Riassunto esame Digital consumers culture, Prof. Caliandro Alessandro, libro consigliato Libri per esame Digital Consumers Culture , Vari

Introduction

Consumer Culture Theory helps us better understand why consumers do what they do and why consumer culture takes the forms it does. Let us consider two different consumption contexts:

Tough Mudder

Tough Mudder is a military-style obstacle course, which millions of people have paid about $100 each for. Rebecca Scott, from Cardiff Business School, decided to answer a question: Why would comfortable Westerners want to pay for physical pain? Scott and her co-authors interviewed 26 participants, and read online forums to try to understand what motivates people to run these races:

• The participants emphasized how rewarding the pain felt in the end;
• Many participants described dissociating from their thoughts while racing, which was consistent with past research arguing that extreme pain obliterates “the contents of consciousness.” The intense pain helps to forget, temporarily, the hyper-mental concerns of daily lives;
• Tough Mudders and other painful forms of exercise allow people to “rediscover” their physical bodies, as revealed in comments like “I hurt in places I didn’t even know existed.”

Cosplay

Cosplay: Cosplayers construct and purchase costumes, learn signature poses and dialogue, and perform at comics conventions and parties, as they transform themselves into chosen (fictional) characters. Where a costume party ensemble is picked simply to amuse, cosplayers feel a deeper connection with their character, so they adopt the same mannerisms, posture, and accent, embodying the character rather than just imitating. Cosplay is a highly competitive field that permits social status accumulation through constructing costumes (which enrich the experience). It is an emotionally rewarding practice. Participants experiment also with the performance of gender in male-to-female and female-to-male transformations, making complex investments in emotional labor.

Consumer Culture Theory Framework

Consumer culture theorists seek to provide understanding of global consumer culture, exploring the multiplicity of cultural groupings that exist. Consumer culture is a dynamic network of economic, symbolic, and social relationships and is what consumers do and believe. The consumption of market-made commodities and desire-inducing commercialized symbols is central to consumer culture and is largely dependent upon the exercise of personal choice. Consumer culture also conceptualizes an interconnected system of commercially produced images, texts, and objects that groups use to make collective sense of their environments and to anchor and orient their members’ experiences and lives.

Four Theoretical Dimensions

Consumer Identity Projects

Align CCT with the cultural studies focus on identity work and the negotiation of cultural contradictions through the marketplace, as well as the commodification of cultural rituals and emotions. Why is identity such an issue in consumer culture? For example, Jafari and Goulding (2008) analyze the different meanings of consumption and consumer identities for young adult Iranians in their home country and in the UK: their consumption practices, in the first case, sought freedom from theocratic restriction, and in the second case freedom to live in anonymity, rather than as subjects of perpetual suspicion, to enact a visible degree of Westernization.

Marketplace Cultures

Studies on the role of everyday practices and rituals in creating institutional forms of social and familial solidarity. How do communities form in a market-mediated society? For example, Sandikci and Ger (2010) detail the emergence of the market for tesettur fashion. Tesettur began as metropolitan professional women appropriated a dressing practice that had formerly been associated with the impoverished and less educated rural sector of Turkish society. Leveraging their economic capital and the cultural capital acquired through their middle-class lifelong immersion, these women remade the once stodgy and unflattering tesettur style of dress into a more urbane, appealing, and hybridized fashion style, leading to the emergence of an upscale tesettur market.

The Socio-Historic Patterning of Consumption

Research on the role of class, gender, and ethnicity as structural influences on marketplace behaviors and vice versa. How do immigrants assimilate through consumption? For example, David Crockett (2017) investigates the intersection of race, class, culture, and consumption. Crockett argues that African Americans use the marketplace and conspicuous consumption practices to reclaim selected aspects of black culture from negative associations circulated by dominant racialized institutional discourses in popular media.

Mass-Mediated Marketplace Ideologies and Consumers’ Interpretative Strategies

Argue that consumers creatively and constructively rework mass media and advertising messages in ways that often run against the grain of their corporate encoded meaning, through a dialogue with the cultural frames imposed by dominant commercial ideologies. What are the ideological underpinnings of consumer societies?

