Abstract
Ritzer suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of prosumption (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies. This essay presents the results of a qualitative study of the lived experience of “doing prosumption,” in particular, how prosumption work in user-generated media environments is experienced by prosumers over time. For the purpose of this investigation, the authors conceptualize eBay as a space for the social production and consumption of desire, where, akin to the concept of prosumption, the consumer of these experiences is also, at least in part, a producer of the same experiences. The authors argue that the experience of prosumption changes over time even as the frequency of using eBay as a marketplace may not. The data suggest a trajectory from “enchanted prosumption” to “disenchanted prosumption” as, over time, the collective social production and consumption of desires, daydreams, and fantasies give way to a sense of eBay as a place for routine, efficient, and habitual buying and selling activities. In the final analysis, the authors argue that the disenchantment of and through eBay is a function of the routinization of the self and the rationalization of eBay as technological structure. Hence, the authors extend recent theorizations of the de-McDonaldizating effects of user-generated Web 2.0 spaces by suggesting that the dimensions of McDonaldization built into the technological structure of such spaces can encourage a slow re-McDonaldization of the user experience, albeit not universally. In sum, a longitudinal view of prosumption in user-generated online spaces cautions those studying new media spaces, not to underestimate the power of the McDonaldization processes.
Lately, consumers have been doing a lot of producing, and these acts of production, many of which now occur in the virtual worlds of the so-called Web 2.0 (Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc.), are committed voluntarily and often collectively (Terranova, 2000). The situations in which consumers join fellow consumers and businesses to produce things of value have variously been described as “cocreation,” “coproduction,” and “prosumption” (see, e.g., Foster, 2007; Humphreys & Grayson, 2008; Zwick, Bonsu, & Darmody, 2008). Although all three neologisms refer, by and large, to the same set of practices of collaboration, prosumption may be the most intuitive and perhaps best-known term to describe a process where the consumer produces at least part of what he or she consumes (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). Prosumption, as Ritzer (2009) reminds us, is neither historically new nor specific to 21st-century information capitalism. Rather, by recognizing that production and consumption are two sides of the same coin, prosumption is intrinsic to all forms of capitalist and noncapitalist economies. Nevertheless, recent social transformations, such as the emergence of the Internet and, in particular, its user-generated version, commonly called Web 2.0, have moved practices of prosumption to the center of economic value creation.
The growing role of prosumption in shaping economic relations in contemporary capitalism has many commentators (e.g., Anderson, 2009; Benkler, 2006; Howe, 2008; Kelly, 2009), including some from the critical camp (e.g., Arvidsson, 2008; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010; Terranova, 2004), who wonder whether we are witnessing a shift toward a new type of capitalism—a kind of “prosumer capitalism” in Ritzer and Jurgenson’s (2010) words, or what Arvidsson (2008) calls an ethical economy—characterized by a rise of unpaid labor, new forms of control and exploitation, and a shift in the economics of scarcity. Perhaps so, but we should not underestimate “old” capitalism’s desire to maintain its stranglehold on both production and consumption by adapting its techniques of surveillance, legal definitions of private property, and modes of exploitation, control, and value extraction to the prosumer logic of the information age (Fuchs, 2008; Humphreys & Grayson, 2008). However, we would agree with Ritzer (2009) that despite being in the early stages of significant cultural, social, and economic transformation, we can already attest to an increasing prominence of prosumption, even the emergence of a prosumer society where early forms of putting consumers to work (the gas station, the automatic teller machine, McDonalds, etc.; Ritzer, 1993) are now being universalized across industries, product and service categories, and geographies (see, e.g., Howe, 2008; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2004).
Although conceptualizations and theorizations of prosumption abound in the literature, few studies (e.g., Laughey, 2010; White, 2010) have taken an empirical look at the experience of “doing prosumption,” in particular, how prosumption in user-generated media environments is experienced by prosumers over time. In this article, we attempt to address this gap by presenting the results of a comprehensive study of 40 skilled and active eBay users living in the south of England, who were interviewed between 2008 and 2010. We conceptualize eBay as a space for the social production and consumption of desire, where, according to the concept of prosumption, the consumer of these experiences is also, at least in part, a producer of the same experiences. Two questions were of particular interest to us. First, what drives the initial enthusiasm to participate in and cocreate the prosumption space of eBay? Second, how is this enthusiasm for prosumption reproduced over time; and if it is not, why not? Answering these questions provides us with an empirically grounded account of what it means to “do prosumption” in the age of mass collaboration and social production (Benkler, 2006).
