Journal Entry - 10/16 Prosumerism
What exactly do we sign up for when we register to social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. While these platforms seem like harmless ways to share information with close friends and family, we are often unaware of just how much we are actually sharing. In chapter two of Estee Beck’s Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance Beck discusses just how much we are giving to large corporations and companies that benefit from the sharing of social media through processes of prosumerism and digital algorithmic surveillance.
Prosumerism is a term that was coined by Alvin Toffler in his 1980 work The Third Wave. In this work he described the development of civilization through three different “wave” periods: The agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the informational age. It is within this third wave that we find the use of the word prosumerism. In this wave, consumers would take on the labor roles of the previous two waves and begin to do things on their own. This is where the “do-it-yourself” mentality was born and inventions such as IKEA’s build-your-own furniture, self-service gas pumps, ATMs, and self-checkout stations began to rise in popularity.
Prosumerism was revered as a method of empowerment and individualism. With the help of rhetoric and composition, students are encouraged to become creators in digital mediated spaces. These content creators when using open source are able to provide content for the use of inquiry and information. Unfortunately, prosumerism is often used as a means of exploitation and economic gain. Businesses will purposefully capitalize on prosumerism to have their consumers provide free labor for the company.
Prosumerism also plays a large part in capitalism of social media through the use of digital algorithmic surveillance. Companies such as Facebook will use algorithms that track the wants and needs of its users. In the case of Facebook, everything you click, share, like, sell, etc… will contribute to the different advertisements you may see. This is used as a way to make users provide their own advertisement, enticing the user to buy a product similar to their own interests. Along with this, many of these ads can act as a way to influence users as to what to buy. The more a user is exposed to a specific object they are conditioned to want it.
The internet and social media is a dangerous thing. As technology increases, it seems that the consumer does more and more within a society. As we dive further into the informational age, people are becoming obsolete. Every day more and more of our information can be found online and thanks to technology we don’t even need to physically input it anymore. This is why it is always important to understand the dangers of technology. Understanding it will allow us to use it to its fullest potential without jeopardizing our freedoms and security along the way.
For my rhetorical models I chose to use linguistic and visual. These two modes compliment each other nicely an always work well together. The linguistic model is always helpful when expressing the general idea of the post as well as provide insight into the heart of the content. The visual mode was used for strictly humorous purposes. The content in this section is rather dense and the visual aspect helped break this up and make it easier to read.