The Body and Technology: Discourses Shaping Consumer
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ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 The Body and Technology: Discourses Shaping Consumer Experience and Marketing Communications of Technological Products and Services Margo Buchanan-Oliver, The University of Auckland, New Zealand Angela Cruz , The University of Auckland, New Zealand Frontiers of thought in other disciplines, popular culture, and marketing communications are continually ‘re-visioning’ technology and influencing how consumers think about and experience technology-based products and services. Providing a glimpse into these frontiers, this paper re-introduces the body into theorisations of consumer-technology interaction and reviews interdisciplinary discourses shaping views of the body and technology. The key theoretical discourses of body-machine liminality, control and freedom, embodied interaction, and identity are discussed. These discourses expand conceptualisations of technology beyond a limiting focus on functional benefits, offering new frames and foundations for investigating consumer experience and marketing communications of technology-based offerings. [to cite]: Margo Buchanan-Oliver and Angela Cruz (2009) ,"The Body and Technology: Discourses Shaping Consumer Experience and Marketing Communications of Technological Products and Services", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 367-371. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/14183/volumes/v36/NA-36 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/. The Body and Technology: Discourses Shaping Consumer Experience and Marketing Communications of Technological Products and Services Margo Buchanan-Oliver, The University of Auckland, New Zealand Angela Cruz, The University of Auckland, New Zealand ABSTRACT Conversations around these issues have circulated in other Frontiers of thought in other disciplines, popular culture, and academic disciplines, popular imagination, and in marketing marketing communications are continually ‘re-visioning’ technology communications viz. Apple’s classic ‘1984’ advertisement (Scott and influencing how consumers think about and experience 1991). Ericsson’s ‘Designer Technology’ print campaign (Schroeder technology-based products and services. Providing a glimpse into and Dobers 2006), Sony’s print campaign for the Memory StickTM these frontiers, this paper re-introduces the body into theorisations (Venkatesh, Karababa, and Ger 2002), and Nike Lab’s ‘Les Jumelles’ of consumer-technology interaction and reviews interdisciplinary and ‘Eye(D)’ (Campbell, O’Driscoll, and Saren 2006) television discourses shaping views of the body and technology. The key commercials (TVC) have recently been analysed as exemplifying theoretical discourses of body-machine liminality, control and the merger of the body with technology. freedom, embodied interaction, and identity are discussed. These These explorations have emerged from a visual cultural discourses expand conceptualisations of technology beyond a approach in marketing communications research. Schroeder and limiting focus on functional benefits, offering new frames and Dobers (2006), for instance, illustrate how visual rhetoric is used in foundations for investigating consumer experience and marketing a range of print advertisements to represent information technologies communications of technology-based offerings. in increasingly corporeal ways, using the body as a means of anthropomorphising abstract technologies and rendering them INTRODUCTION familiar and accessible. Campbell et al. (2006) have presented a How do consumers understand and experience technology? brief typology of visual tropes used to represent the posthuman How do marketers and advertisers communicate these experiences technologised body, as exemplified in Nike’s TVC ‘Les Jumelles’. in a compelling way? In addressing these issues, present theorisations However, understanding visual rhetoric per se, while insightful, of consumer-technology interaction in marketing literature offer a requires contextualisation within existing discourses which inform narrow perspective, with a lack of attention to the body restricting the construction and interpretation of specific tropes. As Arnould the focus of marketing theory to the functional benefits of technology. and Thompson (2005, p. 869) note, these “manifestations of Underlying this pervasive disembodiment of the consumer is consumer culture are constituted, sustained, transformed, and shaped an assumed Cartesian dualism which not only separates the mind by broader historical forces (such as cultural narratives, myths, and from the body but also privileges the former over the latter. Such ideologies).” These discourses therefore provide a discursive context dualism is evident, for instance, in the assumption of a simple to ideologies articulated in consumer narratives around technology dichotomy between the online self and the physical self in explaining (Kozinets 2008). Conversely, as these discourses are largely consumers’ construction of online identities (Schau and Gilly implicated in the social construction of shared cultural meanings, 2003). However, this Cartesian dualism underlying dominant understanding these discourses also enhances understanding of the conceptions of the self in consumer research is profoundly unsettled wider psychological and socio-cultural implications of such by consumers’ interaction with increasingly ubiquitous technologies. representations in marketing communications. These can be linked Today, there is a proliferation of mechanical, digital, and biomedical to emerging works (Venkatesh et al. 2002; Giesler 2004; Giesler technologies which not only allow consumers to transform and and Venkatesh 2005) exploring the notion of ‘posthuman consumer communicate their bodies across time and space (e.g. avatars in culture’ as a theoretical lens for consumer research. Thus, an immersive virtual environments such as Second Life), transport awareness and understanding of these conversations about the body themselves beyond their immediate physical location (e.g. cell and technology frames not only visual rhetoric in marketing phones), but also increasingly merge with and enter consumers’ communications involving the body and technology, but also bodies in a more literal sense (e.g. pacemakers). Thus, such consumers’ phenomenological experience of technology. Clearly, interactions are destabilising the traditional mapping of the individual these are fundamental discourses which marketing theory cannot self onto a single biological body. afford to ignore. In addition, rather than a natural, pre-determined, and discretely- bounded entity, the body is increasingly revealed as a malleable and METHODOLOGY porous construction. Not only does the body function as a site for To uncover and clarify these discourses, key conceptual and multiple, shifting layers of cultural meaning (Schroeder and Dobers philosophical texts were selected based on their salience for lensing 2006), but its actual materiality is similarly elastic. Featherstone consumers’ embodied experience of technology. These were sourced (2000), for instance, sees body modification ranging from simple through keyword searches in online ACR proceedings and the ABI/ prosthetic devices to enhance body motor and sensory functions Inform database, and informed by the authors’ backgrounds in (e.g. spectacles), to the building of technological environments semiotics, literary theory, postmodern theory, and film, television, around the body, to the incorporation of technology into the body. and media studies, with further scans conducted through reference These interactions reveal a complex negotiation occurring in the lists and Google Scholar. These key works encompassed a range of boundary between the body and technology than is initially apparent disciplines including cybernetics, cognitive neuropsychology, media through a Cartesian-framed first glance. In essence, the ubiquity of studies, cultural studies and critical theory. machines and the diversity of consumers’ interactions with them A theoretical discourse analysis methodology guided the are dramatically dissolving the boundaries between the body and induction of discursive categories and related sub-themes from technology and raising fundamental questions about what it means these sources. From each text, main concepts and key themes were to be and to have a body, and what it means to be human, in an identified, which were then categorised into broader themes based environment saturated with technology. on perceived commonalities and linkages. A process of iteration 367 Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, © 2009 368 / The Body and Technology: Discourses Shaping Consumer Experience and Marketing between the emerging discursive categories and the source texts cybernetics and artificial life also illustrate the increasing divest- permitted the development of provisional categories, constructs, ment of human agency onto machines. and conceptual connections for subsequent exploration, thereby Liminality of form is also referenced in the increased plasticity aiding the induction of broader, underlying themes from these of a biological body in its