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The Shaping of High-fidelity Consumption.
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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, co...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... imperatives of surveillance capitalism come top-down from market actors whereas claustropolitan feelings emerge bottom-up as consumers' lived consequences (Figure 1). At their point of intersection, we see the functioning of anticipated conformity through what we call highfidelity consumption. ...
Context 2
... imperatives of surveillance capitalism come top-down from market actors whereas claustropolitan feelings emerge bottom-up as consumers' lived consequences (Figure 1). At their point of intersection, we see the functioning of anticipated conformity through what we call highfidelity consumption. ...
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Citations
... We have noted how the power of videography stems from its movement, its overwhelming immediacy and immanence, that which can bring about 'shocks to thought'. But similarly, with people increasingly falling into uninterrupted online experiences and concomitant social isolation, ever-decreasing attention spans, and the rise of filter bubbles and outrage culture (Boler and Davis 2018;Hoang et al. 2022;Munster 2011;Turkle 2011;Ulver 2021), do we not also see the negative side effects of how social technologies demand our experiences in full bloom? Is one grammatization process of videography the gradual withering away of writing and reading, and in some sense also the patience of thought and abstraction, if all mediation moves towards the 'real' of transparent experience? ...
... Thus, the experience is formed by subjective aspects intrinsic to individuals, not limited to a passive reception (Bhattacharjee & Mogilner, 2014;Hoang et al., 2022). According to Arnould and Prince (1993), consumers experience experiences beyond their routines or control, attributing as extraordinary those characterized by an experienced emotional intensity. ...
The concept of extraordinary experience in the consumer culture tradition it is a seminal theme since 1980. Over the last few decades, discussions have advanced to incorporate virtual ambiance, prosumption abilities, and interaction between peers. Likewise, the consumption of sports leagues has been reframed based on these three emerging themes. Thus, the present study seeks to understand the consumption extraordinary experiences of Brazilian NBA fans through their virtual interactions. To this end, a netnography was carried out between 2018 and 2020 on Twitter. The results point to the overlapping media and sports aspects that allow Brazilian fans of the league to experience liberating or stochastic moments and produce their performances or live adventures with NBA broadcasts. Consequently, such findings endorse the ability of sports league fans to prosume extraordinary experiences aligned with elements that reflect sports business management efforts.
... Collectively these vortices of digital artefacts and signs ('semios')and the resigned acceptance that perpetuates their consumptioncan be located within the parameters of 'semiocapitalism', a technologically-mediated global capitalist formation reliant on identifying, influencing and automatising consumers' informational and semiotic flows, techno-cultural activities and modes of personal stimulation, expression, and meaning-making for its regime of accumulation (Hietanen et al., 2022;Hoang et al., 2022). Under semiocapitalism, consumers remain plugged into what Fisher calls 'the drip-feed of digital stimulus' because of: (1) the pervasive lures of an always-on digital culture that is seductively (and competitively) desirous, indulgent and egotistic; and (2) the naturalisation of ritualistic compliance that works to obviate any opposition to it (Dean and Fisher, 2014: 30). ...
... This is seen in what Fisher (2009: 25) calls an 'ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture' wherein time becomes fragmented into 'digital slices' that allow consumers to treat their relationships with technology as discrete encounters with benefits, which compensate for the cumulative costs of semiocapitalist subjugation (e.g. addiction, targeted advertising, algorithmic manipulation, etc.) (Hoang et al., 2022). ...
... Reflexively impotent (anti-)consumers might also be considered 'futureless subjects' which brings us to our second contribution. Our analyses help to trace the lived consequences of a cultural atmosphere of cancelled futuresor futurelessnessthat ossifies capitalism and all of its horrors as permanent features of tomorrow (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Hietanen et al., 2020;Hoang et al., 2022). The voices of digital detoxers in this paper reflect the cultural 'suspicion' that 'the end has already come' and that 'it could well be the case that the future harbours only reiteration and re-permutation' (Fisher, 2009: 3). ...
