is rather that all kinds of domestic activities and
associated womens labor are ignored. In this entry we take the opportunity to redress this imbalance by
making two typical genres of domestic prosumption more visible, and by articulating them with a set of
more general critical concerns about participatory culture. We zoom in, particularly, on DIY makeup and
fashion videos, and on the online knitting renaissance that emerged since the 2000s.
Do-It-Yourself Makeup Videos
Lauren Luke, also known as Panacea81, is one of the gurus in the Beauty & Fashion section of
YouTube where men and women post DIY and how-to videos on fashion and makeup. She is is a 33-year-old
single mother of a teenage boy from South Shields, England, who dropped out of high school to support
herself and her son. Laurens first video in 2007 was a silent tutorial without music or any narration in the
background, but with a number of print guidelines on the screen following each visual instruction. Her
viewers commented on a range of things from asking her about certain products, to complimenting her on
the look she created in the video to asking why she looked so sad. As Lauren makes more and more videos,
the comments go and expand, with her viewers further expanding her reach by sharing the videos through
social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Hence, like Gauntlett suggests in Making is connecting a whole
community has evolved around Laurens channel which shares beauty knowledge and everyday emotions.
Currently she has over 135 million views andover half a million followers, and she now has her own book
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showing various makeup styles, her own makeup line (sold all over the world) and a smart phone
application. Her success has not gone unnoticed, and the traditional beauty and cosmetics industry have
turned to her for marketing collaboration. Each video nowadays features at least one brand or cosmetics. Her
Facebook bio, for instance, reads: I am currently an Influencer for the Simple Skincare Program. Lauren
made a recent video about making a zombie-face by the invitation of Fox TV to celebrate the launch of the
fifth season of The Walking Dead. The reason, of course, that someone like Lauren is interesting to big
brands is that she represents a seemingly more authentic form of information than traditional advertising.
Brands assume that Laurens followers will be more easily influenced by her advice than by slick
promotional campaigns, because her voice and those of other so-called influencers in other fields may
possibly be interpreted as honest and personal. Whether influencers like Lauren indeed have a significant
impact on peoples everyday consumption choices remains to be seen, but the brands she promotes do gain
more communicative power than without her voice. Yet, such perception easily disappears when brands get a
too strong presence in the blogs of influencers. Laurens community of followers, for instance, is sometimes
critical about her commercial activities, complaining, for instance, that she now only makes videos when
there is a brand to promote.
Fiber Podcasts
Just as in the examples of the make-up videos, online fiber crafters usually start producing YouTube
videos and podcasts to connect with others who have similar interests. The first of these appeared around
2003 and the more famous ones now have immense fan followings and publish their own book(s). The
example we discuss here is of a podcaster called BP.
[1]
In the first episode of her podcast we are
introduced to BP, who in fuzzy audio and dimly lit video, invites viewers to grab some sticks and string and
come sit with me. She moves from standing in front of a bookcase crammed with books and bags to sit
down on a chair that creaks so loudly she apologizes. BPs humble description of her abode, straight bobbed
brown hair, glasses, lack of makeup, and V-neck t-shirt sets the stage for a casual, comfortable presentation.
She explains she is a stay-at-home mom of two, has four cats and one dog and loves to knit, crochet,
spin, sew, do paper crafts, read and write. She tells viewers that she is doing this podcast because she loves
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watching podcasts and loves talking about crafting (she says love about five times in 30 seconds). She tells
viewers that she does not talk to anyone on a regular basis except for her boyfriend and he doesnt want to
hear about my yarn all the time. She hopes viewers of her podcast will be interested in a way that her
boyfriend is not. Through this form of presentation, BP creates a strong sense of authenticity and
ordinariness, which we also saw as a key feature of the beauty videos. What makes the fiber podcast scene
somewhat different, is that aside from the individual videos and podcasts, there is a wider network called
Ravelry on which podcasters and audiences come together to share more tips, but also to engage in gift
exchanges, swapping of material, knit-a-longs, spin-a-longs, crochet-a-longs. Actual objects are mailed out
and received in the building of social relations through these networks. Also, the role of brands and
commercial interest is much less to non-existent here.
New domesticity and unpaid labor
While we can see both examples as archetypes of active audiences who produce their own meaning out of
their existing media and cultural consumption, we can also see how they critically differ along dimensions of
individuality and community. We could argue that the DIY beauty bloggers demonstrate a thorough
internalization of beauty discourse as promoted and sold by the cosmetics industry; hence their easy
accommodation of these bloggers as influencers. From a critical perspective we could therefore argue that
this is an example of perfect and total media-effects in the sense that the message has reached its targets
who, in their turn, bring in wider audiences. The fiber prosumption is not that easily and similarly defined
and looks more like traditional womens leisure, initially transmitted through family and community
networks and later on through womens magazines, that has gone online.
