PROMOTIONAL CULTURES & COMMUNICATION CENTRE

People as commodities.

Written by on October 21, 2012. Posted in Blog

“In a survey conducted by Men’s Health magazine, 44% of the males said they had an affair with a co-worker at a holiday office party at least once in their life.” How do we feel about the concept of ‘owning’ another person? We do not feel protective over a sibling in the same way we do a partner, do we? Is the mourning we suffer when selling/disposing of a commodity similar to when a sibling, friend get married or when we split up from partners or move out of our parents’ homes? Jealousy (according to Richard Dawkins) is a natural instinct we use to protect our kin and to keep close, how does this compare to possessiveness – are we allowed to feel possessive over people?

Comments (1)

rosannaneo

October 21, 2012 at 10:20 am | #

I love this! I think it’s a really interesting idea and you could aquire a lot of research behind it.

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Recent Comments

Viraj Vaz

October 28, 2016 | #

I would like to delve into consumers’ relationships with their digital possessions specifically focussing on the intentional and/or unintentional accumulation/hoarding of ’Digital Clutter’. I would like to provide an understanding into their accounts of digital clutter, its emergence and persistence, its meaning and value and the consumers’ experiences of living with digital clutter.

Basulto (2014), writing for the Washington Post states, “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find.” I want to explore the true meaning behind the term ‘Digital Hoarding’ and why the current generation ranging from millennials, who have a strong attachment to their digital objects and the content saved on them, to elderly individuals who perhaps are not as tech savvy but have gained some form of knowledge and understanding of the technological phenomenon and have started to accumulate a digital library of their own. I will aim to unpack the differences between the meanings behind physical possessions and digital possessions and which holds greater significance in the lives on these individuals.

It will be interesting to investigate the meanings of objects and the biographies they develop among their owners. Kopytoff’s (1986) speaks about the objects being defined as ‘non-human entities’ and Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Hatton (1981) as an ‘extension of the self.’ Kopytoff (1986) goes on the explain how as these objects progress through their individual biographies, they gain a certain level of meaning and values. As Kopytoff (1986) looks at these theories through the means of physical objects, it will be useful to identify the significance the ‘digital objects’ and whether similar theories can be applied to them.

I would also like to focus on the aspect of divestment among digital objects and whether there is a ‘solution’ to the ongoing accumulation of digital clutter. After gaining an understanding of the meanings and significance these objects have for their respective owners, it will be interesting to look at Lastovicka et al. (2005) who speaks about the importance of the different modes of divestment. He comments on the various divestment rituals that are attached to objects that hold different meanings. I would like to investigate this with a focus on digital objects and whether the modes of divestment have similar connotations and can thus fuel a means of generating a ‘solution’ to the problem that is digital clutter.

However, it would also be interesting to research into whether owners of these digital objects (and in turn forming a digital library/digital clutter) actually feel that they need to get rid of their digital possessions. The word ‘Clutter’ tends to have a negative connotation when dealing with physical objects however, is the same true for digital possessions? Do people still feel like their digital libraries are getting to big even though there is no ‘limiting space’ for them? Is the phenomenon of ‘Digital Clutter’ actually seen to be a ‘real’ problem in today’s generation?

I would like to focus on these areas for my project and I think that it poses some very interesting questions and arguments.
Janice Denegri-Knott

October 24, 2016 | #

There is something in your first idea. This paper may be useful in helping refine the idea further: Value-in-disposition: Exploring how consumers derive value from disposition of possessions.
By: Türe, Meltem. Marketing Theory. Mar2014, Vol. 14 Issue 1, p53-72. 20p. DOI: 10.1177/1470593113506245. , Database: Business Source Complete. There is something appealing in asking the question, not in positive terms, as in successfully transferring goods from one stage of their biographies to the next, but rather looking at the failures. This may shed light light on the processes themselves and give us a better idea of the core function they fulfill.

Forced divestment seems
Janice Denegri-Knott

October 24, 2016 | #

I think there is some work that has examined the issue of gift giving at a collective level- for instance Giesler look at Naspter as a gift giving system, which could be revisited in order to help you craft a good justification for the need for further research. The focus on dyadic gift giving seems appropriate, but again will need to be justified. Do we know the extent of gift giving for instance? How big is the market? What qualifies as digital gift?
jthompson

October 24, 2016 | #

I would like to explore the consumer’s relationship with their possessions ‘post-divestment’, and how that can affect the consumer’s self-identity. I would like to touch on the differences between digital and physical possessions within that scenario, as well as the potential differences if the divestment decision was not the consumer’s.

Going from Cszikszentmihalyi’s (1981) stating that “we need objects to magnify our power”, I want to ask what happens to that magnification of power when that object or possession is divested. We still have had the relationship with that object in our memories but has it a much lesser effect once we no longer are in possession of it? Can the consumer still draw on the ‘power’ of an old sports trophy if it is destroyed in a fire, would the consumer lose that part of their identity? Could a woman who felt gorgeous in a particular dress still access that same feeling of beauty when that dress is given to a charity shop? Does the ‘power’ that a possession holds over each of us be inaccessible when it is not with us anymore?

This challenges McCracken (1986) when the study talks of the two divestment rituals, of redecorating a newly bought house of the “meaning created by the previous owner” and of selling your house to “erase the meaning” of perhaps a bad memory or time in your life that occurred within that house. These both offer the consumer closure in one form or another, whereas I would like to explore whether there isn’t closure even after divesting – how much can you really erase? Especially when the divestment was not in the consumer’s control.

Additionally, I would like to see if the effects on the relationship would be the same if the possession was digital. Perhaps the consumer feels very accomplished because they have beaten their high score on a gaming app or achieved a high number of social ‘likes’ on their Instagram post. Does that person feel less successful when they delete that picture, or lose their gaming progress due to a malfunction?

I think that this would be a great area to study and further our knowledge on post-divestment relationships.
Janice Denegri-Knott

October 23, 2016 | #

Whilst your intentions are driven by well placed curiosity, I think the problem may be that we there is a strong assumption here that digital virtual consumption is vain consumption. One may ask, what is vain consumption and how is this different to consumption? Much has been written about consumption as a form of narcissism (see Lasch’ The Culture of Narcissism for example) Rather than framing the study using a virtual/digital binary, it is best to focus on the intersection between digital technology and consumer practices, here a study that uses displaced meaning as a driving concept could be a really interesting one.

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PROMOTIONAL CULTURES & COMMUNICATION CENTRE
Faculty of Media & Communication, Bournemouth University