In this paper, we challenge the prevalent idea that anti-consumption functions as an ideological act of antagonism. We enlist the work of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher to account for the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer, a politically hollowed-out and knowingly helpless subject endemic to the futureless vicissitudes of semiocapitalist consumer culture. Drawing on netnographic data and interviews with ‘digital detoxers’, we explore how gestural – rather than transformational – anti-consumption emerges through individuals’ reflexive awareness of their political inertia, the lack of collective spirit to bring about improved conditions, and their perpetual attachment to market-based comforts and conveniences. Our analyses reveal three features that underpin the reflexively impotent (anti-)consumer’s resigned acceptance of the reigning political-ideological status quo: magical voluntarism, pragmatism and self-indulgence. In the absence of any unifying and politically-centred solidarity projects, mere gestures of resistance are undertaken towards managing personal dissatisfactions with – instead of collectively transforming – their structural conditions.
... Buchanan, 2015b;also Thanem, 2004), such as in overwhelming or even painful consumption experiences (see Patterson & Schroeder, 2010;Scott et al., 2017). Intensive participation, especially in social technologies that increasingly command and model the horizon of our being (Darmody & Zwick, 2020;Hietanen et al., 2022;Hoang et al., 2021), is also increasingly offering momentary 'releases' of all kinds in global flows of algorithmically-guided mediation. ...
... What does remain, however, is constant excitation, a continuous 'anxiety' (23:00) to continue to constantly destroy and reproduce capitalised subjectivation (Figure 3). This irreducible uncertainty has also been made into a hallmark of semiocapitalist relationalities (Fisher, 2009;Hoang et al., 2021). Culp (2016) sums up these sensibilities by noting how 'dominant feelings today are probably anxiety or depression [. . ...
In this essay, we explore the productive potential of ‘expressive videography’ in marketing and consumer research by drawing on Deleuze’s and Guattari’s theorisation of desire in capitalism. We illustrate how videography both express and take part in the production of affective capitalist tendencies through the project If Your Heart Wants It — an artistic video montage of scenes and conversations from the entrepreneurial event SLUSH. This allows us to theorise how ‘capitalised subjectivation’ is produced, and how desire for accumulation and competition readily overtakes other social relations by channelling cruel forms of enjoyment. We discuss how videography is well-suited for exploring desiring-production that does not lend itself to subjective meaning-making and direct attention to the dark affective horizons which, arguably, are increasingly subsuming us in ever-deepening semiocapitalist and technological life-worlds.
... For critical scholars this is an especially deceptive form of manipulation because it draws on the rhetoric of consumer empowerment and choice (Darmody and Zwick 2020). Yet if the products and services offered are highly relevant, then many consumers may view digital (dis)empowerment as a more desirable situation than the pre-AI model of advertising, or at least not undesirable enough to stop purchasing (Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis 2022). Previously, human-segmentation-based techniques resulted in an advertising landscape with many irrelevant ads; now, AI targeting means that every advertised offering is tailor-made to the individual or situation. ...
... On the consumer side, technical questions may be posed to find the social, legal, or technological means to empower consumers to reclaim autonomy over these processes. Thanks to the work of investigators like Zuboff (2019) and Garvey (2021), consumers are increasingly aware of these manipulative communications and more negative sentiments begin to seep into their everyday experience of AI (Puntoni et al. 2021;Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis 2022). This also inspires attempts to resist such technologies through anti-tracking activities, although their effectiveness appears to be limited (Boerman, Kruikemeier, and Borgesius 2017). ...
