September 12, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

It’s been a bit of a media feeding frenzy lately in the entertainment and business pages. For starters, let’s talk Britney. Britney Spears appeared last night on the MTV Video Music Awards in a performance that is being ripped into by the media. CNN.com made perhaps some of the cruelest cuts of all in their story, which I quote here:

“As in most train wrecks, it was hard to focus on just one thing as the Britney Spears disaster unfolded. There was just so much that went wrong. Out-of-synch lip-synching. Lethargic movements that seemed choreographed by a dance instructor for a nursing home. The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly. At times she just stopped singing altogether, as if even she knew nothing could save her performance. Designed to drum up excitement for her upcoming album, Spears’ kickoff to the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night became another example of how far she has fallen.”

Beyond that, on page after page of Internet assessment, and gossipy TV show after TV show, stories asked if Britney is Washed Up? and, apparently even worse, “Is Britney Fat?”

Everyone, apparently, loves a train wreck. And it is this aspect of media, which acts delightedly to knock heroes from their perches, that I believe traditional media and media reception theories don’t account for very well. In many of the blog comments I read today, fans stood up for Britney, seeing her as a victim of needless media cruelty (and maybe I just like to side with the underdog but count me among those). But the media keeps on ripping. Britney was idolized as a near-child star, a Golden Girl. Now that she’s a mother of two and getting older, and a little bigger, the media seems to have turned on her like a rabid raccoon. “The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly.” Whoah. That’s definitely hitting below the belt.

In a related story, I actually feel a little bit sorry for poor old Mattel–but only a little bit. The embattled and venerable toy company is really taking it on the chin with its toy recalls for lead paint and tiny magnets that little kids can swallow. Mattel is a brilliant company but like all manufacturers of physical toys they are fighting a difficult battle to keep kids attention and get their “share of playtime” among a generation that loves videogames and screentime.

Mattel has been brilliant in building the Barbie franchise that every academic loves to hate. They have done interesting retro things with the Fisher-Price brand of late, releasing a series of classic toys that appeal to nostalgic boomers and Gen Xers as they have their kids. They also recognized the immense value in the American Girls brand and have done a masterful job of managing that franchise.

But these three waves so far of recalls, August 1, August 14, and September 5, have really begun to put pressure on the company and the stock. Robert Eckert, the company’s chairman and chief executive warned at a press conference last month that there may be more toy recalls. He said that the company was stepping up its investigations into its Chinese factories. He released a statement last Tuesday saying that:

“As a result of our ongoing investigation, we discovered additional affected products. Consequently, several subcontractors are no longer manufacturing Mattel toys.”

It’s interesting the spin that the story has received, with Mattel being linked with its (usually hidden behind the scenes) Chinese factories. This reminds me a bit of the way Nike came out and blamed its subcontractors during the sweatshop furor of the late 1990s. And Mattel’s share price has been, according to the financial reports, “surprisingly resilient.” That’s amazing, given the incredible amount of press that this story has received and the sheer scale of the recalls. Why hasn’t it been more affected?

I think that the media needs to ask more questions about the Chinese-finger-pointing spin the story has received. Senate hearings are going to help a lot with that, and thank goodness for a US Government that isn’t afraid to put its corporations on the stand. Where are the lessons learned? Or isn’t this just business as usual, and look-at-you, you’re the one who just got caught?

Britney and Mattel: two flavors of train wreck. The media seems to love to report on them. But the media makes money either way. Mattel is going to have to advertise even more to regain the faith and trust of their consumers. So they’ll need bigger media spends. And if they crash and burn, that’s a big story too, and the media reports on it, and sells advertising while they’re doing so. Bad news is good news.

And even on the financial and entertainment pages, baby, if it bleeds, it leads.

Posted in Entertainment Marketing, Marketing News & Insights | No Comments »

September 10, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

Okay. In the last entry about Consumption Studies, we talked about philosophy. Today we’re going to explore methodologies.

The purpose for exploring where methods overlap is not to try to come up with some formulaic method-blending recipe. Rather, I mean to foreground already present areas of intersection in order to foster a more wide-ranging, flexible and, most importantly, deliberately combinatory set of ways to study consumption.

In consumer research, individual studies can certainly confirm to the philosophical basis of more than one form of understanding. For example, the Burning Man paper I wrote tried to bring a resonant sense of being there to the initial part of the paper, but then proceeded to a more macro decoding of the cultural meanings of the events’ practices. However, the problematics-that is, the types of problems that research texts grapple with–often tend primarily to be focused within single categories. So while I tried to be resonant in the Burning Man JCR, that paper was mostly about “intersubjective” meanings and generalizations about the difficult relationships between communities and markets. When I wanted to do something resonant about Burning Man, which would have a subjective effect, I wrote poetry (liked the “Desert Pilgrim” published in CMC), or edited together videographies (like “Rituals Without Dogma”).

