The ACP Virtual Worlds Conference in Philly

May 8, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

Well that’s enough book promotions and griping about bad service for a while. I promise. I want to get back to the focal concern of this blog, and that’s exploring the interface between business and academic research as it pertains to online communities, technology, and entertainment,

I’m in Boston today at a retreat for the Convergence Culture Consortium’s partners at MIT. Writing this from my hotel in Cambridge. We’re going to have a very full agenda that combines academics with businesspeople, and these events are always very stimulating and thought provoking. I’ll post an update for you after it’s done and fill you in.

But first I wanted to provide a little update on a wonderful conference I attended lat week on May 1-2 in Philadelphia. It was the 27th Annual Advertising and Consumer Psychology conference on the topic of “Virtual Social Identity and Consumer Behavior.” The conference got a lot of interest and, again, was one of those boundary-spanning events that drew both academics and working practitioners.

Jeremy Bailenson, the director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford talked about how applications of psychology work out in the virtual world of avatars. His work does a lot of testing of different social psych theories of attraction and repulsion. So, for example, tall avatars are liked better and are more popular than short avatars. Better looking avatars also have an easier time. And, using software, if you get an avatar to mimic your own gestures, or to facially resemble you (with a sort of morph), you will like and trust that avatar more. That was pretty cool stuff.

Lyle Wetsch from St John’s Memorial University presented some very promising and intriguing research he’s doing with students on the socialization in Second Life—they are keeping logs of their own socialization experiences as they move into the culture of Second Life. Alison Bryant from Nickelodeon and MTV, and Anna Akerman from Adelphi, presented fascinating work on the match between kids and particular virtual worlds, and how this linked to their stage of cognitive and social development. I’m over-simplifying, but it was sort of like kids begin with Webkinz tamagotchi-like play world, then they move up to Habbo Hotel, then they get into some of the TV properties like Virtual Hills, and then they graduate into places like Second Life and World of Warcraft. A life cycle of virtual world migration.

Rockstar Georgetown marketing professor Gary Bamossy gave a wonderful presentation on the sacred and profane aspects of online game playing in China, based on his research with Jeff Wang and Xin Zhao. And I thought Bill Minnis, from the company & Billion People, gave a really interesting talk about the problems with online retailing and where it would need to go in order to become as popular and as acceptable as physical retailing. He also compared Second Life programming with cave art and Harry Potter—wondering if the “next Harry Potter” would be a virtual world or a game. This comparison of world creation to art creation is very appealing to me, and I think that conceptualizing these sorts of creations as forms of art could be enlightening to our conceptions.

Newcomer Leila El Kamel from the Universite Laval gave a very scholarly and thorough linkage of Metaverses as Consumer Experiences that drew on a lot of interesting and relevant postmodern theory and philosophy. In such new places, we almost need to draw on elements form science fiction (this was a continual theme) and postmodern theory (Leila was one of the only ones to really push this important point).

I also like newcomers Lauren Labrecque and Ereni Markos presentation on consumption, marketing, and flow in Second Life. Their research explored the implications of marke4ting and brands in Second Life with a number of interesting observations. I also liked that they got theatrical, dressing up in wigs and gloves so that they physically embodied an “avatar-like” presence during their presentation. And, of course, I also loved that they quoted this blog during their presentation. How cool is that? Readers, you are not alone. In fact, this blog is getting some impressive readership now, well over a thousand unique visitors a day, and rising.

Seeing Lauren and Ereni walk in with their wig and costume on while I was presenting (with my co-author Richard Kedzior) was a Burning Man moment for me. It made me remember just how Burning Man Second Life sometimes feels. This Frontier sense and Wild West mentality with different rules, different social structure, a love of technology and technological possibility, a loose feeling of social chaos, of possibility, of anything can happen. Except that I think Second Life’s lack of rules and greater freedom actually makes it a less interesting place than Burning Man. Burning Man has new rules, participative rules, collective identity rules, rules that build community, while Second Life more anarchist approach actually ends up with a more barren, individualistic, predatory feel. Or maybe that’s just because Second Life has become overly commercialized, while Burning Man has kept the black hounds of business at bay….

