Redistributed consumer desire in digital virtual worlds of consumption.

The aim of this paper is to discuss and illustrate how the use of software available in digital virtual worlds of consumption, including wish lists, watch lists, and digital virtual goods (DVGs), interact with consumer desiring practices. We draw on a data set of three interpretative studies with technology users living in the South of England. Our study makes a unique contribution to our understanding of consumer desire and digital virtual consumption by bringing to the fore the often-neglected role of non-human agents in the practice of consumer desire. In particular, it shows (1) the assemblage of consumer desire in human–non-human hybrids (composed of consumers and online wish lists, online auction tools, and video-game resources; (2) the redistribution of competence and skills in human–software hybrids; (3) the r-distribution of affect and commitment in human–software hybrids; and (4) the refocusing of desire in human–software hybrids. Based on our findings, we conclude that, over time, the use of software in the construction and actualisation of desire reconfigures consumer desire practices into a goal-orientated task, where the focus is not daydreaming activity or material commodities per se but rather the software itself. Here, the software not only presents things to be desired, but also absorbs some of the skill and competence needed to conjure up desire. Ultimately, these configurations appear to create breaks in the experience of desire that weaken the hold previously binding consumers to objects of desire

The digital virtual dimension of the meal

In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals, lightening the load of meal preparation by taking on ‘the difficult parts of making food that is hard and/or time consuming to make fully by hand’ (Foodini, 2014). Similarly, food photocopiers that reproduce the molecular structure of food hold the promise of repurposing leftovers into brand new meals (Electrolux, 2009). This future may be unpalatable to some because it supposes a corrosion of human knowledge and a brutal displacement and reduction of human competence by ever-increasing automation of domestic practices within the home kitchen (see for example Fırat and Dholakia, 1998). A less extreme, but more present infiltration of technology within the kitchen is that of devices like tablets, smartphones and laptops that are routinely used in preparing meals. Based on a global survey of 7,000 cooks, Allrecipes.com (2013) found that nearly half of respondents used smartphones while shopping for food, while almost a third of American and UK cooks surveyed said to routinely use their mobile phones to find recipes. Through these devices home cooks can access an array of food related content including step by step tutorials on YouTube, recipes and recipe reviews on specialist foodie websites and blogs, and themed meal ideas on Pinterest boards. We refer to these devices as digital virtual (DV) devices in that they open up new spaces and opportunities for the home cook. The integrative ontology of the digital virtual (see Shields 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010; Molesworth and Denegri-Knott, 2012) that we use here enables us to navigate and consider how consumers’ minds (their imagination, memory and knowledge), the digital virtual spaces located on the screens like YouTube and BBC Good Food website, as well as the device itself – as a physical artefact, interact in practice. For us, this helps overcome some of the essentialism that is inherited by perspectives that create clear demarcations between reality and virtuality (for a critique see Shields, 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010) which deny the presence of constitutive elements of practice, their various locations and how they come into play, in this case, during, meal preparation. Whilst popular, the presence of DV devices in the kitchen may raise concerns about the growing digitisation of meal preparations, which sees technology as driving the transformation of human practices. A way of eliding the technology determinist standpoint, where use of DV devices like tablets is seen as displacing human labour, is by adopting a practice-based language to account for how human and non-human actors come together in configuring practice. Adopting this approach has two key consequences for our understanding of doing the meal. First, it enables us to document in detail the many ways in which meal practices are transformed when knowledges, skills, and competences necessary to carry out practices around meal preparation are not only distributed across enthusiastic home cooks and material artefacts (such as hand mixers, food processors, cookers, freezers, recipe books and instruction manuals) and other people, but also located in digital virtual space. Second, it helps us see the kind of new meal work that is required from the home cook in maintaining the coupling between the cook and their devices. In this chapter we discuss the intersection between DV devices and food consumption and resultant practices they configure. Drawing on insights gleaned from in depth interviews with 29 cooking enthusiasts living the South of England, we provide an overview of new configurations, placing emphasis on the ways in which various components of practice – knowledge, competence and commitment – are redistributed between our home cooks and their DV devices. While we acknowledge the significance of ultimate goals, which are to be substantiated and attained through meal work, for example the expression of caring parent or competent cook (see for example Molander’s (2011) work on meal preparation as a meta-practice of love and motherhood) here we focus less on the teleoaffective, or goal dimension of practices to deal with specific meal related projects and tasks, like knowing how to decorate a pirate chest birthday cake or make gluten free bread. In this way we can better hone in on the way in which the coming together of technology and home cook produce new forms of doing meal work

