Online investing: Derealization and the experience of risk

In this paper we set out to show that the Internet causes a disruption in traditional patterns of online investors’ perception, resulting in, what Lyng (1990) calls, edgework: a desire to experience risk as an end in itself. The perceptual disruption caused by the Internet is a function of two distinct yet interrelated processes: virtualization and derealization (Virilio, 2000). Virtualization denotes the process of substituting reality with virtual representations, including money, the practice of trading, companies, and even the Self. Because of this progressive virtualization of its key components, the entire investing experience seems increasingly unreal (derealization). It is only after the phenomenon of online investing has been derealized in the mind of the investor that it emerges as site par excellence for voluntary high risk-taking behavior, transforming its purpose from maximizing risk-adjusted returns to maximizing the experience of risk for its own sake

Mobile Technologies and Boundaryless Spaces: Slavish Lifestyles, Seductive Meanderings, or Creative Empowerment?

According to the instrumental theory of technology, mobile technologies - what McLuhan\u27s refers to as electronic prostheses - promise opportunities for greater freedom, creativity, leisure, and productivity by enhancing organic bodily functions. Correspondingly, as (Cavallaro, 2000) would argue, objects such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable physiotherapy units, laptops, and portable stereos - to name just a few - seem to impart a sense of solidity to consumers\u27 lives. Just like prostheses, they are inserted into our everyday lives, helping our inadequate bodies along in fulfilling practical tasks. Phenomenologically, these kinds of mobile technologies supposedly support the subject\u27s sense of ontological completeness and security. On the other hand the substantial theory of technology draws together less optimistic commentators. Among a host of other things, they stress the panoptic nature of new information and communication technologies (Clarke, 1994; Marx, 1999; Poster, 1995; Webster, 1995). The emphasis in these accounts is on the potential for surveillance and monitoring that these technologies place in the hands of the powerful. Mobile technologies according to this view is but the latest incarnation of capitalist (the Marxist view) or state (the libertarian view) power and control fantasies. Far from empowered and freed, the subject becomes captured and enslaved by these mobile communication devices. Phenomenologically, the networked worker and consumer subject is the disciplined and docile slave of the information matrix

Consumer Subjectivity in the Age of Internet: The Radical Concept of Marketing Control Through Customer Relationship Management

In this paper, we present a poststructuralist analysis of customer database technology. This approach allows us to regard customer databases as configurations of language that produce new and significant discursive effects. In particular, we focus on the role of databases and related technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM) in the discursive construction of both customers and customer relationships. First, we argue that organizations become the authors of customer identities, using the language of the database to configure customer representation. From this perspective, we can see the radical innovation that the customer database brings to the organizational construction of its market: the emergence of the individualized customer. The cultural novelty of the database—ignored by instrumental analyses of information technology—also requires a theoretical reconceptualization of the notion of virtual identity. Against existing positions, we posit a non-essentialist theory of virtual identity where the subject is constituted outside the immediacy of consciousness and thus emerges as the result of the technological and linguistic context in which it was produced. Second, we take our analysis of the discursive construction of the customer further by proposing that the emergence of the individualized customer was the prerequisite of the social construction of CRM as one-on-one affair between the customer and the organization. We suggest that this is a limited and limiting understanding of the concept of customer relationships especially if the one-on-one relationship is placed in a computer-mediated environment (CME). By mobilizing theories of play developed in the fields of human–computer interaction and consumer research, we propose that organizations would benefit from opening up the current discourse on CRM to include relationships between customers, customers and non-customers, and customers and the virtual organization

The Politics of Macromarketing delivered as part of the Plenary Roundtable on Macromarketing and Politics

This roundtable session was delivered at the 36th Annual Macromarketing Conference in Williamsburg Virginia, June 2011. The purpose of this roundtable was to generate a critical debate about the politics of macromarketing. Participants: Ray Benton, Loyola University Chicago, USA Alan Bradshaw, Royal Holloway College – University of London, UK Janice Denegri-Knott, University of Bournemouth, UK Sanford Grossbart, University of Nebraska, USA Pia Polsa, HANKEN School of Economics, Finland Ben Wooliscroft, University of Otago, NZ Detlev Zwick, York University, Canad

Privacy and Consumer Agency in the Information Age: Between Prying Profilers and Preening Webcams

This article is about the ability of the consumer to control his or her destiny in the new electronic marketspace. Two seemingly opposite phenomena – the need for privacy and the desire for exhibitionism and voyeurism – are vying for attention on the media landscape. We believe the simultaneous occurrence of privacy concerns and ultraexhibitionism is not coincidental. Indeed, exhibitionism and voyeurism seem to offer new tools for consumer resistance against the electronic surveillance systems in networked markets and are inextricably linked to consumers’ desire for control over their intimate personal information

