Chair: Robert Kozinets, York University, Canada
Paper #1: Reflections of Self in Food Sharing Interactions and Experiences
Robert Kozinets, York University, Canada Rachel Ashman, University of Liverpool, UK Anthony Patterson, University of Liverpool, UK
Paper #2: Consumer Soiveillance: Observations of the Self by Means of New Media Technologies
Anja Dinhopl, University of Queensland, Australia Ulrike Gretzel, University of Queensland, Australia Paper #3: Co-Construction of the Digital Self
Russell Belk, York University, Canada
Paper #4: Self-Transformation and Performativity of Social Media Images
Joonas Rokka, NEOMA Business School, France SESSION OVERVIEW
Although the term “selfie” has gained wide, and often inap-propriate, currency in common parlance, the use of technologies to reflect images of the self is actually much wider than mere digital self-portraiture. Indeed, beyond the varieties of self-portrait shared through social media are technologies that reflect the self back to the self, mirror-like, as well as out to the world, broadcast-like, thus play-ing key roles in the complex contemporary construction of combined private-public selves. Conceptually emphasizing this self-reflective quality, its technological orientation, and its co-creative aspects, this session uses the term “the iMirror” to begin a research conversation about this potential new area. The “iMirror” theoretical conversation focuses not merely on particular manifestations, such as smartphone portraiture, but on the wider phenomenon of public-private self-related image sharing, including images of the self in consumption, and its implications for our understanding of self-in-culture and culture-in-self. Using consumer culture research on the vanguard of the phenomenon, this session is intended to highlight and begin to systematize the theoretical implications of these ideas.
Drawing upon multiple case studies interrelated by their self-reflective characteristics, the sessions explores different facets of the iMirror. First, Kozinets, Ashman, and Patterson use their longitudinal netnography of online food-sharing practices to conceptualize these different elements. Their study of food consumption photography blends technology consumption with food, self, and other in digi-tal consumption “networks of practice”. Rob, Rachel, and Tony link these elements to notions of emancipation and participatory culture.
But, showing that things are not so rosy, these notions are counterbal-anced by a series of updated hegemonic and Weberian “iron cage”
implications. Next, drawing on their ethnographic work with wear-able camera technology, Dinhopl and Gretzel explore the notion of
“soiveillance”, a widely used social media term that situates self-re-lated digital technology practices within the context of surveillance.
Building on notions of the panopticon and reconsumption, Anja and Ulli develop theory that helps add qualitative aspects to the quanti-fied self. Belk then takes us on a journey to the center of theories of the self. Building from social psychology and sociology, he skillfully adapts them to the new digital world of iMirrors. Cooley’s notion of The Looking Glass Self and Goffman’s theories of presentation of self are confronted with Russ’s new realities of online tagging, com-ments, endorsecom-ments, and other such responses to consumers’ digital self-presentations. He shows nothing less than that the new digital
self-image is subject to a complex of old and new co-constructing responses of others. In the final paper, Rokka introduces notions of class and status. Joonas uses performativity theory to examine how champagne consumers are bounded by their own self-limits as they self-reflect their consumption online. Analyzing digital images re-veals the disciplinary constraints that capital places on performative agency, and allows some speculation about what it might take to es-cape those limits, and engage in genuine self-transformation.
Each of these papers combines theory with fieldwork and ob-servation. Each deals with the central topic of iMirrors. However, each assumes a unique perspective on the phenomenon—participa-tion, surveillance, co-construcphenomenon—participa-tion, and self-limitation. Combined into the session, this congerie of related themes reveals more than could any individual presentation. Although the session features consumer culture work, its central topics and constructs—the self and consumption—have wide appeal to those with self and social psychology orientations. The four papers were handpicked for their interrelated fit, offering different theoretical and site sampling angles on the phenomenon, but also with considerable depth. The session is well-suited to elicit and answer questions about new and existing constructs and theoretical relations to explain these new phenomena, such as: “Is there enough here to sketch out a nascent research area?”