What we find is that the ideal of collective forms of prosumption as nonalienating, beyond the regime of property, enjoyable, and empowering can, in fact, be experienced, even in a clearly proprietary and “a-symmetrical” (Terranova, 2000) capitalist space, such as eBay. 1 However, we argue that over time, eBay—paradoxically—tends to curb the desire of its users to freely and enthusiastically coproduce, share, and co-consume, partly because of structural changes of the service’s operations. Indeed, as we put our data in a dialogue with theories of desire (see, e.g., Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003; Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010), we suggest that over time, what we describe below as “enchanted prosumption” follows a trajectory increasingly characterized by rationalization of market interactions and behaviors reminiscent of the processes of McDonaldization described by Ritzer (1993). Hence, we see a need to integrate an analysis of the phenomenological reality of the user with an analysis of the structural reality of eBay as a technological construct with built-in rules and set parameters.
In the final analysis, our study also prompts us to qualify recent claims that eBay represents the end, or the antidote, to McDonaldiaztion (Ahuvia & Izberk-Bilgin, in press; Jurgenson, 2010). EBayization and de-McDonaldization effects, according to these accounts, provide unlikely spaces for destandardized and derationalized experiences in a world of advancing McDonaldization of production and consumption. What our study suggests, however, is that eBayization and de-McDonaldization effects, although certainly possible, are difficult to sustain over time even in the user-generated spaces of Web 2.0. In this article, we use the notion of the prosumption trajectory to emphasize the time element of prosumption experiences and to conceptualize the changing nature of prosumption as described by our informants.
Prosumption on eBay
Before the enthusiastic embrace of prosumption as an organizing theme of contemporary capitalism, Toffler (1980) and Ritzer (1993), from two different vantage points and with disagreements about its historical evolution (see Ritzer, 2009), argued quite some time ago that we have entered the age of prosumption. The recent surge of interest in prosumption is because of the dramatic rise of user-generated, virtual spaces of the so-called Web 2.0. Unlike the provider-generated Web 1.0, Web 2.0 refers to a world of services, spaces, and products (such as Facebook, eBay, Second Life, YouTube, etc.) that come into being via the mass collaboration of the users (or consumers) of these services, spaces, and products. By making processes of production and consumption indistinguishable, the Web 2.0 emerged as ground zero for the development of new means of prosumption (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010). As such, Web 2.0 brings about new forms of labor, what Terranova (2000) calls the “free labor” of consumer-producers, which is simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed, and, perhaps, exploited.
However, free, creative, and cooperative labor of the web economy does not mean that prosumption marks the arrival of the some kind of communist nirvana where we are all free to produce, share, and “contribute to the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (Lazzarato, as cited in Toscano, 2007, p. 73), cooperatively created and collectively enjoyed, and in principle not owned by anyone. Whatever it is that is produced, consumed, and shared by the creative, affective, and cognitive effort of the users runs sooner or later up against the limits imposed by proprietary structures and existing rules of capital accumulation that persist in the social web, including, of course, eBay (see Zwick et al., 2008). In other words, free labor, such as the photographing, listing, and shipping of personal items on eBay, is often experienced as empowering and fun by the poster (Laughey, 2010), despite being a central element in eBay’s strategy of capital accumulation.
We will argue below, however, that when the fusion of production and consumption into prosumption comes undone in the mind of the user, in other words, when users recognize and experience production and consumption as independent activities, what started as enjoyable and collaborative prosumption can quickly deteriorate into an individualized experience of (re-)McDonaldized chores. In short, for the “new means of prosumption” (Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) to work, as it were, they need to carefully and consciously reproduce the conditions of prosumption.
Method
The majority of research exploring motivations of eBay users and drivers of eBay use approaches the topic with rational choice and game theories or cognitive and behavioral decision-making approaches (e.g., De Ruiter & Van Heck, 2004; Durham et al., 2004; Hemetsberger & Pieters, 2001; Heyman et al., 2004; Mathews, 2004). This body of literature tells us much about the economic and emotional benefits that may come from individual sales or purchases or the winning (or losing) of an individual bidding war. The literature is much less clear about how users’ motivation and emotional involvement change over time, especially in the context of digital prosumption technologies, and how the desire to continuously participate in the selling, buying, and bidding game, that is, in prosuming, is being sustained (or not). Hence, in this article, we present a detailed empirical account that illustrates how consumer involvement with eBay is initiated and reproduced through a cycle of prosumer desire. We also discuss how in most instances and over time, the attachment and relation to eBay, conceptualized as enchanted and disenchanted prosumption, changes as new desires are not reproduced. As a result, we see the slow re-McDonaldization of eBaying and the end of prosumption controlled by the prosumer.
