What is digital possession and how to study it: a conversation with Russell Belk, Rebecca Mardon, Giana M. Eckhardt, Varala Maraj, Will Odom, Massimo Airoldi, Alessandro Caliandro, Mike Molesworth and Alessandro Gandini

Abstract

The platformisation of digital consumption, means that increasingly many of the things that we call ours-our messages, photos, music, achievements-are entangled in complex socio-technical arrangements which require ongoing market mediation. In this context, refining our understanding of what digital possessions are and how to study them is vital. This requires refocusing research away from existing comparative analyses between digital and material possessions. To do so, we organised an interdisciplinary roundtable discussion with critical marketers and digital media scholars, consumer researchers, digital sociologists and researchers in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at the 11 th Interpretive Consumer Research Conference held in Lyon in May 2019. The result of that discussion is this curation of comments which deal with theoretical, methodological and critical issues and a bold agenda for future research.

High-fidelity consumption and the claustropolitan structure of feeling

“…Class has been a notable absence in Zuboff’s treatment of surveillance capitalism (Fuchs, 2021; Morozov, 2019) and remains an area that is relatively underexplored in studies of technocultural consumption. For instance, Denegri-Knott et al (2020: 951) acknowledge that accounts of social media usage are largely ‘de-coupled from wealth and class; consumers of any background can create online personas’. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that divisions in wealth mean some consumers will have greater access to digital amenities and the lifestyle accoutrements that are fetishized on social media platforms.…”

Understanding Environmentally Conscious Behaviour Through Environmental Identity

“…Drawing from the classic theory, a plethora of research establishes the strong association between self-identity and consumer behaviour. This research finds that consumers perceive possessions as parts of themselves and are used as a means of expressing identities [7][8][9][10].…”

Possessions and memories

“…The distinctions we have drawn between active and lost connections between possessions and memories becomes blurred in the context of digital possessions such as music, texts or photos that are neither singular nor fixed in form. Cloud-based storage, hosted content, streaming services and subscription-based services reflect a transition to access rather than ownership of our possessions [3,37,66]. In this access-based model of possession, memories are not tied to one specific instantiation of a digital file but are instead tied to any instantiation and therefore live on when the original digital possession is lost or deleted [14,15].…”