Consuming Technocultures: An Extended JCR Curation

Almost 50 years ago, the American anthropologist Geertz (1973) famously described culture as the “webs of significance” in which human beings are suspended, and which we ourselves have spun (5). Today, these webs are worldwide and technological. Through cell phones and facial recognition software, credit ratings, online banking, e-government, and social media, these interwoven webs of social, institutional, and economic significance affect every aspect of our lives. We continue to spin technological webs into increasingly sophisticated forms, to weave devices of information and communication into every aspect of our lives, and to further entangle ourselves in their multifarious snares. Consumer researchers have investigated technology consumption in its various manifestations—for example, looking at the multiple factors influencing whether or not consumers are ready to adopt technology (Parasuraman 2000). For these purposes, technology has often been defined as the complex, engineered contraptions that characterize so much of the consumption in our contemporary society—things like laptop computers, web applications, and mobile phones. Influential philosophers and scholars of technology such as Heidegger (1954), Ellul (1964), and Mumford (1967) have tended to associate technology with the efficiency-driven techniques (or “techne”) and machines at work in a society. However, technology in its anthropological sense is much wider. Archaeologists find that human beings have been evolving along with our tools for at least the past 2.6 million years (Semaw et al. 2003). For this reason, it is almost impossible “to imagine human beings as pretechnological” (Nye 2006, 5). From an anthropologist’s point of view, tool making and increasing technology development are and have long been an essential part of being hominid, and from our contemporary perspective they are certainly a key part of being a consumer. Making and using ever more sophisticated things and assemblages of symbol-things is a hallmark element of consumer culture and its consumers, respectively. Yet something new is currently happening, something previously unseen and unforeseen. More and more, our technological creations are reflecting us, connecting us, shaped like us, shaping us, replacing us, controlling us. They are increasingly impacting so many different aspects of our existence that they seem, qualitatively, to be a new force in our lives, our cultures, and our world. Alongside the tools themselves, increasingly potent, diverse, persuasive, and commercial beliefs and practices suffuse our use of them. Beyond its interaction with their function as interactive objects, contemporary technology consumption also interacts with human experience on almost every level in a complex cultural embedding that further ensnarls us in more technology consumption. This embedding of technology results in experiences that scholars of cultural studies and science and technology studies have long been calling technocultural (Penley and Ross 1991). Citing the cultural critic Postman (1992), Mick and Fournier (1998) assert that the impact of “technoculture is irrefutable and pervasive” (123). If we consider cultures to be the plenitudinous distinct and intersecting networks and structures of meaning-making and meaningful action in which our lives are suspended, it becomes readily apparent that human society is accompanying and accommodating these technologies with a multitude of different, overlapping, and sometimes even conflicting cultures. Consumer culture is not a singular or stable thing but a complex mosaic of “relations between ways of life and market-mediated resources” (Arnould and Thompson 2005, 869), and it includes and intersects with a variety of other relational forms aside from, but overlapping, technology. We can layer onto the rich, fast, and deep communications of technologies ethnic cultures (Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005), political cultures (Zhao and Belk 2008), shared social identities and leisure interests (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001), and many other cultural forms and foci. Like bacteria in swamp water, they constantly interact, merge, mate, and battle with each other as they play out on social stages ranging from the very large to the very small. On these various stages, technologies are important actors, introducing into consumers’ contemporary life plots and devices thick with new meaning and action. The consumption of contemporary technologies such as those relating to information and communication is continually altering what people can do and how they can do it, constantly interacting with and impacting a range of other social forms to create what are, ostensibly, new forms of culture. This article defines technocultural consumption as follows. Technocultures are the various identities, practices, values, rituals, hierarchies, and other sources and structures of meanings that are influenced, created by, or expressed through technology consumption. Selfies, emojis, avatars, memes, GIFs, and augmented reality are contemporary sources of consumer meaning (Ge and Gretzel 2018; Li, Chan, and Kim 2019), as are message streaks, Facebook FOMO, Instafame, unfriending, and retweets. Technocultural consumption is the inflection of consumers’ experiences by technologies as well as the injection of consumer desire and intent into the development of sophisticated devices, their service logics, and their services. Technologies inspire dynamic new vocabularies, practices, self-presentations, and forms of connection. Our consumption is thus not limited merely to the material goods and services we associate with modern technology. When we rate an Amazon review, buy a weapon in the Overwatch video game, refuse to take our mobile phone on vacation, or bemusedly deign to answer the survey questions on an online dating site such as OkCupid, we are, inevitably, also consuming and co-creating technocultures. The five articles chosen for this curation represent only a local scraping off of an exciting intellectual subfield of technocultural exploration that ranges across the fields of history, psychology, communication, media studies, organization science, education, science and technology studies, sociology, anthropology, the digital humanities, and a number of other fields. Because technology is changing so quickly, and these changes are in turn transforming so many different aspects of the human experience, it is unsurprising that almost every academic field has grown its own branch devoted to exploring them. In consumer research, there is a burgeoning literature stretching back over two decades and encompassing an impressive range of different