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The analogue diaries of postdigital consumption
Journal of Marketing Management
Abstract
Even in a world that is saturated with the digital, we still seek out analogue objects. Drawing on concepts of postdigital aesthetics, we examine the use of analogue objects to escape the omnipresence of the digital realm. Based on consumer narratives from interview, archival, and netnographic data involving the use of analogue notebooks and film cameras, we derive the notion of postdigital consumption and analyse the ‘digital’ as a background object foregrounding the analogue. Our findings reveal ways in which consumers use these analogue objects to escape controlled consumption, to enchant their consumption with their labour, and to seek continuity and permanence, in navigating paradoxical relationships with the digital world.
... Furthermore, the more automated and algorithm-dependent the devices and services become, the less their users are likely to understand the data these devices and services collect, produce and distribute. This might eventually result in real concerns over privacy and surveillance that constitute reasons for partial disengagement or outright rejection (Humayun and Belk 2020). Epistemologically, the opaqueness of the computational leads to a state in which we are alienated from understanding our technologies because our 'knowing' has become mediated through what has been called grey media (Fuller and Goffey 2012). ...
... The use of physical objects and analogue technologies as replacements for digital devices and services has been seen as emerging from a desire to disconnect from the digital (Humayun and Belk 2020). Humayun and Belk (2020: 649) note that objects such as physical notebooks and film cameras are "objects to escape the digital" which provide ways to avoid digital use. ...
... Thus, the adoption of film cameras, notebooks and basic function phones is not due to their original functions but related to their newly assigned role of supporting and mediating disengagement from the digital. As the adoption of analogue offline products to avoid the perils of the online emerges as a popular practice, Humayun and Belk (2020) note their place within the post-digital context, referring to them as postdigital consumption practices. For the /r/nosurf community, post-digital consumption is a solution to the intense digital consumption and use of pervasive technologies. ...
Book Description
With the widespread transformation of information into digital form throughout society – firms and organisations are embracing this development to adopt multiple types of IT to increase internal efficiency and to achieve external visibility and effectiveness – we have now reached a position where there is data in abundance and the challenge is to manage and make use of it fully. This book addresses this new managerial situation, the post-digitalisation era, and offers novel perspectives on managing the digital landscape.
The topics span how the post-digitalisation era has the potential to renew organisations, markets and society. The chapters of the book are structured in three topical sections but can also be read individually. The chapters are structured to offer insights into the developments that take place at the intersection of the management, information systems and computer science disciplines. It features more than 70 researchers and managers as collaborating authors in 23 thought-provoking chapters.
Written for scholars, researchers, students and managers from the management, information systems and computer science disciplines, the book presents a comprehensive and thought-provoking contribution on the challenges of managing organisations and engaging in global markets when tools, systems and data are abundant.
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Table of Contents
Preface
Peter Ekman, Peter Dahlin and Christina Keller
Foreword
Fredrik Nilsson and Fredrik Tell
1. Perspectives on Management and Information Technology after Digital Transformation
Peter Ekman, Peter Dahlin and Christina Keller
2. Digital Transformation: Towards a New Perspective for Large Established Organisations in a Digital Age
Alan W. Brown
Part 1 – The transformation of society and markets
3. Managing Digital Servitization: A Service Ecosystem Perspective
David Sörhammar, Bård Tronvoll and Christian Kowalkowski
4. Caught on the platform or jumping onto the digital train: Challenges for industries lagging behind in digitalisation
Peter Ekman, Magnus Berglind and Steven Thompson
5. Digitalisation for Sustainability: Conceptualisation, Implications and Future Research Directions
Elena Anastasiadou, Linda Alkire and Jimmie Röndell
6. Reaching New Heights in the Cloud: The Digital Transformation of the Video Games Industry
Kevin Walther and David Sörhammar
7. Hyper-Taylorism and Third-order Technologies: Making Sense of the Transformation of Work and Management in a Post-digital Era
Christoffer Andersson, Lucia Crevani, Anette Hallin, Caroline Ingvarsson, Chris Ivory, Inti José Lammi, Eva Lindell, Irina Popova and Anna Uhlin
8. Why Space is Not Enough: Service innovation and service delivery in senior housing
Petter Ahlström, Göran Lindahl, Markus Fellesson, Börje Bjelke and Fredrik Nilsson
9. Challenges in Implementing Digital Assistive Technology in Municipal Healthcare
Ann Svensson, Linda Bergkvist, Charlotte Bäccman and Susanne Durst
Part 2 – Managerial and organisational challenges
10. Modern project management: Challenges for the future
Klas Sundberg, Birger Rapp and Christina Keller
11. Managing the Paradoxes of Digital Product Innovation
Fredrik Svahn and Bendik Bygstad
12. When External Reporting Goes Social: New Conditions for Transparency and Accountability?
Cecilia Gullberg
13. Robotic Process Automation and the Accounting Profession’s Extinction Prophecy
Matthias Holmstedt, Fredrik Jeanson and Angelina Sundström
14. Managing Digital Employee-Driven Innovation: The Role of Middle-Level Managers and Ambidextrous Leadership
Izabelle Bäckström and Peter Magnusson
15. Digital Gamification of Organisational Functions and Emergent Management Practices
Edward Gillmore
16. Leveraging Digital Technologies in Enterprise Risk Management
Jason Crawford and Jan Lindvall
Section 3 – Framing digitalisation
17. The End of Business Intelligence and Business Analytics
Matthias Holmstedt and Peter Dahlin
18. ‘Deleted User’: Signalling Digital Disenchantment in the Post-Digital Society
Cristina Ghita, Claes Thorén and Martin Stojanov
19. The Role of Boundary-Spanners in the Post-Digitalised Multinational Corporation
Henrik Dellestrand, Olof Lindahl and Jakob Westergren
20. The Effect of Digital Transformation on Subsidiary Influence in the Multinational Enterprise
Noushan Memar, Ulf Andersson, Peter Dahlin and Peter Ekman
21. Understanding Information System Outsourcing in the Digital Transformation Era: The Business-relationship Triad View
Cecilia Erixon and Peter Thilenius
22. Transforming the Management/Profession Divide: The Use of the Red–Green Matrix in Swedish Schools
Anton Borell, Johan Klaassen, Roland Almqvist and Jan Löwstedt
23. Integrating research in master’s programmes: Developing students’ skills to embrace digitally transformed markets
Todd Drennan, Cecilia Thilenius Lindh and Emilia Rovira Nordman
Index
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Editor(s)
Biography
Peter Ekman is an associate professor of marketing at Mälardalen University and deputy dean of the Swedish Research School of Management and IT hosted by Uppsala University. His research focuses on firm digitalisation within business networks and service ecosystems, often in a global sustainability or globalizationn context.