A series of in-depth interviews with 40 experienced eBay users from various background and ages were carried out between September 2008 and March 2010 in the south of England (see Table 1 for informant profiles). Following interpretive research conventions, the sample was small, since the aim was to attain not a statistically representative sample or produce generalizable theory but, rather, variation in experiences (Creswell, 2007; Thompson, Locander, & Pollio, 1989). The sample was made up of 23 females and 17 males between 19 and 58 years old who had on average been using eBay for the past 5 years, with the most novice user having only 6 months of experience and the most experienced ones 10 years. Most respondents reported using eBay at least once a week, with individual sessions ranging from anywhere between a few minutes and up to 4 hr. The number of purchases and sales made by individual respondents also varied, with the most industrious users purchasing more than 600 items.
Informant Profiles
The interviews adopted a phenomenological perspective, which privileged the lived experiences of eBay users and aimed to produce thick descriptions from which understanding of these experiences could be gained (Creswell, 2007; Geertz, 1973). The ultimate aim of our approach is to understand the phenomenon under scrutiny from the individual’s point of view while situating it in the larger social and cultural context in which it occurs (Burawoy, 1991; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The main focus of the current study was to unearth how individuals relate to eBay as a site that is designed to stimulate participation and kindle desires. Most of the interviews were held at respondents’ homes. Additional interviews took place in coffee shops and, in case of student respondents, on campus. During almost all interviews, informants were logged onto the Internet accessing their eBay accounts. This proved important because reference to recent and more distant online activity, all cataloged in the personal My eBay section of the site, allowed users to remember many instances of watching, listing, bidding, and winning (or losing) in much detail. The in-home interview context was useful, as it presented the interviewer with a rich repository of material objects, many of them bought on eBay. We asked respondents to trace the item’s biographical trajectories, to recall key events around the bidding and purchasing of the item, to describe emotions and feelings surrounding it, and so on. We also explored more practical aspects of their eBaying behavior, such as how they search for, acquire, and then appropriate into their lives items found on eBay (and in some cases, the process of getting rid of it again). On average, interviews lasted approximately 1.5 hr, with individual interviews ranging from 1 hr to 3 hr in length.
In total, 70 hr of data were recorded. Each interview was transcribed verbatim and was read carefully and repeatedly to develop theory. Data interpretation took place by way of a hermeneutical circle involving a part-to-whole reading, made up of individual interpretation of interviews at an ideographic or individual level and cross-case analysis. From this exercise, thematic descriptions of experiences were derived. Syntheses then followed to identify common structures or global themes in the experience, which were then built upon for theoretical elaboration (Goulding, 2005; Spiggle, 1994).
Trajectory of Prosumption and Re-McDonaldization
As prosumption is performed through the various practices that make up eBaying—browsing, selling, stocking goods, managing a sale—it follows a path of development or a particular history that is framed by eBay’s platform and consumers’ own projects and goals, as well as individual level of skill and expertise. This said, prosumption trajectories on eBay are variegated and internally differentiated; each user, depending on level of expertise and motivational state, will engage in prosumption differently. We can, however, map our participants’ experience in terms of a trajectory, from enchanted prosumption early on to disenchanted prosumption and, in some cases, abandonment later on. As is to be expected when drawing on 40 user accounts, this trajectory is not the only path eBayers take. A few informants have figured out various techniques to prevent the end of their desire to engage with eBay. However, when looking at the data as a whole, the pervasiveness of the enchanted-disenchanted prosumption trajectory presented below was simply impossible to ignore, despite nuanced individual variations.