The best part of the conference was the conversations. One lively discussion was about the future of Virtual Worlds and who to understand them. I made the point that we really don’t have an adequate overview of the different kinds of virtual world marketing elements that are out there yet, and a link to how that relates to our business models. Are they games that are pay-for-play or subscription? Are they advertising, which supports content development? Are they like e-commerce, stores where we buy something online and which replace brick and mortar? Are they add-on services, providing things like customer service or access to a community? Are they themselves a different kind of service, separate from a game, offering some new element to our product? We just don’t know.

There was also a nice set of volleys about whether there is anything really new here at all. Professor Bamossy made some very good points that there wasn’t anything all that theoretically interesting being show here. People were just showing that theories that apply in one domain (like tall people are more successful and more well-liked) also apply in the virtual world domain of perception. Okay, that begs the crucial question: so what? Richard and I had tried to argue that there were key elements of virtual world experience that were actually quite unique. I’ll share those with you another time. But Gary was pretty adamant that we didn’t need new theories to explain how people behaved, even under those new circumstances or contexts, and that the old ones seemed more than capable of doing the job. Goffman explained how people presented themselves in avatars pretty well. Piaget explained the way kids moved through stages. Freud explained why there was so darn much sexual activity in Second Life. This didn’t seem like it was really “new” at all. It’s a very interesting and important point, and certainly in a half-hour of discussion we only got to dig underneath the surface level just a bit. But that’s what these conferences are great for.

On the plane ride home, I began to sketch out a way to understand and focus our attention on virtual worlds, to organize what is still, in a lot of ways, the Wild Untamed West for Consumption and Marketing Theory and for Business Practice.

So thanks to Natalie Wood and Mike Solomon of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia for co-chairing and organizing such a stimulating and exciting conference. I think the ripples from this conference will continue to spread and build into many worthwhile contributions to our growing knowledge of this fascinating development of virtual world.

Posted in Virtual Worlds, Conferences & Presentation, Technology, Burning Man, Communities and Tribes, Marketing Science | No Comments »

Barack Obama, David Palmer, and the Hypermediation of the Political Realm

January 16, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

With this historic election year upon us, I’ve been pondering the connection between the candidacy run of Barack Obama and the role of the mass media in this bid for the position of Leader of the Free World.

In particular, I’ve been thinking about the first season of Fox-TV’s hit show “24,” which featured counter-terrorism super-agent James Bond, oops I mean Jack Bauer, trying to save America’s first -and very promising–African-American Presidential candidate from an assassination attempt.

“24″ has actually featured African-American Presidents (or to-be Presidents, or ex-Presidents) in every one of its six seasons, which strikes me as remarkable. The show gathers a considerable audience of about 13 million viewers and has had, according to many critical accounts, an impact on American culture. Not only has it reflected post-911 fears of terrorism and concern with National Security, it has also reflected difficult and conflicting attitudes about gender, race and “the Other.”

Writing in “Canon Fodder” in June of this year, Lucia Bozzola drew some similar links in a very insightful analysis that I quote from here.Bozzola asserts that 24

“has made the presence of an African American president not only normal, but also desirable. Take, for instance, how the presence of the dearly departed David Palmer, and in this season his brother Wayne is treated by the show. Their race isn’t a big hairy deal. It’s certainly not the point of the show. Contrast that to Hillary Clinton’s canceled TV avatar Commander in Chief. The presence of a female president was precisely the point of the show, because oh my God, isn’t that just so high concept weird?”

So a woman President was treated as the central point of CiC, highlighted, emphasized, but 24 just accepted an African-American president. See also this related blog on Palmer Obama.

Then there is the matter of the characteristics of this racially Other President. On 24, [the actor] “Dennis Haysbert’s David Palmer is smart, charismatic, informed, judicious. . . One of the reasons a freshman senator from Illinois with only two years of D.C. experience under his belt is even in the mix, let alone a major player, is because Obama proved in his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that he has the presence to be ‘presidential’” (Bozzola 2007).