Peter Dahlin is an associate professor of business at Mälardalen University, Sweden, and honorary visiting scholar at the University of Exeter, UK, and is affiliated to the Business School. His research interests include applied analytics, network analysis and business performance.
Christina Keller is the dean of the Swedish Research School of Management and IT at Uppsala University and professor in informatics at Lund University School of Economics and Management. Her main research interests include online learning, design science research and information systems in healthcare.
... In a time where digital technologies have entered almost every sphere of consumers' everyday life, consumer researchers are observing a re-emergence of analogue consumption objects such as vinyl, Polaroid cameras, or paper notebooks (Bartmanski and Woodward 2015;Humayun and Belk 2020;Minniti 2016;Sax 2016). Some findings reveal symbolic aspects of these forms of retro-consumption and consumers' nostalgic desires (Alexis 2017;Reynolds 2011;Sax 2016), while others focus on consumers' need to disconnect from the digital (Humayun and Belk 2020;Thorén et al. 2019). ...
... In a time where digital technologies have entered almost every sphere of consumers' everyday life, consumer researchers are observing a re-emergence of analogue consumption objects such as vinyl, Polaroid cameras, or paper notebooks (Bartmanski and Woodward 2015;Humayun and Belk 2020;Minniti 2016;Sax 2016). Some findings reveal symbolic aspects of these forms of retro-consumption and consumers' nostalgic desires (Alexis 2017;Reynolds 2011;Sax 2016), while others focus on consumers' need to disconnect from the digital (Humayun and Belk 2020;Thorén et al. 2019). Recent studies highlight that a sharp delineation of the physical and the digital (Jurgenson 2012), or offline and online identities (Šimůnková 2019) is no longer possible. ...
... This study focuses on the Moleskine paper notebook, an object that was originally deeply rooted in physical space both as an object and regarding its associated practices such as writing or drawing. Today, Moleskine successfully combines the myth of its origins with the positioning as a brand that accompanies contemporary creative nomads with digital and analogue tools (Humayun and Belk 2020;Moleskine 2019). This paper explores digital traces of consumers' ways of using and relating to the Moleskine notebook on Twitter. ...
This paper draws on theories of materiality to explore consumers’ ways of using and relating to a seemingly outdated analogue object,
the Moleskine notebook, on Twitter. The findings reveal three creative practices that show how consumers materialize the notebook as
a meaningful object both in digital and physical space.
... The growth in analog entrepreneurship reflects a renewed interest in several apparently obsolete non-digital technologies and is supported by an emerging analog entrepreneurial ecosystem-the system of interconnected actors, products, and forces that supports the pursuit of opportunities focused on analog technologies when digital alternatives are dominant. The resurgence of analog, non-digital technologies has occurred in industries and categories long thought to be "dying" or "dead," such as vinyl records (Bartmanski and Woodward, 2015), film and instant cameras (Humayun and Belk, 2020), cassette tapes (Ledsom, 2020), board games (Matalucci, 2019), paper notebooks (Raffaelli, 2018), and mechanical watches (Raffaelli, 2019). ...
... Product characteristics: simplicity. The demand for analog products is driven by their simplicity (Humayun and Belk, 2020). Because analog products are often based on less advanced technologies, they have fewer functions and features than their digital counterparts (e.g., paper notebooks versus electronic tablets; mechanical versus "smart" watches; cf. ...
... The simplicity of analog products is also identified as a benefit by consumers because it stimulates creativity (Humayun and Belk, 2020). Users must innovate within the confines of the limitations imposed by analog products' simplicity. ...
Research has focused on the ecosystems of forces that influence how organizations pursue opportunities in new industries, nascent markets, and novel technologies. However, there is an emerging, but unstudied, ecosystem supporting entrepreneurial activities in legacy industries, mature markets, and based on (seemingly) obsolete technologies - the analog entrepreneurial ecosystem. To develop a framework to explain this phenomenon and guide entrepreneurs and managers operating in this ecosystem, a theory of the analog entrepreneurial ecosystem is proposed. The theory explains the ecosystem's main components and delineates the forces driving its emergence. The model contributes to research on ecosystems, technology reemergence, and management in mature markets and has implications for organizations pursuing opportunities outside the digital ecosystem and based on legacy products.
... Non-adoption can reflect preferences to see products first-hand, doing things in-person, or wanting to go out (e.g., Rahman & Yu, 2019;Vuori & Holmlund-Rytkönen, 2005;Wu et al., 2021). These preferences suggest older consumers may simply seek non-digital forms of consumption like their younger counterparts (see Humayun & Belk, 2020). ...
... Future research thus can study a fuller range of contexts in which older consumers resist technologies they view as unnecessary. One context may be the resurgence of analogue objects like notebooks and vinyl records (Fernandez & Beverland, 2019;Humayun & Belk, 2020). Another may be 'digital detoxes' in which consumers wrestle over the necessity of their tech-uses by formulating and enacting temporary or permanent disconnections from their technologies (Nguyen et al., 2022;Radtke et al., 2021). ...
Older consumers’ adoption and consumption of technologies continues to be an important research area. However, marketing scholarship on this topic risks unintentionally smuggling age stereotypes into its constructed theories. Such assumptions include older consumers’ adoption processes being complicated by health and social isolation issues and their low tech-skills. Although stereotypes hold a ‘kernel-of-truth’ and underpin meaningful research, they can transform from helpful heuristics to impediments to crafting reflexive scholarship. Therefore, this article reviews marketing literature on older consumers and technology. It develops a 2 × 3 typology to analyse 86 articles based on their portrayals of older consumers’ capabilities (incapable/capable) and technology orientations (resisting/discerning/seeking). The typology’s six emergent categories aim to turn age stereotypes into ‘productive tensions’ for researchers by encouraging critical reflexivity in ways that broaden future research possibilities. These possibilities include better accounting for older consumers who are skilled technology-seekers, and equally, non-adopters with non-technophobic reasons to resist adoption.
... For example, only when their data come from the CT, authors of marketing papers are asked to provide more elaborate and apologetic descriptions, which reproduce the symbolic order between the CC and the CT (cf. Humayun andBelk, 2020 andNguyen andBelk, 2013). Below, we first examine academia as a neocolonia site, and then elaborate Bourdieusian theory as a frame for the study of toxic illusio in the neocolonial academic field. ...
... For example, only when their data come from the CT, authors of marketing papers are asked to provide more elaborate and apologetic descriptions, which reproduce the symbolic order between the CC and the CT (cf. Humayun andBelk, 2020 andNguyen andBelk, 2013). Below, we first examine academia as a neocolonia site, and then elaborate Bourdieusian theory as a frame for the study of toxic illusio in the neocolonial academic field. ...
We explore the knowledge production experiences of marketing academics who currently work in countries that have previously colonized their home countries. Building on Bourdieu's concepts of illusio and the field, we demonstrate that participants are drawn to the appeal of the academic game, which perpetuates itself as a toxic field of relations. Within this toxic field, academics from former colonies are pushed to certain roles that sustain the colonial knowledge hierarchies. We show that colonisation has not ended but transformed into contemporary forms which sustain the hierarchies of knowledge in marketing. Notably, the study illustrates first, that academia is a toxic field of neocolonial relations; second, that dominant exploitative academic practices serve to sustain this toxic field; and third, that there is a toxic illusio which prevents academics from developing a healthy sense of colonial relations in their knowledge production.
... Furthermore, the more automated and algorithm-dependent the devices and services become, the less their users are likely to understand the data these devices and services collect, produce and distribute. This might eventually result in real concerns over privacy and surveillance that constitute reasons for partial disengagement or outright rejection (Humayun and Belk 2020). Epistemologically, the opaqueness of the computational leads to a state in which we are alienated from understanding our technologies because our 'knowing' has become mediated through what has been called grey media (Fuller and Goffey 2012). ...
... If the initial argument is true, that the digital has rede ned many of the ways we work and socialise, the increasingly post-digital practices referred to by the online /r/nosurf community have the potential, by the same logic, to rede ne our future. Many of the changes we are seeing in disparate settings are already theoretically articulated within a post-digital understanding; for example, in the political recon guration of academic publishing, discussed by Jandrić and Hayes (2019) as postdigital challenges, and the addition of mindfulness in technology consumption, described by Humayun and Belk (2020) as postdigital consumption. ...
... Previous studies have found that consumers feel more like they "own" physical objects than digital objects (Atasoy & Morewedge, 2018). Finally, other research has suggested that consumers use physical products to escape from the digitization that pervades their daily lives (Humayun & Belk, 2020). ...
The explosion in digitization means that individuals increasingly have the opportunity to choose between digital and physical versions of creative works—for example, between eBooks and paperback books. However, despite the popularity of digital objects, many people continue to prefer physical equivalents. We suggest that one reason for this preference is that physical versions of works are felt to embody the essence of their creators. Across six studies, we find that physical versions of creative works are indeed seen as embodying the essence of the creator, and as a result, are perceived to be more authentic instantiations of the creative work as compared to digital versions. We also find that perceptions of authenticity and essence transfer are strongest for works by creators to whom we feel connected, and are attenuated when individuals are motivated to distance themselves from a creator.
... The Work Machine ideology is correspondingly transitioning into the Sustainability Engine ideology that emphasizes smart technology's potential to enable sustainable manufacturing, facilitate resource and asset sharing, and reduce consumption, pollution, and waste (Kusiak 2018). As a result of this readdressing of environmental concerns, the Green Luddite ideology is shifting toward the Analogue Luddite ideology, which encourages the use of analogue technological objects to escape the IoTP (Humayun and Belk 2020). Finally, the Techpressive ideology, with its focus on pleasure, is transforming into the Human Augmentation ideology that articulates the use of smart devices to enhance the physical and mental capabilities of humans (Raisamo et al. 2019). ...
Following the institutional logics perspective and an inductive research design, this study is the first to outline the Internet of things and people as a new institutional order with a distinct logic. The rise of this new institutional logic is prompted by smart technology, which transforms the ideological field of technology and challenges consumers’ self-concepts. In counterbalancing attempts, consumers internalize those “non-smart” practices that assist in maintaining the self’s integrity and differentiate “Us” – humans from “Them” – smart things. In contrast to previous research describing the material as a passive carrier, this study provides evidence that the material can be the driving force behind the emergence of institutional logic.
... We have also shown that consumers' experiences of their digital possessions can mediate their relationships with their physical possessions, with undesirable instances of affordance misalignment in the context of digital objects resulting in increased appreciation for the affordances of their physical counterparts. These findings provide new insight into growing nostalgia for analogue media such as vinyl records (Humayan and Belk 2020), which may be attributed in part to consumers' experiences of affordance misalignments with their digital counterparts, which may result in a longing for the object affordances they had come to expect in possession, and which these physical objects deliver. Thus, we demonstrate that consumers' experiences of digital objects as possessions have more far-reaching consequences than previously recognised. ...
The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photographs to social media profiles and avatars. Digital objects are often argued to be less valued, personally meaningful, and self-relevant than their physical counterparts and are consequently dismissed as poor candidates for possession. Yet, studies have identified highly meaningful, even irreplaceable, digital possessions. In this article, we account for these contradictory narratives surrounding digital possessions, arguing that digital objects are not inherently unsuited to possession, but rather their affordances may not align with consumers’ imagined affordances (i.e., the object affordances that consumers anticipate). Drawing from a qualitative study of 25 consumers and their digital possessions, we identify three recurring types of affordance misalignment—missing affordances, covert affordances, and deficient affordances—that mediate how consumers and digital objects interact (pragmatic mediation) and, consequently, consumers’ experiences of, and beliefs surrounding, digital objects as possessions (hermeneutic mediation). We demonstrate that these affordance misalignments can create obstacles to consumers’ desired experiences of possession and document consumers’ attempts to overcome these obstacles by employing alignment strategies, with varied behavioral outcomes. This article advances debates surrounding digital possessions and presents an enriched affordance theory lens that provides new insights into possession.
... Appropriation of affordances may result in displacements of other ways of achieving goals that are deemed more authentic or meaningful. For example, visiting a friend rather than messaging or using an analog camera to achieve a more labored and meaningful form of photography (Humayun & Belk, 2020). ...
In this article, we introduce an affordance-orientated approach for the study of digital possessions. We identify affordances as a source of value for digital possessions and argue that dominant meaning-orientated approaches do not enable us to fully appreciate these sources of value. Our work recognizes that value is released and experienced in “the doing”—people must do things with digital objects to locate and obtain value in and from them. We distinguish three levels of affordance for digital possessions—low, mid, and high—and introduce the concept of digital incorporation to explain how the three levels of affordances come together, with the individual’s own intentionality to enable the achievement of goals. We draw from postphenomenological interviews with 47 individuals in the UK to provide a possession-based and lived experience approach to affordances that sheds new light on their vital role in everyday life and goals.
... While the elderly consumers experience increased autonomy, the relatives find themselves trapped in a micropolitical spiderweb, unable to escape from constantly being on duty and with digital disconnection an unattainable luxury (Humayun & Belk, 2020). In this way, the experience of ageing and its restrictive influence on everyday practices is extended from the elderly consumer to the relatives in their liminal role as neither-formal-nor-informal caregivers. ...
Smart assisted living technologies are often touted as the solution to the challenges associated with an ageing population. Viewing elderly consumers, their relatives, and technologies as comprising an assemblage, this article aims to understand how smart objects actively reshape the everyday practices in families with elderly consumers. Interviews with and observations of users of smart alarm systems indicate a stratification of the paired experiences of users and systems and identify a tension between enabling experiences of the elderly and constraining experiences of the relatives. This article contributes to views of families with elderly as assemblages by providing insights into joint and disjoint consumer experiences in multiple consumer-object assemblages, identity negotiations of the elderly and their relatives, and the hidden costs of smart assisted living technologies.
... Zwraca się uwagę na spowolnienie tempa cyfryzacji, powrót do wcześniejszych wartości (analogowych), co widać w decyzjach zakupowych konsumentów [Humayun, Belk, 2020]. Egzemplifikacją tej tendencji jest wzrost sprzedaży płyt winylowych w połączeniu z dywersyfikacją kanałów ich dystrybucji. ...
... In theorising the affective make-up of the consumer subject, we emphasise the importance of transindividual feelings as inseparably bound up in the functioning of dominant systems and their consequences. In an increasingly post-normal world where theorists constantly grapple with conceptualising how consumers' sense of time, space and self is disrupted and distorted in many ways (Humayun and Belk, 2020;Kozinets et al., 2017;Šimůnková, 2019), understanding the emergence of subjectivities beyond conscious and rational activity and being able to simply label a certain tone in the air become more important than ever. This is where we believe a claustropolitan frame is significant. ...
This paper invokes Redhead’s concept of claustropolitanism to critically explore the affective reality for consumers in today’s digital age. In the context of surveillance capitalism, we argue that consumer subjectivity revolves around the experience of fidelity rather than agency. Instead of experiencing genuine autonomy in their digital lives, consumers are confronted with a sense of confinement that reflects their tacit conformity to the behavioural predictions of surveillant market actors. By exploring how that confinement is lived and felt, we theorise the collective affects that constitute a claustropolitan structure of feeling: incompletion, saturation and alienation. These affective contours trace an oppressive atmosphere that infuses consumers’ lives as they attempt to seek fulfilment through digital market-located behaviours that are largely anticipated and coordinated by surveillant actors. Rather than motivate resistance, these affects ironically work to perpetuate consumers’ commitment to the digital world and their ongoing participation in the surveillant marketplace. Our theorisation continues the critical project of re-assessing the consumer subject by showing how subjectivity is produced at the point of intersection between ideological imperatives and affective consequences.
Although a wealth of consumer research literature has examined privacy, the majority of this research has been conducted from a micro-economic or psychological perspective. This has led to a rather narrow view of consumer privacy, which ignores the larger socio-cultural forces at play. This paper suggests a shift in research perspective by adopting a consumer culture theory approach. This allows an in-depth look into the micro, meso and macro levels of analysis to explore privacy as a subjective, lived experience but also as a representation of cultural meanings that are further shaped by marketplace actors. The paper synthesizes how privacy has been conceptualized within consumer theory and advances three necessary shifts in research focus: from (1) prediction to experience, (2) causality to systems and (3) outcome to process. Specific theories or focus areas are explored within these shifts, which are then utilized to build a future research agenda.
The Indian Stationery market has been subject to dynamic changes owing to the shift in education,growing urbanization, living standards of the population according to published report. This industry was estimated to have six thousand corers of business pre-covid period. There are multiple brands competing for their share in this sector. The growth is expected to be more in coming years as e-commerce also grows. This research paper focused on the most consumed stationery among the youth in education sector which was printed Notebooks. The data was collected from 250 respondents in Ernakulam region, Kerala. The research was focused on a branded notebook. The research was able to identity three factors-Promotional factors, Brand awareness and Customer factors as the main contributors to purchase influence among the respondents. Easy availability of the product was a key factor for popularity of the brand under study. The research used multivariate technique of exploratory factory analysis using IBM SPSS for analysis. The need the sector to diversify the product variety may be an area the companies need to look into especially for attracting professionals in different sector.
Dominant perspectives on technology adoption and consumption tend to be cognitive, instrumental, and individualistic. We offer a desire-centered, future oriented and culturally grounded alternative model called the Disenchanted Enchantment Model (DEM). Drawing on historical evidence and revised interpretations of theories of enchantment and disenchantment by Weber and Saler, we show that desire is at the heart of technology consumption's enchantments, and how its fulfilment is temporary, sceptical, and ironic. We provide an important cultural counterbalance to models such as the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which replace wonder with reason. Instead we theorize the process that drives contemporary technology adoption as centering on desirous senses of wonderment and anticipation. We offer current and recent examples of the DEM process and discuss the implications this model holds for a new understanding of technology, consumption, desire, and broader consumer culture.
Introduction: Given the breadth of correlational research linking social media
use to worse well-being, we undertook an experimental study to investigate the
potential causal role that social media plays in this relationship. Method: After a
week of baseline monitoring, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania
were randomly assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat
use to 10 minutes, per platform, per day, or to use social media as usual for three
weeks. Results: The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness
and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups
showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline,
suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring. Discussion: Our findings strongly
suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may
lead to significant improvement in well-being.
Purpose
This paper examines the notion of escape, which is central to the consumer experience literature, yet remains largely undertheorized. By surfacing the multi-dimensionality of escape, we develop a more fine-grained conceptualization of this notion. In addition, our work helps shed new light on past consumer research findings that mobilize the notion of escape.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a review and interpretation of literature referring to the notion of escape in consumer research.
Findings
Our first contribution is to extend the concept of escape based on the turnerian framework of structure/anti-structure, by establishing a key difference between objects to ‘escape from’ and the major themes of ‘escape into’. A second contribution is to identify other forms of escape that are mundane, restorative and warlike, and that mobilize the self in different ways.
Practical implications
We provide a more precise conceptualization of escape to motivate further research on this particularly important concept for understanding consumer experience.
Originality/value
This paper goes beyond past research on escape by identifying other types of escapes, which have not really been theorized in consumer research. We especially note the importance of ephemeral moments where people temporarily suspend their reflexive self which we conceive as a new type of escape route.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how the material nature of legacy technology makes its users passionately prefer it over its digital alternatives.
Design/methodology/approach
This ethnographic study uses data from 26 in-depth interviews with vinyl collectors, augmented with longitudinal participant–observation of vinyl collecting and music store events.
Findings
The findings reveal how the physicality of vinyl facilitates the passionate relationships (with music, the vinyl as performative object and other people) that make vinyl so significant in vinyl users’ lives.
Research limitations/implications
As this study examines a single research context (vinyl) from the perspective of participants from three developed, Anglophone nations, its key theoretical contributions should be examined in other technological contexts and other cultures.
Practical implications
The findings imply that miniturisation and automation have lower limits for some products, material attributes should be added to digitised products and that legacy technology products could be usually be reframed as tools of authentic self-expression.
Originality/value
This study explains what can happen beyond the top of the “S” curve in the Technology Acceptance Model, furthering our understanding of consumers’ reactions to the proliferation of digital technology in their lives.
This article introduces a new dimension of consumption as liquid or solid. Liquid consumption is defined as ephemeral, access based, and dematerialized, while solid consumption is defined as enduring, ownership based, and material. Liquid and solid consumption are conceptualized as existing on a spectrum, with four conditions leading to consumption being liquid, solid, or a combination of the two: relevance to the self, the nature of social relationships, accessibility to mobility networks, and type of precarity experienced. Liquid consumption is needed to explain behavior within digital contexts, in access-based consumption, and in conditions of global mobility. It highlights a consumption orientation around values of flexibility, adaptability, fluidity, lightness, detachment, and speed. Implications of liquid consumption are discussed for the domains of attachment and appropriation; the importance of use value; materialism; brand relationships and communities; identity; prosumption and the prosumer; and big data, quantification of the self, and surveillance. Lastly, managing the challenges of liquid consumption and its effect on consumer welfare are explored. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographi-cally study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeal-ity. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.
In this paper, we use the case of the vinyl record to show that iconic objects become meaningful via a dual process. First, they offer immersive engagements which structure user interpretations through various material experiences of handling, use, and extension. Second, they always work via entanglements with related material ecologies such as turntables, speakers, mixers, and rituals of object care. Additionally, these engagements are complimented by a mediation process which emplaces the vinyl historically, culturally, spatially, and also politically, especially in the context of digitalization. This relational process means that both the material affordances and entanglements of vinyl allow us to feel, handle, experience, project, and share its iconicity. The materially mediated meanings of vinyl enabled it to retain currency in independent and collector’s markets and thus resist the planned obsolescence and eventually attain the status of celebrity commodity with totemic power in music communities. This performative aspect of vinyl markets also means that consumers read closely the signals and symbols regarding vinyl’s status, as its various user groups and champions try to interpret its future, protect, or challenge its current position. Vinyl’s future, and the larger expansion of pressing plants and innovative turntable production around it, largely depend on processes of cultural and status mobility. In the current phase of market expansion, vinyl’s status might be challenged by its own success. Neither a fashion cycle phenomenon, nor simple market conditions explain vinyl’s longevity. Rather, cultural contextualization of vinyl as thing and commodity is crucial for avoiding symbolic pollution and retaining sacred aura.
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws on netnographic and interview data from the Greek football manager (FM) online gaming community. FM is a simulation strategy game in which players act as “real-life” managers from the screen of their computer.
Findings
A central paradox and a set of four supporting paradoxes are identified. These paradoxes give rise to a transitional mode of experience, which lies on the borders of reality and fantasy, and is realised both at the individual and the tribal levels.
Originality/value
This study makes a threefold contribution. First, it advances the understanding of the paradoxical aspects of consumption experiences in light of post-postmodern consumer culture. Second, it shows how these paradoxes are negotiated by consumers between individual and tribal levels. Third, it extends the understanding of the nature of consumption experiences through the development of the concept of the transitional consumption experience.
This chapter focuses on the specific practices of a set of people in Denmark, who voluntarily, and reflexively generate, process and analyse data about their lives. From 2012-2014 we followed these 'self-trackers', who are organized in a movement called " Quantified Self " (QS), in order to understand the conscious digital tracking and active engagement with data in the construction of subjectivity and sociality. Our theoretical frame is based on assemblages of interacting economic, technological, social and cultural logics (Barad 2003; Marcus & Saka 2006; Orlikowski 2007; Ruppert et al. 2013; Lupton 2014a). In this way we focus our analysis of self-trackers on the dynamic and historically intertwined constellations of discourses, practices, meanings and materialities. Our conceptual argument is that the process of self-tracking subjectivation can be described by the metaphor of the digital doppelgänger: a digital version of the self that is perceived as 'more you than you are yourself'. We do not see the digital doppelgänger as a final result of self-tracking activities, but as a relational actant in a performative process. There are three intertwined process modes that define "doppelgängering " : enactment (giving the doppelgänger a form), existence (being one with the digital other) and entanglement (negotiating with the digital other).
Selfies, blogs and lifelogging devices have become important ways in which we understand ourselves. Jill Walker Rettberg analyses these and related genres as three intertwined modes of self-representation: visual, written and quantitative. Rettberg explores topics like the meaning of Instagram filters, smartphone apps that write your diary for you, and the ways in which governments and commercial entities create their own representations of us from the digital traces we leave behind as we go through our lives.
While drawing from general cultural myths, marketplace mythologies are tailored to the competitive characteristics and exigencies of specific market structures, providing meanings and metaphors that serve multiple ideological agendas. I illustrate this conceptualization by analyzing mythic narratives that circulate in the natural health marketplace. I propose that a nexus of institutional, competitive, and sociocultural conditions that engender different ideological uses of this marketplace mythology by two types of stakeholders: advertisers of herbal remedies and consumers seeking alternatives to their medical identities. I discuss the implications of this theorization for future analyses of consumer mythologies and for theoretical debates over whether consumers can become emancipated from the ideological influences exerted by the capitalist marketplace.
We explore the slow disappearance of the postmodern critique that challenged mainstream marketing and emphasised the importance of locating phenomena in their wider social, political and historic contexts to expose embedded power relationships and ideologies. After an initial overview of how postmodernism impacted on theorising in consumer research, we highlight how it reached saturation point, with many of its ideas accepted into mainstream marketing. Following this claimed demise of the postmodern critique, we review the proliferation of post-postmodern proposals and speculate from where the next theoretical direction will originate. As part of this analysis, we focus on a group of theorists who are giving communism a renaissance and consider how these ideas can help us critique and reimagine consumer culture theory.
Modern mountain men form temporary consumption enclaves focused on reen‐acting the 1825–40 fur‐trade rendezvous held in the Rocky Mountain American West. In the process, they become part of a transient consumption community predicated on invented traditions and the invocation of a mythic past to create and consume fantastic time and space. Based on ethnographic methods employed over a five‐year period, we develop a historically contextualized understanding of this consumption fantasy. We analyze how modern mountain men enact fantasy experiences of a primitive alternative reality within the bounded ritual space of the modern rendezvous. We conclude that participation in this fantasy world offers a special opportunity for transformative play, while reinforcing a romanticized set of beliefs.
This article retreats from an entirely relational treatment of matter, to rediscover the object nature of things. The thingly relations of things include object relations; materials provide affordances or potentialities to humans. The brute matter of things has effects on us that go beyond social networks. We cannot reduce things solely to the relational, to a semiotics of things. To do so undermines the power of things to entrap, and particularly to trap the more vulnerable. In the modern world, we have come to see that we need to use things sustainably and responsibly, to care for things. But this care and sustainability themselves too frequently involve further management and control of animals, plants, landscapes, resources, and humans. A long-term archaeological perspective shows that our attempts to fix things by finding technological solutions have led to an exponential increase in material entanglements. It is in our nature as a species to try and fix our problems now by fiddling and fixing, but such responses may have their limits.
With the increasing adoption of smartphones also a problematic phenomena become apparent: People are changing their habits and become addicted to different services that these devices provide. In this paper we present AppDetox: an app that allows users to purposely create rules that keep them from using certain apps. We describe our deployment of the app on a mobile application store, and present initial findings gained through observation of about 11,700 users of the application. We find that people are rather rigorous when restricting their app use, and that mostly they suppress use of social networking and messaging apps.
In pursuit of the "good life," less affluent societies focus on the material - that is, consumption and economic development. The author discusses human and environmental consequences of this focus. She suggests alternative emergent ideologies, structures and processes, and practices to enable the enhancing potential of goods and thus move toward well-being, which she proposes to entail humane consumption embedded in human development.
The extended self was proposed in 1988. Since it was formulated, many technological changes have dramatically affected the way we consume, present ourselves, and communicate. This conceptual update seeks to revitalize the concept, incorporate the impacts of digitization, and provide an understanding of consumer sense of self in today’s technological environment. It is necessarily a work in progress, for the digital environment and our behavior within it continue to evolve. But some important changes are already clear. Five changes with digital consumption are considered that impact the nature of self and the nature of possessions. Needed modifications and additions to the extended self are outlined, and directions for future research are suggested. The digital world opens a host of new means for self-extension, using many new consumption objects to reach a vastly broader audience. Even though this calls for certain reformulations, the basic concept of the extended self remains vital.
People increasingly seek out opportunities to escape from a sped-up pace of life by engaging in slow forms of consumption. Drawing from the theory of social acceleration, we explore how consumers can experience and achieve a sloweddown experience of time through consumption. To do so, we ethnographically study the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain and introduce the concept of consumer deceleration. Consumer deceleration is a perception of a slowed-down temporal experience achieved via a decrease in certain quantities (traveled distance, use of technology, experienced episodes) per unit of time through altering, adopting, or eschewing forms of consumption. Consumers decelerate in three ways: embodied, technological, and episodic. Each is enabled by consumer practices and market characteristics, rules, and norms, and results in time being experienced as passing more slowly and as being an abundant resource. Achieving deceleration is challenging, as it requires resynchronization to a different temporal logic and the ability to manage intrusions from acceleration. Conceptualizing consumer deceleration allows us to enhance our understanding of temporality and consumption, embodied consumption, extraordinary experiences, and the theory of social acceleration. Overall, this study contributes to consumer research by illuminating the role of speed and rhythm in consumer culture. © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
This ethnographic study increases our understanding of Westerners seeking genuine fairy tale experiences of magic, transformation and enchantment within South American psychedelic ayahuasca tourism. Examining 63 tourists, this study shows how vision-based spirit sensegivers facilitate individuals in exorcising demons, to make sense of themselves as spiritual beings within an enchanted universe. However, and with this potion quickly wearing off upon returning to the West, tourists feel abandoned by their spirits, and disconnected from the fairy lands. Coupled with not wanting to re-experience intense inner tensions from stepping in and out of a fairy tale, further tourism is rejected. As such, ayahuasca tourism becomes a ‘forgotten’ fairy tale, rarely told.
This study delivers a clearer understanding of the constitution of the datapreneurial consumer, the role of the market in that construction, and the implications for consumer identity projects in the age of Big Data and an increasingly data- and surveillance-driven society. The study uses a theoretical framework of the “quantified self” (QS) to examine consumers (re)building creditworthiness. In the context of a major online credit-user forum, it employs creative-nonfiction methodology to protect forum-member privacy. To the literature on creditworthiness, the study contributes a process model of the construction of the datapreneurial credit consumer identity. To the QS literature, it offers insight into how consumers may embrace quantification and self-tracking, even in areas where they are nudged or pushed into it. To the sociology of quantification literature, it adds empirics to explain how consumers may embrace market-provided self-quantification resources in attempts to liberate themselves from the structural control of that very quantification.
As seen in Wired and Time
A revealing look at how negative biases against women of color are embedded in search engine results and algorithms
Run a Google search for “black girls”—what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls,” the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society.
In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online. As search engines and their related companies grow in importance—operating as a source for email, a major vehicle for primary and secondary school learning, and beyond—understanding and reversing these disquieting trends and discriminatory practices is of utmost importance.
An original, surprising and, at times, disturbing account of bias on the internet, Algorithms of Oppression contributes to our understanding of how racism is created, maintained, and disseminated in the 21st century.
The consumer Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize consumer experience. Because consumers can actively interact with smart objects, the traditional, human-centric conceptualization of consumer experience as consumers' internal subjective responses to branded objects may not be sufficient to conceptualize consumer experience in the IoT. Smart objects possess their own unique capacities and their own kinds of experiences in interaction with the consumer and each other. A conceptual framework based on assemblage theory and objectoriented ontology details how consumer experience and object experience emerge in the IoT. This conceptualization is anchored in the context of consumerobject assemblages, and defines consumer experience by its emergent properties, capacities, and agentic and communal roles expressed in interaction. Four specific consumer experience assemblages emerge: enabling experiences, comprising agentic self-extension and communal self-expansion, and constraining experiences, comprising agentic self-restriction and communal self-reduction. A parallel conceptualization of the construct of object experience argues that it can be accessed by consumers through object-oriented anthropomorphism, a nonhuman-centric approach to evaluating the expressive roles objects play in interaction. Directions for future research are derived, and consumer researchers are invited to join a dialogue about the important themes underlying our framework. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
People often share their experiences with others who were not originally present, which provides them with both personal and interpersonal benefits. However, most prior work on this form of sharing has examined the decision to share one's experience only after the experience is over. We investigate a distinct, unexplored aspect of the sharing process: when the decision to share is already salient during an experience and hence can impact the experience itself. We examine this research question within the context of photo-taking, an increasingly ubiquitous and integral part of people's experiences. Across two field and three laboratory studies, we find that relative to taking pictures for oneself (e.g., to preserve one's memories), taking pictures with the intention to share them with others (e.g., to post on social media) reduces enjoyment of experiences. This effect occurs because taking photos with the intention to share increases self-presentational concern during the experience, which can reduce enjoyment directly, as well as indirectly by lowering engagement with the experience. We identify several factors that moderate the effect of photo-taking goals on enjoyment, such as individual differences in the extent to which individuals care about how others perceive them and the closeness of the intended audience. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. All rights reserved.
Growing concern about the impact of constant, mediated connection has often focused on the ways in which technologies contribute to a ubiquitous sense of presence and interaction, and the kind of invasion that this may represent to a sense of self and privacy. Discussion about information communication technologies (ICTs) is increasingly converging around the need for a deepened understanding of their effect on pace of life, methods of work, consumption and wellbeing. Counter-narratives to overwhelming hyper-connectivity have emerged as a result of these changes. Using qualitative interview data from respondents recruited from across the globe, we focus on the strategies and worldviews of those who explicitly reject the use of any ICTs. Our participants relate how, to varying degrees, they have elected to avoid forms of immediate connection, and what they identify as the deep advantages and therapeutic benefits of such ways of being. The article responds to rising social anxieties about being locked into ICT ecologies, and the difficulty of opting out of corporate information-exchange systems. These concerns, we argue, are generating increasing interest in how to manage ICTs more effectively, or to switch off altogether.
The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek.
We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It's as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman's curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.
Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash to Diderot's Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost's satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google's goal of anticipating our questions, Uber's cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.
If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities.
How is consumer desire transformed by contemporary technology? Most extant theory holds
that technology rationalizes and reduces passion. In our investigation of networks of desire—
complex open systems of machines, consumers, energy and objects—we find technology
increasing the passion to consume. Effects depend upon participation in the network, which
can be private, public, or professional. Private participation tends to discipline passion into
interests reflecting established cultural categories. Public and professional participation build
new connections between extant desires and a wider network, decentering ties and
deterritorializing flows that limit hungers to emplaced bodies. Public and professional
participation drive consumption passion to transgressive extremes. We use ethnography and
netnography to study online food image sharing, a broad field that includes everything from
friend networks to food bloggers. Using and extending Deleuze and Guattari’s desire theory,
we conceptualize desire as energetic, connective, systemic, and innovative. Critically
examining the role of technocapitalism in the realm of consumption passion, we question
the emancipatory possibilities of unfettered desire. Networks of desire create a passionate
new universe of technologically enhanced desire, one that challenges the way we think
about consumer collectives, capitalism, emancipation, and posthuman consumption.