We discuss these trajectories in terms of two distinct moments. Under the rubric of prosumption-oriented practices, we first discuss prosumption practice as ignition and management of consumer desire at the outset of a prosumption trajectory. In this mode, prosumption can be characterized as a generally harmonious coming together of a desiring prosumer and a platform for production and consumption (here, eBay) that because of its always morphing and interactive nature continuously provides the impetus for the recreation of prosumption desire (Knorr Cetina, 1997, 2001; Zwick & Dholakia, 2006a, 2006b). We find that the material elusiveness and ontological openness of eBay demands from its users a certain level of psychological flexibility and affective investment, which is then returned to the user as emotional stimulation and pleasure by an increasingly interesting and exciting prosumption object. At this stage of the prosumption cycle, eBay represents an enchanted world offering a seemingly endless resource for the production and pursuit of fantasies, magical moments, and daydreams (cf. Campbell, 1987; Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010). We then focus on the back end of prosumption trajectories on eBay, where we detect among the vast majority of our informants a shift toward a much more rationalized relationship with eBay that we describe as the re-McDonaldization of prosumption (see Jurgenson, 2010). Characterized by an emphasis on efficiency, speed, and the use of technology, the process of re-McDonaldization thus spells the gradual end to the enchanted experience of early eBaying, when the prosumptive process was still fueled by the magic of the technology, the endless promise of new discoveries, and the possibility to fantasize and daydream.
We detect in some of our informants a sense of growing emotional saturation with eBay typified by a progressive wearing out of the nexus previously holding a desiring subject and eBay in a mutual relationship of interdependence. For most of our informants, the drive to learn about new things and having new experiences—in short, the desire to continually ignite new desires, fantasies, and daydreams and actualize them—is virtually exhausted, producing habit and boredom in the face of experiences that were once seen as imaginative, exciting, and magical. As a result, what was previously considered pleasurable prosumption now becomes the odious task and laborious drudgery of posting, photographing, bidding, mailing, and so forth.
Stage 1: Desire and Enchantment
At the outset of the eBay prosumption trajectory, we find that the promise of novelty both in terms of the availability and variety of goods to be had and the eBay experience itself give traction to prosumption activity. Put differently, prosumption trajectories are animated by two underlying undercurrents of desire: one focused on achieving some kind of imaginary and fantastical transformation following purchase or selling activity and another fixed on the excitement of the novice experiences as the composite of knowledge and skill necessary to operate the site are harnessed. These trajectories are intertwined, often feeding from each other. Insider tricks, which are excitedly deployed to produce bargains, precipitate a literal acceleration in cycles of desire for goods. Similarly, it is the impetus for actualizing desired goods and/or an ongoing daydream of achieving success through entrepreneurial activity that propels consumers’ discovery and exploration of the site. Our participants were often as excited to find a desired good, as they were of the often-serendipitous discovery of the knowledge and skills that enabled them to find rare items or bargains as well as achieve a successful sale.
For our sample of informants, early experiences of eBay use are recalled mostly as intoxicating and exciting. Our respondents describe their first experiences with the auction house and online marketplace as “fun” and “thrilling.” Importantly, many regard eBaying as a “time filler” and eBay as something of a continuous entertainment service with an endless supply of channels. EBaying is what our respondents do when they “get a bit of time and there’s only so long you can read a paper for” (Mark, age 35). In moments of boredom, eBay is approached as an always-accessible pleasure dome and treasure chest for discoveries and daydreams. As Mark explained during the interview, “Yes, every day I’m checking just in case there’s something on there I want. . . . It’s like having all the channels on the Sky TV looking through all of them if something’s better on the next channel.” Martin described how, at the beginning, he liked to lose himself in all the options and opportunities and how he was open to suggestions from eBay to explore other areas and products, exclaiming that “you could spend two, three hours just looking at different stuff.”
Other respondents, such as Leah, a 28-year-old engineer who had been using eBay for a few years to purchase toys and films from her childhood, recalls “how fantastic” it was to be able to go on eBay and suddenly find Button, Moon, and Fraggle Rock (children’s TV shows popular in the 1980s in the United Kingdom). These experiences, where objects of or to desire come into view as they appear on eBay, also applied to other everyday goods linked to future-oriented projects (Campbell, 1987; McCracken, 1988), such as furnishing a house in a particular style. Zoe, a full-time academic working in the area of health, was in the process of furnishing her home and was using eBay to help her with this project. She would combine shopping outings to her local department store and eBay to help her learn what she wanted. One day Zoe discovered a lamp on eBay that was very valuable and exactly what she had been looking for, and she realized that the seller was unaware of its value. Zoe describes how she realized that “they have no idea because they haven’t put in there who it was by, who it’s made by.” With pride, she told us how she got a £1,000 lamp for only a £10, and to secure the deal, she gambled hard and waited for her last bid until the final seconds of the bidding window. The thrill of the bidding frenzy during the last seconds of the bidding time is a cherished moment of other users, too.