Technological and theoretical advancements and the nature of con-sumer-technology, consumer-consumption and consumer-consumer connection will be explored, “advancing” our understanding of con-sumer “connections” and also connecting “self” concepts across the field of consumer research.
Reflections of Self in Food Sharing Interactions and Experiences
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Displaying representations of food is a widespread, global, and significant social media phenomenon with many aspects. This behav-ior is rooted in part in food photography and recipe books, but has grown to encompass and assume many new forms, such as recipe sharing and so-called “foodporn”. As it always has for scholars such Pierre Bourdieu (1984) and Sidney Levy (1981), food consump-tion reveals a socially embodied structure of taste and distincconsump-tion.
Hence, we link the sharing of food related photography to a structure of ‘culinary capital’ (Lebesco and Naccarato 2012), a particular lan-guage and set of meanings that is both acculturated and immediately grasped. This research combines longitudinal netnographic work in the space of food and drink display with three years of in-person ethnographic and interview work.
In this paper, we demonstrate how a variety of styles of self-representation can inform our knowledge of the “iMirror”: public-private self-related image sharing, including images of the self in consumption, and its implications for our understanding of self-in-culture and self-in-culture-in-self. We note several major uses as consumers reflect consumption outwards, to others. Cosmopolitan and fashion-able people like to be seen to eat the ‘correct’ foods, in the ‘correct’
restaurants and, as a consequence, gain admiration through display of their consumer status. However, until relatively recently, telling consumers what and where to eat has mostly been the preserve of food critics writing in newspapers. For many years, alongside the Michelin star system employed to assess haute cuisine restaurants, the system of food critics and evaluators legitimized particular
per-sons as the dominant purveyors of food knowledge. However, the disrupting disintermediation of traditional institutions of taste dis-tribution is shifting, with voices being coopted alongside the emer-gence of new institutional voices (Dolbec and Fischer forthcoming;
Jenkins forthcoming; McQuarrie et al. 2013; Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). In tandem with a broadening public sphere more open to ex-hibitionism through the sharing of intimate and personal revelations resulted in self representation which is outwardly directed and which both de-institutionalizes and re-institutionalizes consumption prac-tices, identities, and characteristics.
The iMirror also exhibits consumption of the self to the self.
The technological infrastructure equips people with unprecedented agency to reflect their own consumption to themselves through oth-ers. Although Web 2.0 technologies, according to the rhetoric at least, render a software-based architecture of participation that has led to consumer empowerment on a level previously unimaginable (Con-stantinides and Fountain 2008; Krishnamurthy and Kucuk 2008), we also, following Weber’s famous metaphor, see this as a type of “Sili-con Cage of Rationality”. When media is marketplace, and when media are social, there is no escape from the gaze of the market.
The implications for media scholar Henry Jenkins’ (1991, forthcom-ing) notion of “participatory culture” is especially salient as it shows how participation in technology for consumption, even in boundary zones where it is not directly or immediately shared through social media, now performs not only a motivational function but also a pedagogical one. Emancipatory potentials are counterbalanced by marketplace hegemonies, and vice versa (Kreiss et al. 2011). Self-reflective technology teaches us how to consume, how to consumer better, hot to display and how not to consume/display. The resulting consumption process is thus much more than a simple addition of voices to an existing process. Instead, the connections enabled by so-cial media create entirely new demands for new self-presentational practices and form of consumption. These work alongside economic and social processes requiring access to technology and a myriad of other products and services.
Although critics still exist and have (real world, and sometimes social media) klout, the creation and maintenance of food markets is therefore, to some extent, now dependent on networks of prosuming consumers, collectives composed of individuals capable of techno-logically-enabled production, consumption, and entrepreneurship (Moffitt and Dover 2013). Collectively, across a multitude of sharing sites, the depiction of food-related images plays an undeniable role in the arbitration of food tastes and restaurant choices. Typically, in excursions from home to restaurant, consumers are equipped with mobile phone cameras, which they use to capture and upload salivat-ing pictures of restaurant-bought delicacies or homemade foodstuffs.
These phones, and the cameras within them, made possible by the miniaturization of both electronic circuits and processors, often de-scribed as appendages of their bodies, directly linking them to social cuisine networks.