To give another example, while Fournier’s detailed contextual inquiry on the relationship between three women and their brands could have been cast into a socially critical light, that wasn’t really the point. Instead aims for the precision, predictability and generalizability of an intersubjective mode. There are many extant studies of consumption that cross boundaries and cannot cleanly be fit into one and only one form of understanding. In general, however, it methodological moves toward the coordination and integration of forms of understanding has been taken without conscious recognition. Without a guidemap, so to speak. So a structured and reasoned approach may provide the foresight for this movement to be taken in a much more impactful and structured manner.

Doing so requires an exploration of epistemic linkages and what I’m going to call the “slippages” between ways of knowing.

Let’s take as a starting points three proposals that allow for considerable interaction between the intersubjective, subjective and collective forms of understanding. Here they are:

Point 1: Consumptions are meaningful only in context. In consumer research, this point has been rendered obvious by the pioneering contextual inquiries of scholars such as Russ Belk (1984), John Sherry (1987), and Grant McCracken (1986), to name just a few.

Point 2: This is a considerably slipperier one. Contexts are infinitely extendible. Theorists from the hardest to the softest of the social sciences have proposed epistemological approaches that emphasize the boundedness of knowledge claims (e.g., Campbell 1988; Sternthal, Tybout and Calder 1987). For example, Culler (1982), a respected scholar of poststructural thought, asserts that Derridean deconstructive theories do not deny truth per se but only insist that truth and meaning are context-bound. Therefore deconstruction could be identified, according to Culler (1982, p. 215), “with the twin principles of the contextual determination of meaning and the infinite extendability of context.” According to deconstruction, any type of ultimate context is “unmasterable, both in principle and in practice. Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless” (ibid, p. 123). These assertions do little to simplify matters. As Koestler (1976) notes, reality, including the sociocultural consumptive reality studied by contextual inquiry, is composed of contexts (e.g., the individual consumer, the brand) that are also parts of other contexts (e.g., the household, the product category) that are parts of other contexts (e.g., a geographic region, household rituals, religious rituals, socio-demographic income realities, a company) in endless infinite regress. Knowledge claims about consumptions thus can only be true or even meaningful in context (”the contextual determination of meaning”) and the contexts of consumption (both in the discursive and the material sense are potentially infinite in reach (”the infinite extendibility of context”).

Okay, point two is biiiiiig.

But hear me out. This point numero duo a space offering some bona fide conceptual leverage. It tells us that in order to be intersubjectively meaningful, the potential infinity of possible investigative universes must be reduced to a manageable number. And this leads to the third and final point.

Point 3: In order to be understood and integrated, contextual inquiries need to delimit and specify the contexts they will examine. In order to be integrative, a contextual inquiry might include these specific contexts examined using intersubjective, subjective and collective forms of understanding. It is in the overlapping explorations of these demarcated, particular contexts that opportunities exist for truly interdisciplinary and boundary spanning works.

There are multiple influences that will conspire to narrow a given researcher’s investigative grid. These would include, for instance, the intersubjective theoretical and methodological leanings of the research community, the popular problematics currently circulating within certain cultural-industrial-academic social spheres, the determining properties and constituent dynamics of the consumption phenomenon itself.

As well, the subjective social field or “habitus” of informants (Bourdieu 1984) and the skillset and proclivities of the researcher(s) would be impactful (Levy 1996). As McGuire (1989, p. 215) notes, “knowledge involves representation, but only selective representation.” All knowledge, all information, all understand is selective, delimited, demarcated.

In this selection of knowledge, poststructural perspectives fulfill a valuable role. They help us remember to include the representation of subjective and collective contexts and subtexts that are missing (and perhaps suppressed) from the traditionally objectifying representations of empiricist science (Anderson 1986, Firat and Venkatesh 1995). They also usefully undermine the reductionist tendencies of such conceptualizations. Yet as their relativist tendencies might suggest, the number of contexts -relevant and irrelevant-that poststructuralist perspectives might find worthy of inclusion are potentially infinite. It is for precisely this reason that a coherent integrative research approach requires that ww find some way to limit and organize these contexts.