For Leah and Martin and Zoe, eBay is awarded a key role in producing things to want. Leah considers eBay as “encouraging” her to “buy something that you were not looking for,” and Mark discovers an “inventory of all other things to want” when he surfs through its many pages. However, surprise discoveries are then often followed by periods of learning about objects and object categories, in particular about the qualities that constitute these objects as having a certain value (see Callon, Meadel, & Rabeharosoa, 2002). In other words, eBaying-as-discovering spurs a desire to explore the unknown, which then spurs a desire for further discovery.
In these cycles of desire, eBay brings about and materializes new wants, but this is a joint project that is necessarily animated by consumers’ competences, embodied knowledges, and skills to make the technology produce desired outcomes. Returning to Zoe, she perceives that her expert knowledge of ceramic artists as well as her skills in recognizing a potential bargain and bidding at the last minute helped actualize what resided in her imagination. Succinctly put, for eBaying to constitute a thrilling, surprising, and enchanting experience that reproduces cycles of desire, fantasy, and daydreams, the user must be willing to expend his or her own cognitive and affective energy; he or she must, simultaneously, be producing and as well as through consuming. It is the acquisition and deployment of competencies that make eBay a site of active and enchanted prosumption, rather than passive and disenchanted consumption found, especially, in highly McDonaldized settings (see Ritzer, 1999).
Stage 2: Disenchantment
Although the activities of prosumption constitute eBay as a collaborative, enjoyable, and social space, the company’s inclination to increase the site’s efficiency to complete sales by streamlining processes for searching, posting, watching, and bidding, including the ever-more-popular Buy Now feature, has produced gradually a more routinized and rationalized experience for eBay users. For example, the Buy Now feature has in many instances replaced altogether the option to bid for an item, thus speeding up sales but eliminating the more slowly developing excitement and social aspect of the bidding game. Also, improved search capabilities, although commonly regarded as an improvement to the user experience, bring with them the unintended and somewhat counterintuitive consequence that moments of surprise, such as locating a real bargain that only the initiated would notice as such, are less likely to occur. On one hand, as the consumer becomes familiarized with the eBay technology and its use (Alba & Hutchinson, 1987, 2000), this reduces the surprise factor associated with enchanting consumptive experience. Somewhat paradoxically, the more skilled an eBay prosumer becomes in navigating the rationalizing features of the site, the more likely he or she is to take out of his or her prosumption experience a sense of randomness and unpredictability, undermining in the process the pleasures associated with the sense of possibility that may spring from the vortex of mass collaboration, mass creativity, and cocreation (Denegri-Knott & Molesworth, 2010). On the other, product familiarity resulting from consumers’ increased proximity to desired goods significantly accelerates the cycle of desire, which more readily confronts consumers with their inability to substantiate idealized meanings or displaced meanings associated with goods longed for (Belk et al., 2003; Campbell, 1987). In short, the back end of a prosumption trajectory results from the inherent disenchantment that the lack of desire brings about, as search for goods on eBay, once novel and exciting, becomes something known, and contracted, reducing again the time necessary to sustain desire.
Eventually, we see a transformation of the eBay experience from enthusiastic, playful, and productive participation to more mundane involvement, where eBay is regarded as a marketplace for batteries, inkjets, and even toilet rolls. 2 When we interviewed Ian, a 48-year-old professional in the aeronautical industry, he was working on his third collection of miniature airplanes. He described himself as a keen plane spotter who, in his travels around the world, has spotted approximately 40,000 planes and recorded his sightings in very detailed log files. Ian had started using eBay to help his son with his collection of Matchbox cars, and this prompted his own use of eBay to collect miniature airplanes. Within an 8-year period, Ian had began three collections and finished two. The third and yet-to-be-finished collection, which he proudly displayed in his office, was particularly meaningful to him, as it included only planes that had been operational between the time he started plane spotting and the year he started his current job.
The problem for Ian is that eBay made it possible for him to locate and acquire all sorts of previously hard-to-find miniature planes, and this, as he puts it, “made it too easy,” adding that “if it’s too easy, it’s not worth doing.” This ease eventually made the practice of collecting through eBay problematic, as it threatened the meaningfulness of collecting itself. As Ian started to incorporate automated eBay e-mail alerts to find desired items, in effect distributing agency because the search is being entrusted to an external vehicle, the essence of collecting is changing. Once newly acquired competencies and embodied knowledges are delegated to electronic agents and search and acquisition processes become automated, the possibility of surprise and serendipity that characterized early experiences in the user-generated space gives way to routine.