Possession work on hosted digital consumption objects as consumer ensnarement

This paper extends prior critical discussions of digital prosumption by demonstrating that prosumer reliant online business models represent new ways to valorise consumer labour through the creation of multiple realities whereby digital consumption objects are simultaneously enacted as assests by companies, and as possessions by consumers. We argue that this ontological multiplicity means that consumers’ ‘possession work’ no longer serves to separate these objects from the market sphere, as in prior work. This produces a new form of consumer lock-in, or actually ensnarement as it is consumers’ own efforts to make objects meaningful that keep them in the market, similar to the psychological attachments seen in ‘brand love’, but also incorporating aspects of proprietary tie-ins, and access-based market systems. We further consider the implications of such a system. For companies we portray such ensnarement as an attractive, emerging mechanism for ongoing valorization of ‘free labour’. Yet we also argue that this presents significant consequences for ensnared consumers who may be subject not only to the ongoing financial exploitation of their possession work, but also restrictions on possession. As a broader contribution we highlight how the examination of multiple, potentially conflicting

Biopolitical Marketing and Technologies of Enclosure

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about consumer empowerment through new information and communication technologies. Corporate captains of marketing, Wired Magazine’s neo-libertarian techno-utopians, marketing consultants of the digital economy and many marketing academics agree that we all have more choices, more information, more entertainment, more transparency, and lower prices thanks to Amazon, Facebook, Youtube, and all the rest. We are liberated from the burdens of material ownership, free to access digital objects and services in ways that satisfy our needs in highly targeted and efficient ways. The empowerment through technology chorus is so loud and cohesive that we generally take the message for granted. And in some limited respect, consumers may feel empowered when shopping on Amazon.com or in the malls with their iPhones on hand. But let us be very clear about the idea of empowerment that is promoted by the cheerleaders of what Jodi Dean (2005) calls communicative capitalism. Real empowerment, so much should be clear, will never be “granted” to consumers by those in economic (and thus political) power. In the final analysis – and putting aside for a moment the fact that even empowered consumers are still interpellated first and foremost as subjects of consumption – the ideal of the empowered consumer (rational, enlightened, informed, restrained, un-manipulable) is completely antithetical to the needs of capital and the marketing regime within consumer capitalism. Therefore, any call for actual consumer empowerment would automatically be a radical demand and an insurgent claim aimed at undermining and replacing capital’s power to dominate the consumer totally. In the end, it is important to recognize that any technology employed by marketing today becomes a technology of enclosure (even if never completely successful), which permits empowerment only in a version sanction by capital. That is why marketing (and capital more generally [see Lazzarato, 2004]) today is biopolitical. It wants to govern life completely while appearing to not govern at all. In this chapter we argue that new technologies in contemporary marketing management are best thought of as technologies of enclosure. On the one hand, marketing encloses the subject as individualized and individuated consumer. On the other, marketing aims to enclose (ie., capture, make proprietary, appropriate) what is common or collectively produced or cherished by individuals as inalienable expressions of personal identity and agency. At the same time that marketing encloses, it operates ideologically, although not in the classical Marxist sense of creating a false consciousness. Rather, the challenge for marketers is to enclose and capture the subject and the common while appearing not to do any of these things. By accepting as non-ideological terms such as choice, identity, fulfillment, empowerment, enrichment, collaboration, creativity and so on, marketers and consumers alike choose to believe, just as anyone sensible would believe, that new techniques and technologies of enclosure are really just good marketing practice aimed at value creation and delivery, not customer domination and exploitation. We should remember that an atmosphere of distrust has accompanied the development of marketing from the beginning and marketers have long