The new WWW model, however, with the advent of the social web, has modeled itself more on the prosumer model. “Prosumers”, as defined in Wikipedia, are the mixture of the two concepts of the word professional or producer and the word consumer. The social web is interactive; it beckons visitors to not only be an audience, but to get up on stage and act themselves.

This fun little video goes into a nice presentation of the subject, and also makes some bold – but nevertheless sensible – predictions on where this is all going.

If you’d never heard of this model in the first place, you might have a hard time imagining it. It sounds like you’d pay for cable TV, only to end up watching your neighbor. Then you remember the “reality TV show” wave that’s swept televised media in the past decade! Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.

It is wise for both the web designer and the Internet marketer to be aware of this new world they inhabit. The thing that we have to do is, do not build walls. Walls separate consumers and producers, preventing them from merging into prosumers. We have to let the customers be salespersons. We have to let the employees shop at the company store. We have to let the amateurs be experts, and not let the experts hold themselves in higher regard than the amateurs.

The businesses that are adapting to this new world are flourishing. The ones that don’t aren’t doing very well. Maybe the producer/consumer model of media won’t die off as fast as that video predicts (Lawrence Lessig becoming the US Secretary of Justice in 2020! Ha!), but almost certainly some time soon.

Peter Brittain