The Prosumption Flywheel: How Short‐Video Platforms Reduce the Digital Production Divide

ABSTRACT Most studies on the digital divide have focused on access to digital technology and individual capability to use ICT, thus treating users primarily as consumers of information. In this study, we focus on content production and examine how information technology (IT) can reduce the digital production divide for digitally disadvantaged groups. Despite the literature suggesting that content production skills are more advanced than content consumption, short‐video platforms have gained popularity worldwide, offering previously underrepresented communities in digital production an unprecedented medium for self‐expression. Using an interpretive case study approach and adaptive structuration theory (AST) as a conceptual framework, we analyse data from platform managers and users of a short‐video platform in India. We explore the change in users' practices toward content creation and highlight the role played by technology in more inclusive content production. We find that content consumption and production are interdependent and that various aspects of the IT artefact, such as technical objects, symbolic expressions, functional affordances and spirit, reduce different levels of the digital production divide. We contribute to the research on digital production divide by identifying three mechanisms that illustrate how the appropriation and sense‐making of the IT artefacts reduce the skill gap and enable better outcomes for users by minimising the influence of their offline resources.