Prosumer Revisited 2009

Frankfurt.
The next presentation at Prosumer Revisited is by Dirk Dalichau, whose interest is in the motivation of participants in user-led production processes. There are a number of types of participants here - people involved in DIY production, co-creators for example in software development, or informal contributors adding value to commercial processes, for example.

Toffler's prosumers worked outside of business, Dirk suggests, and produced largely for their own use, mainly in the fields of arts and crafts; the new type of prosumer, however, operates in a more business-like context, only indirectly for their own use. These different types of prosumers have different motivations as well - participation, difference, and self-sustainability on the one hand; rational motives driven by user needs, but also the fun in the experience, on the other.

Frankfurt.
The next keynote at Prosumer Revisited is by trend researcher and journalist Holm Friebe. He begins by referencing de Certeau, and describes prosuming in the first place as the creative repurposing of existing products; from this, though, we've also moved on to the creation of new artefacts by users. There is a semantic shift in the description of prosumption, then - a shift further towards various forms of DIY production.

What's happening now is that this form of DIY production is becoming a brand in its own right - and this 'DIY brand' may be the most important brand of the 21st century. This is visible for example in 'crafting', the latest iteration of the arts and crafts movement - in effect an extension of online DIY and produsage (and importantly also of its its collaborative, community-based aspects) into the offline world. In the long tail of interests, some of this is becoming an industry in its own right as well, of course - the arts and crafts marketplace Etsy is a clear example for this, and it's even begun to operate its own (offline) training courses.

Frankfurt.
The next speakers here at Prosumer Revisited are Matthias Bode and Per Østergaard, whose interest is in consumption studies. How do consumers relate to culture, products and brands, companies, and each other - and where does the idea of the prosumer fit in here? They begin by noting the idea of integrating consumers into the production sphere in order to make production more democratic as well as to make production more profitable.

How can different conceptual approaches to the consumer be mapped? One approach is to map them across the micro-macro continuum. On the macro level, the term is used to refer to a kind of social revolution in late capitalism, but also to the potential for exploiting consumers by involving them in production processes; on the micro level, it is used more anecdotally to refer to examples and symptoms of such changes, but without enough broader conceptual support. From a marketing perspective, at the micro level there is interest in developing new revenue models and changing relationships between companies and customers, while at the macro level there is a focus on the co-creation of meaning.

Frankfurt.
I'm following on directly from this first keynote at Prosumer Revisited. I don't think the audio recording worked, but here's the presentation at least. It went pretty well, I think, though I still find it hard to present this work in German...

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Frankfurt.
The Prosumer Revisited conference begins with a keynote by Frank Piller, who presents the perspective from management research. He begins by describing the story of the ice cream king of upper Manhattan - a small old-fashioned store which sells only a small range of flavours and does not mix them. This is the old market model - where the quality of products means that producers have no need to respond to the needs and interests of consumers. But we've moved away from this, as Chris Anderson's 'long tail' model shows - while such old-fashioned marketing models focussed on extracting profits from the short head of the long tail distribution, stores like Amazon have emerged to cater to the long tail, offering a vast variety of products but selling only a relatively small quantity of each title. What Amazon has managed is to build a sustainable business model from this.

Frankfurt.
I've arrived at the Prosumer Revisited conference in Frankfurt, where we've gathered in the very stylish main hall of the Johann-Wolfgang-von-Goethe-Universität. We begin with a welcome by conference chair Birgit Blättel-Mink, and a representative from conference sponsor eBay, who notes the site's own contribution to prosumption culture (and describes what eBay generated more specifically as an 'auction culture', from which the site is slowly moving on, however - a culture of buying and reselling goods relatively rapidly, of a transient ownership which I've also touched on in the final chapter of my produsage book).

Frankfurt.

From WebSci '09 in Athens, I've arrived in Frankfurt (where it actually snowed this morning...), for the Prosumer Revisited conference over the next few days. My first official engagement today was a guest lecture for Cultural Science stalwart Carsten Herrmann-Pillath at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, though - not the kind of audience I usually speak to, but a very relevant one for a guest lecture on produsage nonetheless. My presentation is below - when I have a chance, I'll also add the audio from my talk.

In just over a week, I'm off to Europe for the first of a number of conference trips this year; as always, I'll try to blog my progress as I go. My first stop is the WebSci '09 conference, where I'm presenting a poster on the background to our blog mapping project (which has already produced papers at the AoIR and ISEA conferences last year, with more to come). Should be interesting, even if it's a lot more (computer and social) science-y than what I'd usually attend. And, they've got Tim Berners-Lee as a keynote speaker - no doubt in honour of yet another anniversary, and one which I didn't even mention in my post the other day: yes, the Web, too, first happened 20 years ago (or at least that's when Sir Tim first proposed his hypertext transfer protocol)!.