Routine is also produced by the repetitive nature of tasks needed to be performed to get certain goals accomplished, such as selling unwanted goods. The industrious processes involved in selling are exemplified in Lizzie’s experiences. Lizzie, a mature student in the process of moving houses, went through two big boxes replete with a range of items, such as old mobile phones, crafting tools, books, and unwanted gifts, and bemoans the onerous processes required to auction her items, stating that “the process is the painful thing about it.” She dislikes writing descriptions, mailing the sold items, and dealing with returns when they come. These are the moments, following Colin Campbell (1987), when fantasy is pushed aside by reality, ending the possibility of enchantment.
In addition to becoming a chore, selling experiences on eBay become increasingly predictable over time. Lizzie knows how much her goods will go for, the various processes required to maximize her sales, even her potential buyers’ bidding behavior. Existing consumer research into consumer delight would account for this loss of excitement as a direct consequence of decreasing elements of surprise in the eBay experience (Oliver, Rust, & Varki, 1997; Rust & Oliver, 2000). The lack of surprise and its effects on enchantment also afflicts the eBayer in a buyer mode. The rationalization of eBaying and the acceleration of cycles of desire become problematic when they rob prosumers of the pleasures associated with wanting, making, longing, and consuming (cf. Campbell, 1987). Over time, the reproduction of desire, to always desire something else, creates a sense of entrapment and then tedium as the once-exciting dialogue with eBay (via searching, wanting, and bidding) morphs into more mundane and alienated forms of consumerism. It is as if the continued prosumption on eBay creates the conditions for the demise of prosumption.
Paradoxically, then, the better eBay operates as a place for mass collaboration in the social production and consumption of desire (e.g., people’s willingness to post items for sale and to bid), the harder it becomes for some eBayers to find meaning in their prosumption practices. Ian finds himself constructing new boundary conditions for what counts as a meaningful airplane collection to again experience eBay as a challenging and surprising place. Failing to do so leads to an eventual disenchantment with eBay as “dreamspace” (Belk, 2001; Belk et al., 2003; Ritzer, 1999; Stevens & Maclaran, 2005) and to an untangling of the very fabric that holds the prosumption of desire together. Put differently, eBay’s technostructural interventions that aim to streamline and rationalize the production and consumption of its services as a user-generated marketplace end up suffocating the fire of (prosumer) desire (Belk et al., 2003).
Discussion
What our data suggest, then, is that over time, continued participation on eBay combined with always-“improving” eBay technology seems to reduce the sense of personalization, attachment to the site, and community of social production and consumption present at the outset. The excitement that comes from acquiring new skills and knowledge, seeking adventure, finding surprises, and kindling novel desires settles into a more routinized behavior of buying and selling that exploits the predictability and efficiency of eBay as market platform. Conceptually, we see over time a gradual (re)distribution of skills and agency on eBay from the user to the technology, or as Ritzer (1993) puts it, from human to nonhuman technology, where eBay absorbs and then performs some of the skills used by prosumers for the social production and consumption of desire, fantasies, and daydreams. In these efforts to increase productivity, prosumers then engage in a self-induced form of deskilling as well as the homogenization of prosumption activities. But the more eBay takes on the roles of prosumers and outside human input is reduced to increasingly standardized tasks, the more Web 2.0 comes to resemble the predictability and controllability of the (Fordist or McDonaldized) Web 1.0 (Jurgenson, 2010). To the vast majority of our informants, eBaying no longer represents prosumption after they feel that outcomes and events are less left to chance and are more predictable. And with the relationships to eBay as an interactive prosumption technology reformulated as utilitarian and rational, user practices become equally rationalized and routinized. We therefore suggest that at the level of microanalysis that illuminates the phenomenological perspective of the user-prosumer, prosumption in a mass collaboration space, such as eBay, underlies a trajectory that begins with a sense of excitement, wonder, and expectation; then goes on to spur new (or revive old) fantasies of identity and lifestyle, daydreams, and desires; before finishing with a disillusioned sense of eBay prosumption as routine. Obviously, this slow gestation of the routinized self on the microlevel cannot be disentangled from the increasing efforts by eBay to fashion itself into a machinelike bureaucracy and rational exchange platform. Hence, on the structural macrolevel of analysis, we observe that eBay’s push toward rationalization and organization is embraced by the prosumer, who then comes to resemble increasingly the kind of routinized self-characteristic of bureaucratic capitalism. The routinized self combined with the technostructural bureaucratization and rationalization of eBay leads to a phenomenology of disenchantment, where the prosumer no longer expects to find the unexpected, fantastical, and magical (springing out of the creative, disorganized, and nonhierarchical cocreation of experiences) but rather hopes to exploit the technologically produced efficiency of the selling and buying process for personal gain.