It’s interesting to draw the link, as Zack Pohl does here, between Haysbert’s contributions to Obama’s campaign and the two Presidential images.

Bozzola speculates here:

“Could such a state of affairs translate to real world actions? It depends on one’s faith in the general population outside of the bluest blues that are allegedly more open to such things. Considering all of the noise year after year about the deleterious effects of TV sex and violence, not to mention negative stereotypes, it would be unwise to completely discount what one of our favorite TV shows has been telling us for most of the Bush presidency. Indeed, one writer noted that the cabal of older white men currently in the White House have done such a bang-up job that we finally might be over the knee-jerk assumption that anyone but a white Christian man wouldn’t be right for the presidency”

Part of my early research has concerned itself with the way that mediated representations of future realities had a way of slipping into reality, sort of like the sort of morphic crystallizations that scholar and thinker Rupert Sheldrake has written about and that have been taken up in paranormal metascientific discussions of the Hundredth Monkey phenomenon. Think about it. So many contemporary devices have been envisioned and named by writers before they were created in physical reality: rockets, space travel, submarines, robots, computers, communications satellites, mobile phones, table PCs, big-screen TVs, and so on. The list goes on and on. These are, to borrow a nice turn of phrase, “The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of.”

In past writing, I have coined the term “hypermediated” to try to capture some sense of the cultural influence of our pervasive mass mediated images and symbols. George Gerbner’s influential school of “Cultivation Theory” argues quite persuasively that the mass media acculturate particular perspectives, making things seem normal or prevalent. In our field of consumer research Tom O’Guinn and L. J. Shrum are our native experts in this field, and their award-winning work has shown how cultivation effects lead heavy mass media viewers to over-estimate such things as numbers of police officers or attorneys in the population, or amount of actual violence occurring.

Media theorist Tony Bennett (1990) consider the reality-creation role of the mass media. He explains that the mass media have often been described and studied as “definers of social reality,” and that this description has very important social effects in regards, for instance, to news reporting and the democratic political process. However, the idea that the mass media define social reality still partakes in the older notion that the mass media reflect social reality, and thus that social reality and media reality are separable. Bennett rejects this idea, contending that the media are agencies of mediation between thought and action, and provide frameworks for interpreting events that actually structure our consciousness.

As Sarup (1993: 165) puts it:

Media practices have rearranged our sense of space and time. What is real is no longer our direct contact with the world, but what we are given on the TV screen: TV is the world. TV is dissolved into life, and life is dissolved into TV. The fiction is realized and the real becomes fictitious.

I like this quote a lot. Dissolution, intermingling. We can’t tell one from the other. That’s the essence of hypermediation rather than cultivation. I’ll be writing more on hypermediation theory soon in this blog.

From there, it’s only a small stretch to think that the media images of an African-American President can become a strong cultural influence and accustom people to particular new forms of governance.

Is 24 helping to prime America for an African-American President by virtue of the fact and the way that this President has been fictionally portrayed? I think that my own hypermediation theory and Gerbner’s cultivation theory would say yes. The determining question is, is this effect widespread enough to show up at the polls? Is Barack the candidate going to be as charismatic as Palmer the fictional president? And what about the competition, not only from Hillary Clinton, who is running a historic campaign in her own right, but from the Republican party candidate as well.

Real world complexity complicates every attempt at social scientific prediction. But I think Obama’s chances are very good. And maybe he can thank Jack Bauer and his writers just a little bit for that.

Posted in Marketing News & Insights, Marketing Science | 5 Comments »

Organic Intellectualism, Conclusion, and References: Consumption Studies, Part 12 of 12

October 31, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

The Consumption Studies paper was originally written in 1998 and submitted to the Journal of Consumer Research. Although I received some very interesting and encouraging feedback, the paper was rejected. And for very good reasons, I believe.

The illustrative example of technological consumption meanings demonstrates a focus limited to only a few contexts relevant to the topic, and is certainly flawed and needs to be developed further (some of that work I have started to do here, and will continue to do). But it seeks to prove a point about the different lenses that get lumped together as “qualitative” work, and how they actually differ and complement each other.

