Page - 105 - in Radical Solutions and Open Science - An Open Approach to Boost Higher Education

7 ProsumerisminHigherEducation… 111 league tablesandre-constructing lecturersas facilitatorsof the ‘studentexperience’ (Hayes&Wynyard,2002).Ritzerlaterarguedthatthefocusofcapitalismhasshifted fromexploitingproducers, toexploitingconsumers, toexploitingprosumers. In the McDonaldscase,Ritzersuggests,prosumersdounpaidwork.Insteadofhavingwait- ers inMcDonald’s, theyhavetheprosumerscarrytheirownfoodandclear theirown tables. In thecaseof thenewonlineglobalcapitalists—likeAmazon,Facebookand Google, thebusinessmodel is supportedbyprosumerswhonotonlyconsumeprod- ucts but who do all the advertising and product endorsement that formerlywould have been done by expensive sub-contractors (Ritzer, 2015). Ritzer describes uni- versitiesas‘thevelvetcageofprosumption’.Studentsare increasinglyseen,andsee themselves, as consumers of educationwho are there to get their money’s worth. Universities are set up to attract students (and their parents) to the university and then to keep them on campus to spendmoney. Yet fewer students have access to good teachers because of the high cost. Poorer students are nowpoorly educated. Thewealthier studentsgo to themostexpensiveuniversitiesandstill haveaccess to thebest education, although theymaynot take full advantageof it (Ritzer, Jandric´, &Hayes,2018). What this suggests is that, rather thanservingasanantidote to theentrenchment of traditional power structures, through the democratization of education, the pro- sumer’s engagementmostly serves to reinforce the interests of the status quo. As Comor(2011)argues, ‘theprosumerseemsmore likely tobecome,at thevery least, thesubjectofongoingexploitationand,quitepossibly,anagentofincreasinglycom- plexformsofpossessiveindividualism’.Alvesson(2013)referstothe‘massification’ ofhigher education, as it is increasingly influencedby theprinciplesofMcDonald- isation, arguing that it raises fantasiesabout success in life,nationalgreatnessanda fast-track to top jobs that areunlikely tobe fulfilled. Cole and Bradley (2018) go further, arguing that the prosumer ethic in higher educationserves tocontribute to thedominanceofglobal capitalismasaone-world system. They suggest that themarketing of prosumerism in education as ‘person- alisationof learning’—aimedostensiblyatprovidingopportunities for creativecol- laboration—is in fact a smokescreen for amore sinister agenda that aims todo two things: extend the culture of surveillance and commodify knowledge in order to makeitmoremarketable.Byencouragingstudents to increase theiruseofplatforms likeFacebook in their collaborative learning, the prosumer ethicmakes themmore vulnerable to exploitationof their personal data.By encouraging students to act as unpaidcontributors toknowledgecreationandaffectivecapital—asa result of edu- cational institutions exploiting their student experience—theprosumer ethic serves tocontribute further tounpaidcustomer input into theproductionprocess. An important question these critiques of prosumerism in higher education pose iswhat is the connectionbetweenprosumerismand social inclusion. Some studies suggest that, inorder tobegoodprosumers, students need tohaveaccess to awide rangeof content production resources.For example, studentswith access to awide rangeof content production resources are likely to dominate in theworld of social media. Access to social media has in turn been shown by a number of studies to be a key determinant of prosumer capability and success. But as long as content