Does this mean that eBay, and perhaps user-generated means of prosumption more generally, is based on the same forces of McDonaldization that, according to Ritzer (2004, 2006), have come to dominate the organization of work and consumption in postindustrial societies? McDonaldization as a concept refers to the optimization of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control in all business processes to produce a highly standardized outcome. One of Ritzer’s key insights was that the radical rationalization of the production process must include the rationalization of the consumption process, effectively recognizing that in a McDonaldized world, production and consumption are two sides of the same coin. Ritzer’s work suggests that McDonaldization represents a grand narrative for 21st-century global capitalism and that as a form of organization of society, work, and consumption, the processes underlying McDonaldization are likely to strengthen, proliferate, and grow. From that perspective, eBay should be no exception.
Two recent essays (Ahuvia & Izberk-Bilgin, in press; Jurgenson, 2010), however, reject the idea that the principles of McDonaldization can be used as a solid basis for understanding the mode of production and consumption on the social web. Neither Ahuvia and Izberk-Bilgin (in press) nor Jurgenson (2010) refute the fact that McDonaldization remains a useful model for explaining many aspects of the organization of work and life in contemporary capitalism. But they do, in slightly different ways, conclude that the recent rise of user-generated online spaces and the social production of experiences and services should be regarded as counterevidence to the grand narrative of the ever-increasing rationalization and McDonaldization of society. What Jurgenson calls the de-McDonaldization of the Internet and Ahuvia and Izberk-Bilgin call the eBayization of consumer culture refer, in essence, to the capacity of the social web and postindustrial capitalism more generally to bring elements of unpredictability, variety, and surprise to the lifeworld of prosumers, as well as a destandardization of services, products, and experiences. Even though Jurgenson correctly points out that the Web 2.0 remains highly McDonaldized, rationalized, and standardized, when considering the technological structure underlying its spaces of social production and collaboration, he fundamentally agrees with Ahuvia and Izberk-Bilgin that on top of this McDonaldized technology base grows a mode of production and consumption that is built on unquantifiable, uncontrollable, affective, and communal human effort. The result of such freely associating forms of prosumption (e.g., Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, eBay, Twitter, etc.) marks, in the eyes of Jurgenson as well as Ahuvia and Izberk-Bilgin, a clear shift away from the concept of McDonaldization as Ritzer defines it.
Based on our empirical analysis, we support the basic premise of the de-McDonaldization and eBayization theses as they relate to user-generated means of prosumption characteristic of the Web 2.0. We agree with Ahuvia and Izberk-Bilgin (in press) that the variety, control, and surprise offered by the ontologically more open and cocreated spaces of the information economy are a strong motivating factor for eBay participation and continuous involvement. Nonetheless, our data suggest that we need to qualify the accounts of Jurgenson (2010) and Ahuvia and Izberg-Bilgin by looking at both the microlevel and the macrolevel. Specifically, on the microlevel, the experiences of our informants, reflecting on their past and present use, reveal that we should not underestimate the forces of rationalization and routinization operating in the spaces of Web 2.0. In short, eBaying, despite all its potential for magic, surprise, and fantasy, can evolve from the perspective of the user into an efficient and rationalized system of transactions. On the phenomenological microlevel of analysis, then, eBaying becomes, after a while, a place where users hand back control of the market process to technological systems, actively limit variety, and curtail unpredictability. Thus, in the longer term, even the world of eBayization reverts back to producing routine and rationalized experiences. Such a trend toward sensations of monotony and disenchantment cannot be separated from the structural (or macrolevel) effect of eBay as a technological construction. As Jurgenson points out, the technological structure that makes prosumption possible is still highly McDonaldized. And therein, we believe, lies the limitation of the de-McDonaldization and eBayization arguments. In our data, we see clearly that prosumption ends when the means of prosumption become too predictable and conventional. Or put differently, the desire to investigate, question, explore, and continuously cocreate the means of prosumption wanes as an increasingly McDonaldized structure imposes its limits. Hence, as user-generated spaces lose their enchanted properties and become rationalized and routinized, so do the experiences, behaviors, and practices of most users. In short, routinization at the microlevel (of routinized selves) and McDonaldization at the structural level combine to lead to the disenchantment of prosumption.