Through that example, various overlapping contexts provided occasions for coordinating techniques of introspection, textual and historical analysis, and critical theoretic cultural criticism. A big ingredient that was missed in the original version that you saw posted here, which was picked up in subsequent revisions to the original document, was the inclusion of the intersubjective voice of others, of consumers reflecting about their own technology consumption. In fact, in subsequent revisions that included consumer interviews, it was this element that rose to the forefront, completely overshadowing the semiotic reading of the technology ad and the overt green criticism (implicitly, it remained). In future blog postings, I’ll have more announcements about the final deposition of the paper that this once was. I think the open format, showing you (the public, as well as those of you who practice “The Craft” of Re:Search) the tricky process of journal submission, rejection, and revision, can be quite informative.

On to the analysis, and the conclusion for this lengthy set of blog entries.

As the cultural meanings of that one single advertisement (the Sun Microsystems ad) met the subjective perceptions of one particular reader (yours truly), the result was a subjective account that highlighted the way in which science fiction meanings from the macro-social field had been appropriated by the industrial field of high technology marketing. The sociohistorical contexts of this association were empirically examined through textual interpretation and historical analysis. A collective framework that drew from contemporary criticism of consumer culture, particularly its social (e.g., Murray and Ozanne 1991, Rosenblatt 1999) and ecological (e.g., Ross 1991) aspects then explored the macro-societal ramifications of this conjunction of meanings. It concluded with a consideration of the collective context and a suggestion of a response from the research community.

Consumption studies such as this one can draw attention to a range of heretofore under-explored contexts. In the commingling of these different contexts, each of which impacts consumption, new configurations for consumer research might be suggested that might help begin the process of envisioning more inclusive, participative and ecologically sound social alternatives to contemporary consumption.

That is a major goal.

Conceiving of other crosscontextual consumption studies infers asking how, in the lived experience of individual consciousness and social relations, the intersubjective social meanings of other types of consumption get played out. It means continuing to ask about the moral ramifications for the suppression or actualizing of human (and ecological) potential.

Assuming such a perspective infers that philosophical polarities, and their attendant theory-method superstructures need to “get real” (Wells 1993) in order to ‘get along.’

It requires acknowledgment that the social reality that encompasses “Consumptions” is not linguistic, dynamic and multiple on the one hand, or material, immutable and singular or dialectic, moral and socially conflicted, on the other, but a synthesis: simultaneously and irreducibly all of these.

Truly living from within such a view of research means envisioning a consumer research that views consumption knowledge as similar to life itself: an ineluctably bumpy and unavoidably messy affair.

The very real tensions -especially of the axiological variety-that exist between paradigmatic theory/methods will not simply evaporate. (Recent ACR debates certainly attest to this.)

I believe, but still may have a difficult time proving it, that understanding when pursued as a terminal goal is qualitatively distinct from understanding as means to attaining prediction and control.

In the same manner in which the tensions and overlaps in the meaning of a word, symbol, or action (inevitably) exist within even the most single-minded text or actor, paradigmatic research tensions can coexist in research that deliberately manages them by strategically aligning epistemological perspectives in order to accomplish a cooperative or loosely coupled structure.

One the major obstacles hampering this type of coordination of contextual inquiries may arguably not be methodological, but psychological. It has been noted that researchers generally tend to refuse to acknowledge the equivalent validity of other “competitive” paradigmatic approaches. Burrell and Morgan (1979, p. 36) venture that relations between research paradigms are best described as “disinterested hostility,” perhaps because, as Giddens (1976, p. 142-4) maintains, researchers differentiate and identify themselves based on what their own research paradigm is and is not.

Good ol’ stinkin’ primate territoriality, short-term monkey tribe horizons, shit-slinging and chest-beating, and battles cries for scarce resources are the metaphors for the major “scholarly” impediments to the realization of Ferber’s (1977) “interdisciplinary ideal” for consumer research. There are, as Anderson (1986, p. 167) keenly notes, few systemic incentives encouraging interdisciplinary research, and considerable professional disincentives discouraging synthesis.

