Wikistudents : teaching consumption through production

This paper describes and reflects on a fascinating teaching experience that we developed for the unit Consumer Culture in Academic Year 2014-5, a subject examining the history, theory and politics of consumption, and which was taught at the University of Milan within the Master of Arts Program in Corporate Communication. A collaborative teamwork workshop was set up to complement the main textbook (Sassatelli 2007) and to reflect more critically on the complexities of the commodity circuit as it goes through the so called “sign economy” (Baudrillard 1981) and the increasing engagement of consumers qua producers. The workshop began by providing the class with a general introduction to the notion of “prosumption” (Fuchs 2013; Humphreys & Grayson 2008; Ritzer & Jurgenson 2010). Prosumption, a term coined by Alvin Toffler (1980), identifies the trend in late capitalism toward putting consumers to work (at the fast-food outlet or at the ATM machine, shopping on line or animating a brand community). Prosumption, by rejecting any sharp division between the production and the consumption sphere, is a concept that allows the co-creation of value and the dynamics of exploitation and control under regimes of unpaid labor and post-scarcity markets. Within this new “wikinomic” model, and the development of Web 2.0 in particular, consumers are increasingly asked to contribute to the production of both the symbolic value of commodities (fan communities, for example; see Cova, Kozinets & Shankar 2012; Van Zoonen 2014) and, notably, the production of knowledge about commodities and the world more generally. The ways consumers contribute to the generation of value in the sign economy include the production of knowledge, via, for example, reviews of films and books on Amazon and reviews of travel hotels on Booking.com. More specifically, consumers can become producers contributing to the construction of a common base of knowledge in Wikipedia, the online open-access encyclopedia based on an openly editable content and the collaboration of thousands of anonymous contributors who write for free. Wikipedia is well-known to university students worldwide as a source of information. Founded in 2001, Wikipedia can be understood as a kind of “commons”; ideally, it will provide well written, balanced entries containing comprehensive and verifiable (via clear quotations) knowledge. The challenge was to involve students into writing and editing entries, thus critically appreciating the way it engages “consumers” in the production process.