How It Will Be Created and How It Will Change Our Lives
Alvin and Heidi Toffler
Currency/Doubleday, 2007
In their most recent book, the Tofflers describe a huge new and uncharted part of our economy as “prosuming.” Prosuming has two primary features. The creation of “goods, services or experiences for our own use or satisfaction, rather than for sale or exchange,” or the co-creation of a product or service offered by a third party or the participation in its delivery in a way that involves no direct financial compensation. This includes everything from parenting and caring for an elderly friend (85 – 90% of all medical care in the United States is provided by ordinary people) to building Wikipedia to providing self-banking services through the use of ATM’s, (thus displacing the need for more than 200,000 tellers annually.)