Sport and prosumption

Abstract

This article engages and extends understanding of the interrelated concepts of prosumption, the prosumer, prosumer capitalism, and McDonaldization in relation to the highly commodified and spectacularized world of professional sport. Developing an understanding of modern sport forms as having always exhibited prosumptive dimensions, the discussion focuses on the contemporary sporting context. The analysis highlights the increasingly intertextual and interactive nature of sport prosumption, as realized through Web 2.0 technologies, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and website comment pages, all of which provide a means of contributing toward (and thereby co-producing) the prosumer sport spectacle. Within this explication of sporting prosumption, we focus on empirical forms occupying the center of the prosumption continuum: those expressions wherein the productive and consumptive aspects of prosumption are “more or less evenly balanced.” In doing so, we examine sport spectatorship as a form of material prosumption – the digital-based prosumption implicit within “socialmediasport” and the enmeshed digital and material prosumption constitutive of eSport. Our aim is to critically explicate the prosumptive dimensions of contemporary sport culture and, in conclusion, to contribute to the wider dialogue regarding the nature and implications of prosumer capitalism.