This appears to be the favourite reading from this past week, at least based on comments I've read so far. Maybe my group members were better able to understand this article, or better able to extract value from it, than I. One of my favourite professors once said, "There are two kinds of people in this world, those who make distinctions and those who blur them." I can't decide which category Ritzer and Jurgenson fit into. Granted, they did not coin the term "prosumption/prosumer" and it is not a new term, they attribute it to Alvin Toffler back in 1980 (p. 17), but I wonder if their use of it isn't confusing the real issues at stake.
It seems to me that, in a virtual service economy of sharing where money has very little or no influence, one should question whether capitalism has a place at all, not whether it is morphing into a new form. Capitalism still has very much influence over the world of produced goods, but as the psychology of sharing replaces the one of exchange in this realm, as modeled to an extent online, does it make sense discuss a new form of capitalism as opposed to its failure and replacement?
Maybe I'm failing to grasp the subtlety of the argument, but after an initial reading it seems to me that the invention and use of the terms "prosumption/prosumer" serves more as an attempt to obfuscate the flow of capital, which the distinction between consumption and production allows us to do more clearly. Indeed, the authors seem to fall into this obfuscation themselves, grouping non-profit and profit-seeking entities together in the same category to prove their point (Amazon.com alongside Linux, etc., p. 19). There are many points in this paper I take issue with, but before I do so publicly, can anyone help me see the light here? Is there a value to this "new" terminology that I'm not seeing?
No comments:
Post a Comment