Postscript on Contribution Societies

Surveying the landscape of mid-century industrial society, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer observed the strange role of variety in consumer and cultural goods. The techniques of mass production in the factories and studio system had, oddly enough, managed to produce not a surface of sameness, but a great diversity of things. On the one hand, however, the diversity of goods that faced consumers was merely apparent, decipherable as false by “any child with a keen interest in variety.” On the other hand, the variety of offerings on the market was functional and effective at securing the social order. “Something is provided for all,” Adorno and Horkheimer gloomily observed, “so that none may escape.”¹ If the Frankfurt school theorists could peer into contemporary culture, they would observe a stunning intensification of variety, as well as a search engine–optimized system for identifying and catering to niche desires that would make their imagined color-coded advertising maps seem quaint by comparison. The difference between the cultural consumption analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer and today’s practices is not the variety, which has only proliferated. Rather, it is the unidirectional character of being provided for. The subject of the industrial society is positioned as passive in this regard, whereas the consuming subject today is active and productive: the famous prosumer we’ve heard so much about.

Today, as we’re told in nearly every Web 2.0 business book, consumers are not merely provided with a variety of goods. Prosumers actively codevelop and coproduce; successful production depends on empowering prosumers and valuing their contributions. And such statements need not be read cynically. The principle of free and open source software production—that users will identify bugs and needed features and contribute code as a common resource—actually seems to work, and work beyond the limited sphere of software programming. People contribute videos on YouTube; contribute T-shirt designs and ratings on Threadless; contribute entries and up to the minute updates on Wikipedia; contribute to the marketing of bands, films, books, political candidates by sharing, linking, and liking them on Facebook; contribute images on Flickr; contribute artwork and music and poetry with Creative Commons licenses; contribute endless commentary, opinions, fan fiction, breaking news, and survey data on Twitter, on blogs, and on news sites; and so on. This is, indeed, where the first version of the World Wide Web fell short, still asking its users to submit information, in order to be better provided for. The shift from the submit button of Web 1.0 to the share button of Web 2.0 can, from this perspective, be seen as the putatively radical shift away from being-provided-for and toward contribution. It was, of course, one of the signal achievements of cultural studies (or its most notable ideological production—the jury’s still out), to show that the passive consumer of Adorno and Horkheimer’s account was never quite as passive as they imagined, but if the variety of goods they saw facing the consumer has multiplied exponentially, the condition of being-provided-for has shifted its directionality completely. The first clause of their famous diagnosis—“Something is provided for all”—might be better rewritten today as “Everyone may contribute.”

The second clause is trickier. All this contribution in the area of new media is regarded as the escape itself, an escape from the passivity, limitations, and gatekeeping functions of the old media. Using Twitter, in this sense, is not merely a matter of coproducing the information sphere. It is, both in the aggregate and at the individual level a reassertion of publicness that both overcomes and surpasses the limits and controls of...