authors and journals from around the world. Although this narrative will focus on the five Journal of Consumer Research articles that constitute this curation, it also will attempt to convey some of the highlights of a range of other published and influential consumer research in the area. These mentions also tend to lean more heavily on work published in JCR, but I acknowledge from the outset that high-quality work in the area is distributed among many journals from around the world that also publish high-quality consumer research. In the 1990s, consumer researchers joined their colleagues in the social sciences in recognizing the importance of the emerging revolutions in information and communication technologies. Extending Baudrillardian scholar Poster’s (1995) early and critical conceptions of “cyberdemocracy” into the realm of consumer culture, Firat and Venkatesh (1995) conceptualized the experiencing of new technologies as one in which media spectacles become intensified, power hierarchies become unraveled, cultural and social spaces fragment, and consumers are empowered in various ways (253). Although they modestly cast their postmodern insights as “speculative” (ibid.), those conceptions have nonetheless proven prophetic. Their powerful framing of technology consumption from critical, celebratory, and liberatory perspectives has also been extremely influential on the field. Without a doubt, Firat and Venkatesh (1995) set the stage for consumer researchers’ ongoing conceptual development and empirical exploration of technoculture. Mick and Fournier’s (1998) “Paradoxes of Technology: Consumer Cognizance, Emotions, and Coping Strategies” (vol. 25, issue 2) was a watershed moment in our conception of technocultural consumption. Part of a wide-ranging MSI-sponsored research project, the article, included in this curation, presents us with an expansive theorization of technology consumption that cuts across fields of history, philosophy, psychology, and marketing science. The study draws together and extends classic and contemporary technology scholars in order to recognize the important role that technology has played in Western history and American society. Building on the long-standing cultural disposition to see technologies as a combination of utopian and dystopian tendencies, and taking a cue from Firat and Venkatesh’s (1995) combined critical-liberatory perspectives, Mick and Fournier (1998) proceed to conceptualize technology consumption as a “paradox” resulting from the lack of “faith in progress through science” and the “unintended consequences” of technological development in “a postmodern age” (124). They elaborate on the general notion that technology consumption is viewed as a “double-edged sword” (128) by detailing and illustrating eight specific paradoxes that imbue the contemporary consumption of technology, such as freedom/enslavement and control/chaos. As their figure 1 diagram illustrates, Mick and Fournier (1998) extend their cultural and historical theorizing into the world of psychology. The model invokes psychological “coping strategies” that individual consumers experience in relation to the stresses, ambivalences, and conflicts of contemporary technocultures (126). The article’s goal was to be able to explain consumer thought and action across diverse technology consumption situations and using multiple paradigms. It certainly succeeded in the latter. Later, consumer researchers added detail to these important beginnings. In a study of the mythologies of the natural health market, Thompson (2004) unpacked the cultural and ideological bases of three natural health print advertisements. The article tracked the presence of a paradoxical cultural myth in which the battle between technology and culture was waged through a Romantic ethos that viewed technology as a source of “monstrous” and unnatural outcomes, and a Gnostic one that viewed it as a magical path to the attainment of a new “earthly paradise” (165). Adding complexity to Mick and Fournier and Thompson’s notions, the idea of “technology/ideology” (Kozinets 2008) locates a contradiction-activated semiotic ideological structure underlying both the paradox notion of Mick and Fournier (1998) and the mythological binaries of Thompson’s (2004) cultural analysis. The core elements of the ideological field of American technology consumption link them to particular “institutionalized nodal points” that include progress/utopia, work/economics, expression/hedonism, and resistance/nature (867). The dynamic interaction of these four underlying institutional nodes organize group discussion as well as technocultural consumer behavior at the dyadic and individual consumer level of thought, speech, and action. As technocultures with increasing intensity pervaded other forms of cultures and microcultures, they created a plethora of new sociocultural formations. Some of the most intriguing works within consumer research have examined aspects of technology consumption and used the findings to conceptualize their powerful transformative effects not only on consumer culture, but on wider society as well. This work has revealed the early precursors to the influencer economy, various effects on self-presentation and self-concept, assemblage-enabled extension of the capacity for consumption passions and their extremes, and the growing presence and import of nonhuman consumers and consumption systems. A sampling of those perspectives form the remainder of this curation. Schau and Gilly’s (2003) “We Are What We Post? Self-Presentation in Personal Web Space” (vol. 30, issue 3) is the first of these. Schau and Gilly (2003) conceptualize the complex network of effects resulting from the construction and maintenance of a personal web page. The study finds that keeping a personal web page is a dynamic and evolving process that changes a range of other behaviors in consumers’ lives, such as their appearance, technical skills, language use, brand use, and endorsements. The act of keeping a web page, the early form of a blog, metamorphizes these consumers into deliberate and strategic creators of online content. They become what we can recognize now as the precursors of contemporary “influencers”—using their online involvement to engage in personal and professional self-promotion, to showcase product and brand use, to observe others’ social media presence, and to adjust to audience feedback. They become content creators who try to build the reach of large audiences with positive engagement. As Belk (2013) later describes, technology has dramatic effects on consumers’ of the and article (vol. issue 3) is a more and more conceptual exploration of the dynamic and effects of technology on consumer culture. 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