3.5 Curated Consumption and the Aspirational Class
At the other end of the platform, there is the consumer, who either directly purchases a service, or simply spends their time on the platform’s content. In the former case, consumption is a straightforward act of monetary exchange; in the latter, to return to the communicative capitalism thesis, the consumer may be scrolling through Facebook or watching YouTube videos and is exposed to advertising. From an economic standpoint, any platform user is a consumer as they generate value for content producers, including bloggers, influencers, and others, by expending resources, namely, time, attention, and communication skills. For the platform economy, everyone who uses the internet is a potential customer whose resources can be exploited.
Consumer engagement with various activities online and ofline is frequently the result of psychological manipulation, such as clickbaiting or algorithmically recommending content which would engage the consumer with the platform for as long as possible. Yet the consumptive engagement with certain practices is also formative for one’s identity. In the context of a consumer society, expenditure of money, time, and resources are inextricably linked with who one is and what one does. This consumer identity is not independent of the actual conditions surrounding it, rather, individuals act as consumers against the backdrop of social representations, discourses, and values that shape “consumer subjectification” in specific ways (Schmitt et al., 2022: 76). In an economy of abundance of choice and diference, where everyone is supposed to “choose” what they want to be, the engagement with specific goods and services over others shapes social perceptions about identities (Skeggs, 2013). Crucially then, consumption not only reflects the consumer’s class background (e.g., “they eat in an expensive restaurant because they are rich”), but it also creates perceptions of class as through that consumers assume social positions and navigate values (“they eat in an expensive restaurant because they value quality”). Curated consumption, or consumption that is based on the guiding authority of experts, is a way to claim a consumer (and larger social) identity which is culturally refined. This refined identity can be shared, exchanged, and communicated, thereby constructing more uplifting perceptions of classed personhoods.
Before moving on, let us consider the broader relationship between consumption and identity through an aspect of curated consumption: the case of “ethical consumption”, which supposedly represents a distinct form of self-fashioning from the mainstream, if not a form of resistance to dominant values (Adams and Raisborough, 2010). By purchasing “ethical” brands and boycotting “unethical” ones, the ethical consumer can incorporate moral values into their purchasing decisions, such as veganism, environmentalism, anti-discrimination, and other tropes pertaining to some idea of justice. By consuming justly, the ethical consumer can tell themselves and others morally uplifting stories about their shopping habits given that there is a social space that afirms the significance of these stories (in certain social contexts a space for moral consumption is limited or may not even exist). These stories would make a claim to what Bourdieu famously theorized as “distinction”, that is, the privilege to be distinct in some way from the masses, which is a marker of social class (1987). As ethical consumption is embedded in commodity relations and new markets, it is also a target of market-based ideological encoding. For Sobande, this can entail “woke-washing”, or the appropriation of social movement ideals by corporations, which occurs when companies adopt “social justice rhetoric and representations in pursuit of profit”, capitalizing on diferent sorts of demands for justice (2019: 2724). This technique of value extraction can commodify social struggles, making their causes a sign of moral superiority in society’s competing perceptions of class belonging (Kanai and Gill, 2020: 2). The same is true for the greenwashing, queerbaiting, and pinkwashing campaigns of corporations, whereas the very same corporations may otherwise rely on cheap labor, lobbying, and exploitative relations of production. The ethical consumer legitimizes new consumptive identities by placing value on the ethical, and thus on the “right” over the “wrong” consumption practices. In this regard, apart from potentially activist, ethical consumption is also an ideologically ridden practice, insofar as it allows the consumer to hypothetically assert a morally superior self against other, inferior “functional” consumers. Thus, consumption ideology are the “ideas and ideals related to consumerism that are manifested in consumers’ social representations and expressed in their communicative actions in the marketplace”, where this ideology is expressive of broader perceptions of class, status, and identity (Schmitt, Brakus and Biraglia: 2022: 2). Whether it challenges capitalism or not, ethical consumption is capable of shaping these perceptions.
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Homo Curatorius