Bringing the Market to Life: Screen Aesthetics and the Epistemic Consumption Object

This article argues that the new ‘visuality’ (Schroeder, 2002) of the Internet transforms the stock market into an epistemic consumption object. The aesthetics of the screen turn the market into an interactive and response-present surface representation. On the computer screen, the market becomes an object of constant movement and variation, changing direction and altering appearance at any time. Following Knorr Cetina (1997, 2002b) we argue that the visual logic of the screen ‘opens up’ the market ontologically. The ontological liquidity of the market-on-screen simulates the indefiniteness of other life forms. We suggest that the continuing fascination with online investing is a function of the reflexive looping of the investor, who aspires to discern what the market is lacking, through the market-on-screen that continuously signals to the investor what it still lacks. Implications for existing theories on relationships and involvement are discussed

The Epistemic Consumption Object and Postsocial Consumption: Expanding Consumer‐Object Theory in Consumer Research

We introduce the concept of the epistemic consumption object. Such consumption objects are characterized by two interrelated features. First, epistemic consumption objects reveal themselves progressively through interaction, observation, use, examination, and evaluation. Such layered revelation is accompanied by an increasing rather than a decline of the object’s complexity. Second, such objects demonstrate a propensity to change their “face‐in‐action” vis‐à‐vis consumers through the continuous addition or subtraction of properties. The epistemic consumption object is materially elusive and this lack of ontological stability turns the object into a continuous knowledge project for consumers. Via this ongoing cycle of revelation and discovery, consumers become attached to the object in intimate and quasi‐social ways. Therefore, the concept of the epistemic consumption object brings the “object” directly into theorizations of consumer‐object relations, extending current theories of relationship, product involvement, and consumption communities. We draw from research with individual online investors to illustrate the theory of the epistemic consumption object

Cultural Contradictions of the Anytime, Anywhere Economy: Reframing Communication Technology

Technology-aided ubiquity and instantaneity have emerged as major goals of most information technology providers and of certain classes of users such as “road warriors”. New mobile technologies promise genie-in-a-bottle type near-magical qualities with anytime, anywhere access to information and services. While the complex science, systems, and economics of such technologies receive considerable attention from industry executives and researchers, the social and cultural aspects of these technologies attract less attention. This paper explores the oft-contradictory promises and pitfalls of anytime, anywhere technologies from a cultural standpoint. It makes suggestions for reinterpreting these technologies for greater human good

Consumption As a Practice Of/In Self-Formation: the Neoliberal Politics of Consumption (And Consumer Research?)

Politics loom large in much CCT work but it is often conceived of and rendered intelligible through the individual, autonomous and strategic work consumers do to make themselves moral, gendered, economic, social, political, etc. subjects. Largely unexplored in these accounts of democratization are questions of power at play when the participation of consumers in the rationalization of their own consumption is sold as empowerment and valid democratic expression (Andrejevic 2003). Put differently, detecting in collective struggles over brand meanings an important form of democratization in one thing. Querying the implications of a political-economic regime (Neoliberalism) that orients flows of democratic energies toward brands is quite another. The questions I want to ask, then, relate to the kind of politics our work represents when we no longer see a need to make a distinction between forms of market morality and non-market morality

Creating Worlds that Create Audiences : Theorising Personal Data Markets in the Age of Communicative Capitalism

In this article, we draw on theories of biopolitical marketing to explore claims that personal data markets are contextualised by what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” and Jodi Dean calls “communicative capitalism”. Surveillance and communicative capitalism are characterised by a logic of accumulation based on networked captures of life that enable complex and incomprehensive processes of extraction, commodification, and control. Echoing recent theorisations of data (as) derivatives, Zuboff’s key claim about surveillance capitalism is that data representations open up opportunities for the enhanced market control of life through the algorithmic monitoring, prediction and modification of human behaviour. A Marxist critique, focusing largely on the exploitative nature of corporate data capitalism, has already been articulated. In this article, we focus on the increasingly popular market-libertarian critique that proposes individual control, ownership, and ability to commodify one’s personal data as an answer to corporate data extraction, derivation and exploitation schemes. We critique the claims that personal data markets counterbalance corporate digital capitalism on two grounds. First, these markets do not work economically and therefore are unable to address the exploitative aspect of surveillance capitalism. Second, the notion of personal data markets functions ideologically because it reduces the critique of surveillance capitalism to the exploitation of consumers and conceals the real objective of data capitalists such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple to not (just) exploit audiences but to create worlds that create audiences. Keywords: personal data marketsPeer reviewe