Publics
Discussion
Adam Arvidsson:
"Publics. “The popularity of communities on the Internet has captured the attentionof marketing professionals. Indeed, the word “community” seems poised to overtake “relationship” as that new marketing buzz-word. So-called “community brands” like the Geocities Web site (“home” of more than three million community members “living” in 41 neighborhoods”) provide communication media for hundreds and thousands of individuals who share common interests.” (McWilliam, 2001:43). This prophecy, taken from one of the pioneering articles to launch the concept of “communities” as a new way for marketers to conceive of and address the phenomenon of productive consumer action, was certainly right in predicting the success of this buzz word. (The Google NGRAM viewer shows how the frequency of the term ‘brand community’ in the English language books scanned by Google increases fourfold between 2000 and 2008. ) At the same time the frequent use of quotation marks seems to signal a certain hesitation about the semantic adequacy of this term. Because, clearly, phenomena like the now defunct Geocities web space with its ‘more than three million members’ are not to be understood as communities, at least not in anything that resembles the significance that that term has originally held in social theory (not to speak of Facebook or YouTube that are most definitely not communities). In social theory, the term ‘community’ denotes a social formation marked by dense webs of interpersonal interaction and a durable attachment to a shared territory or at least identity. It is certainly possible to find collective practices of productive consumption that take the form of communities. And arguably consumer research has come to privilege the study of such practices, as a result of its embrace of ethnography or ‘netnography’ (cf. Kozinets, 2010) as a methodological strategy. And it might be true that up until a decade ago the term community offered a more reasonable description of how consumers came together to create meaning and value around brands (, cf. Muniz & O’Guinn,2001), how people shared and co-created information online (in virtual communities, cf. Rheingold, 1993) and how knowledge workers worked together in collaborative communities, whether inside companies or in peer-to-peer networks.
But this term is no longer particularly representative of how collaborative processes of consumption/production function today. This is so for principally three reasons. First and at a very basic level, the shift in consumer culture form a reproductive to a productive phase, where it is expected of consumers that they make active use of commodities in creating individual life-style statements, something that sociologists have identified as a key feature of our times ever since the bygone days of ‘postmodernity’ (cf Featherstone, 1991), implies, per definition that productive consumer practices have entered as an ordinary pursuit on the part of ever more ordinary kinds of people. And while theorists of ‘the postododern0 might have exaggerated the representativeness of this ’tendency back in the 1980s, recent decades have produced a number of detailed studies that clearly show that such practices of productive consumption has become part of the ordinary business of, at least, the ‘New Class’ of knowledge workers (for an overview see Arvidsson, 2006). To put it simply, you do not need to be a member of a ‘community’ to engage in productive consumption, you are expected to do this, at some level of activity as part of your ordinary life course. Naturally this becoming generally productive of consumption has been aided by the mediatization of consumer culture, by global consumer culture and global brands by a flourishing DIY culture aided by a pletora of television chefs and reality shows dedicated to home decoration, and , of course, by the diffusion of internet connectivity. Internet and in particularsocial media have both greatly extended the number of people who participate in productive consumer practices and the ways in which they participate. If, in the 1990s, the principle way of participating in an creating value for a brand consisted in taking part in forums mailing lists and other participatory media that were biased to interpersonal interaction, today it is also possible, and far more common for consumers to create value for a brand by re-tweeting its communication of simply ‘liking’ its viral communications on Facebook. And there is accumulating evidence that most forms of online consumer action involve such looser and more transitory forms of engagements with brands and products: posting once or twice in a blog, looking up an online forum on motherhood to ask a question about a branded product and then never coming back again, liking something on Facebook and so on. And while marketing approaches tended to focus on the crucial role played by a small community of influencers (a community in the sense that they interact with each other) in creating and diffusing buzz and opinion, recent approaches that rely on the potential of big digital data, have instead pointed at the role of a large mass of loosely connectedindividuals. Watts & Dunn, for example, argue that information diffusion is driven “not by influentials but by a critical mass of easily influenced individuals” (Watts and Dodds 2007: 441, cf. Brown &Reingen, 1987). Such, ‘accidental influencers’, as they call them, are not connected to each other by strong webs of interpersonal interaction, but by weaker forms of mediated association (like re-tweeting a message). Consequently marketing strategies aim at discovering and promoting the abilityof such loosely associated individuals to create buzz in a coordinated way (Hansen et al, 2011, Pekka, 2010), to enhance the ‘network value’ or such associations, (Domingos& Richardson, 2011, Cha, 2010).
Such loose and fragmented forms of attention are difficult to subsume under the term community, because they do not involve sustained relations of interpersonal interaction with other members.(And there is accumulating evidence that when such direct forms of interaction do occur, ‘membership’is highly transitory. For example, only 58 per cent of those who have posted one time in a usenet group have subsequently reposted, and World of Warcraft guilds lose, on average 25 per cent of their members per month, Arguello, et al, 2006, Ducheneaut, et al, 2005).
