Prosumer

I've heard the world prosumer used a lot lately.

I've noticed that it has taken on two separate meanings.

The first meaning, coined by Alvin Toffler in his prophetic book, The Third Wave, is the merger between the notions of producer and consumer. Toffler envisioned the world we now live in where the consumer is participating in the production of customized products and services.

But there is a second meaning, that of products targeted between the low end consumer market and the high end professional market. You hear it most often used in products in the audio, photography, and video markets.

And then there is the more activist meaning, which simply takes Toffler's meaning and extends it into a world where mass produced goods are bad and "do it yourself" is the mantra. We certainly have made a number of investments at Union Square Ventures which are based loosely on this theme, certainly Etsy and Bug Labs, but also to some extent delicious, FeedBurner, and Oddcast, play on the theme of consumers creating their own products and services.

Blogging is also an expression of the "do it yourself" mantra. Why rely on traditional mainstream media to inform, educate, and entertain when we can do it ourselves now?

The reason I am writing about this today is that I've been reading a bunch of essays that Jessica was assigned to read in her history class. One of them was from Horace Mann, written in 1848, and titled On Education and National Welfare. This is an amazing essay and one which you should read if you've never seen it before.

In his closing paragraph, Mann writes:

That political economy, therefore, which busies itself about capital and labor, supply and demand, interests and rents, favorable and unfavorable balances of trade, but leaves out of account the elements of a wide-spread mental development, is naught but stupendous folly. The greatest of all the arts in political economy is to change a consumer into a producer;

I don't know whether Toffler was inspired by Horace Mann or someone else in his conception of the prosumer, but I agree with both of them. We are into a new era where techonology and education have allowed the consumer to become the producer. It's an important change in the forward progress of the human condition.

Comments

[Rem]

Great Post, it got me thinking about some other views I have seen about the idea of a prosumer.

One is Eric Von Hippel's analysis of the "lead consumer" in his book Democratizing Innovation (you can download it for free off his website). He argues that with the ever increasing ease of innovation due to the internet it, as Hippel writes, "is becoming progressively easier for many users to get precisely what they want by designing it for themselves"(2). The users who innovate first, hacking a product to meet their needs, are the lead users. It is these lead users that are Hippel's prosumer, the new product designer / consumer of that product for the internet age. Hippel argues (and to some extent shows) that the lead user is being taken into account by comapnies and that we are seeing the emergence of a strong set of prosumers and products for them (ex, Widgets and Instructables, just to name two).

[Rick Burnes]

That's a great passage from Horrace Mann. It reminds me of a point Yochai Benkler makes in The Wealth of Networks:

"Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others, are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the material and social conditions in which we find ourselves."

[EthanB]

That is a really beautiful thought that Mann had.

Lessig addresses a similar point in "Free Culture" [which I really hope everyone here has read; at least read the intro and first couple of chapters...the whole book is free on his site].

In the intro [I think}, he talks about George Eastman, his film inventions, and how particular court rulings on copyright [that allowed people to take pictures of private property or persons w/o permission] had the effect of "lowering the barriers to expression."

Clearly the Internet has hastened this for blogging, where direct quotation and linking is accepted as a legitmate part of the creative process.

The same literal creative process still doesn't have the same legitimacy in other mediums, specifically music and video, because of how perverted "fair use" has gotten. Of course I am referring to the mass appeal of so-called "mash-up" and remixing.

Judging from the overall jist of Eastman, Mann, Lessig, et al, it seems like there is vastly more value for companies and the public by encouraging "prosumer" remix culture than restricting the flow of "intellectual property."

[CoryS]

When starting up, my partner and I saw three very important elements arising (even before web 2.0 was coined):
1. highly trained and educated workforce soft-retiring into consulting or being laid off (leading to more job changes even later in life) in the US
2. the internet fostering connected collaboration
3. manufacturers listening to consumers and their employees more dynamically and taking more action on recommendations

All of these transformations are the basis for our belief in the shortening of the innovation pipeline. Prosumers, a.k.a. enthusiasts or lead users, drive usage forward in many categories as Von Hippel and his colleagues have described. The recent boom in collaborative tools have only added to the internet's great platform for further and faster development of ideas.

What is even more interesting is when prosumers have the low cost means to then take their output and distribute it for free, for a return, etc. along with the industry that can facilitate that activity in each market.

Interesting times.

[dave]

Check out www.threadless.com for a true"crowd-sourced" business model that blends the consumer and the producer.

[Kempton]

Thanks for the discussion of the new twist of prosumer - producer and consumer (I only know the second definition). And that wonderful 1848 quote.

By the way, you may have a typo in this -- "products targeted between the low end consumer market and the high end professional market." I think you might have meant, "between the *high* end consumer market and the *low* end professional market."

[Chris Hunter]

I can't begin to tell you how jealous I am of the founders of ETSY. What a great idea; bring artisans who have items worth cherishing to people who will cherish them. A win-win situation -- especially since the items are affordable. Geez!

[finn mckenty]

perhaps it's only because i come from the broadcast design world (which has a lot of crossover with the video production business), but i've always heard "prosumer" used to describe products that are affordable to high-end consumers, yet good enough to produce low-end professional work. the panasonic DVX-100 video camera is a perfect example.

this phenomenon in itself is pretty interesting. more and more products across all categories are introducing prosumer-level offerings: look at the enormous, overpowered barbecue grills and lawnmowers, for example.

[Dustin]

Mann sounds a large amount like Adam Smith. I like his idea that education is the greatest political 'art'. And thus, we should educate all in this manner.