For quite some time, it’s been becoming easier to conceive of the commodity as something immaterial – a social relation – and indeed of economic value as a social construct. Indicative of the accentuation of such trends – and this is one of the truths of the “knowledge economy” – is the phenomenon of “weightless capitalism”, something discussed suggestively by Nathan Jurgenson at Sociology Compass. Taking Facebook as an example, and utilising Zygmunt Bauman’s theme of liquidity as his own compass, Jurgenson argues that the ‘prosumer’ increasingly eschews the accumulation of stuff and instead values a largely symbolic and lighter form of exchange. The sting in the tail or the tale, and this is applicable far beyond the domain of social media, is that we – the ‘content creators’ – are the unremunerated producers of value for the very media which we use as forms of expression and creativity.
To cut a long story short, there is a real sense in which the concept of the ‘prosumer’ gestures towards a hypostasised economic (and social) relation as well as a blurring of borders between consumption and production of content and knowledge.
Elsewhere: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog.
Are you saying that people don’t pay for things in web 2.0?
on a not unrelated note, you seen this?: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html
I’ll explain my attitude to Mark’s argument for a small fee.
I don’t [ahem] buy it.
This speaks of someone who can’t remember the video shop.
If going to netflix instead of buying a DVD is the example of changing-lightening consumer patterns, the obvious historical counter-example is the cinema. Before television and VHS, people consumed film primarily in a communal, ephemeral manner, in the picture theatre, as part of regular rituals of leisure ie. “going out to the pictures”. Was the nickel odeon heavy or light capitalism?
The cinema of the pre-TV era was just as much a virtual good as any product of the internet age, and IMO the accumulation-of-stuff which the article argues is a product of modern capitalism is really just a feature of the 1970s-1990s marketing age.
You’re dead right Liam.
Exactly the same thing has occurred, over a longer timescale, in the consumption of music.
Hadn’t thought of music, FDB, but yes.
Although this in your article Mark:
…rings very true and again it strongly suggests not anything particularly new but something resembling pre-modern modes of capitalism—I’m thinking of blogging as a cottage industry, the narrow loom weavers and spinners enjoying work from their homes, drinking on the job and taking off Saint Monday. Personally, I approve.
I agree with Liam and FDB that there’s nothing new about renting.
I’m also not sure that there is anything new about the blurring of production and consumption. For centuries your humble pub has provided a bare infrastructure (room, booze) which becomes a valuable product only through the company of fellow bullshitters.
the company of fellow bullshitters – and the kindness of strangers – the blog as pub.
Err, note the qualifiers, comrades!
Jurgenson might not be old enough to remember the video shop (I don’t know), but I remember when VHS tapes weren’t the only option there!
@6 – Jenny – heh!
From time immemorial, I’d say.
‘Content producers’ (I hate that phrase), have been unremunerated, or underemunerated for years. What’s new about that?
@5 – Liam, yep, the pre-modern capitalism point is a good one. Except that a lot of things which are now commodified weren’t then… and didn’t necessarily enter the market/capitalist zone. Growing your own food or making your own clothes, for instance. That’s where Marx was wrong – there’s an interesting point to be made about the degree to which the working class was never wholly reliant on income from wage labour and that there’s always been (a) a sphere of labour outside commodification; (b) an informal circulation and exchange of goods which also exists outside teh market.
Again, Fine, note the word “accentuation”. We’re all “content producers” now, even if we don’t think of ourselves as such, and many aspects of cultural practice which used to be reasonably well remunerated now aren’t so much, or aren’t at all.
I rarely go with analyses that suggest that everything is new. Things don’t work like that. But trends do reach tipping points, and things do transform into different things.
Yep, and I think immediately of the food-blogs and dressmaking-blogs of quite a few commenters here. You know who you are.
I don’t know what Marx would have made of something like Etsy. The all-conquering cash nexus perhaps?
In Marx’ defence, I guess he hadn’t read Braudel!
I remember a time, pre video store, indeed pre TV, when we grew a lot of our own food, had plenty of entertainment and paid nothing for it. I saw about 5 films before I went away to secondary boarding school. Since then there has been an ever increasing commodification of experience in order to entertain (and it doesn’t stop there) both vicarious and real.
The ‘weightless’ economy is one of the major reasons, along with energy efficiency, why GHG emissions don’t keep up with GDP growth, or was until some countries started building humungous numbers of very dirty power stations this century.
The weightless economy is one reason why we won’t have to turn ourselves back into peasants wearing hair shirts to meet the challenges of climate change and still have economic growth. Or so I hope.
And in any case, depending on the type of pub, the booze is not so much purchased as hired for a short while.
Elsewhere: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog.