Janice Denegri-Knott

The objects we consume increasingly exist in digital form, from audiobooks and digital photographs to social media profiles and avatars. Digital objects are often argued to be less valued, personally meaningful, and self-relevant than their physical counterparts and are consequently dismissed as poor candidates for possession. Yet, studies have identified highly meaningful, even irreplaceable, digital possessions. In this article, we account for these contradictory narratives surrounding digital possessions, arguing that digital objects are not inherently unsuited to possession, but rather their affordances may not align with consumers’ imagined affordances (i.e., the object affordances that consumers anticipate). Drawing from a qualitative study of 25 consumers and their digital possessions, we identify three recurring types of affordance misalignment—missing affordances, covert affordances, and deficient affordances—that mediate how consumers and digital objects interact (pragmati...

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life. We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production–consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site...

In this article, we introduce an affordance-orientated approach for the study of digital possessions. We identify affordances as a source of value for digital possessions and argue that dominant meaning-orientated approaches do not enable us to fully appreciate these sources of value. Our work recognizes that value is released and experienced in “the doing”—people must do things with digital objects to locate and obtain value in and from them. We distinguish three levels of affordance for digital possessions—low, mid, and high—and introduce the concept of digital incorporation to explain how the three levels of affordances come together, with the individual’s own intentionality to enable the achievement of goals. We draw from postphenomenological interviews with 47 individuals in the UK to provide a possession-based and lived experience approach to affordances that sheds new light on their vital role in everyday life and goals.

Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration amongst marketers. In this paper we account for virtualised consumption by highlighting its pleasures. We start by historicising the trend towards imaginary consumption practices, depicting virtual consumption as the latest stage in an ongoing transformation of consumption from a focus on utility through to emotional value, sign value and finally playful experience. Viewed from this perspective, we consider the role of emerging virtual consumption spaces as liminoid, transformational play-spaces and explore examples of consumer practices found in these spaces. Ultimately we argue that virtual ...

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that rely on the exploitation of the multitude of consumer life. We suggest that the recent increase in available consumer data, computational power and analytical skills leads to a reorganization of the gaze of marketers and increasingly reverses the Fordist articulation of production and consumption. More specifically, instead of flexibly adjusting production regimes to shifting consumption patterns, database marketers collapse the production‐consumption dichotomy by manufacturing customers as commodities. Hence, theories about the role of surveillance and simulation technologies for strategies of economic value creation need to be updated in order to acknowledge the evolution of database marketing into a central site...

In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals, lightening the load of meal preparation by taking on ‘the difficult parts of making food that is hard and/or time consuming to make fully by hand’ (Foodini, 2014). Similarly, food photocopiers that reproduce the molecular structure of food hold the promise of repurposing leftovers into brand new meals (Electrolux, 2009). This future may be unpalatable to some because it supposes a corrosion of human knowledge and a brutal displacement and reduction of human competence by ever-increasing automation of domestic practices within the home kitchen (see for example Firat and Dholakia, 1998). A less extreme, but more present infiltration of technology within the kitchen is that of devices like tablets, smartphones and laptops that are routinely used in preparing meals. Based on a global survey of 7,000 cooks, Allrecipes.com (2013) found that nearly half of respondents used smartphones while sh...

Artificial intelligence that can change the way we live is less of a future possibility and more a present reality. Social Robots that help the elderly, play children’s games and learn from their environment in order to adapt and interact with humans are some of the latest breakthroughs (The Guardian, 2015). Such technological developments may make some people feel uneasy - perhaps a car’s cruise control function or robot vacuum cleaners are more familiar robotic technology advances that rest more comfortably with people. Even less extreme, but much more common, technological advances sees the use of digital devices and software applications being adopted by many and integrated into their everyday lives. For instance, wearable technology and fitness and weight loss apps that track performance, set goals and provide progress reports were amongst the most popular smartphone apps of 2015 (Techradar, 2015). GPS on smartphones is offered via Google Maps so there is little need to know wh...

The fundamental question we pose in this article is how should we understand marketing in the age of increasingly integrated and networked customer databases? This article argues that new forms of database marketing are best described as customer production processes that ...

... We could presume that it is the Internet's anti-hierarchical nature that conflicts with offline norms of accepted behaviours. ... Tug-of-wars: Shifting the balance of power through discourses ... Was hacking theft or service?'' (Stearling cited in Reed, 2002, p. 138). ...

Our work adds to existing research on eBay by presenting it as a space where consumers’ imaginations are stimulated and where their psychological work to manufacture ever new wants and desires allows for a reflection of consumer tastes and practices. To do so, we conceptualize eBay as a digital virtual space that allows consumers to browse at length through a plethora of goods, test preferences and potentially reflect on the significance of objects and daydreams pursued.Conceptually, we draw a synthesis between desire and imagination-laden narratives within consumer research with Rob Shield’s analytic of the digital virtual and its relationship to the real and ideal. From that reading we attribute eBay with a liminoid texture that helps us account for the social dramas that some of its users, such as famed science fiction writer William Gibson, may experience. We argue that whilst eBay does not provoke the initial breach, its enormous, global, ever changing catalogue of goods, produces a crisis that invites the user to engage in redressive action. That analysis has two moments, one focusing on the eBay experience as a form of flânerie, and then, how visual and written information gathered from searching eBay can be used to craft daydreams relative to a desired good. Specifically, we consider concrete consumer practices through which consumers feed and actualize more substantive daydreams of an improved life, including bookmarking, bidding and winning (owning) desired items. We conclude that eBay’s significance as a seductive site to consume (in) lies in its ability to allow for the continuous construction of latent wants while providing consumers with the tools to react to these wants in various ways.

In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals, lightening the load of meal preparation by taking on ‘the difficult parts of making food that is hard and/or time consuming to make fully by hand’ (Foodini, 2014).  Similarly, food photocopiers that reproduce the molecular structure of food hold the promise of repurposing leftovers into brand new meals (Electrolux, 2009).  This future may be unpalatable to some because it supposes a corrosion of human knowledge and a brutal displacement and reduction of human competence by ever-increasing automation of domestic practices within the home kitchen (see for example Fırat and Dholakia, 1998).
A less extreme, but more present infiltration of technology within the kitchen is that of devices like tablets, smartphones and laptops that are routinely used in preparing meals.  Based on a global survey of 7,000 cooks, Allrecipes.com (2013) found that nearly half of respondents used smartphones while shopping for food, while almost a third of American and UK cooks surveyed said to routinely use their mobile phones to find recipes.  Through these devices home cooks can access an array of food related content including step by step tutorials on YouTube, recipes and recipe reviews on specialist foodie websites and blogs, and themed meal ideas on Pinterest boards.  We refer to these devices as digital virtual (DV) devices in that they open up new spaces and opportunities for the home cook.  The integrative ontology of the digital virtual (see Shields 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010; Molesworth and Denegri-Knott, 2012) that we use here enables us to navigate and consider how consumers’ minds (their imagination, memory and knowledge), the digital virtual spaces located on the screens like YouTube and BBC Good Food website, as well as the device itself – as a physical artefact, interact in practice. For us, this helps overcome some of the essentialism that is inherited by perspectives that create clear demarcations between reality and virtuality (for a critique see Shields, 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010) which deny the presence of constitutive elements of practice, their various locations and how they come into play, in this case, during, meal preparation.
Whilst popular, the presence of DV devices in the kitchen may raise concerns about the growing digitisation of meal preparations, which sees technology as driving the transformation of human practices.  A way of eliding the technology determinist standpoint, where use of DV devices like tablets is seen as displacing human labour, is by adopting a practice-based language to account for how human and non-human actors come together in configuring practice.  Adopting this approach has two key consequences for our understanding of doing the meal. First, it enables us to document in detail the many ways in which meal practices are transformed when knowledges, skills, and competences necessary to carry out practices around meal preparation are not only distributed across enthusiastic home cooks and material artefacts (such as hand mixers, food processors, cookers, freezers, recipe books and instruction manuals) and other people, but also located in digital virtual space. Second, it helps us see the kind of new meal work that is required from the home cook in maintaining the coupling between the cook and their devices. 
In this chapter we discuss the intersection between DV devices and food consumption and resultant practices they configure. Drawing on insights gleaned from in depth interviews with 29 cooking enthusiasts living the South of England, we provide an overview of new configurations, placing emphasis on the ways in which various components of practice – knowledge, competence and commitment – are redistributed between our home cooks and their DV devices.  While we acknowledge the significance of ultimate goals, which are to be substantiated and attained through meal work, for example the expression of caring parent or competent cook (see for example Molander’s (2011) work on meal preparation as a meta-practice of love and motherhood)  here we focus less on the teleoaffective, or goal dimension of practices to deal with specific meal related projects and tasks, like knowing how to decorate a pirate chest birthday cake or make gluten free bread.  In this way we can better hone in on the way in which the coming together of technology and home cook produce new forms of doing meal work.

Artificial intelligence that can change the way we live is less of a future possibility and more a present reality. Social Robots that help the elderly, play children’s games and learn from their environment in order to adapt and interact with humans are some of the latest breakthroughs (The Guardian, 2015). Such technological developments may make some people feel uneasy - perhaps a car’s cruise control function or robot vacuum cleaners are more familiar robotic technology advances that rest more comfortably with people.  Even less extreme, but much more common, technological advances sees the use of digital devices and software applications being adopted by many and integrated into their everyday lives. For instance, wearable technology and fitness and weight loss apps that track performance, set goals and provide progress reports were amongst the most popular smartphone apps of 2015 (Techradar, 2015). GPS on smartphones is offered via Google Maps so there is little need to know where you are going or prepare a journey in advance or even be able to read a map accurately.  Apps such as Timehop remind users of specific memories once posted on social networks, providing personalized material to reflect on and be nostalgic about.  In relation to consumer practices, a wide variety of applications are routinely used via smartphones, tablets and laptop computers, and are consequently changing the way that people engage in practices and the ways that people consume more generally. For instance, 100 million monthly active users of Pinterest search, pin and share things they desire (Fortune, 2015) and can make purchases of these objects via the site.  Nearly 50% of people reported using their smartphones while shopping for food and a third use their smartphones to find recipes as a matter of routine (Allrecipes.com, 2013).  What these examples tell us is that there is a growing delegation of everyday practices to technology and it is clear that consumption has been altered and enhanced by such advances in digital technology. 
In this chapter we explore the growing digitalisation of consumer practices from a perspective of how human and non-human actors come together in configuring such practices.  We draw on practice theory – an accepted and growing area of work in consumer research – to introduce the foundational concept of human-non-human hybrids.  We then focus particularly on the ways in which consumers’ cognitive abilities are apparently extended by and externalised to digital technologies and use the concept of extended mind (Clark and Chalmers, 1998) to develop this line of thinking.  In particular, we focus on consumers’ knowledge, imagination and memory related to a given practice or consumption object.  To do this, we draw on data from a large, on-going study related to digital virtual consumption conducted over the last eight years, which enables us to consider how digital devices and the various platforms and software applications that are accessed through them are integrated in and consequently transform consumer practices.  We identify the kinds of new work that is required from consumers in terms of using digital technology – i.e., developing skills, knowledge, competence and a commitment to their use.  We also consider the implications of this for practice and for the consumption experience.