Second, to create such wide and loose forms of association among consumers also seems to be the aim of contemporary brand management. Asian brands for example, aim to create a diffuse sensation of imagined belonging to a – difficult to localize – Asian identity, that thus fosters ‘ new kinds of social relations, enabling connections between people who may have never seen each other yet come to shared sense of moral responsibility towards the brand and the community to which they perceive themselves as belonging’(Cayla& Eckhardt, 2008:216). In a similar vein both Lury (2004) and Arvidsson (2006), along with a long list of marketing practitioners have pointed at how contemporary brand management aims at creating affective connections among consumers. But affective connections do not presuppose or direct interaction. Rather, as already GabrileTarde pointed out, affective connections depend on the media to foster a ‘mental union’ a communion mentale among participants to a public without them needing to actually interact with each other,as when a cinema audience is grasped by a common affective intensity, or when the 49 million fans of the Korean pop band Super Junior, gasp in unison as the lead singer shakes his hips (Shim, 2006, cf. Kittler, 1990). And as recent theories of brand management suggests, both critical and practitioner oriented, it is precisely in the formation of such disembodied affective associations that value creation occurs.
It is of course possible to call such forms of loose association ‘communities’ (imagined communities, perhaps, Anderson, 1983, Cohen, 1985), but there already exists another social science term for such ‘community without propinquity’ (Calhoun, 1997, cf. Webber, 1963). And incidentally this term also describes how information is created and re-elaborated as it circulates: this term is a ‘public’.
Too Gabriel Tarde, who made a point about the social and economic salience of publics already in 1901, a public is a mediated association amongst strangers who are united by a however momentary affective intensity that is directed towards a common thing (a brand, a celebrity, a news story). Publics are thus weaker forms of association than communities and participation in a public might be less enduring, one is part of a public while reading the newspaper or while clicking on the like button on Coca Cola’s Facebook page. And the effects of such participation on identity might be much more transitory and, above all, weaker. Along with these socio-psychological features of publics, publics also designate a different structure of communication. A community is based on direct interaction among its members. And while such forms of direct interaction might exist among members of a public as well, what makes them members of a public is not their interaction with each other but their common devotion to the thing in common that constitutes the public, the communion mentale that they can form around it (cf. Tarde, 1989 [1901]).
This thing can consist in a common focus of attention, as when a theatre public goes silent as the curtain opens. It can consist in something more substantial, like a devotion to a common cause (like in the case of a working class public held together by a common political identity). Publics are held together by what moral philosopher Charles Taylor calls a social imaginary, that confers however a weak experience of community among members of a public (‘we are the citizens of France’, ‘we are the true wine connoisseurs’ ‘we defend open software against corporate profit motives’, Taylor, 2004).
But this absence of direct interaction does not necessarily mean that publics are orchestrated form the top down. Some publics might be, in particular those that rely on centralized masscommunication. But, as Chris Kelty(2010) and others have suggested, the kinds of publics that develop with digital media tend to be what he calls ‘recursive publics’. That is, they are united by a common social imaginary that is, in turn, created and re-elaborated by the members themselves. Such recursive publics are self-organized entities. They are constituted - tautologically- by their ability to organize and maintain the particular imaginary that makes them into publics. As Michael Warner (2002:56) puts it ‘a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse’, that is, by the circulation of utterances (in some form of another) that always already understand themselves as addressing the particular public that they are indeed addressing. (And the creation of such ‘circulation of discourse’, and not of tightly knit communities, was precisely what already ArjunAppadurai(1986) described as the cultural effects of the global circulation of commodities.)
Of course in the case of consumer publics, the degree of autonomy and self-determination on the part of publics naturally depends on the success with which corporate actors are able to control and orchestrate the socialimaginary that unites them. However the frequency with which marketing discourse addresses consumer publics as ungovernable, chaotic or uncontrollable suggests that such autonomy is difficult to completely eradicate (cf. Zwick et al, 2008).
In any case, as asocial form, publics suggest a different modality of co-creation than a community. Simply put, in a community members co-create by cooperating with each other directly. And while such forms of co-creationmight be a feature of consumerpublics, the main modality of creation is different. In a public, the ideal-typical way of co-creating consists in individual, or sub group appropriations and re-elaborationsof common resources that are subsequently put back into the common domain. Creation in publics is thus not an interpersonal, as much as it is a common pursuit, uniting a multitude of local and small scale elaborations that might occur independently of each other, around a common interest or goal.To my mind this seems much more logical as a description of how productive consumption works, and much more in line with existing empirical research (and, incidentally it is also the model of co-creation that is emerging in studies of Free Software and ‘large scale collaborative creativity mong knowledge workers’, Kelty, 2010, Adler & Chen, 2011). While some consumers might form communities around say the Apple brand, the co-creationof a valuable Apple brand equity is not the effect of all Apple consumers co-operating directly with each other, but of the ability of the Apple platform to connect individual or small-scale community based forms of cooperation into a common public united around a common social imaginary. (And it was precisely this ability to foster an experience of communality in the absence of community that Bernard Cova (1997) pointed to by his concept of the ‘linking value’ of commodities.) I would suggest that such communality without community is a core feature of contemporary consumer culture, and it also a core feature of publics, as Gabriel Tarde’sdescribed them.
So, at a first level, publics seem to offer a more empirically adequate description of the social forms in which contemporary productive consumption takes place, at least in its manifestation as a mass phenomenon. But the concept of publics also allows us to think through the issue of value creation in more innovative ways. "
Source
- Article. Adam Arvidsson. The Potential of Consumer Publics. Ephemera.