... More than two decades ago, Zinkhan (1994, p. 1) proposed that advertising should be a field underpinned by "a set of moral principles directed at enhancing societal well-being," such as "nondeception" and "nondiscrimination." If studies of surveillance capitalism are to be believed, algorithmic AI advertising thrives on the deception of manipulating consumers' choices while maintaining the illusion of choice (Darmody and Zwick 2020;Dholakia et al. 2021;Hoang, Cronin, and Skandalis 2022). Although difficult to challenge (Boerman, Kruikemeier, and Borgesius 2017), advertising theorists may seek to play the role of the ethical educator (Frazer 1979) rather than simply a problem solver (cf. ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming advertising theory and practice. However, while applications of AI abound, it appears that not enough questions are being asked about the ontological, technical, and ethical consequences of artificially intelligent advertising ecosystems. Given the pace and unpredictability of technological change, this article adopts a question-driven approach, emphasizing the importance of adopting a maieutic attitude for academics, practitioners, and other advertising stakeholders, including the AI-ad-consuming public.
... Rather than rely on theories of the 'whole individual', TM study problematizes subjectivity irredeemably. Agency and individuality become fractured, displaced and incoherent (Cluley and Dunne, 2012;Gabriel, 2015;Hoang et al., 2021). This should not be confused with now-familiar claims that consumer identities are 'fragmented' (Firat and Dholakia, 2006), 'tribal' (Cova and Cova, 2002) or 'liquid' (Bardhi and Eckhardt, 2017). ...
... In addition, novel technologies are rising to channel desire in consumption in ever-intensifying ways. These include algorithmic social automation that dynamically delimit consumer choice (Darmody and Zwick, 2020;Dholakia et al., 2021;Hietanen et al., 2022a), and which are predicated on behavioural control that brings about a newly perforating consumer 'fidelity' (Hoang et al., 2021;Wood and Ball, 2013). TM entwines these different forces with neoliberal capitalism both emerging from and exacerbating its inherent tendencies (Coffin, 2021). ...
... Again, this is not to say change does not happen or that it is ineffectual in particular contexts, but it is to say in a more abstract sense that it is the feature of markets to proliferate via such challenges, thus reminding us to critically assess what is being changed, lest the systemic global tendencies of markets are either taken for granted or overlooked. As sociality is becoming increasingly mediated by automated technologies, TM also increasingly suggests that the focus should be on the affective potentials transported and transmuted without needing to become consciously significant to have an effect (Darmody and Zwick, 2020;Hietanen et al., 2022a;Hoang et al., 2021;Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). ...
Marketing theory has twisted and turned with the introduction of many theoretical innovations. Yet, despite being influenced by various critical perspectives, the general marketing discourse remains remarkably optimistic about contemporary consumer culture, its capability to produce meaning and individuality, and its potential to overcome the existential threats of the 21 st century, or at least its capacity to be transformed for the better. This paper discerns a countervailing current within critical marketing thought; a smattering of scholars that resist the therapeutic urge to tell that all will be well, producing a proliferation of papers that are deeply pessimistic about conventional marketing concepts like meaningful experience, agency, and the sovereignty of the consumer ‘self’. Against the current of convention, this research seeks to address an increasing zeitgeist of bleak cultural aporia, an atmosphere of apolitical apathy where the future has increasingly been ‘cancelled’ and all that remains is a carnivalesque consumer culture that has resigned itself to extinction, even if on the semiotic surface it is increasingly ethical and ecological. The present paper catalogues this development and draws together some of its tendencies. Chief amongst these is the tendency to see the consumer as a desiring intensity immersed in vast networks of techno-capitalism and thus reduces the idea of the agentic and individualistically creative consumer into a myth at best. We propose the term Terminal Marketing to describe this pessimistic theoretical attitude, but we consider its mood as potentially producing more critical interventions than the generally critical-yet-optimistic tone of interpretive marketing.
... The promise of automation is an incessantly intensifying production of the social sphere (Darmody & Zwick, 2020;Etter & Albu, 2020;Hoang et al., 2021). With it, we readily enter something more akin to an immanent world of forces in which D+ G's notion of desiring production insists on being recognised before individual sensibilities or meaning-makings. ...