And that’s the rut we’re in as qualitative researchers living sort of on the margins of the field. But sometimes the ruts are the most fertile parts of the field (or the goat’s life).

Thinking of what we do as a unified field (a la “CCT”), the winding and branching streams of contextual inquiry in consumer research might find themselves naturally running together. This could happen if they were they to ground themselves in the same contexts, i.e., in theoretically rigorous examinations of issues that are socially, historically and politically relevant.

In so doing, they would be following Italian cultural studies theories Antonio Gramsci’s (1973) notion of the “organic intellectual,” a very useful and generative concept within the field of cultural studies (see, e.g., Hall 1986). You can also read here the original sections from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. I’ve loved this idea of the organic intellectual ever since I came across it as a Ph.D. student in 1996. It seems to fit extremely well with the age of technology that we are in, where academics have every opportunity to step down from their high perches and engage one-on-one with people who are doing their own interesting work, engaged in their own important and urgent issues, carrying their own intriguing opinions and theories, and who also, sometimes, might benefit from an academic perspective on matters.

As I see it, the organic intellectual is a scholar with responsibilities that commit research activities to three goals:

• (1) social relevance: investigating currently vexing, situated social problems in realistic contexts,
• (2) theoretical rigor: being at the very forefront of intellectual, theoretical work and, simultaneously,
• (3) populist communicative activism: attempting to transmit in a meaningful way the ideas thus generated to those beyond the confines of an intellectual elite (fellow scholars, formal students) or even of a dominant social class (among whose ranks we might include business managers, the business press, prominent consultants, or the business intelligentsia), i.e. to the affected, or general, public.

The concept of the organic intellectual refocuses the contexts of contextual inquiries in consumer research.

The focus on social relevance means that the collective contexts that consumer research considers shift away from the interests of the industrial (and various research and academic elites) towards those of particular consumer communities and other macro-social communities, e.g., government, public institutions, general society.

The emphasis on theoretical rigor is a strong suit of contemporary consumer researchers. But new and more comprehensive theory might be required in order to investigate consumption in this manner, as a complex interrelation of multiple contexts. Not so much new theory, and new methods, but “Rosetta stone” type code-switching and translation patterns. How exactly do we cross the various sub-disciplinary bridges, how to we build expertise in highly fragmented solos, how do we cross divides in whays that keep everyone happy that “rigor” was served and “validity” was not compromised? The primary contexts we would need to cross would include research, macro-social, micro-cultural and industrial domains, and the view from the intersection of these points is at once highly revealing (thus the edgework is risky and exciting, perhaps not for juniors, or on the other hand exactly for juniors) and also much more informative than the view from any one of them alone.

Finally, the organic intellectual’s emphasis on populist communicative activism practically requires a reconsideration of the subjective contexts (identities, roles, practices) of consumers researchers and research consumers (who may shift from being fellow academics, to members of the public). This suggests radical alterations in our modes of research presentation and the distribution of our discoveries. These sorts of shifts won’t happen overnight, but I like to think that more engaged and engaging forms of research representation, such as the videographic forms that Russ Belk and I have been exploring along with many other consumer researchers, will help to provide some strong examples. In terms of straightforward organic intellectuals, Henry Jenkins has always been my role model in his work, and his blog is exemplary in this regard. He doesn’t talk down to people, he shares his research openly, he is seeking multiple conversations abotu topics that matter, and doing it in a way that is both rigorous and accessible to intelligent and interested people.

Engaged increasingly in general public discourse about consumers’ consumption, rather than specialized business discourse about consumer commerce, a consumption studies focus would bring the consumer research field into closer alignment with the “issues” orientation of similarly oriented subfields of anthropology, sociology and cultural studies.

Organic intellectual work in consumption studies points us to research impact, an impact that comes from balancing description and accessible abstraction in theory. It directs us to pursue research whose legitimacy comes from balancing procedural rigor and social conscience in persuasive rhetoric –providing a mixed and arranged marriage of science and praxis.

And that’s all about Consumption Studies….for now. Thanks for Listening!

Here is the reference list for all 12 segments:

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