That this limiting and organization of context can be accomplished is enabled by the objectification function of social construction (Berger and Luckmann 1967). In the social world of symbolic interaction, objectivity does exist “as an accomplished aspect of human lived experience” (Dawson and Prus 1995, p. 113). “We can deconstruct any text, disseminating and fragmenting its meaning into its different contexts and codes. . .Yet, particular texts are consistently read with the same meanings, located within the same codes, as if they were written there for all to see” (Grossberg 1996, p. 157).

The material and discursive referents that underlie consumption contexts are subjectively and intersubjectively meaningful. “Self-understanding is connected integrally to the understanding of others. . . . [because] language. . . is a medium of practical social activity” (Giddens 1976, p. 24-5).

So this means that context can be specified with reasonable accuracy within a given research text. Particular contexts -however rhetorically subjective and institutionally-influenced their manifestation-can therefore serve as the basis of particular consumption studies.

It may be that contextual inquiries often study very dynamic cultural phenomena, and that observation inevitably alters findings. This could be in the actual observation, in a physical observer effect principle kind of way, or in a representational manner, sort of like the Rashomon effect, the effect based on the famous story in which the observers of an event are able to produce significantly divergent but equally plausible accounts of what just happened (a great article on the “The Rashomon Effect” was published by Karl Heider in the March 1988 issue of American Anthropologist).

Specific attention to intersubjectively specifiable consumption contexts such as temporal positioning and subjective biases can, in principle, address some of these contingencies. Situating the study, the researchers, and the topic in historical, sociocultural and reflexive contexts will provide clues that potentially allow future researchers and readers to construct their own theories about the dynamism and universality of themes and processes.

The material and discursive patterns of social webs of meaning, of lived subjectivity, and of collective potential intersect in numerous and fertile ways. Detailed intimate descriptions of experiential consumption are clearly compatible with a verstehen of empathic understanding. Concretized with precise contextual description (for instance, historical, social, cultural, demographic, ethnic categories), they can also can serve as the source code of objectified theory for an N=1 study, as they have within numerous historic studies, such as those of Sigmund Freud (Dukes 1965). Sartre (1981, p. ix) states that the person is “summed up and for this reason universalized by his epoch, he in turn reproducing himself in it as a singularity.”

The intensive analysis of a small body of empirical materials (cases and processes) might reveal universal social experiences and processes (e.g., Denzin and Lincoln 1994, p. 202). Subjective information from acts of introspection (Gould 1991, Holbrook 1995) can therefore complicate and nuance an abstract theory of the patterning of consumption relationships, or can inform critical social critiques.

Subjective contexts (such the embodied intelligences of consumers, researchers, research readers) are inextricably entwined within intersubjective and collective contexts [material reality, moral reality and the discursive realm of “language games” (Wittgenstein 1965)].

Contextual inquiry that touches on one form of understanding unavoidably references the others. For instance, Thompson and Haytko (1997) exemplify such a study, in which researchers transmute the subjective impressions of twenty interview participants regarding their own lived experiences of fashion into abstract theoretical formulations about systems of social meaning, and draw collective conclusions about the role of fashion as ideology and lived hegemony.

Consumption studies are enriched by consumer research’s vanguard that recognizes the “researcher as instrument” (Sherry 1991) as the obverse of “researcher reflexivity” (Wallendorf and Brucks 1993) and “praxis” (Murray and Ozanne 1991) as the flip-side of the “value-ladenness” of theory (Anderson 1986).

When linked to a new and more deliberate recognition of the contexts of consumption, the trajectory of this sort of thinking may be to suggest a strategic widening of the traditional contexts considered in qualitative research, consumer culture theory, or contextual inquiry. Before proceeding with an extended illustrative example that explores high technology consumption, let us move first to a more detailed description of some of these different investigatory contexts, and how their consideration is important to investigations of contemporary consumptions.

And that sort of deliberate recognition is something I’m going to explore as we move into a more systematic understanding of what this Consumption Studies, as an integrating field of inquiry, might look like. Stay tuned.

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September 9, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

And here’s the conclusion to that great Gender Debate, also featured on Henry Jenkins highly recommended blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Hope you enjoy it.

* * * *

Techspressive Tools

Francesca Coppa: The two other gendered concerns I have are about technology and affect: technology in that it seems to me that there’s a cliché of “men are techie” and women are not, but media fandom in general and vidding in particular go against that: fannish women have always been particularly drawn from the sciences, and vidding was pioneered by women who (by definition) knew how to program a VCR. So the history of vidding is important for exploding some of those stereotypes. However, these technical, filmmaking women didn’t make ironic, distanced parodies; they tended to make emotionally invested music videos, and that’s an affective choice with problematically gendered legal implications. Mocking male distance is explicitly protected by the Constitution, where female identification/emotional investment is not as explicitly protected, although it is certainly transformative. Even in these debates on HJ’s journal, we see a kind of gentle mocking of slash, or trying to come up with “wild” examples, (say, Geoffrey Long’s “a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader“); my own experience in fandom actually tells me not to prejudge such a story: the writer might have a reason for writing that. The story might be great: imagine how it might comment on gender and race.