In January 2013, a picture of a young man typing on a mechanical typewriter while sitting on a park bench went ‘viral’ on the popular website Reddit. The image was presented in the typical style of an ‘image macro’ or ‘imageboard meme’ (Klok 2010, 16–19), with a sarcastic caption in bold white Impact typeface that read: ‘You’re not a real hipster — until you take your typewriter to the park.’
The postdigital, as an aesthetic, gestures towards a relation produced by digital surfaces in a bewildering number of different places and contexts. This interface-centricity is not necessarily screenic, however, and represents the current emerging asterism that is formed around notions of art, computation and design. In this conception, the postdigital is not purely a digital formation or artefact — it can also be the concepts, networks and frameworks of digitality that are represented (e.g. voxels, glitch, off-internet media, neo-analogue, ‘non-digital’ media, post-internet art). Nonetheless, the interesting aspect is the implicit notion of surfaces as theatres of action and performance — such as through data visualization, interactivity or material design — above and beyond a depth model, which highlights the machinery of computation (see Berry 2014, 58).
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Social media technologies such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook promised a new participatory online culture. Yet, technology insider Alice Marwick contends in this insightful book, "Web 2.0" only encouraged a preoccupation with status and attention. Her original research-which includes conversations with entrepreneurs, Internet celebrities, and Silicon Valley journalists-explores the culture and ideology of San Francisco's tech community in the period between the dot com boom and the App store, when the city was the world's center of social media development.Marwick argues that early revolutionary goals have failed to materialize: while many continue to view social media as democratic, these technologies instead turn users into marketers and self-promoters, and leave technology companies poised to violate privacy and to prioritize profits over participation. Marwick analyzes status-building techniques-such as self-branding, micro-celebrity, and life-streaming-to show that Web 2.0 did not provide a cultural revolution, but only furthered inequality and einforced traditional social stratification, demarcated by race, class, and gender.
This article describes an emergent logic of accumulation in the networked sphere, ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and considers its implications for ‘information civilization.’ The institutionalizing practices and operational assumptions of Google Inc. are the primary lens for this analysis as they are rendered in two recent articles authored by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. Varian asserts four uses that follow from computer-mediated transactions: ‘data extraction and analysis,’ ‘new contractual forms due to better monitoring,’ ‘personalization and customization,’ and ‘continuous experiments.’ An examination of the nature and consequences of these uses sheds light on the implicit logic of surveillance capitalism and the global architecture of computer mediation upon which it depends. This architecture produces a distributed and largely uncontested new expression of power that I christen: ‘Big Other.’ It is constituted by unexpected and often illegible mechanisms of extraction, commodification, and control that effectively exile persons from their own behavior while producing new markets of behavioral prediction and modification. Surveillance capitalism challenges democratic norms and departs in key ways from the centuries-long evolution of market capitalism.
Recent discussions of music listening practices have given priority to the digitalisation of sound and the role of digital music players in changing the form, medium and possibly even the content of listening. While such an emphasis is warranted given the rapid uptake of digital music consumption, it is also the case that vinyl records are currently the fastest growing area of music sales. Moreover, within particular music listening circles, the vinyl record is approached as an auratic object. In this paper, we explore the vinyl’s persistence on the market and its rekindled cultural prominence. Using the frameworks of cultural sociology, combined with insights from material culture studies and cultural approaches to consumption within business studies and sociology, we explore the reasons why vinyl records have once again become highly valued objects of cultural consumption. Resisting explanations which focus solely on matters of nostalgia or fetish, we look to the concepts of iconicity, ritual, aura and the sensibility of coolness to explain the paradoxical resurgence of vinyl at the time of the digital revolution.
The term postdigital has in recent years been applied across a broad range of disciplines, often with contradictory meanings. This article seeks to map the various definitions, deployments and appropriations of the term alongside undertaking a consideration of the underlying issues that the postdigital is argued to gesture towards. These issues, which pertain to contemporary (post)digital technologies and their relationships to discourses and practices surrounding novelty, materiality, embodiment, progress and the construction, comprehension, and control of contemporary urban spaces, are considered through the rhetorics associated with the multifarious manifestations of the postdigital and subsequently contrasted with numerous existing apertures that explore digital technoculture, including digital humanities, software studies, digital studies (following Bernard Stiegler) and media archaeology.
A powerful and innovative argument that explores the complexity of the human relationship with material things, demonstrating how humans and societies are entrapped into the maintenance and sustaining of material worlds • Argues that the interrelationship of humans and things is a defining characteristic of human history and culture • Offers a nuanced argument that values the physical processes of things without succumbing to materialism • Discusses historical and modern examples, using evolutionary theory to show how long-standing entanglements are irreversible and increase in scale and complexity over time • Integrates aspects of a diverse array of contemporary theories in archaeology and related natural and biological sciences • Provides a critical review of many of the key contemporary perspectives from materiality, material culture studies and phenomenology to evolutionary theory, behavioral archaeology, cognitive archaeology, human behavioral ecology, Actor Network Theory and complexity theory.
Myths have come of age in consumer research. In the 22 years since Levy's inaugural article, the literature has grown at an impressive rate. Yet important questions remain unanswered: What makes some myths especially meaningful to consumers? Why are certain consumer myths more prevalent and less perishable than others? This article argues that ambiguity is an influential factor. Using the RMS Titanic as an empirical exemplar, it unpacks the principal forms of myth-informed ambiguity surrounding "the unsinkable brand." Predicated on William Empson's hitherto unsung principles of literary criticism, the article posits that ambiguity in its multifaceted forms is integral to outstanding branding and consumer meaning making, as well as myth appeal more generally.
There are numerous and substantial effects of the use of digital technologies on consumers. I focus here on the ways in which these technologies have brought changes to the extended self. This review builds on earlier work considering digital subjectivities. I find that the human–machine digital interface results in a series of challenging theoretical issues. In considering these issues at the broadest level I also address how the affordances of digital technologies may cause us to rethink the notion of extended self, the body and the relationship between objects and consumers in digital environments.
Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students' capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.