Consuming Technocultures: An Extended JCR Curation

Abstract

SIGNIFICANT TECHNOLOGIES AND WEBS Almost 50 years ago, the American anthropologist Geertz (1973) famously described culture as the “webs of significance” in which human beings are suspended, and which we ourselves have spun (5). Today, these webs are worldwide and technological. Through cell phones and facial recognition software, credit ratings, online banking, e-government, and social media, these interwoven webs of social, institutional, and economic significance affect every aspect of our lives. We continue to spin technological webs into increasingly sophisticated forms, to weave devices of information and communication into every aspect of our lives, and to further entangle ourselves in their multifarious snares. Consumer researchers have investigated technology consumption in its various manifestations—for example, looking at the multiple factors influencing whether or not consumers are ready to adopt technology ( Parasuraman 2000). For these purposes, technology has often been defined as the complex, engineered contraptions that characterize so much of the consumption in our contemporary society—things like laptop computers, web applications, and mobile phones. Influential philosophers and scholars of technology such as Heidegger (1954), Ellul (1964), and Mumford (1967) have tended to associate technology with the efficiency-driven techniques (or “techne”) and machines at work in a society. However, technology in its anthropological sense is much wider. Archaeologists find that human beings have been evolving along with our tools for at least the past 2.6 million years ( Semaw et al. 2003). For this reason, it is almost impossible “to imagine human beings as pretechnological” ( Nye 2006, 5). From an anthropologist’s point of view, tool making and increasing technology development are and have long been an essential part of being hominid, and from our contemporary perspective they are certainly a key part of being a consumer. Making and using ever more sophisticated things and assemblages of symbol-things is a hallmark element of consumer culture and its consumers, respectively.