The picture becomes more interesting, however, if we consider the prosumption in our two examples
as a form of work, rather than as part of a media practice. In the case of the handcrafting and fiber
communities, laboring happens in a manner reminiscent of pre-industrial production by women fiber
workers who performed key tasks such as the spinning of the yarn needed for weaving of textiles. What is
interesting about the kinds of handcrafting labor undertaken is that these (mostly) women not only engage in
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clearly parlor room leisure identified crafts such as knitting and embroidery, but they take up tasks such as
spinning, dyeing and weaving associated with a pre-machine textile industry that relied on handmade tools
for fiber work. It is almost as if they are working to route around the mechanical industry commodity chains
in order to revive a handloom industry through domestic space in the global north. In contrast, the fashion
and make up bloggers share modern brand values, and recreate them for themselves and others on a daily
basis. For some women and men this has become a full time career, involving researching, fashioning,
creating and sharing videos revolving around fashion making.
The work involved in the skills of fashion, make-up and knitting is domestically defined as it is not often
considered as labor. At the same time, the work of producing videos and podcasts around such topics is
also not popularly viewed as labor, but rather as leisure activity. Still, scholars such as Humphreys (2009),
Jarrett (2014), Hellstrom (2013), Rettberg (2009), Gauntlett (2011), Bratich and Brush (2011) as well as
Ratto and Boler (2014) and several contributors to their collection on DIY Citizenship: Critical Making and
Social Media have argued how these sorts of socially networked and digitally mediated activities by women
in highly gendered contexts can be examples of immaterial labor 2.0 through work, play and domesticity
(e.g., Lazaratto, 1996). The overall cumulation of such activities (including alsocooking, cleaning,
styling,decorating or other crafting videos) has been summed up in the concept of new domesticity.
Matchar (2013) describes new domesticity as a return to a life-style that often takes shape in mostly
westernized do-it-yourself spaces. She notes that this new domesticity distinguishes itself from previous
domesticity by existing in a neoliberal and digital DIY ontology while referencing womens labor of old
(e.g., knitting, cooking, making the home).
Critical conclusion
Ritzer, Dean and Jurgenson (2012) contend that consumption and production have always been on a
continuum and that people have often enjoyed being both but one more than the other depending on
historical context. Grinnell (2009) agrees but adds that the real reason prosumer could now be considered
distinctive from previous points in our producer/consumer history is that the two are occurring
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simultaneously, especially on the internet. She is referring in particular to how people are both the viewers
and the viewed, those who see while also being seen, in Web 2.0 spaces such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter
and more.
Thus, there are benefits and costs involved with prosumption. Prosumers, according to Bianco
(2009), benefit within the social networking age (e.g., Web 2.0) by reaching and/or selling to others in
similar prosumer positions. At the same time, prosumers allow big businesses - simply by doing their
production/consumer work via Web 2.0 - to make money off of their private information. Facebook and
YouTubes terms of services, for instance, ultimately help those companies maintain control of content,
sometimes even after prosumers ask to have their commodities removed.
Our critical interrogation of prosumption from the perspective of it being work, shows how a
discourse that defines prosumption as a particular form of audience activity that testifies to the absence of
media effects successfully obscures how more fundamental social inequalities are evolving here. What
these examples demonstrate, and what has been identified in other forms of prosumptions as well, is that a
big reservoir of voluntary labor is developing from which both consumer capitalism and traditional gender
discourse easily benefit. This is not to say that it is a self-evident and unproblematic process. The new
domesticity and wider amateur economy are rife with contradictions. On the one hand, in the case of the
fiber networks at least, they can be seen as attempting a rerouting of commodity chains through producer and
consumernetworks away from consumption of mass produced goods based in sweatshop models. On the
other hand, as in the case of the makeup DIY videos, they can be seen as variations of advertising for big and
small businesses producing and selling fashion and makeup products. As Bratich and Brush (2011) note,
both cases:
encode a desire for the precapitalist form of production, for the personal touch. The commodity
now infused with a code that embeds noncapitalist desire is ironically part of a new marketing
campaign: global/local authenticity (p. 233).
While these forms of prosumption do suggest a different relationship between the viewer and the media
environment than the term audience would describe, the critical question still is what this different position
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of the prosumer exactly permits? Who are the actors (both producers and consumers) involved in these
relationships, and who benefits? What are the inclusions and exclusions? These are question that can no
longer be answered within a media studies framework only, but which deserve a much wider (feminist)
political economic approach.
See also: Political Economy and the Media; The Network Society; Bricolage; Personal Media; Performing
the Self; Reading; Reception; Empowerment; Participatory Audiences.
References
Aragon, J. (2008). The Lady revolution in the age of technology. International Journal
of Media & Cultural Politics, 4(1), 71-85.
Baym, N. K. (2007). The new shape of online community: The example of Swedish independent music
fandom. First Monday, 12(8).