been suspected of being professional manipulators, devising salacious techniques and technologies with which to incite, manipulate and exploit consumer desire and anxiety. As Packard put it fifty years ago, “[T]hese depth manipulators are in their operations beneath the surface of conscious life, starting to acquire a power of persuasion that is becoming a matter of justifiable public scrutiny and concern” (1957, pp. 9-10). More recent popular indictments of marketing include Adam Curtis’s documentaries on The Century of the Self, Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2000), and the BBC series The Men Who Makes Us Spend (presented by Jacques Peretti). Criticism of marketers is compounded by widespread consumer cynicism regarding the genuineness of marketing messages (see Gabriel and Lang, 1995). Interestingly, the emerging generation of online marketers– typically referred to as digital or social media marketers – see marketing’s crisis of legitimacy directly tied to what it considers the corporate, top-down marketing methods devised in the 1970s and 1980s and designed to discipline and control consumers. For a new generation of tech-savvy marketers, imbued with a solid dose of techno-libertarian ideals of independence and a frontier mentality that rejects top-down authority and bureaucracy in favor of self-organizing systems, radical autonomy and freely collaborative networks, a dramatic shift in mindset was needed in the age of participatory media and Big Data. In a radical turn propagated, for example, by prominent social media marketing experts like Solis (2010) and Stratten (2010), marketing has to be ‘un’-done. The term ‘un-marketing’ rises to prominence in the consulting literature and offers a reframing of marketing that rejects corporate-controlled top-down techniques, and favours horizontal, collaborative, and participatory customer engagement (Kutcher, 2010, Stratten, 2010, 2014). In this context, the idea of online customer communities gains popularity because it provides a fantasy of restructuring marketplace relations according to principles of co-creation, sovereignty, equality, and sharing. More recently, what we call Big Data marketing is framed according to similar registers where data magnetizes consumers and marketers to a shared ethos of the “opt-in” economy (Godin, 1999). Big Data marketers – at least in the version propagated by Google’s Hal Varian, for example – pose innocuously enough as personal recommendation and consulting agents for consumers who in return for giving up personal information receive ever more relevant, valuable, and desired information, goods and services (Zuboff, 2015). Who would not like such a deal that appears to be based on liberal ideals of good intentions on all sides and the equal distribution of costs and benefits, even as companies manage communities and customer data not on behalf of consumers but on behalf of corporate profit. In sum, new marketing technologies – from blogs to communities to surveillance-based collaborative filtering and recommender systems – no matter how invasive, ever-present and insidious, have been framed by technology-driven marketers as democratizing and equalizing forces reshaping the contemporary marketplace in favor of the consumer. Customer and brand communities are happy places of collaboration and collective value creation governed by an ethos of mutual respect, sharing and dispersed control. Big Data Marketing, which aspires to intensifying consumer surveillance and control (Zuboff, 2015), is often presented as part of the contemporary ethos of collaborative ‘in-this-together-ness’ and collective support structures between companies and consumers. Marketers are asked to employ Big Data to better understand, assist, support and connect with customers; the technology magnetizing both exchange parties to a fantasy of better products, better choices, better experiences, better prices, better service and generally happier lives. To live in a world where companies strain to innovate and please consumers, all we need to do in return is give companies complete access to our personal information. Such a request makes sense to a generation of marketing professionals and consumers that have grown up with Google, Facebook and Amazon tracking its every move. In the next section we explore critically new marketing technologies such as online customer communities and Big Data, and possession of digital objects as consumer lock in. .We suggest that these technologies are technologies of Biopolitical Marketing. They aspire to enclose all forms of life for profit. We suggest that marketing innovation is now structured according to the imperative of biopolitical marketing: the making, valorizing and enclosing of all forms and expressions of life

