Have Web 2.0′s innovations in social media urged on individual self-expression or simply accelerated the stint of capital-friendly identity production?

Consumerism is an opaque and frustrating mode of social communication. It devises a language it compels us to speak, and whose meanings, simplistic and one-dimensional, are continually shifting, like a code changed on a daily basis to thwart some unknown enemy.

At best, these shifts seem arbitrary, a nuisance that requires us constantly to update our lexicon of goods. At worst, they seem motivated by a caste-based scheme to devalue whatever social capital we have painstakingly amassed. Styles change to spite us; our identity appears to change even though we have not changed. Moreover, some of the words of this language — brands — are proprietary, giving our communication an inescapable economic dimension and burdening us with the sense that we speak words that belong to someone else.

Many of us have a hard time coming to terms with this loss of autonomy. Consumerism, after all, has been successfully sold as the great carnival of personal sovereignty, the sphere of social life where our individual choices are supposed to matter the most, where we can use what purchasing power we have (far more significant than political power, of course) to pursue whatever goals we devise for ourselves. Yet we inevitably find the dictates of fashion encroaching on that sphere, circumscribing it; or, more depressingly, we begin to realize that keeping up with trends has become the most relevant personal goal that we can come up with.

Despair over this loss of control prompts the fantasy of the return to use value: the longing to acquire only goods that are “really” necessary and that we will use strictly according to their function. “I just buy what I need. I don’t care about trends.” This is slightly strange, because for most of history humans have sought to escape the constraints of necessity so that their true individuality could emerge beyond the collective instincts for survival. Only when our needs are met does our behavior become truly free. But the conundrums of identity-driven consumerism have managed to prompt a reversal of that. Tyrannized by what our disposal of discretionary income says about us, some of us choose to pretend that we have no such discretion.  The various anti-branding screeds, austerity cults and voluntary simplicity movements that have emerged since the 1990s are an expression of this. They build on the somewhat shaky logic that holds that if somehow everyone could recognize that we are consume only what we have to, they won’t be allowed to judge what the consumption is meant to represent. The goods we have will no longer be seen as signifying anything about our identity. Everyone will recognize a purity and a discretion in our minimalism, and the sanctity of the private self, a self free to express itself however it sees fit through its actions, will prevail.

The myth of use value has its empirical basis. In their 2007 paper, “Where Consumers Diverge from Others: Identity Signaling and Product Domains,”  Jonah Berger and Chip Heath sought to determine which sort of goods people see as saying something about themselves. They found that functional goods are less likely to be used to signal identity, and the functional attributes of goods are less likely to be read in terms of their potential meanings.

Based on psychological discounting (Kelley 1973), people should find it easier to attribute someone’s choice to individual characteristics when the choice does not produce obvious functional benefits. Backpacks and pens have an obvious functional component that is missing from music, indeed the very afunctionality of music makes it a stronger signal of identity. Afunctionality also illuminates which product attributes are more likely to serve as signals. Clothes are functional, but their color and style are less functional.

But the escape to use value is nonetheless a fantasy, akin to those early 1990s bands that sought to have “no image” — as if that then did not become their image. Pretending we can hide behind the functionality of our goods and our behavior is ultimately an extension of the untenable individualist ideology that has helped elevate consumerism to such a prominent place in our culture. The zeal for rejecting “trends” is generally fueled by the fantasy of being able to reject society altogether and live a Crusoe-like lifestyle of untainted self-sufficiency. Consumerism, by letting us purchase goods that can seem to supplant human relationships, is a providential means by which we can abstract ourselves out of social norms and responsibilities, with what we consume having no ramifications for anyone but ourselves. It’s akin to the Hummer-driver mentality, the curious attitude of “my status symbols are none of your business.”

Pretending we can hide behind the functionality of our goods and our behavior is ultimately an extension of the untenable individualist ideology that has helped elevate consumerism to such a prominent place in our culture.

Living by such principles as those attempts to solve the problems inherent in social communication by pretending that there is no such thing, and that all communication is interpersonal, if not entirely solipsistic. The communication methods enshrined in Web 2.0 applications take this to its logical conclusion, presenting personal communication as asynchronous broadcasting. When we speak, we speak to everyone with no particular concern for context or for when our updates will actually be received. The idea of community gets re-branded as “social network,” with each of the network’s nodes safely insulated from the others to which it’s linked.

If, through a rigid dedication to use-value functionality, our consumption becomes free of unwanted meanings, it’s only because we have effectively prevented it from have any meaning for ourselves. In The World of Goods anthropologist Mary Douglas and economist Baron Isherwood take great pains to debunk the view that consumption can ever merely be a matter of sating individual needs, arguing that consumption is essential to establishing and maintaining communities. That is to say, despite consumerism’s promise to elevate us above society into a hedonistic world of private convenience, consumption is actually a fundamental way we participate in our society. Consumption choices, in their view, are a  basic unit of culture out of which necessary categories and boundaries are built. “Consumption is a ritual process whose primary function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events,” they write. “Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid processes of classifying persons and events.” Therefore consumption will always bring us up against exercises in exclusion and inclusion, of group delineation.

Often consumption choices will signal inclusion and exclusion simultaneously, or they come together in clusters that signal any number of “truths” about ourselves in a given moment. The different levels of meaningfulness in these choices allow for the coherence of certain behavior that can otherwise seem contradictory. The pursuit of conformity and individuality often occur simultaneously, because we are placing ourselves in different groups at the same time, and those levels of identification are themselves hierarchical — some identities are more important to us than others, are more important socially than others, and so on. What sort of music player you have is less important than what sort of music you play, even though the signals in the latter domain are harder for people generally to accurately decode (making for a more ineffable, satisfyingly unique-seeming self). Berger and Heath write:

Although certain domains tend to be used in identity inference making, that does not mean that people cannot express identity in other domains. These identity signals are probably less likely to be picked up by the population at large, but they may be helpful in coordinating with other members of a highly sophisticated in-group. Buying a very high-end stove may not be a good way of signaling identity to most people because most people do not look to stoves for identity signals. But the high-end stove may be a good way to signal to interior designers or kitchenophiles. Even in functional domains, extremes — extreme knowledge, purchasing an extremely costly item, or attending to fine details — may be good signals because they separate sophisticates from the general population.

The less obvious the signal, the more refined the identity, and the higher that identity domain is in the hierarchy of signification. The retreat to use value, then, may only masquerade as proclamation of transcendent individuality. Instead it may be a mystified attempt to climb that hierarchy of identity domains, to signify personal identity with dog-whistle goods that only the right people will be able to recognize and interpret.

Mirror stage: consumerism mediates the "ideal-I."

Consumerist ideology promotes the notion that “pure” needs never involve gaining social recognition or a sense of how we fit in, even as it supplies the goods and meanings that mediate identity. It urges us to think that we can have some sort of social identity without bothering to be social, but by dealing entirely with the market instead as isolated, exalted individuals. Advertising is a chief means for conveying this ideology, primarily because its ubiquity has led us to conclude that we are impervious to it, that it doesn’t persuade us. But ads do more than try to sell a particular product; they offer a widely dispersed set of ideas that seem like common social ground, that substitute themselves for the long-lost public sphere.

In Decoding Advertisements, Judith Williamson argues that “advertisements are selling us something else besides consume goods: in providing us with a structure in which we, and those goods, are interchangeable, they are selling us ourselves.” Even when we aren’t convinced by a particular ad to buy anything, we are nevertheless led to assume that other people are convinced, and that from the totality of ads we can deduce social norms and salient lifestyle distinctions that are operating generally, even as we hold ourselves above them. The goods become shorthand for inferences and judgments that we can make about other people but that we can believe we are immune from. Ads lift us above the other people who are duped by them. That is how they persuade us.

That elevation is the way in which ads stake their claim for shaping our subjectivity. It is one of the means by which they flatter us. Another way is how ads call out to us, seem to address us specifically. Williamson points out that “there is no logical reason to suppose that the advertisement had ‘you’ in mind all along. You have to exchange yourself with the person ‘spoken to,’ the spectator the ad creates for itself.” Ads turn us into their implied reader when we consume them, an apparently attractive bargain because the “you” of ads is always an important person with money and taste whose decisions about breakfast cereals or watch brands are held to be earth-shatteringly important.

Of course, part of us sees through the ads ploys to hail us and flatter us into malleability. We recognize their insincerity. But insincere flattery can still be effective, as marketing professors Elaine Chan and Jaideep Sengupta demonstrate in a recent paper (“Insincere Flattery Actually Works: A Dual Attitudes Perspective,” Journal of Marketing Research 47, 122–133). They report that their findings “are consistent with the premise that the implicit favorable reaction to flattery, instead of being replaced by the discounted explicit judgment, continues to exist along with it.” Not only that, the implicit attitude is “more resistant to subsequent negative information” than the explicit one. The overt rejection of insincere flattery serves as a screen to permit us to accept the flattery at a deeper level, because it provides an occasion to indulge in unearned recognition.

Advertisements have always exploited this principle, intimating that we have magically earned a right to think of ourselves as special and significant. Most importantly, it allows us to feel for a moment as though we have garnered social recognition without having to do anything socially useful. Then, so flattered,we don’t question some of the other assumptions about us that ads establish as social facts. As Williamson explains:

Ads create an ‘alreadyness’ of ‘facts’ about ourselves as individuals: that we are consumers, that we have certain values, that we will freely buy things, consume, on the basis of those values, and so on. We are trapped in the illusion of choice… [Ads] invite us ‘freely’ to create ourselves in accordance with the way in which they have already created us.

Williamson argues that ads work mainly by creating an arena into which we can enter and make meanings, and it’s that meaning-making process that traps us, not any specific ad-based purchases.

Nothing [in the ad] even ‘says’ that Catherine Deneuve is ‘like’ Chanel no. 5, or that they have a similar aura. We are given two signifiers, and required to make a ‘signified’ by exchanging them. The fact that we have to make that exchange, to do the linking work which is not done in the ad, but which is only made possible by its form, draws us into the transformational space between the units of the ad. Its meaning only exists in this space: the field of transaction; and it is here that we operate — we are this space.

There are clear parallels between the transformational space of ads and the interactive spheres opened up by commercial social networks — in which brands intermingle with people on equal terms and data about the sort of connections we make are carefully aggregated. Much of our behavior online consists of this “linking work” — a form of immaterial labor which strengthens the consumerist code of meanings for goods while presenting that work as the strengthening of ties between friends and family. We are recognized as subjects by virtue of performing this sort of work.

The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation.

It may be that the internet is expanding the kinds of domains that can signal identity, driving the domain hierarchy to ever further reaches of minute refinement. Berger and Heath claim that the product choices that are typically used for identity signaling are “publicly visible and made from a large choice set and take time or effort to make.” Web 2.0 services seemed to make more product choices visible and thus potentially identity-signaling. Social networks also help give shape to the groups that we seek to belong to through consumer goods — the networks produce and disseminate meanings for goods that need not be engineered in advance but that add value to the products. Social networks give us a field to display our identity in and a compendium from which to learn possible meanings that can be displayed. These are becoming more and more refined all the time, so that everything has an identity component, and everything must be “shared” in order for the consumer to realize what identity value is there to be realized in a good.

At this point, identity itself becomes a highly wrought, labor-intensive product. It begins to play as a status good, helping others signal belonging and uniqueness through association with us, with our reified identity, and so on. It has become an object among objects in the field of advertising, of which social networks are merely an extension. This is what Web 2.0 is ultimately all about — making everything part of the code of identity and stripping away the autonomy of any of our choices. Instead, they all mean something that we may or may not intend, we may or may not want to have to worry about. 

That ties in to what is most disturbing about consumerism: how it appropriates consumption rituals and commercializes them, building in the priorities of capital directly into the social world and its material culture. It promises a paradoxical escape from being labeled by what we consume, by suggesting we can consume in isolation from society. But at the same time, that isolation makes us vulnerable, more prone to turn to advertisements in lieu of communities for a quick infusion of the social meanings none of us can exist without, regardless of what ideology tells us. The social hierarchies reproduced by consumerism are also engineered to suit capital, naturalizing the sorts of ritual consumption that suit its perpetuation: rather than potlatches and festivals, we orient our consumption through such ideas as invidious comparison, competitive conspicuous consumption and self-presentation as branding. Rather than use consumption to stabilize identity and render it secure, we end up using consumerism to chase the impossible dream of unfettered individuality, of identity that is entirely free of contingencies, of finding the goods that represent us and no one else for only those rare soul mates who can interpret them. We search and search for these people, destined never to find them, no matter how many fleeting glimpses of them we catch in the mirror.

Rob would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at horninggenbub [at] gmail [dot] com.