Appetites, tastes, and distinctions in such food sharing net-works become complex market-community-industrial processes.
Self-presentational practices in the iMirror play a vital role in these processes. Food sharing practices can include human bodies or no human bodies, depending upon the cultural codes conveyed. Patterns in distinct objectified edible objects are complex, and run from the pornographic to the sacralized. Food recipes are shared and tested regarding homemade cuisine. These recipes are subject to further elaboration and addition by other consumers, creating a collective co-creative process akin to networked new product development presaging, perhaps, such refinements in a maker movement of 3-di-mensional “recipes”. In addition, photographs, restaurants, recipes
and their resultant foodstuffs are ceaselessly rated, presenting a quantification of the gut that has distinctly material effects.
Throughout, the iMirror’s representation of the insatiably hun-gry and always-eating consumer is present, even when it is absent from photographs. In this netnography of online food photo net-works, we find food consumption reflected back to self, food con-sumption reflected outwards to others, technology concon-sumption reflected back to self, and technology consumption reflected out to others. The core categories of self and other—what anthropologists explore as “alterity” (Taussig 1993)—are present not only in every bite we take, but with every photograph we make.
Consumer Soiveillance: Observations of the Self by Means of New Media Technologies
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
Soiveillance is a term used in social media to situate self-related practices within the context of the “veillance” family (sur-, trans-, sous-, etc.) and refers to consumers’ own observations of the self by the self by means of new media technologies. This paper will build on this term, examining how the consumption of new devices affords consumers increasingly complex ways to expose aspects of the self that are not visible unless tracked or recorded technologically. Wear-able technologies, such as diet or activity trackers, in particular have become important tools in aiding consumers track and communicate aspects of their selves. Such user-generated data and technology not only allow insights into people, but give consumers agency: Tech-nology acts as a digital mirror that enables consumers to engage in self-reflection (Lupton, 2013) and personalized interpretation of and interaction with data (Nafus and Sherman, 2014). Previous research on self-tracking has focused exclusively on users’ interaction with
‘objective’ numeric data. Yet, consumers increasingly engage in self-tracking and self-reflection via new media technologies that deliver rich visuals.
Technology now affords consumers the opportunity to watch themselves and their own consumption experiences through video-recording their consumption experiences with wearable cameras.
Wearable cameras that offer continuous, hands-free recording have become a global consumer phenomenon, specifically in the action and sports markets. Despite wearable cameras’ innovation being the ability to record video from a point-of-view perspective, consumers often use accessories that enable them to record themselves to later rewatch their experiences (Dinhopl and Gretzel 2014). By rewatch-ing their experiences, consumers engage in a variation of volitional reconsumption (Russell and Levy 2012), that is, the conscious seek-ing to relive their consumption experiences. This volitional recon-sumption is not a simple hedonic re-experiencing but is mediated by and reflected upon through a technological lens. It is reflective sumption turned on its head: rather than engaging in reflective recon-sumption to reflect on oneself at one’s current point in life (Russell and Levy 2012), consumers engage in reflective reconsumption to reflect on their past self at the point of their (recorded) experience as well as in regards to their future consumption and social media represented future self.
The self and its consumption experiences thus become imag-es and bits of data that are carefully monitored and scrutinized by consumers themselves or those with whom the records are shared.
Self-tracking approaches have previously been linked to Foucaul-dian themes of surveillance (Albrechtslund 2013; Bossewitch and Sinnreich 2013; Lupton 2012), and in this paper, we equally take a Foucauldian perspective to theorize consumers’ practices of self-tracking via wearable cameras as both a classic panopticon (1977),
engaging consumers in a disciplinary gaze onto themselves, thereby governing consumer behavior, as well as an obverse panopticon (Kozinets et al. 2004), playing to consumers’ enjoyment of being watched. We therefore seek to better/more broadly conceptualize soiveillance with respect to consumption experiences.