Origins and Future Application

Origin

CCT emerged as a corrective to the conventional orientation that consumers were rational decision-makers, most concerned with maximizing subjective utility. What fascinates CCT researchers is consumers’ desires, the consumption experiences, or the ways in which consumers meaningfully integrate brand and commercial services into their personal and social lives. For example, American Thanksgiving Day celebrations: celebrate specific beliefs about family pooling and redistribution of resources, important ideas about American social life. Family members often make heroic efforts to come together across time and space, even though members may experience considerable mutual ambivalence during most of the year, negotiating their relationships in the kitchens. Through cooking and following what they claim are old family recipes, people celebrate skills and in turn are celebrated. They often believe they celebrate just like everyone else although researchers found quite a variety of distinctive ways of celebrating. The goal was understanding how consumption experiences were shaped by webs of cultural meanings and the symbolic value that consumption goods served in consumers’ personal and collective life projects.

Looking to the Future

The CCT approach has found application in the managerial sphere, as brand managers realized that cultural meanings, consumer collectivities and social affiliations, and consumer identity projects, are integral to the market success of brands. Doug Holt has proposed an approach to research that he terms Consumer Culture Strategy to drive substantive engagements with significant real world problems - climate change, poverty, inequality, shortfalls in the distribution of health care services. Holt’s consumer culture strategist would pursue his/her project by building expertise in the social problem domain.

Linda Scott, a contributor to foundational feminist CCT scholarship, devoted her efforts to promoting and publicizing what she calls the XX economy, a gynocentric vision of economic relations. Her network manifests a blog, aggregates projects devoted to women's empowerment, engages in advocacy directed to governmental and intergovernmental organizations, and develops teaching cases on women’s empowerment.

About This Book

The Identity of Consuming Human Beings

Nowadays, the consumer self is globalized throughout the world although taking different forms that reflect regional and local socio-historical shaping forces. The perpetuation of a market society depends on an endlessly stream of commercial offerings. We consumers assert our distinctive selfhood though acquiring, rejecting or discarding these commercial offerings. Contemporary neoliberal political and economic ideas shape our understanding of our consumer selves and our responsibilities as consumers. Massive flows of goods, ideas, images, and people produce different ways people think of goods, ideas, images, and people produce different ways people think of themselves and their consumption. Individual’s identities form over the life course by way of our interaction with intimate others in households.

Agentic acts of consumption are subject to social influences and constraints in ways that people do not readily recognize. There are dominant, that is, socially approved, consumer identities and there are subordinated consumer identities, sometimes negatively sanctioned or stigmatized. Cova and Shankar reveal subcultures, tribes, communities, and publics: each of these forms of social life develop distinctive relationships to commercial market offerings, inevitably affecting what marketers bring to the marketplace. With the rise of Web 2.0, we assist the emergence of contemporary markets and the active role that consumers take in forging and forming new markets, market forms, and offerings. The distinction between producer and consumer - or between supply and demand - is still meaningful in contemporary consumer culture. Unique to our era is the truly global extension of market-based society. The interaction between a consumer culture that took form in Euro-American contexts produces global-local hybrids as it takes root in regions of the world with dramatically different socio-historical experiences such as Asia. Market-mediated society and consumer culture has modified and even produced distinctions of gender, ethnicity, and class. In consumer culture, gender roles are always in flux: branded products and services are strongly linked to gender roles, and gender affects how people respond to marketing practices. There are complex relationships between consumer culture, race, and ethnicity. The construct of race focuses on the physical characteristics of people: it is an influential and divisive marketplace identifier that groups and separates people on the basis of quite arbitrary distinctions. Consumer theorists have tended to treat subculture, ethnicity, race, and social class as stable structural factors. Globalization accelerates the movement of people, products, ideas, and images. Global mobility can take different forms from economic and political migration to global nomadism. Global nomads are pioneers in liquid consumption, a kind of hyper-cosmopolitan consumer lifestyle that prioritizes flexibility and adaptability in consumption practice. Global mobilities are challenging and can result in feelings of homelessness. Some migrant consumers use what is called compensatory consumption to cope with these feelings.

Ideology and Consumer Behavior

Ideology consists of values, norms, beliefs, meanings, symbols, and customs and shape consumer behavior: is a set of shared beliefs linked to social practices and integrated into key political and economic institutions. Neoliberal ideology is one of the dominant ideologies of our time: the satisfaction of individual interests through consumption is a responsibility, a right and the lynchpin of the market economy. Consumers contribute to market formation in consumer culture through the development of taste regimes, a kind of aesthetic ideology. It is not purely individual, and social influences shape taste. Consumer resistance means standing up against marketing practice and communications can impose norms, consumer resistance can be transformative, mobilizing for change.

Identity Projects and the Marketplace

Roles, Perpetual Becoming and Self-Narrative

Identity encompasses:

• Personality, the set of features that comprise a given person’s character;
• Self-concept, a collection of beliefs one has about one’s self;
• Identity project, the strategic configuration of objects, symbols, scripts and practices to claim particular identity position;
• Self-presentation, the performance of an identity project within a social context.

