Conclusion

By examining broad fields we have clarified the nature of prosumerism as a practice and mentality. Through contextually exploring production tools (covering the effect of technology on creative practices), communities (examining the nature of peer relationships, networking, feedback, education, support and collaboration) and distribution (observing the delivery of media content via digital networks), we have highlighted trends which may have implications on the wider mediascape and what are referred to as industry standards. 

We saw the beginning of fundamental shifts in the availability of professional-equivalent tools in the user-end market.  Recording devices and editing software, for various forms of media creation, are becoming increasingly more affordable.  This offers the consumer greater opportunities to cross the lines and to break the barriers between themselves and the contrary producer, thus becoming, by definition, something that lies in the middle: a prosumer.  But access to these tools is hardly enough to lend the title to the regular user.  Any monkey with a cheap computer, Microsoft Paint 7 and a Facebook account can upload an image of their dog with a moustache and call it media (or worse: art), but this does not immediately qualify them as a media maker and nor as a prosumer.  There must be and, indeed, there is a point of distinction between the average media user broadcasting their every thought through Twitter and the amateur journalist who uses the social medium as a tool for their craft.  Transpose this into all other media examples: the filmmaker on YouTube versus the user who uploads a video of their cat meowing; the songwriter who submits songs for Hatsune Miku to sing versus the rabid teenage fan who submits tripe; &c.  There is a distinct difference between the consumer and the prosumer engagement with these tools and that is the craftsmanship of the final product.  Indeed: "only a small proportion of the consumers in Web 2.0 settings actively make significant contributions. The rest has varying levels of engagement with the creative community." (van Dijck 2009)

Likewise: there are strong points of difference between the prosumer and the producer.  The producer is a paid professional while the prosumer is an avid amateur.  There is a disparity in the modes of motivation ingrained in the opposed working practices, that is: “artists— they're not driven by money, they're driven by writing music" (2011 Rise Of The Bedroom Producer).  The lack of monetary influences over their work, the lack of convoluted hierarchical structures and the lack of external productive dependency (i.e: the prosumer owns all of their tools and, as a result of, owe their loyalties to nobody) allows the prosumer total and, essentially, absolute control over their craft.  Given the many potentially dissimilar backgrounds and creative approaches of a large population of prosumers, this creates an incredible possibility for greater diversity in media products.

Ironically, it’s those same tools, allowing increased prosumer aggression which allow them to bypass the distributors altogether, maintaining total (or partial, if they use a private social media network) control over their work. This eliminates another potential barrier to contributing to the mediascape without being forced to alter or omit content based on commercial interests.

We are finding that  the media worker is no longer an academically, formally trained, individual. They are an aspiring group of prosumers, helping and educating and offering each other critique. The media worker is, therefore, someone who did not necessarily study media at any tertiary level. They are a group of untrained individuals with the tools to teach themselves and each other. Sharing and remixing, of content and knowledge, is key in this working landscape. The spaces they congregate and collaborate in aren’t necessarily designed for their media format in particular, like prosumer music producers distributing their via. video channels (Youtube, Nico Nico Douga). This is appears to be because social functionality is valued. Since it is only the few who can rely on their work for income, social relationships based around creativity, even those that are simply the validation of anonymous positive feedback may be what drives many prosumers to create (Leonhard 2008).


Media creation in the prosumer context is, essentially, an event.  We say that insofar as we mean to suggest that there is rarely ever one person responsible for the production of a prosumer product.  These are teams of people, many people, sometimes separated by vast physical and cultural differences, uniting to produce a product.  Professional work, likewise, involves grand teams of people but these are teams uniting for and united by financial profit.  In the inverse we are seeing people that work together out of passion for the project.   This crossover is more prevalent than we have so far admitted: the prosumer and producer want the same thing (an audience), build the same thing (a media product) and distribute it through similar channels (social media outlets, online broadcasting structures, even tradition broadcast protocols via community channels).  Ultimately, everyone is in the game for the same reason: to push units.  “Selling enough copies of one's work (whether physical or digital, whether books, songs,movies, software or games) to make this the sole pillar of one's livelihood has in reality always been reserved to those very few creators that are at the top of the heap (i.e. not in the so-called longtail or even the body).” (Leonhard 2008)


The functionality of these audiences, and these productive communities, are entirely unalike, however.  Given a vocal audience, either one critical or receptive, the team of prosumers is more like to listen than the team of producers.  For the producer: the money talks.  There is no money for the prosumer; or if there is: it is spent or otherwise minimal.  For the prosumer: the audience talks.  In both cases: the creator is listening.  We have found that “a lot more people can now become their own publishers and can have a go at becoming [auteurs]; the gates are now wide open to either prove yourself or be demolished by your peers.” (Leonhard 2008)  This is another of the drastically important differences between the old model producer and the new model prosumer: the power of the peer and what constitutes a peer.  The producer’s peers are simply other producers.  But for prosumers peers are en masse made of other prosumers, producers and consumers.  The tiers are muddled and mashed together and the lines of distinction are vague and ill-defined.


This is the problem we had encountered the whole way through this examination.  The conclusions are vague and ill-defined, our own and those from which we have drawn.  We are in the transition period and, because of that, we are effectively making educated guesses - the most educated, but guesses nonetheless.  We cannot predict that this phenomenon will continue throughout media practices in the future and we cannot claim to know how the prosumer idealistic cultures will be adopted or rejected by the big-scale production models.  Any “paradigm switch-over period will be tough: media companies (and those aggregating or represent creators) must facilitate, syndicate, amplify, contextualize, catalyze, administer and most importantly provide scale” (Leonhard 2008) for things to work out.  For prosumerism to be more than a phase, it must be either assimilated into the realm of production and producers, thus changing that world, or it must be raised to a point that it can stand on its own two feet alongside the traditional paid models.  We can commit to neither eventuality, but we can foresee either.