Drawing from a year-long field study with wearable camera users (snowboarders, skiers, skateboarders, water park visitors, and cyclists), we explore the roles in which consumers use wearable technology for observations and reflections on the self. The camera performs at once as a neutral observer, a quasi-social actor, an arbi-ter, and an enabler of consumption. As a neutral observer, consum-ers use wearable cameras as sources of evidence to document their consumption. For example, cyclists mount wearable camera equip-ment to their bicycles to have visual proof of their innocence in case of traffic accidents. As a quasi-social actor, consumers use wear-able cameras as a stand-in for their intended future audience, either themselves or others. They openly integrate the camera into their consumption by talking to it, or engaging in performativity (Larsen 2005, conceptualizing Butler’s notion of performativity for the tour-ist context), for example, by ‘mugging’ for the camera. As an arbiter of consumption, consumers use wearable cameras to track their con-sumption, often related to the notion of progress to be critiqued by themselves or others. For example, skateboarders will film tricks and then (re)watch them to critique themselves and their consumption.
As an enabler of consumption, consumers use wearable cameras as facilitators of the consumption experience in its own right. Filming consumption is prioritized over the consumption that is being filmed.
In order to capture satisfying video, consumers engage in consump-tion behaviours they otherwise might not have enacted. For example, snowboarders will decide to jump over trees with snow on them for a more stunning visual.
The technology thus becomes both a digital mirror and an al-ways-on panopticon through which consumers are able to reflect on and understand their own consumption experiences but also change their behaviours and self-perceptions. Consumers hereby respond as predicted by Foucault’s panopticon with self-disciplining, but they also engage in the obverse panopticon (Kozinets et al. 2004), where they take pleasure in being recorded (and in recording) and being observed (by their future self or others). Indeed, while oth-ers may be involved in this process, the self-tracking phenomenon suggests that ever more technology is developed that supports new levels of self-reflection through quantitative and qualitative data: It allows consumers to watch their quantified selves consume, altering how they engage in reflective reconsumption. With this paper, we hope to prompt discussions on the role of technology for shaping consumption and reconsumption practices in the age of consumer soiveillance.
Co-Construction of the Digital Self EXTENDED ABSTRACT
One of five ways in which Belk (2013) contends that the ex-tended self is modified in a digital era is through the co-construction of self that occurs online much more than offline. This paper is an extension and update elaborating on the observation that despite the vastly increased possibilities for representing the self online, there is also a welcome or unwelcome loss of control to known and un-known others whose online activity helps to shape the way we and others view our self. The idea that others help construct the way we see ourselves was formulated by Charles Cooley (1904/1964) who posited that our self presentation is interpreted and reflected back to us by others we encounter in daily life. Zhao (2005) takes up
Cooley’s looking glass metaphor and suggests that online we have more resources available for self presentation (Goffman 1959) to telecopresent others: we are able to provide more information about our self online, engage in more self-disclosure, provide more elabo-rate self-narratives, and possibly present multiple and “retractable”
selves untethered from our bodies.
But the sort of audience mirror that Zhao (2005) envisions on-line is passive one like a fixed mirror that reflects more or less what is presented. The co-construction of self that Belk (2013) envisions and that I pursue here involves a more active audience. Take the case of Justine Sacco, former Senior Director of Corporate Communica-tions at IAC (InterActiveCorp). While on a long journey from New York to visit family in South Africa, she made a few quick Tweets from JFK and Heathrow airports, including these:
“’Weird German Dude: You’re in First Class. It’s 2014. Get some deodorant’ – Inner monologue as I inhale BO. ‘Thank God for pharmaceuticals.’”
“Chilly – cucumber sandwiches – bad teeth. Back in London!”
“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” (Ronson 2015).
She then wandered around Heathrow for half an hour and boarded the plane for the 11-hour flight to Cape Town. It was only while the plane was taxiing that she received a call from her best friend saying that she was the number one worldwide trend on Twit-ter. That’s when the baffled woman had to shut off her smart phone for the flight. Although she had only 170 Twitter followers, the rac-ist tone of her last comment caused great offence and led to viral follow-up messages like these:
“All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.”
“Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.”
“We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”
“We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”