The focus here is on identity projects, where identity is recognized as volitional, that is, a matter of choices, and that imagination is the process of forming identity. Of central importance is how the market supports identity projects.

Identity is volitional. Identity projects are complex sets of behaviors and affiliations carried out daily and affected by social context. People have multiple identity projects depending on context and social role (a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms people inhabit in a social situation, e.g., son, employee, athlete). The social context determines which role is, or roles are, dominant.

Identity evolves over time. The idea of identity as a project refers to the ongoing creation of narratives of self-identity relating to our perceptions of the past, present, and hoped-for future. In contemporary consumer culture, people strategically construct their identities across time and space. For example, to be an athlete requires a combination of activity-appropriate clothes, shoes, food and drink, and equipment. These roles are made manifest through the marketplace where objects, symbols, scripts, and practices are on offer to support identity performance. Taken together, identity projects and self-presentation form self-narratives, and self-narratives organize identity projects and performances into relatively cohesive, holistic identities. This perpetual recursive loop begins through the process of imagination.

The Process of Imagination

Humans are distinct from other living beings due to their ability to create and communicate knowledge. People have the capacity to understand themselves and their environment, and to transmit this understanding to one another. Humans have identities.

Benedict Anderson’s contemporary theory is that our imagination became commodified via print capitalism (the consequences of Gutenberg’s printing press), enabling collectives beyond those that meet face-to-face to form. The concept of imagination yields two primary themes:

• Imagination links corporeality (the body and physical sensations) and abstract reasoning (thought) to yield knowledge (intelligence);
• Imagination is central to the construction and expression of identities and realities.

Plato contends that imagination transforms sensation into knowledge. The mind must attach meanings to the perceptions that can then be ordered by rational thought into understanding. All knowledge is filtered through imagination.

Aristotle makes a subtle distinction between sensation and imagination. Sensation is what we do when confronted with a stimulus and imagination is where we attach meaning to a stimulus so it can remain in our minds after the stimulus disappears. These meanings become unmoored from the stimuli that inspired them, expanding human intellect far beyond bodily experience.

The imagination is, in Descartes’ terms, completely reliant on, and tainted by physical experience. Imagination is not infinite; it is inextricably dependent upon what the body has experienced. Imagination is limited to what at least once, we have sensed. Descartes might say that we imagined human aviation from examining birds in flight and extrapolating to what we know about gravity and speed.

David Hume concurs with Plato and Aristotle that imagination is the central intellectual endeavor, however, the specifics of how imagination works are omitted, and given a mystical or magical nature within the proverbial black box of the mindscape. Hume echoes Descartes that imagination is grounded in sensation and limited. He states “nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible.” For example, Hume might say that color-changing clothing is introduced to mimic chameleons’ chromatophores.

Reality is a social construct built from shared individual physical experiences. Hume refutes Plato’s claim that imagination leads to knowledge and truth that form stable realities. For Hume, reality, based on truths, is historically and culturally variable and is socially defined, that is to say, by convention.

Kant distills imagination into two primary forms:

• Reproductive (pre-experiential intuition summoned spontaneously);
• Productive (the location of knowledge construction).

For Kant, understanding and imagination are interdependent and together produce realities that can be empirically experienced. Kant agrees with Hume that a person’s imagination is constrained by their social network, their culture.

Benedict Anderson identifies imagination as an integral component of community formation. He is the first theorist to apply imagination to consumption. In Anderson’s account, print capitalism fostered a sense of national community. It gave national citizens consumable tools to imagine and build shared experience. Through reading, people became united in language communities overlapping with geographical boundaries. Anderson’s notion of imagination is premised on the act of consuming (buying and deciphering written texts) which led to new identity configurations, new industries, new markets, and new social realities. Anderson’s notion of print capitalism can be updated to include global media brands like Harry Potter, they span media to form common vocabularies for understanding worlds beyond what any person has physically experienced. Likewise, the Internet gave rise to global imagined communities centering on commercial brands. In these brand-based collectives, brand enthusiasts collaborate to create value by enhancing brand-oriented experiences through creating and performing practices related to the brand. In this way, the LEGO brand experience is enhanced through fan collaboration to construct block representations of iconic architectures (e.g., Tower of Pisa).

Arjun Appadurai considers the manipulation of signs, symbols, commercial products, and their respective meanings to visualize human potential and limitations. Imagination is a mundane practice and an inherently social process, belonging to all people.