Our analysis raises a pressing question that relates to the contradiction of prosumption capitalism as articulated by our theory of disenchanted prosumption. In short, how can we square the fact that even as many companies increasingly require enchanted coproduction for their ongoing economic value creation, they tend to apply, wherever possible, regimes of rationalization and appropriation to these activities, thereby threatening the continuous reproduction of the conditions of possibility for enchanted production? From a business strategic perspective, this contradiction represents one of the most vexing challenges for today’s marketing managers, who are looking for ever-new ways of encouraging consumers to create economic value while experimenting with forms of value appropriation that do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (cf. Frank, 1999; Holt, 2004). From our perspective, success in the age of prosumption capitalism would require that companies become a genuinely supportive and authentic resource for prosumers’ prosumption (and innovation) activities while refraining strictly and absolutely from any familiar urge to control, streamline, and enclose—in short, to manage—prosumption (Arvidsson, 2008). Whether conventional companies can manage their pathological impulse to intervene and rationalize prosumer creativity and innovativeness remains to be seen. It seems to us, however, that the more likely scenario would be the emergence of a new breed of companies that are based, from inception, on the economic logic of prosumption. 3
Conclusion
This article presents the results of a qualitative study of eBay users living in the south of England. Our analysis shows that the experience of prosumption—as the social production and consumption of desire—changes over time even as the frequency of using eBay as a marketplace may not. Our data therefore suggest that simply participating in user-generated online spaces may not always be best characterized as prosumption in the sense of free, creative, and cooperative activities. Equally important is the perception of the prosumer that the object of user generation—in our case, eBay as a place for the prosumption of desire—provides a level of surprise, unpredictability, and ontological liquidity, to use Knorr Cetina’s (2001) term (i.e., variety and always-changing assortment of eBay’s content), that is sufficient to further motivate prosumers to prosume. Looking at our informants’ accounts, we detect a trajectory from pleasurable prosumption to chorelike laboring. In other words, although initially, users clearly embody the spirit of social production and collective consumption captured in the concept of prosumption, over time, a sense of the voluntary and enjoyable work of prosumption wanes, and activities on eBay are increasingly seen as laborious and routine tasks by the users. We thus argue that when eBay is no longer perceived by the individual user as providing a sufficient degree of surprise, unpredictability, and variety, it ceases to be the powerful platform for the social production and consumption of desires, fantasies, and emotions—what we would call, following Ritzer (1999), enchanted prosumption.
Furthermore, by making changes to its interface that take out some of the elements of surprise, that increase exchange efficiency, and that boost behavioral predictability, eBay is partly to blame for the conversion of a playful and pleasurable prosumption experience to the experience of eBaying as laborious chore. For example, a more user-friendly search engine and the replacement of the bidding process by the more efficient Buy Now feature may increase what Laughey (2010) calls user authority and units of sale, but these changes diminish the sense of sociality among users who are looking for experiences that go beyond rationalized market exchanges. EBay, with its quest to make the user experience ever more seamless, efficient, and friendly, resembles more and more closely a giant shopping mall, and for many of our informants, mundane shopping is what they now do on eBay.
In the article, we have used the distinction between the microlevel experience of progressive routinization of eBay prosumption and the macrolevel configuration of eBay as a rationalized technostructure to theorize the trajectory of prosumption in user-generated Web 2.0 spaces. Simply put, our research suggests that in the long run, the dimensions of McDonaldization built into the technological structure of eBay seem to encourage rationalized user experiences and disenchanted prosumption, albeit not universally. Hence, there is no guarantee that user generation is always driving prosumption behavior. User activity does not equal prosumption. The company needs to reproduce continually the conditions of unpredictability, daydreaming, fantasy, and desire to encourage the kind of emotional attachment with, and social organization on, the site that is crucial for the production of cultural, social, and economic wealth. Finally, although we support the general premise that user-generated spaces dominated by prosumption give rise to de-McDonaldization and eBayization effects, our analysis illustrates that over time, the rationalizing and standardizing forces of the social web’s technological structure have the potential to limit the ability of the users to reproduce a desire to prosume, promoting instead a gradual re-McDonaldization of the mode of work and consumption. In sum, when we trace closely the actual experience of prosumers in user-generated online spaces, we are reminded not to underestimate the power of McDonaldization processes.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.