American Self-Enhancement Culture and the Cyborg Consumer: Consumer Identity Construction Beyond the Dominance of Authenticity

Social critics of American self-enhancement culture often lament that it draws individuals in a biomedical consumerism that frustrates the construction of genuine self-identity. This "lost authenticity" critique ignores that consumers can forge their identity in narrative terms not dominated by modernist questions regarding inauthentic vs. authentic. Americans injecting Botox for self-enhancement purposes draw from a new model: the cyborg consumer. We develop this conception to analyze how consumers partially and inconsistently transcend historically established dualities-nature vs. technology, authentic vs. inauthentic-to create consistent "stories of the self." We profile an emerging historical discontinuity between a modernist identity protocol prescribing self-authenticity as the ultimate goal and a competing protocol challenging this authority by prescribing unlimited agency through technological selfenhancement

Contested consumption in everyday life

This article introduces the concept of "contested consumption," a set of mundane antagonistic social practices not yet explored by consumer culture theorists. Contested consumption refers to a multitude of discursive behaviors that consumers apply for challenging the legitimacy of each other's consumption choices, behaviors, and ideologies. Using the Hummer brand of vehicles as empirical context, ethno-and netnographic methods for data collection, and hermeneutic reading for data analysis, we reveal the cultural tensions and empirical practices of contested consumption and discuss their theoretical implications

Consumers and Artificial Intelligence:An Experiential Perspective

Artificial intelligence (AI) helps companies offer important benefits to consumers, such as health monitoring with wearable devices, advice with recommender systems, peace of mind with smart household products, and convenience with voice-activated virtual assistants. However, although AI can be seen as a neutral tool to be evaluated on efficiency and accuracy, this approach does not consider the social and individual challenges that can occur when AI is deployed. This research aims to bridge these two perspectives: on one side, the authors acknowledge the value that embedding AI technology into products and services can provide to consumers. On the other side, the authors build on and integrate sociological and psychological scholarship to examine some of the costs consumers experience in their interactions with AI. In doing so, the authors identify four types of consumer experiences with AI: (1) data capture, (2) classification, (3) delegation, and (4) social. This approach allows the authors to discuss policy and managerial avenues to address the ways in which consumers may fail to experience value in organizations’ investments into AI and to lay out an agenda for future research

Warming increases the compositional and functional variability of a temperate protist community

Phototrophic protists are a fundamental component of the world's oceans by serving as the primary source of energy, oxygen, and organic nutrients for the entire ecosystem. Due to the high thermal seasonality of their habitat, temperate protists could harbour many well-adapted species that tolerate ocean warming. However, these species may not sustain ecosystem functions equally well. To address these uncertainties, we conducted a 30-day mesocosm experiment to investigate how moderate (12C) and substantial (18C) warming compared to ambient conditions (6C) affect the composition (18S rRNA metabarcoding) and ecosystem functions (biomass, gross oxygen productivity, nutritional quality – C:N and C:P ratio) of a North Sea spring bloom community. Our results revealed warming-driven shifts in dominant protist groups, with haptophytes thriving at 12 C and diatoms at 18 C. Species responses primarily depended on the species' thermal traits, with indirect temperature effects on grazing being less relevant and phosphorus acting as a critical modulator. The species Phaeocystis globosa showed highest biomass on low phosphate concentrations and relatively increased in some replicates of both warming treatments. In line with this, the C:P ratio varied more with the presence of P. globosa than with temperature. Examining further ecosystem responses under warming, our study revealed lowered gross oxygen productivity but increased biomass accumulation whereas the C:N ratio remained unaltered. Although North Sea species exhibited resilience to elevated temperatures, a diminished functional similarity and heightened compositional variability indicate potential ecosystem repercussions for higher trophic levels. In conclusion, our research stresses the multifaceted nature of temperature effects on protist communities, emphasising the need for a holistic understanding that encompasses trait-based responses, indirect effects, and functional dynamics in the face of exacerbating temperature changes

Rethinking Consumer Risk: Cultural Risk, Collective Risk and the Social Construction of Risk Reduction

"Individual file sharers stand about as much chance of being sued by Big Music as they do of being struck by lightning (…) or winning the lottery." 3- Jon Newton, p2pnet.net 1 The impacts of others on the reduction of one’s perceived risk have frequently been acknowledged within the marketing and consumer literature, yet conceptual tools to study them systematically remain undeveloped. In this ethnography of the Hotline file-sharing community, the ways in which Hotline members ’ ideological and consumption related social discourse and practice help produce and reduce certain cultural consumer risks are explored and developed. The Hotline community is particularly popular in Europe but the study’s findings also apply to any other p2p community such as Kazaa, BearShare, or LimeWire. The present study addresses three important issues to challenge our traditional views of consumer risk. First, the study defines and demonstrates the existence of collective consumer risk. While Hotline consumers participate in the cultural production of the risk of file-sharing, observations of perspective in action also reveal an effective reduction of that risk through the discursive articulation of collective risk. Hotline consumers reduce the risk of Hotline through discursively constructing collectiv

Consumer Gift Systems

This article develops a critique of the dyadic model of consumer gift giving and an extension of the classic paradigm of gift giving as elaborated in fundamental anthropological and sociological texts. I conceptualize and present empirical evidence for the notion of a consumer gift system, a system of social solidarity based on a structured set of gift exchange and social relationships among consumers. Social distinctions, norm of reciprocity, and rituals and symbolisms are defined as key characteristics of a consumer gift system and are shown to be present in peer-to-peer music file sharing at Napster. Implications for extant research on solidarity, gift giving, and consumption are discussed, and future research directions are provided. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Conflict and Compromise: Drama in Marketplace Evolution

How do markets change? Findings from a 7-year longitudinal processual investigation of consumer performances in the war on music downloading suggest that markets in the cultural creative sphere (those organizing the exchange of intellectual goods such as music, movies, software, and the written word) evolve through stages of perpetual structural instability. Each stage addresses an enduring cultural tension between countervailing utilitarian and possessive ideals. Grounded in anthropology and consumer behavior, I illustrate this historical dynamic through the process of marketplace drama, a fourfold sequence of performed conflict among opposing groups of consumers and producers. Implications for theorizing on market system dynamics and the consumption of performance are offered. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..