Bianco, J. S. (2009). Social networking and cloud computing: Precarious affordances for the prosumer.
Women's Studies Quarterly, 37(1/2), 303-312.
Bratich, J. (2010). "The digital touch: Craft-work as immaterial labour and
ontological accumulation." Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 10(3/4), 303318.
Bratich, J., & Brush, H. (2011). Craftivity Narratives: Fabriculture, Affective Labor, and
the New Domesticity. Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2.
Cot, M., and Pybus, J. (2011). Learning to immaterial labour 2.0: Facebook and social
networks. In M. A Peters, and E. Bulut (Eds.), Cognitive capitalism, education and digital labor. New
York: Peter Lang.
Gauntlett, D. (2011). Making is Connecting: The social meaning of creativity, from DIY
and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grinnell, C. K. (2009). From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser: Who Keeps Shifting My Paradigm? (We
Do!). Public Culture, 21(3), 577-598. doi:10.1215/08992363-2009-009
Hellstrom, M (2013). Knitting ourselves into being: the case of labour and hip
domesticity on the social network Ravelry.com (Masters Thesis). Retrieved from
http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/handle/10063/2780.
Hong, R. (2013). Game modding, prosumerism and neoliberal labor practices. International Journal of
Communication, 7, 984-1002.
Humphreys, S. (2009, July 8-10). The economies within an online social network market:
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A case study of Ravelry. In ANZCA 09 annual conference: Communication, Creativity and Global
Citizenship, Brisbane, Australia.
Jarrett, K. (2014). The relevance of Womens Work: Social reproduction and
immaterial labor in Digital Media. Television & New Media, 15 (1), 1429.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York,
NY: University Press.
Lazzarato, M. (1996). Immaterial Labor, trans. P. Colilli and E. Emery, in M. Hardt and
P. Virno (Eds.) Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (133-147) Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press,
Matchar, E. (2013). Homeward bound: Why women are embracing the new domesticity. New York, NY:
Simon and Schuster.
Miller, T. (2014). The prosumer. Social Identities 20(4/5), 259-261.
Pitt, L..,Watson, R., Berthon, P., Wynn, D. & Zinkhan, G. (2006). The Penguins Window: Corporate Brands
From an Open-Source Perspective. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 115-127.
Radway, J. (1984). Reading the romance: Women, patriarchy, and popular culture. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press.
Ratto, M., and Boler, M. (2014). DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media.
Cambridge: MIT Press
Rettberg, J. W. (2009). "'Freshly Generated for you, and Barack Obama': How social
media represent your life." European Journal of Communication 24(4), 451-66.
Ritzer, G., Dean, P., & Jurgenson, N. (2012). The Coming of Age of the prosumer. American Behavioral
Scientist, 56(4), 379-398. doi:10.1177/0002764211429368
Van Zoonen, L. (1994). Feminist media studies. London: Sage.
Further reading
Bruns, A. (2013). 7. From prosumption to produsage. Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy, 67.
Chu, D. (2010). In search of prosumption: Youth and the new media in Hong Kong. First Monday, 15(2).
Chen, K. K. (2011). Artistic prosumption: cocreative destruction at Burning Man. American Behavioral
Scientist, 0002764211429362.
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Fuchs, C. (2013). Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time.
Time & Society, 0961463X13502117.
Woermann, N. (2012). On the Slope Is on the Screen Prosumption, Social Media Practices, and Scopic
Systems in the Freeskiing Subculture. American Behavioral Scientist, 56(4), 618-640
Author Bios:
Radhika Gajjala is Professor of Media and Communication and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green
State University. She teaches and researches digital media and globalization. See
http://www.radhikagajjala.org for further information.
Jeanette Muhleman Dillon is a 25-year media veteran pursuing her doctorate in communication at
Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include health and organizational
communication, particularly within nonprofit organizations and social enterprises. Current research
investigates how millennials are engaging with the social enterprise TOMS shoe company. You can
reach Jeanette at jmdillo@bgsu.edu.
Dr. Samara Anarbaeva is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Florida Southern College. She earned
her Ph.D. in Media and Communication from Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include
digital consumerism, global public relations, gender, race and technology. She has published in journals such
as Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, Development in Practice, Speaker & Gavel, Mass Communication
and Society, Communication Studies, and Journal of Communication and Religion.
[1]
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initials$to$identify$her$in$this$essay.$The$URL$for$the$video$casts$and$her$blog$are$listed$in$the
references,$however,$since$this$is$a$publicly$citable$text.
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/LongRequest/ieme?DOWNLOADhxuD4bC3VnfsrUgr1zB9unfxyFVjbrvzdkzyMZETy4nmxuiUyeXFMjEMNn
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Radhika Gajjala, Jeanette Marie Dillon, Samara Anarbaeva

Word count: 3446

In the first episode of her podcast we are

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