Robert Kozinets: This idea reminds me again of recent developments in my own field, which draws a lot of inspiration from cultural theory and cultural theorists. Regarding technology, I’ve just completed an article on the ideologies that guide technology consumption. It’s a deep tracking of the historical discourses that inform current narratives in the mass media and in consumer’s own speech acts (and their practices/performances with technology). Some of the historical forms are quite familiar, such as the Technological Utopian ideology that associates technology use with progress, or the ideology that associate technology consumption with efficiency, productivity, and economic gains. But I also find a more hidden ideology, one that I think has come to the fore more recently. I call that one the “Techspressive” discourse, and it is about using technology in ways that are playful and self-expressive. Thinking back to when this ideology was really breaking into mass consciousness, in the 1990s, there were a number of female artists and authors who were pushing the boundaries of new digital technologies in very interesting ways, and others who were theorizing these developments. I’m thinking of the top of my head of Laurie Anderson, Pat Cadigan, Donna Haraway, and Kathryn Hayles, but there are many other examples. As groups that have had to function in inventive and underground ways, women have been at the forefront of appropriating new technologies and deploying them in new ways. I think that the positioning of vidding in this wider historical trend is right on target. No question about that.

Francesca Coppa: Oh, I love that word: techspressive! Yes, I think that’s right; and in fact, you know, I wonder if women’s tendency to adopt these technologies early is at all connected to the fact that women have always had a more mediated relationship to public space than men: we were not historically allowed to have an “authentic” or fully “expressive” relationship to public space. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that women were ignored in the first wave of subculture studies because they weren’t visible on the streets the way teddy boys, mods, or rockers were; they were home in their rooms listening to Beatles records on the turntable and spinning fantasies to each other on the telephone. I wrote my first fanfiction longhand and sent it out via snail mail. Now we have irc and AIM and jabber and Skype; we have mailing lists and Livejournal; we make elaborate fannish banners and css design schemes for our webpages; we’ve got wikis and searchable fanfiction archives and iMeem pages for our vids. But we’re not technological or anything.

The Fan Boy Reconsidered
Robert Kozinets: No, of course not. Some of my favorite women are cyborgs. I’ll let you guess the details..;-). The other idea I wanted to raise has to do with maleness. My colleagues Doug Holt and Craig Thompson recently published an interesting article on the ideology of male consumption. Their findings were compelling to me. They found that contemporary American males had to negotiate between two idealized types of masculinity. The first was the solid-but-kinda-boring “breadwinner” model, the guys who is a good provider, solid friend, good husband, and so on. But in order to be attractive and interesting, men also felt a need to tack into a “rebel” model, who was a risk-taker, a hero, an achiever. Doug and Craig called the synthetic model, where men moved between both models of masculinity without ever settling too far into one, a “man-of-action hero model.” Studying fan culture as I do, I’m not sure exactly where fannish expression fits into such a model. Men today work under constraints that are historically new, constraints and expectations that their dads didn’t have (I certainly don’t remember any pressure on my dad to moisturize and exfoliate). Being emotionally invested in texts and characters (particularly male characters) can be genuinely problematic for male fans. I’ve written a bit about the stigmatic side of fannish consumption before. So what have we got now? A social world where traditional maleness is somewhat stigmatized, where softy sensitive maleness is certainly stigmatized, and where fannish investments are stigmatized. What’s a poor fanboy to do?

Francesca Coppa: My first thought when I noticed the rise of fanboy culture was, “oh, you guys are getting alienated from the means of production, too?”

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

Francesca Coppa: When I teach mass culture, I like to use Richard Ohmann’s definition, part of which of which is “produced at a distance by strangers.” And while we have unparalleled closeness to TPTB, I think that at the same time, the gulf between producers and consumers has never been wider, and that there’s a real underlying hostility to the idea of consumers becoming producers, and thinking like producers.

Robert Kozinets: I see that in action all the time. Despite all the talk about Web2.0, there is genuine misunderstanding, real fear, and as you say, genuine hostility to these ideas of suddenly “active” consumers.