Rescuing and preserving values in vintage clothing.

Where previous research into second-hand commodities has focused on dispossession, commodity spheres, and negative contamination, we consider the post-purchase resingularisation and rituals that consumers undertake to preserve invested meaning. Drawing on data gathered from phenomenological interviews with vintage clothing enthusiasts in England and Wales we provide an account of different types of contamination and resingularisation processes. These include new forms of positive and negative contamination where the self becomes a potential pollutant detracting from a good’s ability to actualise displaced meanings

Extending the mind: Digital devices and the transformation of consumer practices

Artificial intelligence that can change the way we live is less of a future possibility and more a present reality. Social Robots that help the elderly, play children’s games and learn from their environment in order to adapt and interact with humans are some of the latest breakthroughs (The Guardian, 2015). Such technological developments may make some people feel uneasy - perhaps a car’s cruise control function or robot vacuum cleaners are more familiar robotic technology advances that rest more comfortably with people. Even less extreme, but much more common, technological advances sees the use of digital devices and software applications being adopted by many and integrated into their everyday lives. For instance, wearable technology and fitness and weight loss apps that track performance, set goals and provide progress reports were amongst the most popular smartphone apps of 2015 (Techradar, 2015). GPS on smartphones is offered via Google Maps so there is little need to know where you are going or prepare a journey in advance or even be able to read a map accurately. Apps such as Timehop remind users of specific memories once posted on social networks, providing personalized material to reflect on and be nostalgic about. In relation to consumer practices, a wide variety of applications are routinely used via smartphones, tablets and laptop computers, and are consequently changing the way that people engage in practices and the ways that people consume more generally. For instance, 100 million monthly active users of Pinterest search, pin and share things they desire (Fortune, 2015) and can make purchases of these objects via the site. Nearly 50% of people reported using their smartphones while shopping for food and a third use their smartphones to find recipes as a matter of routine (Allrecipes.com, 2013). What these examples tell us is that there is a growing delegation of everyday practices to technology and it is clear that consumption has been altered and enhanced by such advances in digital technology. In this chapter we explore the growing digitalisation of consumer practices from a perspective of how human and non-human actors come together in configuring such practices. We draw on practice theory – an accepted and growing area of work in consumer research – to introduce the foundational concept of human-non-human hybrids. We then focus particularly on the ways in which consumers’ cognitive abilities are apparently extended by and externalised to digital technologies and use the concept of extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) to develop this line of thinking. In particular, we focus on consumers’ knowledge, imagination and memory related to a given practice or consumption object. To do this, we draw on data from a large, on-going study related to digital virtual consumption conducted over the last eight years, which enables us to consider how digital devices and the various platforms and software applications that are accessed through them are integrated in and consequently transform consumer practices. We identify the kinds of new work that is required from consumers in terms of using digital technology – i.e., developing skills, knowledge, competence and a commitment to their use. We also consider the implications of this for practice and for the consumption experience

Politicising the study of sustainable living practices.

In studies of consumption, social theories of practice foreground the purchasing and use of resources not for intrinsic pleasure but rather in the routine accomplishment of “normal” ways of living. In this paper, we argue that a key strength of theories of practice lies in their ability to expose questions of power in the construction of normality, but that this has been largely overlooked. Since practice theories are leveraged in understanding urgent questions of climate change, we use ethnographic data of a sustainable community in England to examine the normative dimension of sustainability. Using Michel Foucault's approach to practice, we elucidate the social technologies operating in the community that govern sustainable practices in the absence of a singular cultural authority. We illustrate how shared understanding guiding normative sustainable practice was negotiated and maintained through collective ethical work, the paramount importance of interpersonal harmony, and the continual formation of ethical subjects

Platformised possessions and relational labour

In this article, we focus on relational labour as a form of emotional labour associated with the use of platformised possessions, such as pins, messages, photos, videos and playlists hosted on digital platforms, to maintain relationships with friends and family. We argue that this ongoing effort is a type of consumer labour because it generates profitable engagements for digital platforms, which intentionally exploit negative emotions, namely, anxiety and guilt, associated with maintaining social connections. Drawing on 47 depth interviews with people living in the South of the UK, we identify the direct (communication via platforms) and indirect (information gathered via platforms to attain relational goals) relational work undertaken by consumers via their platformised possessions. We then consider the emotional experiences related to this work, demonstrating how such experiences differ from reports of possession work on material goods, while maintaining platform profits. Recognising that this work is the basis of much platform engagement, and hence profit, we further show how this effort becomes a form of unpaid labour. We thus contribute to the nascent literature on platformisation and emotion, to broader studies of possession work, and to critical marketing scholarship on consumer labour

‘Attention Please’ The Whitepaper

The topic of attention has garnered a lot of attention in recent times; some say attention is in crisis. Combine this with the proliferation of technology able to measure our behavioural and cognitive processes, we aren’t short of studies that measure attention. However, like many hot topics, attention and understanding it is not a new obsession and much can be learned from existing theory and research. We were interested in attention because: a) instinctively it feels like an important criterium for effective advertising b) we were curious how the changing nature of the media landscape was influencing attention As a start point we were keen to get a comprehensive view of the available theory and evidence so that we had a solid foundation for any new research. We believe, whilst it’s important to acknowledge the seismic changes in the media landscape ushered in by the digital era, it’s also important to consider the enduring nature of human behaviour. Behavioural economics, now popularised in the advertising world, continually reminds us of this. This whitepaper, prepared by Bournemouth University, is our attempt to pull together all the existing thinking on attention. It is the first phase of a long-term project ‘Attention Please’. Our ambition with this programme of research is to shed new light on the topic of attention, unearthing useful insights and frameworks for advertisers and their agencies. Ultimately, we want to make the link between attention and effectiveness more apparent so that attention as a topic can be fully appreciated as an important consideration for anyone involved in the business of advertisin