... As such, the idea of semiocapitalism points to an abstract feeling of our times in Western society, rather than any clear message or coordinates. Hoang et al. (2021) make note of an affectivity of collective oppression that is increasingly inherent to how consumer culture is brought under technological control. We might think of it as an eerily enforced enjoyment of participatory dread. ...
... While semiocapitalism and its corresponding subjectivity has remained largely absent from interpretive marketing, it is hard to overlook an affective dimension that is already there looming in plain sight within extant research. We can see it in Zwick andDenegri Knott (2009) andHoang et al. (2021) as they recognise the intensifying commodification of consumer subjectivity, in Wood and Ball (2013) as they map how brandscapes seductively recode consumer subjectivity, and even more so in Cluley and Brown (2015) when they note how 'No one knows their place' (p. 116) in how subjectivity is contemporarily constructed. ...
We connect the notion of the consumer as ‘dividual’ to contemporary automation of consumer culture. By envisioning the issue within a semiocapitalist horizon, we ponder the general affectivity of consumer experience as accelerating but largely veiled processes of desire, incessant accumulation, and intensifying technologies.
... Though we do not disagree that subject-object relations during the postmodern, post-politics, end-of-history pastiche-and-irony-stuffed bonanza of the 1990s evinced an espièglerie that must have appeared both imaginative and blissful, if not amorous, to those of us writing within the marketing academy at that time, the lineaments of relationships that were perhaps already growing more cynical than romantic have since been revealed and debated. Where Brown (1998, p. 788) had emphasised, 'Falling head over heels in love with something, be it a computer game or bar of chocolate, is the norm rather than the exception', critical commentators today consider how a significant population of subjects under the narcissistic, competitive framework of late-capitalism rarely demonstrate such fierce passion for their consumerism, and how their attachments come from a place that we could scarcely call 'love' (Ahlberg et al., 2021;Hoang et al., 2021;Lambert, 2019;Wickstrom et al., 2021). Rather, for subjects experiencing precarity, marginalisation, and inequity within a capitalist architecture of aggressive self-interest and image-obsessiveness -such as those involved in looting shops during the English urban riots of 2011 -there is what ultra-realist criminologists Simon Winlow and Steve Hall describe as: a lazy and disinterested attachment, functioning simply as a means of addressing an issue that cannot be accounted for, because it cannot be named as what it is: permanent socioeconomic marginalization in a system whose core logic and current trajectory will never again be able to provide full and guaranteed socioeconomic participation for the growing number of those who consistently lose out in the unrelenting struggle of competitive individuals. ...
Work alienation (WA) is on the rise, especially in today's era of globalization and digitalization. However, its foundational ties to Marx and Hegel's conceptualizations are often overlooked. Despite extensive scholarly examination across disciplines, the conceptualization of WA remains plagued by a lack of consensus concerning its definitions, processes, and operationalizations. This systematic literature review identifies four major definitional approaches and their inherent limitations. First, equating WA with its antecedents diverts attention from its core mechanisms. Second, definition‐by‐negation leads to an underspecified construct, raising questions about empirical congruence. Third, defining WA through its correlates risks confusing it with different concepts. Fourth, expanding the construct of WA, to include distant constructs with surplus meanings, camouflages WA's essence, hindering a deeper understanding of the phenomenon. To enhance conceptual clarity, this paper aims to clarify WA's definitions, measurements, guiding theories, triggers, ramifications, and coping strategies within organizational contexts. Drawing from Hegel and Marx's dialectical lens, we compose a definition centered on a three‐faceted self‐other dialectic. Also, we present a three‐stage developmental model, illustrating how WA develops and manifests itself as the relationships among the self, others, and work‐life contexts evolve. By integrating elements from various management theories, we offer a fresh perspective for new research aimed at preventing WA. By addressing the theoretical and practical challenges that may arise, we emphasize the crucial role of Human Resource Management and team leaders in recognizing and mitigating WA to preserve vital individual, team, organizational and societal resources.
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