Francesca Coppa: Because the American economy is dependent on consumption, and the mass media seems willing to actually exert force in order to get us to keep consuming at whatever rate they deem appropriate: I mean, I have twice in the last week heard the word “stealing” used to describe a failure to look at ads: once, vis a vis Tivo, and once, vis a vis “adblocker” software. And behind that word, stealing, is the criminalization of the act of keeping our minds ad-free, and behind that criminalization is force. In some economic sense, are we all feminized now?

Robert Kozinets: Bingo. Why are you peasants sleeping when you could be drinking Red Bull, watching TV, and shopping? Get to work!

Francesca Coppa: Absolutely, but to paraphrase Orwell, maybe some of us are more feminized than others. But I do think we’re all of us suffering from a culture that has professionalized, commercialized, and turned spectatorial all the kinds of fun we used to make for ourselves: not just storytelling (written and theatrical) and painting, but sports, singing, and even poker.

Robert Kozinets: Now you’re starting to sound like a Consumer Culture Theorist. Seriously, there’s a whole literature on this coming from the Frankfurt School and descending in crooked lineal lines into consumer behavior theories. My work on Burning Man and among consumer activists chronicles how people feel that their current culture isolates them and tries to render them passive. Movements like culture jamming, doofing and other post-raves, and the rise of major TAZ-like gatherings like the Burning Man project going on this week and the Rainbow Family gatherings all share in this ideological opposition to capitalist culture commercializing our stories and myths, and a sense that they need to be “brought home” again to the people.

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

Francesca Coppa: I just finished reading your “Inno-tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia,” [in the new Consumer Tribes book] and I really love it; I think this is going to be a really, really useful piece for explaining fannish issues to big media. I especially like your concept of “Wikimedia” (media content that has gone open source and begun spawning new content as a kind of ever-expanding collaborative text), which is similar to Derridean “archontic” literature (I myself use “supplement” to describe the same concept vis a vis theatre in my essay “ “Media Fanfiction as Theatrical Performance”). I think that it’s important to emphasize the connection between Wikimedia and other forms of archontic culture; theatre in particular has been a useful model for me to think about what you’ve called brand “invigoration strategies” and what I’d call a theatrical production *g*. In fact, you nearly quote Alan Sinfield’s essay on Shakespeare and cultural materialism in Cultural Politics-Queer Reading; Sinfield says that Shakespeare is relevant to precisely the degree to which he’s interfered with by directors; leave Shakespeare alone and he dies, and Shakespeare is arguably the most successful brand in history.

Robert Kozinets: What a great, and classical, example. Absolutely. For me, the Bible, the Talmud, and exegesis in general have always been important working models, and the way Shakespeare’s texts are sacralized in our culture is another powerful example. It seems like whenever people invest themselves in text and continue working with it, developing it, making it current and specific and situating it, then we have strong texts, meaningful texts. But somehow this never does seem to sink in at the level of the textual producer. It’s funny, because it’s the same in religion. Don’t tamper with the text. We’ll control the text. We’ll control the interpretation. And then, there it is again at the level of brand management. The exact same tension. We’ll control the brand meanings. Don’t you tamper with them. But without the “tampering” the meaning fades out and dies. Damn those The Powers That Be (and you know who you are!)

Francesca Coppa: Vis a vis the gender argument I’m making, I would say that fandom has produced strategies that have allowed women to consume otherwise terrible (and sexist) mass media stories; we have done TPTB’s work and made this stuff interesting to ourselves (to TPTB’s financial advantage; I promise you, I would never have bought Stargate Atlantis action figures otherwise.) Let me give you links to two recent vids by Luminosity, one of our brightest vidding stars: one is a Supernatural vid called Women’s Work (made in collaboration with Sisabet); the other is called Vogue and is a vid made about Frank Miller’s 300. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble seeing these two vids as critiques of the source material. In the first, Luminosity reminds us that, to enjoy Supernatural (and its charismatic and sexy male leads) each week, we have to ignore the plot’s dependence on suffering or murdered women; in the second, Luminosity punctures the violence of 300 by defiantly aestheticizing both the battlefield and the men on it. She conflates the battlefield and the dance floor, subjecting the men to a female and queer gaze and setting Madonna up as this world’s reigning pagan goddess. Luminosity’s epigraph for this gender bait and switch? “Bite me, Frank Miller.” Together, you might think of these vids as: “This is how mass media looks to us without fandom” and “This is your television on fandom.”

Robert Kozinets: This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing all of this, and for the conversation. As a member of multiple minorities and multiple tribes, expression and representation are all-important to me as well. They matter a lot, and I hope they matter to all thinking people.

Francesca Coppa: Thank you, Robert; like so many fannish activities, this has been both productive and a pleasure.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »