SOCA3666 Summary Notes

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SOCA 3666 Course notes
Consumption And Everyday Life (University of Newcastle (Australia))
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SOCA 3666 -
CONSUMPTION, TECH
& EVERYDAY LIFE
COURSE NOTES
2022

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Topic 1 - What is ‘Consumption’ and What is ‘Technology’?

Or why do people panic buy toilet paper in a pandemic?
Lecture 1
Consumption: The Basics
Everyday Life?
• In this course, it’s not just the things we do with frequency everyday.
• What we take for granted, the situations we are in, our experiences, form our responses to
society, community and our lives
• Beyond binaries, consumption and technology influence our everyday lives
• It’s a sociological notion of ‘everyday life’ that challenges us to look beyond the taken for
granted, to make the normal look strange.
• Here, we need to understand the ‘everyday’ as a plethora of dialogues, decisions, moments,

situations, feelings, affects, ethics, values and morals… that is ‘multiple paradoxes’.
• Think beyond binaries, or at least between them, or with multiple: agency/structure,

public/private, global/local, wants/needs, savvy/suckers, nature/culture, real/digital, etc.
Consumption: A Way of life?
• “We are all consumers now”
• Beyond eating and drinking, consumption is watching a TV show or listening to a song from a
sociological view. This is out social identity and how we view others.
• Some argue that globally as many people now die of over-consumption (obesity, heart
disease etc.) related issues as under-consumption issues (no water, food, shelter etc.)
• All of the things we consume have a back story, each of the stories and social effects include
consumption
• Creation of self identity through ‘consumption play’ and making distinctions between/from
others
• “Consumption” here moves beyond just what we eat and drink.
• The stuff you buy, the books you read, the music you listen to, the TV/films you watch, the
platforms you click etc. are all forms of consumption.
The Consumer?
• This course looks at the way we consume that considers both acts of consumption and
processes of consumption.
• The act of consumption usually happens in a transaction at a shop or on a computer screen,

can happen in your bedroom or at a music festival, but there is a process that leads the
consumer to that point.
• It is the process that is most interesting: this course tries to negotiate the contradicting ideas
that consumers are either mindless cultural dupes, or, creative and free to construct their

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own identity. Acts of consumption happen in specific spaces such as in a store, in bed, at a
concert etc.
• Technology is crucial as it bring consumption to us immediately, the delay has moved to the
receiving side. Capitalism allows to spend money ASAP but you wait for the receivables. The
progress enables rapid spending and consumption can happen everywhere, much less social
interaction, social aspects disappear.
History of consumer theory
• Consumption was first studied along political economy lines as a ‘result’ of production.
• After, the ‘cultural turn’ consumption started to be studied symbolically as a form of culture
in and of itself.
• Anthropological: Gifts and Rituals
• Conspicuous consumption (Veblen)
• Blasé attitudes (Simmel)
• Critical theory (Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin etc)
• Semiotics (Barthes, Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding) – cultural aspects of products rather

than their use – symbolise different things through different people
• Distinction (Bourdieu) – judge people based on their likes or dislikes and what we align with
• Patronage, social power, what people consume, who has the power to give and receive and
is consumption a display of power
“Choice” and Identity
• Do we have ‘choice’? – how many choices do we really have?
• What influences our ‘choices’? How do friends/ parents influence this and orients you
towards the world
• Do your choices express ‘you’? are you what you wear, how much is self-expression?
• Are you what you wear (or what you don’t)?
• I consume, therefore I am? Ideological idea that we are spoon-fed concepts
• Authentic self vs. Manipulated aspirations
• Choice – Taste – Distinction
• Our socialisation leads to tastes and lifestyles; our perception of normality and comfort; and
our perception of others.

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Lecture 2:
Technology: The Basics
Technology: a way of life?
• We tend to think of technology as 21st Century objects and the networks powering them:
computers, censors, iphones, streaming, social media platforms. This is our default way of
thinking of technology.
• These objects generate a feeling of deep transformation in everyday life.
• It is common to hear people say things like: "well, that was before the Internet so we had to
use a map" OR "in my day you used to have to meet people face to face" OR 'technology is
ruining society" OR "I need to disconnect for a while and get my head together" ETC. A map
is a technology. Construct their social world, is it ruining society and education? Do we need
to go off grid.
• These ideas are important. It feels as if technology is now such a deep part of everyday life
that it is impossible to imagine everyday life without it.
• Technology doesn’t need electricity, it could be a public space, a road etc. Contemporary
technology is considered digital devices. Two models, world before smart phones v after.
• However, our popular contemporary view of technology ushers in a bimodal logic: the world
before/ the world after.
• We need to consider the deep history of technology as essential to social evolution, from the
wheel to the shoe to the driver-less car. Respond to and shape society.
• Definition: an artificial means to introduce natural power (including ‘hard’ forces like energy
and materials and ‘soft’ forces like natural phenomena –e.g., wind—and inherent properties
in nature) in order to achieve a specific objective efficiently or at a greater scale. “natural
power” hard forces like energy, soft forces like wind and nature.
• Harder to identity requirements for technologies, the statistics, the mining, the electricity
used to power Finland. How to we make life work more efficiently.
• Two parts to this 'instrumentality' [attempts to control human environments] and

'productivity' [attempts to bring new things into existence]. Make life better or easier, e.g.
the fridge, this has changed where food travels from how we eat it, the market for eating it.
• Air conditioners, controlling our environment.
• Technology is human fabrication.
• The lithium battery, prefer that phones weren’t constructed from human slavery. Technology
makes “our” lives easier but not the child being forced to make the phone. How it
technology entangled in this.
• However, technology will not always comply with human expectations and demands and
there are human limits to technological control despite technology being the product of
human invention. Technology inseparable from human society. It might be called a human-
technological system or socio-technological system. There are limits to technological control,
AI control. Production of power leads to climate change. Technology producing electricity has
gotten out of control.

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• The car was a limited technology, due to income, demand this has become out of control.
Freedom associated with owing a car, we are now dependent of them.
• In the 21st Century, sociological, anthropological and philosophical conversations about

technology have moved from ‘what is technology’ to ‘what are the relations between
technology and human beings and society’ to, more recently: ‘does technology have agency
of its own beyond human intervention’ and ‘can technology be trusted’?
• The idea of trust is crucial, trust keeps society together. We trust other car drivers to be on
the road with them. Phones are tracking us, data is being sold, our workplace, KPIs now have
this other agency that interrupts trust. We fly in planes; however, the main command is a
computer.
• These questions reflect ideas we will return to during the course.
• It can certainly feel like technology has broken out from the lab and can no longer be tamed,
especially when we think about artificial intelligence, endless data production, drones, and
the power of sensors and surveillance.
• The COVID dog, would maintain social distancing, facial recognition to enforce lockdown.
Disciplinary technology, used to maintain control within the society, removes the police
officer from the equation and reduces the risk for them.
Technology and Social Science Disciplines
• Technology has a long history in sociology from Marx to Latour. For a great history
see: Gunderson, Ryan. "The sociology of technology before the turn to technology."
Technology in society 47 (2016): 40-48.
• Here is a fantastic quote from Peter Redfield that really sums up what social approaches to
technology can offer:
“By explicitly concentrating on knowledge and tools, key symbolic and material aspects that
constitute modern life, the social study of science and technology offers a natural gateway into the
spatial distribution of modernity. (who has what, how taken for granted are these technologies.)
Thus, for all their neutralizing elements, laboratories and machines are not simply neutral. And
science and technology outside the core, probes and instruments outside laboratory walls, and
machines […] operate amid a welter of climates and encounters, observing and influencing, acting
and malfunctioning. (Contextually experience, phone, laptop or surveillance – experience is very
uneven).
In following such phenomena, one encounters a world of natural and social places amid the
technical space of science, (it’s not all encompassing, there are other importants aspects of life to
focus on) remnants of an older space of knowledge-the field-a space that can in turn reveal human
terrains hidden behind the tools of the laboratory; for while modern sensibilities may stress pure
categories, modern technologies rarely keep still, and bearing down their specific intersections often
leads one far afield, across conceptual and disciplinary boundaries and between ideas and actions.”
pp. 255-6
• Redfield, Peter. "Beneath a modern sky: Space technology and its place on the ground."
Science, Technology, & Human Values 21, no. 3 (1996): 251-274.
Universal Technology?

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• Crucially, despite convergence, there is no universal experience of technology.
• Even now. Technology is experienced in place.
• We must also be careful of linear trajectories of time. The idea of leaders and followers is
complicated by the ways technology ‘jumps’ scale and temporality.
• Thus, it is common in many parts of the world to have a smartphone but lack a water
connection, a laptop but not reliable street lights, connection to hundreds of followers on
Instagram but no wet season road connection to the next city, online trading from a mobile
phone in a hospital waiting room but no doctor to treat the ill sibling sitting in the next seat.
• When viewed globally, technology both overcomes and exacerbates inequalities.
• We also need to consider the ways technology is shaped (and mimicked) by labour in
different parts of the world. We tend to think that all technology emanates from Silicon
Valley, Japan, Germany, and China.
• Yet the technology workforce is global; image tagging in Kenya, click-farming in

Bangladesh, chat-bot handling in India.
Technology and Identity (present)
• There are some very obvious connections between technology and identity.
• Let’s start with the present:
• If we think of technology as high-end consumer products, then these products are the focus
of human desire.
• Possessing these products gives consumers a sense of identity; of belonging, of modernity,

of upward mobility. Possessing the products is important to society.
• We also use technology to curate our identity through networks media; what we like, where
we've been, what we ate, even how we look—and we will discuss this a lot in the course.
• Associate traits, homologies with what products or brands people are using. Using an apple
mac rather than a HP laptop.
• We can also think of this relationship in another way: contemporary technology is

fundamental in confirming our identity and tracking our movements, habits, wealth, health,
ownership etc.
• QR codes, facial recognition, fingerprint swipes, holographic images (on passports for e.g.),
and other biometric data becomes essential for proving who we are, our citizenship, our
right to movement AND also makes life very difficult for people who are not—or yet to be—
enrolled in these technologies.
• There is a long history to this too; from census data to permanent addresses to family tree
diagrams held at the synagogue, mosque or church.
• Vaccines, passports, right to movement. Do they meet the social requirements. The
biometrics.

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Technology and Identity (Past)
• The Past:
• Technology as consumable products that shape, and are shaped by, human desire have a
long history.
• From personal items like radios, cars, and television to technologies in the built environment
—“my building has an elevator”, and technologies of movement—“my grandfather travelled
by ship to Australia, I travel by plane” who was part of modern society and who was left
behind?
• When materialised as objects technology affords the opportunity to differentiate and

separate self from others.
• We can go back even further. Clothes made by machine rather than by hand; books printed
in a press not hand copied, plastic bowls not ceramic (“they bounce!”). And back and back
we go. Cart drawn plough over hard turned soil, etc.
• The limits here come down to when we believe technology becomes commonly manifest as
objects for consumption and when we believe identity becomes an important part of human
societies.
• These are deep and complex historical, sociological and anthropological questions—beyond
what we can do in this course.
• Just take our word for it; the connection is deep, and old.

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Lecture 3:
Toilet Paper as ‘Civilisation’?
Toilet paper and civilisation
• Throughout the pandemic, there have been many instances of panic buying of toilet paper,
with images of bare shelves and fights over TP making the news across the world.
• Stratton argues that “panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western
civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the
loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation”.
Fear of running out of toilet paper, social practices and anxiety. “is your house clean”
• “If we run out of toilet paper we feel that a key moment of etiquette has been breached. If
we visit a home where there is no toilet paper we think that the person/people living there
has failed, for whatever reason, to keep a proper household. A lack of toilet paper is worse
than a sink full of unwashed crockery. (unorganized and unclean, however dirty dishes, too
busy, working hard) It is a signal that civilised behaviour, manners, has broken down, and the
next step is the breakdown of social order.”
‘Civilisation’
• Stratton: “The link with civilisation means also that for people brought up in Western culture
it is taken for granted that using squat toilets and cleansing with water is considered
shocking and disgusting and, indeed, uncivilized”
• “the panic buying of toilet rolls was pervasive in countries of the West and places which had
been impacted by colonization” – one object that determines is your body clean. India
ordering grain and western society ordering toilet paper. Squat toilets are very common
throughout the world.
• Norbert Elias: “this concept [civilisation] expresses the self-consciousness of the West. . .. It
sums up everything in which Western society of the last two or three centuries believes itself
superior to earlier societies or ‘more primitive’ contemporary ones” – hygiene, civilised v
uncivilized
• Guns panic buying in the US – was feature of the pandemic, what was purchased or ordered
defines what is important to that society. The minorities where purchasing the guns.
• Paper wiping vs water cleaning: water seems to be more effective, yet people in the West
see it as unhygienic and therefore uncivilized.
TP and the apocalypse
• In the US, while TP was panic bought, not as much as guns and weed.
• It seems therefore that what was panic bought seemed to represent key anxieties of each
county or society, related to different anxieties of social breakdown.
• Panic buying, stoned Netflix-binging, buying guns because of fear of racist violence are all
forms of consumption that relate to cultural norms, social inequalities, and technological
availability.
TP history

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• Differences between cleanliness and hygiene.
• Stratton – “While hygiene and cleanliness are very different, the one related to medicine,
and thought of in scientific terms as having an absolute quality, the other related to culture,
as Freud suggests they do overlap in practice”.
• “In that overlap between cleanliness and hygiene the threat of the coronavirus is thought of
in terms of uncleanliness, and as such is a threat to social order. Consequently, the spread of
the virus has an implicit apocalyptic quality related to social breakdown and the end of
civilisation. Toilet paper is the means to keep the uncleanliness, and the pollution it causes
including the coronavirus, at bay. From this point of view the hoarding of toilet paper is an
attempt to save civilisation”.
• Scarcity triggers of TP
TP: Consumption and Technology
AS CONSUMPTION
• Cultural dupes of panic buying?
• Distinction of TP?
• Modern/Development etc
• Different brands of TP
• Rise of 'friendly’ TP: who gives a crap
• Joke and novelty TP
• Some people colour code their TP dependent on their bathroom design
• Folders vs Scrunchers
• Semiotics of TP?
• TP was memeified and satirised (cakes!) in the pandemic
• Different things were panic bought in different countries
AS TECHNOLOGY
TP a deep transformation of everyday life; instrumental
TP entangled in: urban technologies
• Pipes/ Sewage [not all pipes can handle TP]
• Treatment works/ sewage plants / water supply
• High Tech Toilets
• TP itself [bleached vs unbleached]
TP entangled in: global resource extraction & logistics:
• Timber/ plantations [land clearing, fertilizers]

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• Shipping / Processing [palettes, cargo, shipping containers]
TP is not universal.
• Squat toilets
• Bidets/ Hose/ Water bucket
• Civilisational marker or not?

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Topic 2 - The Comfort of Things.

Or, why McDonalds might not be so bad (just joking, it’s terrible)
Lecture 1:
A Theory of shopping
An Anthropological view: Daniel Miller – how consumption practises have distinction and why do
we need them to function in our lives
• For Miller, ‘things’ have always played a deeply important role in what it means to be human.
• ‘Things’ do ‘cultural work’ – following Bourdieu, Miller argues ‘things’ represent social
difference, establish one’s social identity and manage social status – just like they have
always done in all cultures!
• Consumer goods form and delineate cultural meanings that create self and culture.
• Give personal meaning to something we exchange: for pleasure, for identity, for money, as a
gift or as sacrifice. Bound within consumer exchanges. Our things become who we are. They
become who we are emotionally. Central to how we think about ourselves.
• Incorporating ourselves into a product; it is becoming part of us: safety and comfort, identity,
meaning, nostalgia etc.
The Gift
• The study of gifts has been central to anthropology and culture in general.
• What are some of the things that you think of when buying a gift for someone:
• How much are you going to spend? (how much are they ‘worth’!)
• What do they like? What was the last gift they have to you?
• Social calculations, the social damage for not participating
• Are you willing to buy something for someone if you don’t like it (or them!)?
• What does this thing I’m giving this person say about me?
• If I buy this as joke, will they find it funny?
• Bourdieu: ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’!
• Interpersonal relationships, the things we like and don’t like classify yourselves and same as
other people. Emotional relationship that we have with people and how it associates with
the gift. Much consumption is about everyday sacrifice.
‘The Poverty of Morality’
• Miller maintains that the critique of consumption is bound up with ideological and moral
critiques of capitalism that associate consumption with production and ignore the way
people actually live there day-to-day lives, and certainly oversimplifies the differences
between positive and negative experiences of consumption. Cultural dupes, consumption on
a basic level is food etc. women normally bare this weight.

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• “At one level most consumption is about basic household provisioning, as in food or clothing.
More deeply, it is also about the intensity of relationships with the people you care most
about or live with, about status and local symbolic systems”.
• (From Consumption and its Consequences 2012: 158).
‘Materiality’
• When Miller speaks of ‘materiality’, he is not just talking about our possession, collection or
attachment to ‘artefacts’, and is not associating with the pejorative term ‘materialism’. Not
just the things themselves, existence and emotions associated with them.
• He is considering the meanings, emotions, affects, relationships, rituals, comforts, security,

order and communication our things provide.
• Things are culture. How we function and set up norms.
• For Miller, what it means to be human always has and always will contain elements of
materiality – regardless of what ideology is dominant.
‘Housewives’ shopping
• Miller studied the shopping practices of UK ‘housewives’.
• In Miller’s study of shopping in London he argued “that while our rhetoric of commodity
purchase is that it is about individualism, hedonism and materialism, the reality is that most
shopping is by self-sacrificing housewives provisioning for their family”. Any budgetary
constraints its usually the mother who self-sacrifices.
• He didn’t see conspicuous consumerism or materialism, but a concern for the family,
concern for saving money and self-sacrificing behaviour that favoured looking after the
needs and wants of the family over their own.
• Most societies are about provisions.
• Constant tension about what will make the family happy and what could be afforded.
• When money is tight, it is always the mother who self-sacrifices consumer pleasure.
Jeans
• Miller did a deep ethnographic study of jeans, which many people wear all over the world.
• He argues that they are so well liked because they do not stand out in a crowd and express
nothing – they do not make a statement.
• In that context, jeans create an egalitarian effect and are adopted because people do not
want to make a fool of themselves through some personalized expressive statement. Form of
distinction as well, having a Camry and not a corolla – targeted to people “who don’t care
about cars” – your participating without even realising.
• Here, so called conformity is an act of agency.

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Lecture 2:
The Comforts of Thing
The Comfort of Things
• For The Comfort of Things, Miller researched 100 houses in a typical London street and
writes 30 ‘portraits’.
• This is a beautifully written book that I would recommend to anyone whether they are
interested in sociology or not.
• The opening portrait in ‘Empty’ of ‘George’ is devastating, but much of the book is a
celebration of the ups and downs of life, where things give our lives meaning, security and
comfort and things mediate our relationships with others.
George
• “George’s flat was disorientating not because of anything that was in it, but precisely
because it contained nothing at all. Beyond the most basic carpet and furniture… During our
time on this street we heard and encountered many tragedies, people who faced all manners
of diseases and degradations, who nearly died, who actually died, whose children had been
killed. There is no escaping the horror and tragedy in the interior of people’s lives. But it was
particularly after meeting George that we found ourselves in tears after leaving his flat.
Because in every other instance there was a sense that, at least, that person had once lived.
With George, by contrast, one could simply not escape the conclusion that this was a man,
more or less waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who at an age of seventy-six had
never yet seen his life actually begin. And, worse still, he knew it”.
• Absence of things in Georges house, he never lived. Very lonely didn’t have a lot of
memories, like of materiality.
‘McDonald’s truly happy meals’
• Marina saw her parents as cold, distant, accusing: “a façade of icy politeness and refusal to
discuss anything” and that in defiance “she knew with absolute clarity almost everything
she did not want to become”.
• When Marina became a parent herself she felt that ‘what she owed to her parents was a
masterclass in how not to be a parent’.
• In repudiation of her parents snobby interest in antique furniture, she ‘went and bought my
child's chest of drawers from IKEA, and I bought it from IKEA because it was easy to open the
drawers, you know. And it was good, and I could build it myself and it was 200 pounds, not
one for 600 pounds that didn’t work and smelt and probably had worms’.
• Her mother’s reaction was ‘as if I had spat in her face’ (a reaction she enjoyed) – the deep
emotional connection with things – relates to ideology
• To move away from the cold meal times she experienced with her parents, Marina actively
uses McDonald’s happy meals to bond with her children, collecting the toys, watching the
tie-in movies and helping them learn through them.
• For instance, the McDonald’s Snoopy collection represented 30 different nationalities, and
the children would look up the nationalities in books as a result.

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• The family developed rituals around the meals where they would eat, play with the figures,
put on the stickers: ‘This was fast food, but not a fast meal’.
Class?
• Marina is ‘well aware of the virtual class war which erupts around these issues of taste. Her
middle-class friends try to persuade her that McDonalds’ hamburgers are largely composed
of animal brains”.
• “But she, in turn, disparages the way they try to take their children to unsuitable restaurants:
“I mean they’re just little monkeys really, you can’t enjoy a meal with children of that age,
they throw everything on the floor”’.
• Note: not all meals were Maccas! It was once a week or so…
• Playgrounds in McDonalds now and pubs, kids get fast food and parents get slow meals while
their kids are entertained.
‘Heroin’
• Working class ‘Dave’ tells Miller how his photo albums and music collection were central to
kicking heroin.
• ‘It was the sheer weight of these material resources that seemed to keep Dave from floating
off in this haze of drink, heroin and depression. Their weight lay in their specificity. Each CD
album contained a multitude of tracks, each photo album was full of images, and every track
and every image was grounded in a particular memory of time’.
• For Dave he used these as a crotch and why he needs to stay off drugs, enabling strength and
the meaning attached to these moment in his lives.
The Comfort of Things
• Miller: “In my research it becomes clear that the people who develop strong and multiple
relationships with things are the same people who develop strong and multiple
relationships with people. While those who find it difficult to maintain their relationships
with commodities are the same people who have problems maintaining their relationships
with other persons” (quote from ‘What’s wrong with consumption’).
• Inverts the way that people have no connection to people and just things
• This is a controversial idea that inverses the dominant ways of thinking about consumerism –
i.e., that people are seduced in to going into debt to buy things that they don’t need to
impress people that they don’t like.
• Miller is arguing the opposite.
From The Comfort of Things (p163)
• ‘Material things in general have a strange and little understood humility. After all, objects are
concrete, up front, evident to the eye. Yet they work generally as background, as that which
frames behaviour and atmosphere, and they do this job best when they are not noticed. You
compliment the painting; you are not supposed to notice the frame. You tell a woman she
is beautiful, not only that her make-up is brilliant. You comment that the room has

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atmosphere, but you don’t just discuss the wall paper. Objects are artful; they hide their
power to determine the way you feel’.
• Effects and the way we form orientation towards each other through objects and things.
Situating things that are supposed to be within our lives, emotional effective things. There
are objects throughout many societies.
• When it comes to studying ‘things’: ‘our job is to confront and expose this crafty life of
things’.
• Photo example, fun things arise we pay to remember that experience.

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Lecture 3:
Discussing the ‘goods and bads’ of consumption and consumer
culture – David Miller
Consumption matters
• Can one be a cultural dupe and a self-sacrificing gift giver at the same time?
• Advertising may make me aware of something a friend may like to own: am I being duped
here?
• Can an act of conformity be an act of agency? (Jeans)
• Can shopping ever be ethical?
• How does the rise of digital technology affect Miller’s ‘comfort of things’?
• Consumption levels in the ‘minority world’ are deeply unsustainable, as we will look at
towards the end of the course.
Consumption and its Consequences (2012)
• The link is to a short video of Miller talking about his book: Consumption and its
Consequences.
• Miller speaks: http://vimeo.com/38910408
• This book starts and ends with a hypothetical discussion between an environmentalist who
argues that consumerism is excessive and must be cut back; a socialist who argues that
consumerism expresses various tensions within the market economy; an anthropologist who
argues, like Miller, that people’s consumption is understandable and that as far as the third
world is concerned, people need to consume more, not less.
• The first chapter outlines various sides of the debate about consumerism, the last tries to
reach for some conclusions to the environmental problems created by consumerism.
Conclusion
• I (Steve) love Miller’s work while not necessarily agreeing with it all.
• He is generous and deeply humanistic.
• His work provides an essential understanding of the way we live our lives that evades the
monolithic theories of dupes and suckers, or conspicuous and distinction-based displays.
• But his work is also problematic: despite some suggestions in his latest work, he struggles to
provide solutions to overconsumption and the coming nexus of problems discussed later in
the course.

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Topic 3 - Humans, Technology and Things

Or, does technology serve you or do you serve it?
Lecture 1:
Humans and Technology: The Basics
Humans and Technology
• Recapping from Week 1
• Definition: an artificial means to introduce natural power (including ‘hard’ forces like energy
and materials and ‘soft’ forces like natural phenomena –e.g. wind—and inherent properties
in nature) in order to achieve a specific objective efficiently or at a greater scale.
• Two parts to this 'instrumentality' [attempts to control human environments] and

'productivity' [attempts to bring new things into existence].
• Technology is human fabrication.
• However, technology inseparable from human society. It might be called a human-

technological system or socio-technological system. Technology is considered not a human
thing, the idea that technology is entangled within society.
Uneveness
• Technology is experienced in place.
• In context, technology always depends on where you are and how we have to improvise to
use technology.
• We must also be careful of linear trajectories of time. The idea of leaders and followers is
complicated by the ways technology ‘jumps’ scale and temporality.
• Thus, it is common in many parts of the world to have a smartphone but lack a water
connection, a laptop but not reliable streetlights, connection to hundreds of followers on
Instagram but no wet season road connection to the next city, online trading from a mobile
phone in a hospital waiting room but no doctor to treat the ill sibling sitting in the next seat.
• When viewed globally, technology both overcomes and exacerbates

inequalities. Consumerism and stuff, stems from human desires. How science and medicine
started.
100 Objects
• Technology has a long history, arguably as long as human history. Depending on the
definition of technology.
• BBC’s History of the World in 100 Objects podcast series and web resources really help
illuminate this.
• It is neat, chronological, and there is lots to consider and disagree with.
• Some of the object seem to be less about technology at first glance, and many technologies
are not captured in object per se and many of the object as representations of human
events, but the chronology is really helpful for us in this course because it leads us to the
question:

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• What is particular about now?
• Is our relationship with technology fundamentally different to other eras?
• Socially? Philosophically? Ethically?
• This is an open question, and one that is asked more and more as things considered outside
technology; person to person relationships, intimacy, intelligence, are seemingly become the
domain of machines.
Should we be afraid?
• Technophobia: the fear of new technologies has a long history in human societies
• However, eventually that fear reduces—though it may persist on the fringes, smart phones,
planes, cars – people become more accepting
• Is acceptance inevitable? Always a challenge and always debates never neutral
• Or does it depend on the technology in question?
• Or the society in question?
• Or both?
• Cal Newport (Prof of Computer Science at Georgetown) has been a strong advocate that our
relationship to digital devices is broken. Very strong advocator of the internet. Am I a
technophobe?
• He argues that this differs from past technophobia directed at electricity or car for example,
because phobia reduced once use was widespread and come from people with limited
understanding of the technology
• Stems from a lack of understanding or come from the more people that use them or both?
• Newport argues that contemporary technophobia comes after widespread adoption and
from insiders (like him), who boosted the Internet and networked societies
• For a short version see Wired

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Lecture 2:
Make it STOP! Entanglements
Entanglement I
• Entanglement is as it sounds; humans and technologies that produce things and connect us
to one another are entangled; twisted together in ways that are difficult to pinpoint. As a
consequence, difficult to untangle.
• This sounds obvious but it is not always been considered this way. Even as recently as 50
years ago it was common to think of humans as holding all the agency over things and
technologies.
• Humans created and used technology to improve their lives and when that technology was
redundant, humans moved on. Relationship of domination and overuse. Idea that we are
separate.
• Or if that technology proved to be harmful, humans were able to change course.
• This view is still common in public discourse from time to time; we can fix things [perhaps
with more technology], e.g. we can solve climate change by changing the light bulbs we use,
for e.g., or by using electric cars.
• We can create treaties to stop the use of harmful weapons, banning landmines for instance
(though adherence and enforcement are complex).
• Listen out for this language in everyday life.
• However most sociological thinking, along with other fields like philosophy, anthropology,
geography and science and technology studies have moved onto much more complex ways
of thinking about the relationships between humans and things.
Entanglement II
• Entanglement has become a common way to think about the mutual relationships between
humans and things, relationships that are ‘mutually constitutive’
• It is useful to think of entanglement as a spectrum; both ‘out there’ in the world and in social
theory. Entangled in deep v shallow ways depending on where you are and what is being
entangled
• Let’s go to the latter first, in social theory there are many different ideas that explore these
entanglements (Hodder discusses several in our reading for this week) and we can think of
them along a spectrum from humans having total agency over things, to things having a level
of agency over humans, to things having agency independent of humans.
• Out there in the world we can think of this spectrum too, there are technologies that seem
relatively easy for humans to control—I can cook without a Therma mix, and technologies
that seems completely outside human control—artificial intelligence, nuclear weapons etc.
So do machines control us?
• Er, maybe.

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• We are not really interested in giving you a position on that spectrum to situate yourself.
There is no correct place to be. Our aim in this course is to get you think of a spectrum rather
than absolutes.
• Are humans entangled with technology? Yes.
• However, the depths of entanglement vary. There is radical unevenness.
• Analysing this unevenness is a crucial tool that we try to develop in this course. Radical and
does follow a pattern.
• Unevenness depends on a range of factors; time, place, race, class, citizenship, laws, the
technology in question, the boarder networks assembled by a technology among others.
• Working in India vs middle-class western family, modern entanglement of technology.
• Hodder’s article suggests we think in terms of dependency and entrapment.
Hodder
• Hodder challenges us to think about the nature of the relationships between humans and
things, and technologies in particular (not his view of technologies is a long historical one);
• Hodder gives these relationships a quality; dependence/dependency, which he argues are in

a dialectical struggle with entanglement—which becomes entrapment. Dominance with
materialism, are we making progress. Is entanglement entrapment?
• “On the one hand, humans depend on or rely on things to achieve goals (dependence). This
is the enabling part of the human use of tools and symbols in order to form the subject,
society, and adaptation to environments”. P. 20
• And, “On the other hand, dependency and codependency occur when humans and things
cannot manage without each other and, in this dependency on each other, they constrain
and limit what each can do”. P. 20 – cars – constrains where we can go the speed, our time
in a day – should we travel there?
• So, “The term “entanglement” seeks to capture the ways in which humans and things entrap
each other. But it also seeks to recognize the ways in which a continual and exponentially
increasing dynamism lies at the heart of the human experience”.
• Entanglements are made and remade, not necessarily erasing and replacing one another but
continually and exponentially expanding.
Hodder cont.
• There is much more to Hodder, there are excellent examples there too.
• One last quote sets us up well here:
• “So rather than talk of things and humans in meshworks or networks of interconnections, it
seems more accurate to talk of a dialectical tension of dependence and dependency that is
historically contingent”. P. 25. Dependence v dependency

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Use and Production
• It is helpful to think of entanglement entrapping users/consumers and producers. Entraps

people who produce the items.
• Hodder even refers to this in the example of Christmas lights.
• There are endless examples—our dependency on lithium batteries in smartphones AND our
constant reuse of phones, incentivized by producers and network providers has accelerated a
massive increase in demand for cobalt (a by-product of copper or nikel).
• 70% of coltan is mined in Democratic Republic of Congo, with 250,000 workers employed in
this sector, many more in transport and logistics, in the labs and factories that turn it in to
batteries, attach to phones, the recyclers (organised and individual), etc. Those workers and
entangled within the global consumption. Millions of lives involved.
• Settlements, roads, shops, debts have all grown around mining sites.
• Migrants to these sites leave families in other towns and villages to work farms, raise
children etc.
• Moneylenders and labour agents recruit for cobalt mining in vulnerable areas.
• On and on the entanglements thread making disentanglement difficult. Entrapment and

certainty, mapping out the dependence on this product to continue the economy.

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Lecture 3:
Seven cheap things
Seven Cheap Things
• Patel and Moore operate in a similar realm to the 100 objects focusing on seven things and
their cost, which depend upon accepting capitalism as a ‘world-ecology’. Network of
relationships.
• Seven things: Nature; Money; Work; Care; Food; Energy; Lives
• These are almost meta-categories of things, enabled by technologies, logistics, and global
networks to transform human societies.
• Their cheapness is the main organising principle of the argument, “a set of strategies to
control a wider web of life”, p. 3.
• Cheapness increases access, but the real cost is hidden—they open with the example of the
chicken nugget and the ways it draws all these cheap things together.
• Patek and Moore want us to look beyond the relationships between labour and capital—
themselves exploitative and problematic despite more than a century of labour rights
movements, systematic upheavals, and union-run governments (and even empires).
• They as us to focus on the women, slaves, ecologies, and others outside the capital-labour
nexus who are essential to contemporary capitalism.
• Cheapness deepens access, and deepens entrapment
• Social, political, and economic forces work tirelessly to maintain the cheapness of these
seven things. Agency to keep these things cheap, lots of policies and laws.
• Should their real cost be unleashed, the world as we know it would be almost impossible to
maintain for most people; the $200 hamburger!
Can We Disentangle?
• Can we disentangle?
• According to Hodder, this is contingent. We have been able to disentangle from some things,
but this depends on the depths of entrapment.
• Entrapment is as much social as technological (hence the idea of entanglement).
• Fossil fuels are a good example.
• There is a strong desire to disentangle from fossil fuels –but it's hard.
• We have alternatives, but the fossil fuels industry is a powerful social and political force.
• There are hundreds of case studies about the machinations of these industries in politics, the
law, tax regimes, and global production and consumption that show this.
• However, disentanglement does happen.
• Technologies do become redundant. Things do fall out of social acceptance.

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• And this has devastating impacts on the lives entangled in them, especially at the end of
production. Is disentanglement victory? What impacts does it have on the people or
industries reliant on this? The redundancy this would create amongst society and the
workers/ lives it would impact.
• The desire to disentangle from coal.
Entanglements of Scale?
• However, social contexts also matter.
• To give a more mundane example.
• The death of cinema has been proclaimed for 70 years; television, video, DVD, streaming and
more recently, COVID19 have all been predicted to lead to the demise of cinema as a
redundant technology and a redundant experience.
• There have certainly been major changes to how cinema is produced, financed, and the ways
it is viewed.
• However, people in different parts of the world still desire a shared viewing experience
despite the availability of content anywhere, anytime.
Yet in some contexts, technological change has effected cinema, such as rural and regional towns—
even Newcastle city has no cinema anymore. Should have become redundant however the social and
emotional ties to this keeps the experience alive.
Redundancy
• In Imphal, a city where I worked for many years researching cities and low-intensity armed
conflict was known for its beautiful art deco cinema halls, social life was entangled in these
places through the 1960s and 1970s. Was a huge part of the city evolvement
• The city’s cinema halls fell into disuse during the 1980s and 1990s when curfews, violence,
and kidnappings made going out at night too dangerous. Further a ban on Hindi language by
local insurgent groups made Indian cinema unpopular and dangerous to screen.
• The cinemas became used for different things; this one is now used by an evangelical church,
others are used to store secondhand clothes bales for the local market, another Imphal
Talkies, has become a theatre—for live plays.
• By the time the city became safe enough for cinema to return, smaller ‘video halls’ had taken
over showing pirated DVDs and streamed content when signal allows for it; or people just
watched at home on phones or cast onto cheap flatscreens from across the border with
Myanmar.
• The technology of cinema was paused due to its environment and by the time it was able to
resume other technologies challenged this and made it difficult to restart.
• Cinemas themselves not equipped for audiences—some had all lights and seats removed.
• Disentangled from one, entangled in other technologies, making it hard to go back, even
when social conditions allowed

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Disentanglement?
• Perhaps the best way to think of disentanglement is at scale; globally, challenging and
difficult to see how this is possible.
• Yet as some locations disentangle, from cars for e.g., other are becoming entangled at speed.
Who wins and who loses? Who is dependent on the chicken nugget?
• Following Patel and Moore's thesis, disentanglement would be violent and chaotic for many.
• Who wins and who loses?
• Or as Matthew T. Huber argues in his review of the book, who is dependent on the chicken
nugget? Probably not the book’s authors.
• Disentanglement is uneven within societies too; some people can afford it, others cannot.
Can people go off the grid? Byron bay.
• Are we witnessing this? A degree of disentanglement or a degree of shortage. How to we

handle reduction in supply.
• COVID19, China’s approach to COVID in particular, and the current Russia/Ukraine War has
had a major impact on the supply and cost of many of the things on this list.
• How are we coping? Almost impossible not to be bound by this. Levels of agency to adjust
your behaviour but are ultimately limited.

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Topic 4 - The Spaces of Consumption.

Or, is there such thing as public space anymore?
Lecture 1:
History of the Spaces of Consumption
Being Malled? Space and Culture
• We reproduce culture through our everyday activity, and we do that activity in specific
spaces.
• Promote certain acts and shopping becomes a public place, less spaces were we can enjoy
without spending money.
• Not just what we do, but where we do it is important.
• The architecture and management of space is imbued with power.
• Strict limits on where we can and cant go, the hours we can be there. Young people can
become a problem and loitering.
• “Cathedrals of Consumption”: Ritzer argues that malls are the churches of consumer culture.
• Malls as the new town hall or public park?
• We are focussing in this lecture on public space – and the concomitant concern with the
privatization of public space.
• Homogenisation vs appropriation - Commercialisation vs subversion
“The Bum Proof Bench”
• In Mike Davis’ book City of Quartz, the chapter ‘Fortress LA’ forcefully shows how the
management of public space through policies about aesthetics, gardening etc. actually have
more insidious intentions of exclusion.
• Going to work and shopping however if someone is homeless you cannot sleep on it.
Aggressive use of sprinklers and how they are turned on at night.
Histories of shopping spaces
• ‘the cathedral of modern commerce’; ‘a ‘palace’ for the middle classes’ etc.
• Do malls take the place of churches in a secularising society, maintaining hierarchies of

power, discipline and control?
• Changing meaning of ‘market’ from feudal to industrial society.
• Various technological developments drive changes to the marketplace: building materials,

transport, refrigeration etc.
• Origin of our products become more distant and we don’t actually know the producers
anymore.
• Are shopping malls dehumanising? We relate to people in a more scripted way, the
relationship of shopper and seller.
• The space of the internet as new market place?

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From markets to arcades to departments stores to malls
• The Frankfurt School’s Walter Benjamin is important for understanding these developments.
• New building materials and electricity lubricated changes to the shopping experience from
necessity to leisure.
• Huge storefront windows produce the ‘shopper’s gaze’ – needs to wants, necessity to luxury,
the birth of the ‘window shopper’. Becomes a leisure practice.
• The idea of the ‘flaneur’ (Benjamin): people wandering around the city with a blasé attitude
(Simmel) looking at things and people and wanting to be looked at.
‘Shopping’ becomes about…
• Looking rather than speaking: Display over human connection; where one buys becomes as
important as what; ‘value’ moves from use value to symbolic value.
• Not work, leisure and pleasure: Shopping becomes ‘something to do’, a leisure practice in
itself. Places to look and be looked at.
• Desire rather than need: Promotes of desire and fantasy, i.e. not rational homo-economicus.
See any episode of Mad Men!
• Women: Appeal to middle class women (although, this has changed recently, parodied in
Kath and Kim)… issues of feminist critiques, class issues, choice etc.
• Of course, the rise of platform capitalism challenges these physical space aspects of
consumption to the point where there is already nostalgia.
• Can I get it cheaper online, incorporates online shopping and personal shopping? Becomes a
replacement for other social meetings.

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Lecture 2:
Place and NonPlace
Place
• Theorists of space and place usually draw a distinction between the two. Can be quite firm
but can collapse.
• Space is rootless and shaped by external forces, lifeless and material
• Place is rooted and shaped through human agency to produce and reproduce a social and
moral meaning. Do and what they make of the space, powerful and emotive concept.
• Can be private, public, or a mixture
• Even a public space might evoke feelings of place for some and not others.
• Place is valuable to communities.
• Place has a complex relationship to capitalism, seemingly countering it at times as refuge

from consumerism, community rather than consumption. Where you may know other
people and focusing on relationships
• but place is also used to sell products and to brand suburbs, cities, towns and consumer
spaces, such as new developments
• And malls, as we discussed in the last lecture, are important social spaces blurring these
boundaries. Consumers think as a public space whereas the owner thinks as a place
Doreen Massey
• Massey notes,
• … the specificity of place… derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct
mixture of wider and more local social relations and, further again, that the juxtaposition of
these relations may produce effects that would not have happened otherwise (1993: 69).
• Mixture, near and far. Consumer spaces v places. Are they similar but there is a strong
essence of mixture.
• Massey, Doreen. 1993. ‘Questions of Locality.’ Geography 78 (2): 142-149.
• Does this close the door on consumer spaces as place?
Place and Belonging
• For Freidmann place-making occurs when a material space is inhabited and allows patterns
and rhythms of life to develop. Not over a set period of time however there are repeated
relationships.
• Seven propositions for understanding place-making (2007: 172).
• 1. place-making is a social process characterised by contestation. Place is not granted but

made through social practices which often invoke competing claims over material space.
Once created, places are not fixed but subject to continued contestation.

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• 2. habitation of material space leads to patterns of everyday life centred on places of

encounter where rituals of life are performed (such as parks, markets, churches, restaurants,
houses). What happens if we stop consuming? Does the fabric of place start to breakdown.
• 3. places are impermanent and undergo changes over time.
• 4. the rituals of everyday life offer a sense of security and stability. When you move away you
lose a sense of security and stability.
• 5. the autonomy of place is illusory and subject to regulation, for instance by property
owners, authorities, or donors.
• 6.regulation affects different members of the community in different ways and while
contestation is common, solidary cannot always be assumed.
• 7. the importance of village and neighbourhood places can diminish over time as social and
economic networks widen (e.g. I have never met my neighbours)
• Friedmann, J. (2007). Reflections on place and place-making in the cities of China.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31(2), 257-279.
• Can the malls have these things?
Place and Exclusion
• Just as place creates and is created by a sense of belonging, it also draws boundaries
excluding certain people, bodies, actions, and behaviours
• Tim Cresswell talks about being in- and out-of-place
• "I feel out of place"
• "Know your place"
• "Not in this place"
• "you don't belonging here, in this place"
• "That kind of behavior doesn't belong here"
• "ahh, back where I belong"
• Exclusions happen at the intersections of race/ ethnicity/ gender/ sexualities/ [dis]abilities/

age. E.g., elderly people going to a rock concert
• AND behaviours, gestures, language, accent, roots/lineage (not from this neighborhood),
activities (e.g solicitation, peddling, scavenging) and even clothing (from gang colours to not
being allowed in the pub with thongs on), and consumption (you can’t drink that here!, you
can’t sell that here!)
• AND these feelings are often generated by or closely entangled with what we consume and
the familiarity it brings (McDonalds in Pakistan has strange food, I felt out of place; you can’t
wear that the shops at the Junction!)
• For Cresswell, exclusion is always being 'trangressed'; lines are crossed to various
consequences

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• Cresswell, T. J. (1992). In place/out of place: Geography, ideology and transgression. The

University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Marc Augé: The Non-Place
• ‘Place’: “relational, historical and concerned with identity”
• Homogenised places that feel the same throughout the world. Such as airports shopping
malls, prisons.
• ‘Non-place’ is the absence of those things, dead or inert spaces that are filled with everyday
movements of people who do not live or dwell.
• Transit zones, airports, hotels, fast food, movie theatres, malls, motorway service stations
and supermarkets.
• Placelessness: same regardless of where you are and is ahistorical.
• We live within a “perpetual present” always en route to somewhere else, where time and
space are compressed.
• Frequent consumers in non-places rarely recognise anyone else.
• There is an anonymity that is comforting, and Augé terms this the “paradox of non-place” -
the feeling of being at home within these anonymous non-places.
• Malls in this regard are seen as a cultural vacuum, sucking in everything around it but
denuding it of creativity, context, authenticity, art, meaning etc. producing nothing but
commodity fetishism.
Airports
• Adey (readings)
• "Sociologically, airports have similarly been defined as rather blank spaces and devoid of
excitement and interest; they are considered abstract, boring, placeless – perhaps non-
places"
• BUT, Adey argues on the contrary:
• "the movements, feelings, and emotions found in airports should not be subtracted from the
powerful forces that permeate the airport terminal." Lost of stuff goes on such as deep
anxiety stress and happiness
• [I] argue that these feelings, motions and emotions are predicated by a form of airport
control; bodies, both physically and emotionally, are opened up to power […]
• In other words, the paper seeks to examine how the affective expressions of hope, fear, joy,
sadness, and many others, as well as the constitutive mundane bodily motions that occupy
the airport terminal, may not be as distanced from power and control as we might think.
• In fact, they are central to their perpetuation as certain triggers – designed-into the terminal
space – are intended to excite bodily and emotional dispositions at an unconscious and
pre-cognitive register.”

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Limits of non-place
• Even if we take the most common examples of non-place; the mall, call-centre, the casino,
the airport, they can evoke a sense of place for some
• Think of people who work in these places—for them these non-places can have a different
meaning. They are places of ritual, rhythm, and in some cases positive experiences of
belonging and identity
• We return again to the idea of things that are uneven, contextual
• Example: migrant mall and BPO workers in Delhi
• So, while the space may signal drudgery for cynical consumers, for workers these can be
places of belonging, pride, and relationships
Lecture 3:
A world without billboards?
Meet you...er, under the tree
• Dekeyser (readings)
• Subvertising: "enacting illicit, material interventions into billboards, digital advertising

screens, bus shelter advertising and a wider plethora of spaces that make up the outdoor
advertising landscape."
• Why?
• Advertising is both physical incursion into public (and sometimes private) space; it looms
over place AND it represents corporate, commercial and or government power; and
associated images/imaginaries
• Subvertising are interventions that critique, protest and mock these incursions and the
powers they represent
• There are a range of actions from the overt (cutting a hole as in the early part of the article)
to barely perceptible modifications that change the message subtly
• Subvertising opens larger questions about the constant noise of advertising in public space
and its impact on place
• Impacts do vary—in some cases outdoor advertising can be a component of place (the Coca-
Cola sign in King's Cross for example)
• But more often billboards are seen as unwanted incursions, noise, pollution; objects that
block the landscape and perpetuate the constant demand to consume
• What would a world without billboards look like? There are places where billboards are
scarce, and others where there are very few regulations—what kind of impact does this have
on how we experience place and space?

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Dwelling, loitering and mis-use
• Understandings of place suggest a degree of stability—even Friedman refers to 'changes over

time' which we often take to mean many years
• War (Ukraine), disasters (NSW floods), pandemics (COVID19) can eradicate place quickly, or
at least pose a major challenge
• Beyond these big ruptures, place is challenged and remade in lots of much smaller, everyday
ways all around us
• Think about hanging out with your friends OR encountering another group hanging out
somewhere; a carpark, a bench, a wall by the beach
• If they were blocking your way would you tell them to move?
• Or would you find another route?
• What factors might determine this decision?
• Consider graffiti and other illegal ways of marking place; these too are texts to be read,
claims being made to a certain area, or at the very least, traces of presence
• Place is also claimed by mis-use; deliberate use of space for things unintended
• These can vary from encampments of the unhoused, to squatting, to unsanctioned markets ,
to building DIY skateparks or under flyovers
• These are temporary claims of place; they might not be in effect 24 hours a day, but they will
usually be established through some kind of rhythm; 'that crew of teenagers is here every
Saturday drinking sarsaparilla!'
Empty space, remaking place?
• One of the enduring images of the pandemic has been empty public spaces
• Where there was bustle and buzz there was now empty space and silence
• Less people, less traffic, less noise, less policing, less social approval/disapproval -- LESS
CONSUMING
• Even when public spaces began to re-open, the speed, capacity, and volume were different
to before; slower, smaller, quieter
• For many people, empty spaces and slow recovery opened up new possibilities for place
• Places to live (moving into/out of the inner-city, temporary shelter in unused or underused
infrastructure, buildings and commercial facilities)
• Places to play (ball games, skateboarding, pavement games, parkour, etc)
• Places to hangout (sit, picnic, drink, eat, lurk)
• Places to care (for objects, animals, trees, plants, gardens)
• Places to mark (paint, tag, graffiti)
• Places to subvert (Dekeyser—readings)

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• Suggests that place-making is also reactive, not just something engineered through stability
and planning
• And not just for humans....

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Topic 5 - Consuming place.

Or, what does it mean to consume place and how are places shaped
for the purposes of consumption?
Lecture 1:
Consuming places through commodifying nature
Nature/Culture
• The extraction and use of fossil fuels and trees, the modification of environments for farming
and building cities and the very notion of ‘externalities’ highlights the commodification of
nature since the Industrial Revolution.
• The very notion of ‘nature’ itself has social and cultural implications that may make the
separation of nature and culture problematic.
• Can anyone think about sharks without hearing the ‘Jaws’ music?
• Is camping a commodified experience?
• The beach: where nature meets culture?
Consuming Nature
• The ‘Tourist Gaze’ and the Fetishization of Nature: Nature becomes a thing to be consumed.
• Themed Nature Parks: Places like SeaWorld essentially McDonaldize and Disneyize nature
into idealized spaces of consumption; nature as spectacle, simulation and virtualized.
• Tourism as Desiring Nature: Romantic ideal of being ‘in’ nature; the post-tourist confronting
the tensions between authenticity and mediation.
• Relies upon the distinction between the simulation of nature and an apparent authentic
experience of nature.
• Thinks of the amazing walking tracks in national parks… nature?
• But ‘authenticity’ is problematic in this regard as it is increasingly rare for our engagement
with nature not to be mediated or commodified in some way.
John Urry: The Tourist Gaze
• To become travellers or tourists, one seeks experiences outside our ‘normal’ life – the notion
of departure or going ‘away’ – new sounds, sites, foods, smells, etc.
• “A gaze is after all visual, it can literally take a split second, and the other services provided
are in a sense peripheral to the fundamental process of consumption, which is the capturing
of the gaze” (Urry)
• The gaze tends to be performed by the first world on the rest, combining conspicuous and
spectacular consumption.
• ‘Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation, especially through
daydreaming and fantasy, of intense pleasures, either on a different scale or involving
different senses from those customarily encountered. Such anticipation is constructed and

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sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, magazines,
records and videos, which construct and reinforce that gaze (Urry).
• The Tourist Gaze is influenced by our previous consumption of media: books, magazines,
films, TV etc.
Tourism as Desiring Nature
• ‘Getting back’ to nature: escape, relax – the romantic view.
• Growing market to consume ‘authentic’ nature or indigenous cultures, ironically at a time

when they are pretty much gone!
• In an urbanised world, the fantasies and myths of contact with authentic nature are
seductive if unrealistic.
• Main problem being is what happens when ‘authentic’ indigenous cultures change the
presentation of self to suit the western tourist gaze.
• We feel like we are being given access to the back stages, but are really witnessing a front
stage performance (Goffman) – staged authenticity (MacCannell).
Do you really want to be ‘IN’ nature?
• Prominent eco-feminist Val Plumwood discusses when she was nearly ‘consumed’ by a
crocodile.
• “I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other
edible being. The thought, 'This can't be happening to me, I'm a human being, I am more
than just food!' was one component of my terminal incredulity”.
http://www.aislingmagazine.com/aislingmagazine/articles/TAM30/ValPlumwood.html
http://www.utne.com/2000-07-01/being-prey.aspx

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Lecture 2:
Selling and branding place
Selling and Branding
• In the previous unit we looked at spaces where identifies are formed and reproduced [place]
and where consumption happens [non-place and its limits]
• This week we want to twist that relationship a bit to look at the ways places themselves are
branded and consumed.
• Can place be consumed?
• Well, yes.
• Does this mean place is sold?
• If so, what are consumers buying?
• Think of tourism and the images, endorsements and advertisements that try to sell place to
visitors.
• Think also, at a smaller scale, of the ways images and pictures of different suburbs or
neighborhoods are utilised to sell place to consumers.
Scenescapes
• Real estate advertising is a great example of this, and while you might not think of real estate
when you think of consumption and everyday life (how many of us are buying property
everyday…. or ever), real estate perpetuates and circulates desires about where to live and
how it reflects things about individuals
• This relates not just to class and upward mobility (e.g., live here and you have made it in life),
but also to what Silver and Clark refer to as “Scenescapes”.
• Silver, Daniel Aaron, and Terry Nichols Clark. Scenescapes. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2016.
• Brings together two common uses: 1. a scene is a shared interest in something: the punk
scene, the hiking scene, the craft beer scene, the knitting scene.
• 2. the character of specific places: the Byron scene, or the Beaumont Street scene, or the
Jesmond Hotel scene.
• They take these two uses and extend them to thinking how these are pegged to landscape,
rooted in place, but also shaped by flows from other places, nearby and globally (‘scapes’,
see Appadurai, 1996) and generate a third meaning:
• “the aesthetic meaning of place”: “different places feel different” (p. 2), even across very
short distances.
• Silver and Clark also argue that scenes are “laboratories of consumption” (p. 14).
• They argue that scenes are remarkable in that:
• a. they are possible at all and we can coordinate our behaviour based on them,

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• b. we can recognise and differentiate among them, and c. they matter for things we care
about like ‘why some people and places are more economically successful than others’, why
we feel comfortable in some scenes and not others, and how scenes are mobilised to sell
and brand neighbourhoods.
Branding
• For now, let’s zoom back out a bit and think of the ways contemporary cities are branded
• Cities that need little branding OR can afford to brand smaller patches, New York, Tokyo,
Shanghai, Rome, etc.
• Most of the furious activity branding cities in in ‘second-tier’ cities; cities poised for
reinvention to attract visitors, investment/capital, and residents
• Re-branding—efforts to CHANGE the way a city is perceived is a very important aspect of

this, especially for cities with an un-glamorous reputation (industrial, dangerous, intolerant,
boring).
• Newcastle, for instance, is a city that has gone through extensive re-branding efforts.
• There are hundreds of cities like this globally, as the core of urban economies shifts from
industry to services
Smart City
• Smart City is: ‘used to describe and label cities that use networked technologies to increase a
city’s efficiency and therefore enable social, cultural and urban development’ (Willis and
Aurighi 2018: 9).

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• Smart city discourse swivels exclusively around what digital is or implies, leaving the city
itself as a neutral or pre-determined platform. They note, ‘[t]he area of digital urbanism
often appears so rapidly evolving as to permanently constitute uncharted territory’, and this
focus de-historicises the city, leaving the past ‘overlooked or considered irrelevant’ (Willis
and Aurighi, 2018: 26).
• Willis, K. S., & Aurigi, A. (2017) Digital and Smart Cities. London: Routledge.
• IBM ran ‘smart cities challenge’ (Melbourne received funds), this being modelled by
government, including India (awarded 100 Smart Cities in 2015).
Creative City
• Vanolo: the image of the creative city (readings)
• Creative city linked: “representations linking a city’s economic success to the presence of
artists, intellectuals and members of the creative milieu” (a.ka. the creative class—(see
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class. And how it’s transforming work, leisure,
community, and everyday life. New York: Basic Books).
• For Vanolo: “this discursive construction tends to implicitly support the idea that a city’s lack
of success may be due to the absence of members of the creative milieu, thereby
legitimating creative policies as a mean to achieve urban development” (p. 2)
• Not just in the realm of ideas and discourse, Vanolo argues that these representations shape
human agency; where people choose to visit, settle, invest, and spend money.
• Also how they imagine the places they inhabit.
• Vanolo’s article looks at how this plays out in the city of Turin in northern Italy; a city
previously associated with industry (FIAT for e.g.), communism, and unemployment.
• Branding pushed creativity, culture, smartness (new industry not old industry/ clean not
dirty/ skilled not unskilled), and gastronomy.
• And crisis became taboo! Pretend it isn’t there.
• Crucially Vanolo argues that the ways the city is branded shows a divergence between
internal and external branding messages; a Turin for visitors is different to the Turin residents
live with everyday
UNESCO CREATIVE CITIES
• “The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) was created in 2004 to promote cooperation
with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable
urban development. The 246 cities which currently make up this network work together
towards a common objective: placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their
development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level.”
• Check the video
• And the cities
• What is interesting here is how the concept has travelled through vastly different cultural,
social, political, and economic contexts

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Lecture 3:
Beer, tea and terrior
• Place is not just linked to aesthetics but to taste
• We are constantly consuming products marketed to use using their place of origin
• From wine to cheese from beer to tea.
• Origin is emphasised on packaging, in marketing, on menus, and in sites of consumption

(cellar door, farm gate etc)
• Supported by media; food shows, food and travel shows, food ethics shows
• In more industrial food production, origin is obfuscated or relegated to phrases like: ‘made
from a mixture of local and imported ingredients’
• The relationships between place and taste create value, value we pay for (either in the price
of goods or the labour to locate them or both).
Terroir
• Relationships between location, production and consumption draws on what Amy Trubek
calls ‘the taste of place’ or ‘terroir’.
• Trubeck, Amy, The Taste of Place. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
• Emerging from French food culture and captured in the concept ‘terroir’, place and nature
are deeply implicated in how craft or artisanal food and drink are produced, marketed and
consumed.
• Place generates a unique ‘language of taste’ that connects agriculture, water, and soil to
quality, uniqueness, and ultimately shapes how people taste food and drink.
• Since the early 2000s the concept of terroir has proven highly mobile.
• It has moved across languages (from French), academic disciplines (anthropology, cultural
studies, economics, geography, political economy, sociology) and commodities (terroir has
become an important concept for understanding geographic variations and taste in
commodities like tea, whiskey, mezcal , cannabis, cheese, olive oil, and, increasingly, beer)—
go have a look at Harris Farms!
• There are hints of terroir on meat, chocolate, bread, sardines.
• Even if the actual term terroir is not used, the connection between place, production and
taste is constantly articulated and sought out.
Stories
• As Castelló argues, terroir is fundamentally a socio-cultural phenomenon requiring story-

telling and evocations of ‘nature, landscape, tradition, territory and know-how’ (2021: 394).
• A way of branding place, usually through ‘natural’ attributes (landscape/ sea scape),
including places that are otherwise rarely branded.

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Beer
• Craft beer has boomed in Australia in the last decade resembling booms in the US in
particular, and elsewhere such as Brazil, Canada, Italy, South Africa and the UK.
• It has also allowed a different way of branding beer in smaller markets like Georgia (Manning
and Uplisashvili, 2007).
• Over 600 craft breweries in Australia.
• Local, small scale beer production was common in Australia in the 19 th and early 20th
Centuries before disappearing almost completely (19 in the 1980s) in the face of corporate
beer (or industrial beer) production and competition from imported beer.
• Now its ubiquitous; from Mayfield to Dungog, Woolgoolga to Bangalow; it seems every town
has a craft brewery.
• Central to the current boom is a strong association between craft beer makers and location,
whether metropolitan, regional or rural—look at marketing, labels, ingredients, and brand
narratives.
• What can this tell us?
• Craft beer making takes place and it also makes place, breweries often being central to the
communities in which they are based
• Location is usually scaled down to small geographic units, and even breweries in major cities
such as Sydney or Brisbane will identify with a suburb rather than the city or state.
• Local production, ingredients, and people—or at least the performance of such—are

fundamental to the industry.
• As the retail space for the sheer number of craft beers reaches capacity, the ‘brew-pub’
model is becoming increasingly popular
• In this model, craft beers are brewed, sold and consumed locally, boosting local economies
and so-
• Craft beer is implicated in local renewal and revival, shaping the environment of cities, towns
and coastal settlements; and with ideas around gentrification, changing clientele, the death
of traditional pub culture.
• Opposition manifests in avoiding consumption, making a point of consuming industrial beer,

and/or humour and derogation of craft beer makers and their product.
• Hipster alert !
Where'd you get your hops?
• The use of terroir in talking about beer is not uncontroversial as ingredients can be sourced
from far away and not all breweries produce their own hops.
• Yet craft beer depends upon at least some connection between place and taste, whether
through careful articulation of ingredients, a narrative about the brewery or brewer(s),
and/or an evocation of the nearby landscape, even if—as in the case of many coastal craft
beers—the surrounding landscape has proffered few ingredients.

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Manning and Uplisashavili— [readings]
• Look at how beer has emerged in a wine dominated national context (some resonances to
Hunter Valley).
• Semiotics of beer production: "which suture contemporary Geogian industrial production of

beer to images of traditional production methods hallowed by time, and figures of traditional
consumption, which link contemporary products to specifically Georgian scenes of traditional
consumption.”
• “Instead of producing a stylistic distinction within production that opposes consumer

products as being “artisanal” versus “industrial” and linking these to discourses of distinction
(aesthetic, moral, class, or what have you), as in Europe and North America, Georgian
manufacturers seem to prefer a dual lineage, which seeks to link tradition to modernity in
each and every product. Because it is
not craft production per se that is important, any aspect of the commodity’s trajectory, from
production to consumption, can be emphasized as being “traditional.”
• Here the terroir shifts from process to place itself, and even society; which is bottled in
Georgian beer—ethnographic brands. Made by different ethic communities and therefore
made with distinction.

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Topic 6 - Gentrification, Class and Race.

Or, why do cool places become so boring and lame so quick?
Lecture 1:
Gentrification and ‘creativity
What is gentrification?
• Gentrification is the influx of more affluent and privileged residents into what was usually a
relatively poor or disadvantaged suburb.
• It is generally seen as a positive thing economically and politically in the public sphere as it
increases property prices and increase mainstream consumption activities.
• It may seem to happen ‘organically’ or can be the result of specific policies.
• It almost always results in the pushing out of poor people and shifts the ethnic demographics
of the place towards being whiter.
• Original inhabitants are displaced.
• Places that are gentrified are often identified as hip, cool, edgy, artistic spaces, where there is
a lot of actual creativity happening.
• Places that were once ‘industrial’ whose production moved elsewhere are also ripe for
gentrification processes.
• But this is then co-opted and commercialised, homogenised and made safe and boring.
• Notions of safety are often invoked: more surveillance, less minorities so it feels safer for
white people even if there was never any real risks.
Redlining
• Redlining: different policy and now algorithmic methods of denying minorities housing,
credit, insurance, healthcare.
• “In recent years, the term “redlining” has become shorthand for many types of historic race-
based exclusionary tactics in real estate — from racial steering by real estate agents
(directing Black home buyers and renters to certain neighborhoods or buildings and away
from others) to racial covenants in many suburbs and developments (barring Black residents
from buying homes). All of which contributed to the racial segregation that shaped the way
America looks today. But what was redlining, really? The origins of the term come from
government homeownership programs that were created as part of the 1930s-era New Deal.
The programs offered government-insured mortgages for homeowners — a form of federal
aid designed to stave off a massive wave of foreclosures in the wake of the Depression. As
these programs evolved, the government added parameters for appraising and vetting
properties and homeowners who would qualify. They used color-coded maps ranking the
loan worthiness of neighborhoods in more than 200 cities and towns across the United
States. Neighborhoods were ranked from least risky to most risky — or from “A” through “D.”
The federal government deemed “D” areas as places where property values were most
likely to go down and the areas were marked in red — a sign that these neighborhoods
were not worthy of inclusion in homeownership and lending programs. Not coincidentally,
most of the “D” areas were neighborhoods where Black residents lived. Though the maps

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were internal documents that were never made public by the federal government, their
ramifications were obvious to Black homeowners who could not get home loans that were
backed by government insurance programs.” (New York Times article, linked below)
• ‘Algorithms of oppression’, ‘weapons of math destruction’, ‘discriminating data’
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/realestate/what-is-redlining.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/10/23/redlining-black-wealth/
Gentrification and creativity
• As we saw previously on the creative and smart city, ‘creativity’ is something that is desired
and funded at various policy levels or by councils etc., but at an education level, creative
degrees are being made more expensive, especially if they contain critical elements.
• Creativity here has specific neoliberal meaning of frictionless consumer experiences, ‘safety’,
green washing, business innovation, agility and flexibility etc.
• Richard Florida The Rise of the Creative Class: argued that if professionals and creatives were
attracted to dilapidated neighbourhoods their stock would rise.
• If you wanted a flourishing city or suburb, you had to attract these people with cafes, art
galleries, organic markets, restaurants and bars, all in tasteful and safe aesthetics.
• In what seemed like emancipatory language, Florida posited the “Gay Index”, that is, if a
place had lots of gay men there would be people in the right careers, and the right tastes to
create tolerance and attract and develop a so-called ‘creative class’.
From Authenticity to Exclusion
• Sharon Zukin is a central researcher when it comes to considerations of gentrification and

authenticity, she describes the process this way:
• Alternative consumption practices often lead to the creation of entrepreneurial

spaces like restaurants and bars, and to the resurgence of farmers’ markets, offering
urban consumers a safe and comfortable place to ‘perform’ difference from
mainstream norms.
• These spaces fabricate an aura of authenticity based on the history of the area or the
back story of their products, and capitalize on the tastes of their young, alternative
clientele.
• This vision gradually attracts media attention and a broader consumer base, followed
by larger stores and real estate developers, leading to hip neighbourhoods with
luxury housing, aka gentrification.
• Whether the specific discourse of consumption is based on distinction or inclusion,

alternative consumers are not so innocent agents of change.
• Their desire for alternative foods, both gourmet and organic, and for ‘middle class
shopping areas encourages a dynamic of urban redevelopment that displaces
working-class and ethnic minority consumers.

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• Zukin Sharon 2008, ‘Consuming Authenticity: From Outposts of Difference to Means

of Exclusion’. Cultural Studies, 22 (5):724-748.
Against creativity!
• The cooptation of ‘creative’ sees any oppositional or resistive aspects of creativity denuded,
with the creative now an economic asset.
• Creativity is part of self-help discourse and entrepreneurialism, rather than actual art.
• While Florida’s idea of a creative class is anyone who produces ‘new’ ideas, even engineers
or architects, he ignored or downplayed the class, race and gender implications of this.
• The so-called nonconformity and tolerance that Florida said was a key asset of the creative
class only goes so far and is not particularly inclusive.
• As Jamie Peck shows it is about developing deindustrialized parts of the city, ‘urban
fragments’, with urban planners and city governments competing for mobile jobs (and
industries) to prop up their ailing economies as production headed to the Global South.
• Sometimes these become purpose-built developments and subdivisions, other times they
are waywardly developed, but the key thing is meant to be that you can live and play in the
same place at all or any hour, blurring the lines between work and leisure, labour and
pleasure.
• Creativity discourses valourise aspects of artistry towards individualised, ‘productive’ and

market driven ideals.
• McRobbie’s (2016) analysis of the fashion industry outlines a Foucauldian form of governing
through freedom, where the dispositif of creativity aligns the creative economy with the
market demands of cheap labour, flexibility, internships, and individualised
entrepreneurialism, where the self becomes an ‘enterprise’ (Kelly 2013).
• Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) maintain that the ‘artistic critique’ of capitalism, of which the
summons to be creative is central, has been co-opted and folded back into its very logic.
• https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1243-keywords
• https://www.versobooks.com/books/2852-against-creativity
• https://www.anthempress.com/the-creativity-hoax-pb
• https://romulusstudio.com/variant/pdfs/issue34/creativityfix34.pdf
Neo-Bohemia?
• Lloyd’s ethnography looks at how this happens in everyday life.
• Culturally hip or ‘bohemian’ urban areas represent the confluence of gentrification, a

concentration of urban and youth taste cultures, and a bar scene that actively creates value
from the area’s reputation as a ‘cool’ place to consume.
• In these areas, young workers require the possession of (sub)cultural capitals that are
aligned to the reputation of the area and the venue, and with the image cultivated by the
venue.

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• These inner-urban neighbourhoods are associated with the celebration of cosmopolitanism,

‘diversity’ and transgression, and as representing an authentic and gritty critique of the
superficiality of mass consumption and the pretentiousness of upmarket cocktail bars and
fine dining.
• Lloyd discusses how the ‘bohemian’ ethos of authenticity and anti-consumerism interacts
with the classed dynamics of urban renewal in processes of gentrification.
• Lloyd, R. (2010). Neo-Bohemia: Art and commerce in the post-industrial city, 2nd edn. New
York.
• More on this in Part 3.

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Lecture 2:
The Hipsterfication of everything
The Hipster?
• My work analysed the figures of hipster and bogan and how they became proxies for class.
• They’re a way of addressing class without talking about class specifically
• In the field of representation in Australia, the terms ‘bogan’ and ‘hipster’ have become
quintessential ‘figures’ of young (and not so young) people participating in
popular/consumer cultures.
• The ‘hipster’ tends to equate with middle class endeavours and is at least allowed a reflexive
irony that sees the term often used in a quite playful way.
• On the other hand, through processes of symbolic violence the ‘bogan’ has rapidly become a
key and voiceless cultural folk devil.
• They both enable distinction to be performed while eschewing the very notion of class.
• Hipster is a global figure (at least ‘Western’ global); bogan is local as are all lower-class
denigrator terms (chav, ned, redneck).
• Figures classify and they classify the classifier… But one person’s hipster can be another’s
bogan and vice versa.
Hipster Capitalism
• Hipster Capitalism: Scott shows how in the establishment of micro-cultures and economies,
there are two ideal typical career strategies are sketched:
• cultural-capital oriented seeking to secure positions within established creative

industries (e.g. he uses is avant-garde fashion).
• economic-capital orientated stylising ‘old’ occupations to access economic returns

(e.g. he uses are tattooing and sex work).
• “Set against the backdrop of neoliberalised labour markets and ongoing state austerity
policies, hipsters also profess interests in entrepreneurship and the conversion of cool into
commerce”.
• “rather than seeing the hipster through the lens of consumption and identity, there is a need
for seeing the hipster also as the neoliberalised entrepreneurial figure at the forefront of
urban cultural production promoting the art of living well: from micro-brewing to fashion,
tattooing to holistic wellness practices”.
• Scott, M. 2017. ‘Hipster Capitalism’ in the Age of Austerity? Polanyi Meets Bourdieu’s New
Petite Bourgeoisie. Cultural Sociology. 11(1) 60–76.
Hipster Aesthetics
• While not the equivalent of ‘non-places’ per se, gentrification and the dominance of hipster
aesthetics have driven processes of spacial homogenisation: a ‘sterile aesthetic’ even if that
involves grungy bars using milk crates as seats.

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• ‘Air space’ or ‘millennial or start-up aesthetic’.
• It’s not just McDonalds, airports, hotel lobbies and shopping malls that look and feel the
same around the world: cafes, bars, shared workspaces, Airbnb, shops etc. have all
developed similar looks and feels in recent times.
• The ‘cool’ offices of the likes of Google, WeWork, Uber etc.
• Becomes hard to tell a café or a workspace apart.
Is the hipster dead?
• The hipster was a ubiquitous figure in the early 2000s through to about 2015, but has
recently faded away.
• Seems to be what were once alternate middle-class attitudes or tastes aesthetics have
increasingly become the norm.
• Normcore: a spoof marketing term kind of becomes a thing where it’s cool to wear K-Mart
clothes:
• But there has been co-optation processes that have seen:
• boutique beers are now in most pubs and clubs (or small brewers bought by big
companies)
• coffee culture is so mainstream turmeric lattes are everywhere
• men with heavily curated beards are ubiquitous
• ironic and designer tattoos are everywhere
• For Hill: “Today, given the increasing impotence of the term “hipster,” proclamations of
cultural discernment are overshadowed by ethical considerations of identity, making
palpable an uncertainty about our capacity to untangle capitalism’s thirst for reinvention
from the artist’s thirst for subverting norms.”
• Hill, W. 2017. Art after the Hipster: Identity Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics. Palgrave.
Resisting Hipster Gentrification
• There has been resistance to gentrification and associated hipsterfication of places and
spaces, with protests and even riots occurring in response to people being pushed out and
cultures and communities being co-opted or decimated.
• One such event was around the Cereal Killer café on Brick Lane in east London, a café where
you could buy overpriced cereal served with the requisite amounts of hipster irony.
• Long standing group Class War organised protests and the shop was damaged.
• As Le Grande points out, moralization processes and classification struggles are central to the
public contestations over gentrification.
• In the Cereal Killer example, the hipster, typically associated with trendy, youthful middle-
class people, is a contested figure who some actors attempt to cast as a folk devil blamed for
the increasing social polarization and displacement of working-class people following
gentrification.

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• But largely misrecognized in this debate is the intensification of neoliberal policies in

contributing to these processes.
• Dominant representations portray the hipster figure as contributing to the vibrancy and
economic development of gentrified districts.
• Public contestations over gentrification and the hipster figure involve forms of class politics
about the moral hegemony to legitimate particular narratives about who has the right to the
city.
• See Elias le Grand (2020): Moralization and classification struggles over gentrification and the
hipster figure in austerity Britain, Journal of Urban Affairs. Online Early.
Lecture 3:
Class affects in the night-time economy
Bar workers, immaterial labour, reflexivity
• 75 hospitality workers interviewed so far, ethnography.
• Class here pertains to positionality and performativity rather than position: class is not static
and determined category.
• Jobs are mostly obtained through (sub)cultural capital and social capital.
• Many of the bar workers are doing these jobs to support study, on an imagined trajectory to
a career in something else.
• But some fall behind their own imagined trajectory, usually due to material aspects of class,
and end up becoming what they call ‘lifers’.
• The illusio of bar work: financial imperatives, creating a good vibe, perform their politics
(leftist/progressive, LGBTI nights, non-gendered bathrooms, art/music scene). They work at
the places that they would normally want to hang out at anyway.
Progressive Politics and Gentrification
• Affinities in these venues between worker and ‘punter’.
• At the same, there are the forces of gentrification happening all around the inner-North.
They want to remove the poor consumers, remove VB beer and add craft beers etc.
• The participants resent this but are also the part of those very forces.
• For instance, Carly talks about the ways her pub tries to put on things for their locals cheap,
without drawing in people just looking for cheap drinks:
“Well, things like, we have like a footy night where there’d be like cheaper drinks and things like that,
but it’s not advertised because they don’t want to bring in certain types of people, or they won’t
serve certain drinks … I know this sounds like kind of awful because it’s economically freezing people
out, but it definitely is that. It’s economically freezing people out and it’s also stopping people from
drinking that much. I feel gross about that because I grew up in the money and I see how much it
happens and how much gentrification has changed and I know that I’m a part of that. I’m not in
denial of that. But some of the old codgers that would come and hang out, they’re on the pension
and they don’t have that much cash. It’s happened especially in Coburg, like dudes who have been

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drinking there for 30 years or whatever. That made me feel uncomfortable, but I also totally see why
they do it, because you don’t want to have people coming here to expect cheap or free” (Carly)
Relations of affinity
• Where one feels more at home there is a socially homologous relationship where class is less
affectively present and one can ‘be yourself’: ‘my loungeroom’.
• Dealing with ‘problems’ is never easy, but easier when it is people like you. People as
problems, you must draw on your own understanding of the world. Learning to scan the
room, predict behaviour and make pre-judgements on race, class etc.
• The directionality of these class relations can go up or down social space.
• The language of class particularly emerges when bar workers talk about working in venues
that they would not go to as customers, spaces where they feel less comfortable.
• People deemed with ‘less class’ can often be above the barworkers in social space
economically.
“We’re talking about the Chrysler brand dickhead as opposed to like a Datsun brand dickhead”
(Greg).
Bar workers are phenomenologists
• Dealing with the human face and effects of poverty or alcoholism face to face can juxtapose
one’s personal politics and their everyday work practices.
• Participants talk about being able to see an alcoholic ‘a mile off’:
• “Somebody walks in with like a very passive at ease kind of – you know they’re just walking
into a bar, you don’t even look at them. But then immediately somebody could walk in
straight afterwards and they would draw your attention like a flare because shoulders back,
swaggering. Either that or like really hunched over and furtive or anything. Anything like
aggressive or defensive in body language you watch it. Getting to the bar and just being
immediately assertive or walking in and being to the bar and just making heaps of noise or
attention drawing or – all of these things are indicators that this person is not there to simply
have a good time. They’re all indicators that this person is out with something to prove or
something to say or something to achieve like an agenda of some kind. Same with
somebody walks and they’re immediately furtive and they go to the corner of the bar and
you seem them like watching everyone else and looking at the staff then again you’re like –
okay you probably going to try and steal something or even if you’re not I’m still – you’re still
exhibiting behaviour that is not there to have a good time you know?” (Greg)
• The affectivity of these relationships does something to individual bar workers in terms of
how they think and feel about their own class position.
• This can manifest in a reflexive mix of pragmatism, ambivalence, disgust and guilt: which
then seems to manifest as reflexive complicity in the reproduction of class.
The Labour of Gentrification

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• Forms of economic value related to youthful subjectivities -edgy, sexy and cool – are mined
and co-opted here. Young people are valued in the spaces, everyone fits and you enjoy the
atmosphere compared to if the wrong crowd is there.
• Affective, Immaterial, Emotional, Aesthetic etc. labours going on in this space.
• Boundaries blurred between work and leisure, labour and play.
• Young barworkers can be reflexively complicit in these relations.
• Class emerges relationally in these banal everyday interactions and affective relations that
range in intensity from the seemingly mundane to the physically violent.

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Topic 7 - Algorithms and AI.

Or, is technology affecting how we consume, behave, and even
vote?
Lecture 1:
AI and Algorithms: the Basics
Relax, its just computers doing human mind work
• AI is rapidly becoming a central part of contemporary life. Often when AI is talked about it is
imagined as Artificial General Intelligence, sometimes referred to as the singularity, or a
superintelligence that will overtake humanity.
• Can be marketed as very misleading, makes people scare. Doesn’t totalize peoples work just
do a portion of it.
• But some AI researchers think that it is not only many decades away but may never occur.
• Margaret Boden states that: ‘Artificial Intelligence seeks to make computers do the sorts of
things that minds do’ (2016, p. 1).
• It might be better to think of AI agents as a heterogeneous set of techniques and tasks,

rather than a single ‘thing’.
The suitcase
• One of the problems we have with Artificial Intelligence, as the late Professor Marvin Minsky
has put it, is that it can be a ‘suitcase’ concept.
• A suitcase concept means we tend to gather up all kinds of things and throw them into
it. Robots, systems, data, headlines. We put them all in the same basket.
• And we often mistake other forms of technology—some very close to AI, some not—and
carry this suitcase with us when we think about AI.
• We do that, I think, for a good reason.

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• It is very hard to understand exactly what AI is. It is a little unclear what is in the suitcase and
what should stay out; what it encompasses, where its boundaries are, and what we are to
make of them.
• At the same time, we are continually bombarded with images and headlines that seem to roll
all of the future into this one concept.
Patterns and boxes
• In most instances we are talking about machine learning; an approach where a machine can
learn from data without being explicitly programmed.
• What is being learnt is pattern matching. Predictions can then be made from these patterns.
• Machines have the capacity to learn from data in ways that are autonomous and adaptive.
• There is a whole lot of human labour and intelligence that feeds this process— part 3.
• One key point to highlight is that the predictions of machine learning are based on
probabilities, or approximate calculations.
• While the outcome of the calculations will be known, the process by which the outcome was
made remains opaque, that is machine learning tends to be known as a ‘black box’.
• Now approximations are not a problem in itself, but do perhaps matter in different
circumstances.
• If software puts the wrong names on a face in the photos in your phone or on Facebook, this
can be inconvenient but not going to have too many adverse effects.
• However, if a decision is going to have resourcing effects—or result in arrest or drone strike--
then knowing the limitations of approximations matters much more.
Facial Recognition
• Software that maps, analyzes, and tries to confirm the identity of a face in a photograph or
video
• Detection – finding a face in an image of visual field (harmless)
• Analysis (or attribution) then maps faces—often measuring the distance between the eyes,
the shape of the chin, the distance between the nose and mouth—converts that into a string
of numbers or points, known as a “faceprint.”.
• Me and some colleagues look at the origins of these ‘distance measures’ for characterising
faces in the Mahalanobis Distance Function in colonial India, used to measure caste and tribe
for statistics—still part of facial recognition tech today
• Recognition takes the faceprint add adds to a database to ‘confirm’ an identity; these
databases often have flawed distance measures (racial bias, gender bias, esp. binary)
• Used in many everyday applications (unlock phones, car computer, sort photos, search and
tag photos)
• Used in many significant aspects of policing, profiling and control of movement (e.g.
airports)

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• Now there are attempts to read emotions—which raise serious issues of cultural bias
See Taylor, S. M., Gulson, K. N. and McDuie-Ra, D. (2021) ‘Artificial Intelligence from Colonial India:
Race, Statistics, and Facial Recognition in the Global South’, Science, Technology, & Human Values.
doi: 10.1177/01622439211060839.
Sensory Power
• Ways of governing people through sensors, surveillance and the data they produce (Isin &
Ruppert 2021).
• Surveillance is the ‘focused, systematic and routine practices and techniques of attention, for
purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’, that ‘occurs as a “normal” part
of everyday life in all societies’ (Lyon 2007: 14).
• Surveillance has reached extraordinary levels since the 1980s through changing technologies
(CCTV, AI, biometrics), integration of surveillance technology into personal electronics, and
the ‘data revolution’ that feeds and ‘feeds off’ surveillance data, much of it created through
consumer activity;
• This shift towards ‘sensory power’ builds on past forms of power (sovereign, disciplinary,
regulatory) to foreground sensors as ‘technologies of detecting, identifying and making
people sense-able through various forms of digitised data’ (Isin & Ruppert 2020: 2).
COVID and Sensory Power
• COVID19 has had a transformative impact on enrolling people into data networks in deeper
ways and/or for the first time
• COVID19 apps, data and subsequent spatial practices enable the ‘live governing of the
dynamic relation between bodies and populations’ by tracking bodies infected with the virus,
‘notifying, testing and isolating (if necessary) them’ and ‘tracing all bodies that infected
bodies came into contact with, notifying, testing and isolating (if necessary) them as well’
(Isin & Ruppert 2020: 11).
• Furthermore, humans are not just passive subjects of sensory power.
• Sensory power is ‘not simply applied; it is also experienced by subjects, agents, and
audiences who define, judge and have feelings about being watched or a watcher’ (G. Marx
2016: 173).
Isin, E. & Ruppert, E., 2020. The Birth of Sensory Power: How a pandemic made it visible?. Big Data
& Society, 7(2): 2053951720969208
Marx, G. 2016. Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Lecture 2:
AI and consumption
So what does AI have to do with consumption?
Two important ideas:
• Data
• Algorithms
Data
• Data feeds machine learning.
• It is common for individuals to consent to sharing their data, especially as a trade-off for
greater access to consumer spaces [virtual and physical], mobility [passports, licence, check-
in] and convenience
• When you enable data functions on your phone, or YouTube or Spotify, the platform ‘learns’
your preferences
• The platform takes your user-generated data and suggests content for you—at a basic level
by matching tastes and preference according to other users behaviors and with tagged
content
• It shapes what you consume (probably not "determines", you can still not buy things)
• Replaces/ compliments human targeted marketing based on meagre data, profiling, and
surveys/focus groups
• There are many everyday applications we use that also generate data
• The data you generate is also valuable to promote further consumption, advertising targeting
you based on your use of the platform
• AND as data that can be on-sold [both aggregated and disaggregated] to other companies
• Data, especially personal data based on tastes, preferences, expenditure, demographic

details, is incredibly value; it is a 21st century commodity
• So, not just that data you greater influences what you consume (or how you are targeted to
consume) the data itself is an important commodity, especially when pooled with other data
BIG Data
• huge in volume, consisting of terabytes or petabytes of data;
• high in velocity, being created in or near real-time;
• diverse in variety, being structured and unstructured in nature;
• exhaustive in scope, striving to capture entire populations or systems (n = all);
• fine-grained in resolution and uniquely indexical in identification;

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• relational in nature, containing common fields that enable the conjoining of different data
sets;
• Flexible, holding the traits of extensionality (can add new fields easily) and scaleability (can
expand in size rapidly).
Kitchin, R. (2014). Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big data & society, 1(1),
2053951714528481.
Small data
• fine-grained ‘to answer specific research questions and to explore in detail and in-depth the
varied, contextual, rational and irrational ways in which people interact and make sense of
the world’
• Despite the rapid growth of big data and associated analytics, small data studies will
continue to flourish.
• small data will ‘more and more be pooled, linked, and scaled through new data
infrastructures, with an associated drive to try to harmonize small data with respect to data
standards, formats, metadata, and documentation, in order to increase their value through
combination and sharing’.
• Risk comes when small data is exposed to ‘incorporation within new multi-billion data
markets being developed by data brokers, thus potentially enrolling them in pernicious
practices such as dataveillance, social sorting, control creep, and anticipatory governance, for
which they were never intended’.
• Small data has a long history in consumer life, from customer surveys to product testing, test
screenings of films to student feedback forms!
• And is vital to qualitative social research
Kitchin, R., & Lauriault, T. P. (2015). Small data in the era of big data. GeoJournal, 80(4), 463-475.
Algorithms
• Algorithms are:
• “In the most general sense, an algorithm is a series of instructions telling a computer how to
transform a set of facts about the world into useful information. The facts are data, and the
useful information is knowledge for people, instructions for machines or input for yet
another algorithm. There are many common examples of algorithms, from sorting sets of
numbers to finding routes through maps to displaying information on a screen.”
• Deny ‘What is an algorithm? How computers know what to do with data’ The Conversation
16/10/20
That doesn’t sound so bad
• Matzner: “Algorithms are a matter of concern. They take important decisions, promise novel
insights into huge troves of data, distribute goods and services, classify persons (potential
partner, customer, criminal), try to detect terrorists and much more.

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• A lot of this is done automatically, reacting to input in a ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ way. Thus,
algorithms take positions or functions that used to require humans – or even have been
impossible as long as humans were the only intelligent actors. Now algorithms act. Of
course, this leads on to all kinds of questions: if algorithms act, how can they be supervised,
can they be governed, can they be moral?
• For both our concepts of rationality and agency have developed with a humanist focus. At
the same time what it means to be human has been defined through, with, and against
technology or technological artefacts.”
Matzner, T. (2019). The human is dead–long live the algorithm! Human-algorithmic ensembles and
liberal subjectivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(2), 123-144.
Burrell and Fourcade- readings
• When you put big data and algorithms together, and unleash machine learning there are
major social implications
• We are shifting to a society of algorithms
• They identify three main phenomena
• Coding elite: “A new elite occupies the upper echelons of the digitized society—a class or
proto-class … of software developers, tech CEOs, investors, and computer science and
engineering professors, among others, often circulating effortlessly between these influential
roles. […] Most valued in this world are those people who touch and understand computer
code. Most powerful are those who own the code and can employ others to deploy it as they
see fit.”
• Cross-domain implementation (education, medicine, credit and finance, and criminal justice
—you could add to this border control, weapons, welfare services)
• Changing the ways people interact, associate, and think – their subjectivities
What I really like is that they say what many of us think:
• “The endgame of the coding elite, the ultimate goal of their professional project, like the
algorithms they build, remains opaque.”
Whyte
• Deepfakes draw on perhaps our deepest fear of AI, that we will lose the ability to distinguish
between human and non-human
• AI enabled disinformation is: “an everyday foil to the normal information consumption of the
average democratic citizen”;
• “a highly tailored instrument that can be used to enhance the effect of other criminal or
conflict actions, such as cyber operations:’
• And “a mass-produced, regular feature of the information environment in democracies.” To

this we could add the “entertainment environment”
• It is also worth checking out the work of Roger Burrows and others here on the relationship
between algorithms and the alt-right, especially the software behind NrX

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• See also Rose Gray in The Atlantic
Can algorithms program creativity?
Lecture 3:
The people in the machine
'The world will never be the same!'
• AI depends upon human labour—the social in the sociotechnical system of AI and data
markets.
• When Burrell and Fourcade write: “AI's trajectory in society, however, is not simply a
question of whether humanity will benefit or not but, rather, who will benefit?”
• They identify the coding elite as drivers of AI in our lives, but here we want to focus on
everyone lese, on the other humans caught in the machine, or left outside of it, out of the
loop, as it were.
• The cybertariat
• When people talk of AI as a 4th or 5th industrial revolution that will completely change ‘the
world’; which world are they talking about?
• Which patches?
• Not just geographically, but which people? Classes? Which realms of social life?
Anticipating the chat bot
• And how might AI unfold in parts of the world either still reeling from earlier industrial
revolutions or where livelihoods depend upon the kinds of work under threat from AI—much
of which is work outsourced from developed countries to begin with?
Will AI help development?
• At the heart of these kinds of questions is trying to come to a better understanding of the
relationships between AI and development.
• In a BBC radio documentary, Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalization and Development at

Oxford University and former Vice President and head of policy of the World Bank Group
wrestled with the question of whether AI will ‘kill development’?
• Goldin begins in Kenya, with workers tagging images to be read by self-drive cars and asks: ‘is
technology, especially automation and artificial intelligence going to allow countries to steal
a march on development and leap ahead or is it going to be their undoing.’?

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• Goldin’s view is interesting not only for the way he shapes the question but because there
has generally been very little overt consideration of the relationships between AI and
development and with labour.
Call Centre to the World
• AI will be a massive risk to India’s IT sector, especially the ‘backroom’ IT that sustains many of
the jobs in so-called Business Process Outsourcing; call centres, software development and
data management.
• Concentrated in a few cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru), Hyderabad and to a lesser extent

Kolkata and the Delhi National Capital Territory (NCT, including Noida and Gurgaon); the
sector draws hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from across the country—local BPOs
in a response.
• As Biao Xiang (2007) notes, a complex industry of labour agents, recruiters, tutors, fixers and
even travel agents are entangled in the Indian IT sector, including within India and for Indian
workers travelling aboard to the US, Australia, and the UK to work in IT.
• He calls these ‘body shops’.
• These ‘body shops’ manage IT workers on behalf of employers, moving them from client to c
Biao argues persuasively that ‘[q]uite the opposite of what is usually assumed, software
development services are highly labour intensive, particularly at the phase of programming
and testing or debugging’ (2007: 4-5).
Biao, X. (2007). Global body shopping: An Indian labor system in the information technology industry.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
End of the body shop?
• AI will impact heavily on this sector, which remains poorly organized, barely unionized, and
highly casualised.
• The government's #AIforAll strategy stresses the need to train and ‘upskill’ the existing IT
workforce to handle the demands of the AI future, though it is difficult to imagine that much
of the backroom workforce will be well-placed for such a rupture.
• The report notes that despite over 2 million STEM graduates in 2016 ALONE, ‘an
overwhelming majority of this talent pool is focused on routine IT development and not so
much on research and innovation’ (2018: 50).
• Where these backroom workers will go when the body-shops gear down or close entirely is a
compelling question for local governments, where local labour markets are both unattractive
and incapable of absorbing even small portions of the IT workforce.
• But before we do it is worth pointing out that it is not just IT and call centre workers who will
be affected, but the ancillary livelihoods entangled in India’s analogue present.
Should we be afraid?
• AI agents are very good at eliciting patterns but deficient in making socially-aware decisions.
• Furthermore, biases in the algorithms and data that underpin AI may lead to ‘algorithmic
discrimination’ against marginalised groups.

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• Additionally, at times even a developer cannot predict the emergent behaviours of complex
AI agents – that is, they cannot predict what the machines will do.
• One response has been a call for ‘core agencies’ such as health, policing and education to no
longer use opaque or ‘black-box’ AI systems.
• There has been a call for explainable AI, both explaining the models used, and the
interpretations that can be made from using AI.
• That is, all of the detailed computational work of AI will be parsed into a language about
what it is doing and what it will do.
• But this does not tell us whether it is a good idea to use AI – only about how the AI agent
worked.
• Perhaps need a new form of public pedagogy around AI which takes away the idea that AI is
some sort of magic and asks if, where and when AI should be used....and why
• Yes

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Topic 8 - Consuming through connectivity.

Or, what are the implications of constant connectivity through
technology?
Lecture 1:
Consuming through Connectivity: The Basics
Connecting consumers
• Technology connects, and in this topic we will be looking specifically at information

technology
• Note that histories of socio-technical systems have also been about connectivity; pipes,
sewage, railways, cars, roads, etc
• This lecture is about connected ICT and how is shapes, and reflects, consumption and
everyday life
• What are we talking about here?
• Connected personal devices that allow for rapid, real-time circulation of data
• Including BOTH, externally generated data/media AND user-generated data/media
The ICT shift
• The big shift in ICT is that it enables content creation by users
• This sounds very familiar now, but 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago, this was not
ubiquitous
• In previous era, data/media was produced by dedicated content creators, usually paid in
some way for their skills and creativity [journalists, editors, photographers, writers, copy-
writers, song-writers, musicians, animators, directors, actors etc.]
• Social media platforms democratised content creation.
• Anyone could, and do/did/will, post anything—users and content creators are blurred
• Shift not unidirectional; skilled users become content creator, and skilled content creators
attract a lot of consumers/users.
• In other words, capitalism has found way to monetise user generated content, to find ways
to reach consumers through targeted advertising (see data unit) and to use new platforms to
circulate traditional content
• The notion of audience has become more fine-tuned in recent years
• The difference between accessibility and discoverability has also become fine-tuned, and
between consumption and influence
• Many, many thousands of jobs and entire industries have mushroomed around this shift
Connectivity changes the way we consume in 3 important ways:
1. Geography; shrinks the geography of consumption

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• We no longer need to physically move to purchase things.
• We can consume from anywhere we have a connection
• No longer need to go to the shop, socialise, browse etc; can do that online
• Also, we are exposed to products in personal, and intimate spaces of everyday life
• We rely less on being advertised to at the place of purchase (in the mall, or shop) or on
billboards in shopping areas for e.g.; rather advertising targeting us ‘pops up’ in our personal
devices
• This is not completely new, televisions has done this for a few generations, but the more
targeted advertising and the probability of devices means we consume advertising in very
more personal and intimate moments and spaces
• Further, the rise of the influencer blurs advertising and social engagement in ways that are
unprecedented, more akin to pyramid schemes and Amway parties
Uneven!
• The shrinking geography of technology and consumption has a long history; e.g. malls
wouldn’t exist without the connectivity of cars, roads, and suburban dwellings
• In parts of the world where car penetration is far less than in our society, you have markets
that can be reached on foot, bike, or public transport; that need to be visited often (can’t
carry a lot back, access to refrigeration); and that take cash
• What you now begin to see is online commerce happening alongside these decentralised
markets; skipping the mall!
2. Temporalities
• We save time at one end by browsing and purchasing online
• We no longer have to wait until we have free time to go to the shops and consume or until
we can travel toa different town or city where certain good are available
• However, time gets added onto the other end in the form of shipping and delivery
• Engaging a complex chain of finding, packing, shipping, customs, sorting, delivery—all

dependent on ‘unseen’ technologies of connectivity
• Gratification comes with the instant purchase, rather than with holding the object
• We have to wait to hold.
• By then, some of the shine is diminished
• Technology also changes what is available; we can shop global supply (with limits)
3. What we consume
• Consumption practices and habits have changed to an extent
• We desire the same objects we might have once sought out in a store; shoes, washing
machines, power tools

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• But we also consume, through connectivity, other people’s lives
• We consume their (curated) images, their preferences, their advice, their lifestyles, even
their houses (AirBNB for e.g.)
• Mostly we aren’t’ directly ‘buying’ the lives of our contacts, but by consuming their data,
circulating ours we are contributing data to data markets, telling advertisers what we like,
and even contributing images to facial recognition mapping software (check your settings)
that might be used to profile alleged criminals
• We also pay indirectly with time
Lecture 2:
Why we Post
Why We Post
• This is a treacherous topic, open top many reactionary perspectives
• Try to approach soberly
• There are good arguments that selfies, posting, and constant image curation are
psychologically and socially damaging
• There are equally good arguments that selfies, posting and constant image curation enhance
self-expression and are meaningful to people
• We tend to focus on image-obsessed teenagers when we talk about this
• However, social media use is inter-generational
• And spread geographically
• So we need to go beyond reactionary
Marwick—Instafame
• Instafame as a variety of microcelebrity
• “Microcelebrity is a mind-set and a collection of self-presentation practices endemic in social

media, in which users strategically formulate a profile, reach out to followers, and reveal
personal information to increase attention and thus improve their online status”
• “These practices are pursued in view of the so-called attention economy, a marketing
perspective assigning value according to something’s capacity to attract “eyeballs” in a
media-saturated, information-rich world”
• “Attention-getting techniques employed by consumer brands have trickled down to

individual users, who have increasingly, and occasionally improbably, used them to increase
their online popularity”
• Hints at multiple spaces for such fame
• One is the luxury consumer (Kane Lim)
• So we consume images of a consumer of luxury consumer objects
Arora & Scheiber—Slumdog Romance

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• Comes at the question of intimacy form the Global South
• Facebook as the internet in some places
• In societies with contact between potential partners (especially male-female) heavily

curtailed by family and social norms, Facebook provides a way to meet and socialise with
potential partners and achieve degrees of intimacy
• Allowed for relationships to develop which would have otherwise been difficult, especially
across social barriers (class, religion, caste, ethnicity) BUT also led to violence, fraud,
catfishing, blackmail—negative impacts overwhelmingly gendered
• Especially blackmail and slut-shaming
• Attempts to regulate the space ethically and practically challenging
Miller et al. Why We Post
• Miller and colleagues conducted a massive research project across 8 countries looking at
social media behaviour
• Results here
• Three main discoveries:
1. Social media is not making us more individualistic
2. Social media does not detract from education (it is education)
3. There are many different genres of the selfie (not just the face!)
Lecture 3:
Who owns your selfie? New data markets
Who owns your selfie?
• Hint: usually not you
• Lots to unpack here:
• Copyright, people taking your images and using them for profit or even just ‘likes’
• Identity theft, people taking your images and using them to impersonate you [or someone
else in your posts]
• The aggregation of your data into big data sets that are on sold and on sold and on sold (this
tends not to worry people as much because aggregation suggest individuals cannot be
identified]
• Feeding AI and facial recognition software
• Privacy; can we assert a right to privacy when we voluntarily erode it
Shosanna Zuboff – The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism (Profile, 2019)
• Argues that turning our experiences into data is a process of rendition

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• ‘the concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished, as human

experience is claimed as raw material for datafication and all that follows, from
manufacturing to sales’ p. 233
• What makes Zuboff interesting is she explores the corporate side of the experience, not just
the user side
• Zuboff has a great section on bodily rendition; how location data, timelines, images, fitness
apps, biometric monitoring (finger print locks, face locks), health apps (now vax status)
render bodies, their health, their movement into data easily and far outpaces laws and
regulation
Many, many controversies

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Fragile Archive
• The images, ideas, content shared through connected ICT lacks a physical archive,
professional archivists, a common approach to meta-data, and even a single index—but it
has replaced older forms of record keeping (both personal and institutional)
• Memory practices now hosted on social media
• Fragility is realized in several ways:
• Commercial entities (not a public good)
• Copyright and moderation (works in many different ways)
• Profiting of user content (where does content go to die)
• Removing data/ images (engaging the machine)
• Human moderation (the turnover and trauma of moderation)
The Monkey Selfie
• Naruto, a macaque, took a selfie with a camera set up to automatically capture primate
behaviour in Indonesia [this is not the image, I am too scared to put it here]
• David Slater, who planted the cameras and is a wildlife photographer, used the image
• PETA sued him on behalf of Naruto in 2015
• In 2017 the case was settled and Slater agreed to donate 25 percent of future revenue from
the photos to groups that protect crested macaques and their habitat in Indonesia.

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• In 2018, monkey lost on appeal
• The controversy boosted interest in the image Slater sells copies and donates to the cause
• But raised a crucial issue over who owns the right to take and circulate images—and profit
from them, not just of humans but other species.
Topic 9 - Crap stuff.

Or, why do things travel such distance and if there is such thing as
‘clever design’ what does this mean?
Lecture 1:
Crap stuff and Fakes: the basics
Crap stuff: the basics
• We have talked about Miller and stuff in previous units
• Miller has a generous take on consumers, consumption and the stuff that makes up our lives
• Building on Miller in this unit we focus on ‘crap’ stuff, specifically low end, ubiquitous
commodities and what they can tell us about consumption and everyday life
• Crap stuff involves a few concepts; Crap, Fakes, Low-end globalization
Crap
• Crap stuff could also be termed ‘low-cost commodities’ or ‘cheap things’ or even things that
‘fail to fulfill their promise’ (see Woloson, W. A. (2020). Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in
America. University of Chicago Press), but crap stuff has an evocative sound to it, it heightens
that sense of entrapment that Hodder talks about; are we trapped with cheap stuff even
when we want out?
• Woloson equates crap stuff with goods that are goods that are unneeded, cheap, shoddy,
and useless (p. 8), and aggressively pedalled to consumers. The ‘encrappificaiton’ of society!

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• Yet she fails, as opposed to Miller, to recognise that people invest many of these objects with
meaning that coexist alongside the dubious aspirations of this kind of consumption; not all
crap, but at least some if it
• Crap is global, but the same crap objects that clutter houses in our society are often put to
extensive and enduring use in other parts of the world
Fakes
• Fakes or counterfeit goods mimic designer goods, but are sold cheaply, and usually in
violation of intellectual property rights
• Fake goods can be a crucial part of modern subjectivities, see Ravi Sundaram, Pirate
Modernity, Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Also Sarai project
• Different kinds of fakes, a spectrum—that end up in markets around the world
• High-quality counterfeits [mimics and made-to-order]; hide mimesis
• Low-quality ‘knock-off’; show mimesis [obvious copies]
• Overproduced licenced goods [same factories on-sell at lower cost]
• Seconds/ dead stock [legally on-sold]
• Parody counterfeits [targeting tourists]
Robinson, D. F., & McDuie-Ra, D. (2018). (En) countering counterfeits in Bangkok: The urban spatial
interlegalities of intellectual property law, enforcement and tolerance. The Geographical Journal,
184(1), 41-52
Low-end globalization
• Gordon Mathews defines ‘low-end globalization’ as ‘the transnational flow of people and goods
involving relatively small amounts of capital and informal, sometimes semilegal or illegal,
transactions’ (2010: ).
• There are many ‘marts’ of low-end globalization around the world, from Guangzhou to Paris,
Kolkata to Nairobi.
• Mathews is interested in trade in goods and the livelihoods generated (as well as desired,
unfulfilled and squandered) through low-end mobility, his focus on is on physical mobility of
bodies enabled by low-cost transportation infrastructure (mostly air) which travel to different corners
of the world to engage in low-cost trade, often—but not always—in the hope of some kind of direct
or indirect pay-off.
Lecture 2:
The Flip-Flop Trail
The Flip-Flop Trail
• Knowles uses the term ‘back roads globalization’ to refer to an ‘alternative set of routes’ to
hegemonic globalization
• She writes, ‘back roads depart from the main roads, with which they form significant
junctions, they cross, they run alongside other main roads, forged by other steams of
business animating other lives’

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• These routes can be fragile and unstable, shifting and ad hoc, and often unpredictable
Knowles urge scholars to adopt an approach to globalization that moves away from ‘high-profile
vectors’ to the ways globalization is experienced by different groups of people situated in place.
What are the backroads of the flip-flop?
• Oil (Kuwait)
• Petrochemistry (Korea)
• Plastic City (China)
• Plastic Village (China)
• Logistics (Gulf of Aden)
• Markets (Ethipia)
• Navigating the city in flip-flops (Ethiopia)

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Hey, where’s my crap?
• The last few years have slowed global logistics; pandemic, war in Ukraine, fuel prices etc
• The Deadly Life of Logistics Deborah Cowen discusses the global logistics system that
transports commodities around the world
• It makes for a fascinating read alongside the Flip-Flop Trail
• Obviously global logistics aren’t just about crap stuff, but these networks of logistics are vital
to the flip-flop trail, just as they are to car parts, macs, and waste.
• Cowan is interested in the choke points of global logistics networks (where movement halts
or slows) and the ways governments try to address choke points through the reorganization
of national economies, development of ports and free trade zones, naval and defence
industries, and the management of human mobilities.

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Lecture 3:
Clever design or more crap?
Maker movement
• The antithesis of crap stuff are commodities that are finely crafted or involve clever design
The case for:
• Relies on expertise [crafts-person-ship]
• Small batches—made to demand
• Less waste/ Better for the environment
• Less shipping*/ lower carbon footprint
• Unique, bespoke—generative of more meaningful relationships
• Social connection between maker and consumer (often, not always)
• Re-use and recycling because goods durable, ‘well -made’
• Gives makers access to consumers in alternative marketplace/ never able to compete at scale
The case against
• So what are the real world alternatives to crap?
• Should we all have hand made things? Recycled things/ ‘Nice’ things?
• There is clearly something to design: semiotics of craft, maker, and design have become
pervasive in what we consume
• Even mass-produced objects with large environmental footprints like IKEA goods trade
heavily on ideas of design
• See Harold (readings), the ‘thing-ing of products’
• How Target has tried to appeal to new class of consumers through design collaborations
• Democratising design—does Target really do this?
• No- “because to have any real political potential, the process of design must be
democratized”
• Yes- “encourages consumers to become conversant in the language of design […] aesthetic
capitalism succeeds via “connective mutations,” via the user-added value
that makes every consumer an inventor, of sorts”
Retro-modern crap?
• An alternative way of thinking about this is craft and design is a kind of retro-modern
consumer identity; a way of differentiated through sophisticated consumption
• People move on from crap; and that is an important marker of social mobility

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• Whereas in some parts of the world, maker-culture is seen as backward and old fashioned,
and [certain] mass produced items are a marker of modernity
• Yet still there are more variations, as in some countries a return to locally designed goods is a
sign of good taste and discerning consumption
• AND can also be a way to bring in hybrid styles rather than just consuming what flows
through low-end globalization
• e.g. Thailand; me and Dan Robinson researched pirated goods in Thailand and one of our
findings was that the domestic market had declining demand for fake stuff and crap stuff
• Especially among the middle classes, designer culture that borrows and modifies styles from
elsewhere, incorporates some local styles, etc.; in clothes, furniture, interior design
See Robinson, D. F., & McDuie-Ra, D. (2018). (En) countering counterfeits in Bangkok: The urban
spatial interlegalities of intellectual property law, enforcement and tolerance. The Geographical
Journal, 184(1), 41-52
Graduating from crap?
• This shift is also part of a state-mediated interest in expanding the entrepreneurial class and
associated forms of capitalism.
• This interest can also be seen in public investment, such as the Bangkok Art and Culture
Gallery (full of Thai designer shops) built over a park in central Bangkok previously occupied
by street vendors and the homeless.
• Another example is the Thailand Culture and Design Centre (TCDC), also in a high-end mall
and containing a shop and museum highlighting the shifts in Thai creativity and design.
• Notably the museum only shows very old (heritage) and very recent (creative industry) Thai
designs, a domestic void during much of the twentieth century within which
adoption/assimilation of designed goods has been the norm.
• The Art and Culture Gallery and the TCDC, along with many of the boutique designer stalls
and shops in Siam Square and Chatu- jak, reflects a demand for these goods but also an
aspiration for a certain kind of modernity – modernity on par with hubs of creative industry.
• To put it another way, a class of Thai consumers and designers has graduated from
counterfeit goods.
• This shift, nascent as it is, is changing urban space, seen most obviously in the gentrification
of Siam Square, which looks more like Seoul than anywhere else

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Topic 10 - Necropolitics, Infrastructure and Space.

Or, why do so many of the things we make kill us?
Lecture 1:
The social relations of
infrastructure
The social relations of infrastructure
• Infrastructure, for real? Yes.
• Infrastructure is crucial not only in enabling consumption by facilitating the movement of goods [in
production and consumption] and data, re-arranging the world at the same time (see Flip-Flop trail)
BUT infrastructure itself is a promise that we buy into socially, politically and economically
• Research on infrastructure in the social sciences has boomed in the 2000s; in sociology, human
geography, anthropology and even in literature, film and cultural studies
• Infrastructure is also a constant in political rhetoric in Australia and globally; the promise to create,
improve, extend infrastructure is at the heart of electoral politics and the business of government
• See Utopia on ABC – brilliantly satirises this obsession
What is infrastructure?
• Infrastructures are built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for
their exchange over space.
• As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its
temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown.
• They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern
societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.
• But infrastructures also exist as forms separate from their purely technical functioning, and they
need to be analyzed as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees.
• They emerge out of and store within them forms of desire and fantasy and can take on fetish-like
aspects that sometimes can be wholly autonomous from their technical function.
Why?
•“Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies
in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things.”
•Infrastructures go beyond their immediate functionality and, as Larkin argues, ‘need to be analysed
as concrete semiotic and aesthetic vehicles oriented to addressees’ (2013: 329).
•Larkin B (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-
343.
Socio-technical systems
• Susan Star challenged scholars to undertake the ‘terrifying and delightful challenge’ of
ethnographic approaches to infrastructure and the systems created by, and reflective of, human
organization (1999: 389).

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• Socio-technical system—thinking back to our technology—the basics unit
• Ash Amin ‘both the social and the technological are imagined as hybrids of human and nonhuman
association, with infrastructure conceptualized as a sociotechnical assemblage, and urban social life
as never reducible to the purely human alone’ (2014: 137-138).
• Humans are entangled in it; demand it, create it, use it, fix it (authorities and unauthorised), lament
it, mourn it
• Infrastructure ‘thickens’ social relations, brings people into social contact and connection Amin A
(2014) Lively infrastructure. Theory, Culture & Society 31(7-8): 137-161. Star SL (1999) The
ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist 43(3): 377-391
The Promise of Infrastructure
• Infrastructure promises to make life better
• Faster, more efficient, cleaner, to enable flows of data, information, logistics, delivery
• Infrastructure is also analysed as a spectacle; a reflection of power, of the presence of government,

or corporate, ingenuity and innovation
• And conversely, an enduring symbol of failed promises
• Infrastructure is also mundane, barely noticed.
• Until it breaks down or disappears or our needs change.
• Part of the everyday experience of infrastructure is improvisation, making do, fixing, mending
• DIY activities; repair
Lecture 2:
Death Traps and
Infrastructural Brutalism
Death Traps and
Brutalism
•Infrastructure kills
•Death traps.
•Solomon—readings, looks at potholes
•This may seem trivial, or banal, but potholes are important for two reasons:
•As indicators of care, response, maintenance
•As direct causes of wounding, injury and death
Care
• Think about this for a minute, where do you encounter most potholes?
• Where are the roads smooth and well-maintained?
• You can think of this at varied scales; on campus, within your suburb, across the city, between
urban and regional towns, compared in different countries

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• Main roads, feeder roads, backroads
• If infrastructure is a promise, potholes are a promise broken, or at least deferred
• Solomon argues that potholes and other disruptions should be seen as planned not as failures
• “Disruption is a feature, not a bug, in the movements of everyday life.”
• Wanksy: Manchester man draws penises around potholes so the city will fix them
Wounding
• “Moving through infrastructures leaves a material trace; wounds are the result of the damage of
blurring the domains of ‘body’ and ‘environment.’”
• There are many examples of this, migrants wounded by border infrastructure for e.g. (fences,
barbed wire, the forced crossing of deserts)—‘the fleshiness of infrastructure in motion’
• And, for Solomon, potholes in Mumbai, especially during the monsoon
• Exposure to wounding brings out deep inequalities in who moves where, how they move, their
degrees of protection (car vs auto or foot or bicycle) and what happens once wounded (care)
• Last part of article, the ways potholes have become part of the city’s life, collective grievances,
humour, culture and protest
Wounding for fun
• Skateboarders are also wounded by infrastructure. Some critically.
• However they are not injured in everyday mobilities, in using the infrastructure as intended, they
are injured appropriating and mis-using infrastructure.
• They are not injured moving with the flows of city, but moving against them; on purpose.
Infrastructure doesn’t attack them in some much as they attack it, and in turn are prepared to live
with the consequences.
• Wounding is an important part of the spectacle in the anti-social life of infrastructure, featured in
skateboard media, leads to emulation, legitimacy, and culture credibility
Infrastructural Brutalism
• Truscello offer a fascinating take on the ways infrastructure is depicted in ‘artistic texts’, especially
TV and film
• Why?
• Through artistic media such as film, photography and literature, ‘even the infrastructure that is
built to be buried—pipes, wires, and stuff that undergirds cities for example—becomes visible in
ways other than breakdown’ (2020: 26).
• He adds, ‘artistic interventions depict the full range of engagements with infrastructures, from the
formulation of an idea to the often-troubled construction to the historical legacies’ (2020: 26).
• Media captures infrastructure in various states, conditions, and spectrums of visibility.

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• These ‘infrastructural narratives’ can be ‘as powerful as, or more powerful than, the materials used
in construction, potentially disrupting hegemonic legacies and contributing the new practices’ (2020:
29).
• So narratives about infrastructure matter in its promise, provision, and also in resistance
Truscello's examples
• Drowned Towns
• The road in road movies
• Ruins of oil capitalism (True Detective Season 1) See also Richard Misrach
• Death trains
Where does the brutalism come in?
• Truscello sees these as interventions into humanity’s collective march to self-destruction through
the ceaseless advancement of infrastructure, ‘consuming vital resources, condemning millions to
premature deaths, and blocking potential exit routes from its own systematic suicide’ (2020: 23).
• Entrapment, think back to Hodder....
• Artistic media may provoke calls to action, provide ‘subtle intimations’, inspire people to ‘unbuild
necropolitical structures’, and warn ‘against the construction of future necropower’ (2020: 265).
• The larger counterhegemonic project at play is ‘that more people realize the necropolitics of
infrastructure, to see and practice beyond the neoliberal consensus that decaying infrastructure must
always be repaired and that an absence of infrastructure is always an opportunity for so-called
development’ (2020: 265).
• Perhaps the key line is: ‘What we deter or destroy today will mean more to our collective future
than anything we build or repair’ (2020: 265).
Lecture 3:
Necropolitics and
Gore Capitalism
Necropolitics
• Achille Mbembe, a social theorist born in Cameroon and now based I South Africa, develops the
concept of biopower, adding a global and post-colonial lens to create the concept of necropolitics.
• Using examples from the suicide bomber to slavery to apartheid in South Africa, he theorises that
power in the post-colonial world is predicated on who gets to live and die.
• The notion of national sovereignty – where nation-states control what happens within their own
borders – was ignored in the colonial context and remains redundant in the post-colonial context as
the right to kill people in other sovereign territory is claimed by some countries and groups, even
though it is mostly illegal.
• Rather than a state of exception such as war, this can be normal everyday life for some people, for
instance, where US drone strikes are flown under the banner of killing terrorists but there is
considerable ‘collateral damage’ of innocent civilian deaths.

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• The USA can seem to do this with impunity, despite United Nations’ laws.
• Mbembe says that this constant exposure to death can leave people in a kind of zombie existence
of precarity, a ‘living dead’, as if they are stuck between life and death.
• This way of living, he says, is unimaginable for most people in in the Global North, who only view
such deaths as events through the media.
Gore Capitalism
• Mexican transfeminist theorist Sayak Valencia has further built on the idea of necropolitics to argue
that violence itself is key to understanding what can be called gore capitalism.
• This is the undisguised price paid by those outside the Global North for being part of the global
capitalist system.
• Valencia argues that the images of tortured, mutilated, or dead bodies of, for instance, members of
Mexican drug cartels and police are consumed as little more than a spectacle in the Global North,
where there are billion-dollar markets for drugs like cocaine.
• The term ‘black market', for instance, not only is colloquial for illegalities, but Valencia suggests
holds additional associations with Black and Brown people that those in the
North depend on being exploited if their own relative material privilege is to be maintained.
Consumerism’s Necropolitics
• Mbembe focusses on the relations of State, but we can think about this for consumer capitalism:
• Young boys miming coltan in the Congo
• Worker suicides at China’s FOXCONN factories
• Sweatshop labour of the fashion industry
• Drone strike ‘collateral damage’ in wars
• Human trafficking for slave and sexual labour
• Mexican drug cartel related deaths
• Chemical waste dumping sites throughout the Global South
• Mbembe: “The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other”
The Spectatorship of Suffering
• With all this in mind, it is interesting to think about how all this is portrayed in the media and how
we as consumers of these images react, or don’t.
• Chouliaraki discusses the media’s portrayal and representation of the distant suffering of people –
earthquakes, tsunamis, famine, hurricanes, terrorism etc. – and how it relates to how we feel and
what are we meant to do.
• Can the media create a situation of genuine care and action for people we are never likely to meet
and of whose exploitation is largely responsible for our own material comfort?

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• She discusses at length the thesis of ‘compassion fatigue’: the audience’s gradual disinterest
towards distant suffering.
• She argues that the result of the various ways suffering is presented in the media leads to a result
where:
• “spectators are confronted with a diffused and often confusing collage of sufferings, each seeking
to make its own bid for public attention, while it offers them ‘no rational weighing the claims of one
against another’. In making it impossible to judge which different suffering matters most, the media
create an ethical vacuum in the voice of justice and this is what may create compassion fatigue and
inhibit action” (Chouliaraki 2006: 216).
• French sociologist Luc Boltanski has also written extensively about this.
Ironic Spectators
•The ironic spectator is separated from the reality of the lives of the precarious.
•Such spectators often feel some empathy and anger about these injustices to the extent that they
may express it through Facebook posts or wearing a wristband, before getting on with their own
lives.
•This, according to Chouliaraki, has little to no influence on making actual change.
•This is essentially an aspect of privileged Western subjectivity when it comes to politics and
consumerism, but is certainly intersectional in its intensity.
Topic 11 - Consumer Culture, the

Environment and Waste. Or, why do we throw out so much crap and
will we ever stop?
The Story of Stuff
Lecture 1:
Visualising Waste
Waste and Culture
•‘Hilarious and horrifying stories about encounters with blocked drains; desperate searches through
a very full garbage bin looking for one lost Barbie doll shoe; the almost new bed taken to a landfill
after an acrimonious break up.
•Waste can generate powerful emotions.
•And not just bodily or organic waste – things don’t have to be slimy or foul smelling to disturb us.
•The empty Coke can just quietly biding its time can really upset the order of things when it’s
encountered on a hike into pristine wilderness.
•You’ve made all this effort to get to a place where the ugly, shit end of capitalism won’t be present,
only to discover that your quest has been futile.
•A bit of rubbish has found its way into paradise and exposed all your yearning for purity as doomed
to fail’ (Gai Hawkins 2006: vii).

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Waste as Culture
•‘Your DVD player breaks down after 15 months of occasional use and the repairer says it will cost
$150 to fix, if he can find the parts; “Cheaper to buy another one”, he advises.
•Your children refuse to wear their siblings’ outgrown, perfectly fine jeans because they aren’t the
latest fashion; they must have new ones – everybody else does!
•Explanations of how wasteful this is are met with a blank stare.
•In the commodity relations that touch every aspect of life, waste, as conspicuous consumption, is
an invitation most find difficult to refuse. Not because they lack moral fibre but because this
particular habit is embedded in the character of social life.
•Constant serial replacement works because a fashion system and forms of identity underwrite it...
•Constant consumption is framed as an expression of personal freedom and choice. But the other
side of it is the freedom to waste, to discard things that are still perfectly useful (Hawkins 2006: viii).
The Great Ocean Garbage Dump
•This isn’t just a problem of mess on beaches or of killing marine and bird life (and even if it was just
those things, surely that’s enough reason to stop).
•The plastic itself is breaking down in the ocean into microplastic polymers and chemicals (DDT, PCBs
etc) to the point where it is inside fish bloodstreams, which humans then eat.
•Who knows the health implications of this...
•Risk Society: Science producing science to clean up the collateral damage of previous science...
•“Swirling vortex of plastic soup” over 25 million square kilometres containing over 10 million tonnes
of plastic waste.

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•Plastic debris outweighs plankton, the most abundant organism on the planet, by about six to one.
•Can’t really do anything about it: far to much of it to scoop up - even if we could, the environmental
costs of recycling it into energy (i.e. using the hydrocarbons that plastic is made of to create energy)
is environmentally and economically unsustainable.
•Only way to prevent more in the future is to stop wasting plastic.
•Is this probable?
•How much plastic have you used today?
•Previous slide is from Rolling Stone magazine, Feb, 2010.
Chris Jordan – Midway: Message from the Gyre
•“These photographs of albatross chicks were made in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny
stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full
of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them
like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of
albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To document this phenomenon
as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed,
manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. Perhaps this tragedy can serve as a multi-layered
metaphor for the state of our world, our culture, and our own inner landscapes”. ~cj, Seattle,
October 2009.
Wasting Food
•Australian households are throwing out more than $5 billion worth of food each year, more than
Australians spend on digital equipment, and more than it costs to run the Australian Army.
•In addition to the direct financial costs of this waste, the environmental impact associated with
excessive greenhouse gas emissions and water use is substantial.
•The data reveal that the extent of food waste is related to both household income and the number
of household occupants.
•The amount of food wasted increases with household income and decreases with larger household
sizes.
•Households with four or more occupants waste the least food per person, while people living by
themselves waste the most.
•The average Australian household throws out an estimated $616 worth of food a year, which
equates to $239 per person.
•Most people are concerned about food waste and report feeling guilty when they throw away food.
•While respondents were able to identify how they could reduce food waste, they simultaneously
reported behaviour that contradicted their own advice.
•For example, most people believe that planning their purchases in advance is the best way to avoid
wasting food, but most of those same respondents admitted to making purchasing decisions on the
spur of the moment.
•Saving money is by far the greatest motivator for households to reduce food waste.

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•Twice as many respondents said that financial considerations would be the main reason to avoid
wasting food compared to those who cited the environmental benefits.
•The data suggest that better planning by grocery shoppers is likely to play an important role in
reducing food waste.
•However, such ‘conscious consumption’ tends to be inconsistent with the ‘convenience foods’
promoted by some food retailers.
•The free provision by some retailers of plastic shopping bags, for example, highlights the manner in
which grocery outlets encourage customers to shop first and plan second.
•In addition to the direct financial benefits to households, reducing food waste has the capacity to
deliver significant environmental benefits at no cost to government.
•Food retailers represent a major barrier to implementing effective food waste policies, since their
profits are contingent on the amount of food sold rather than the amount of food consumed.
•To overcome this, better public understanding of the problems associated with food waste needs to
be a priority for governments at all levels.
•Without considerable policy change in this area, household waste is likely to grow as incomes rise
and the number of occupants in each household shrinks.
Lecture 2:
Thinking about ‘progress”
Economics
•The field of economics is the most dominant and pervasive discourse in contemporary society, a
situation that is unlikely to change in the very near future.
•It is a discourse that is completely dominated by a neo-classical form of economics that treats
humans as ‘things’, where their ‘value’ and ‘efficiency’ is to be judged in terms of ‘profitability’ or by
a set of very dubious numerical equations, and ‘externality’ responsibilities are to be avoided at all
costs.
•Under the shadow of the work of Adam Smith, this form of economics has seeped into every corner
of the globe.
•Contemporary economists love Smith’s promotion of laissez-faire capitalism and free trade and this
neoclassical economic paradigm is taught in economic departments all over the world.
•Ironically, Smith himself would likely denounce the economic paradigm that is largely attributed to
him as he attacked market concentration and advocated small-scale locally owned enterprise.
•He might also denounce economists themselves for their narrow focus on money flows, price
theory and economic growth as Smith devoted plenty of writing to ethics, literature and philosophy.
Homo economicus
•Mostly, contemporary economists have not been able to maintain that breadth of study and many
have the idea that economics is a physical, rather than a social science that has nothing to learn from
other disciplines.

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•They cling to the notion that their models are not tainted by the subjectivity that they claim
apparently confuses other social sciences.
•Economics, they claim, is science and mathematics to the point where Nobel Prize winner for
Economics and leader of the Chicago School, George Stigler, once remarked that ‘without
mathematics, we’d be reduced to the cavilling of sociologists and the like’.
•The idea that neoclassical economics can withstand the rigor of the scientific process is laughable.
•Homo economicus, the theoretical self-interested everyman that economists base there ‘analyses’
on, is a total misrepresentation of human nature ignoring structural factors, altruism and
environmental degradation and assumes that people’s choices are guided by perfect rationality.
•It would actually be funny if this absurd system were not a reality, it sounds like the plot of a Catch-
22 or Brave New World –esque novel.
Externalities
•In economics, an externality is a cost or benefit arising from any activity which does not accrue to
the person or organization carrying on the activity.
•A positive externality may see the publics’ enjoyment of views from a private building or the
fertilization of fruit trees by bees.
•Negative externalities may be damages to other people, or the environment, for example by
radiation, water or air pollution, or noise, which does not have to be paid for by those causing it
(Black, 1997: 168).
The Question of “Progress”
•Economists decided that the environment and land in general derived most of its ‘value’ from
labour and capital investment and is therefore expendable and easily sustainable.
•Within small economies, this logic may (and only may) have been feasible and the natural costs
were probably hard to envision.
•But as populations and economies grew, alongside economic globalisation, the economies’ conflict
with nature was inevitable.
• Economic theory has not caught up with reality, as most neoclassical economists cannot see
anything wrong with their disregard for nature.
•The attitude towards the environment is probably best summed up by another Nobel Prize winner
for Economics, Robert Solow, who had the arrogance to assert ‘The world can, in effect, get along
without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe’.
•Despite all this, discourses can change. It was only 30 years ago that the more benevolent
Keynesian system was in place.
•Any discourse can be influenced form both inside and out. As with all expert discourses, there are
dissenting voices that are marginalised by the dominant.
•Foucault argues that discourses are not necessarily oppressive forces. The power relationships
involved can be creative both in providing ‘normalised’ ways for people to live and creating and
highlighting alternative measures.

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Example: GDP vs GPI’
•For instance, the news often tells us that life is good because the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is
going up.
•Yet, this measurement does not take into account how people actual feel about what is happening
in their lifeworld and it supports corporate behaviour that sees record profits announced alongside
massive labour redundancies.
•It supports a trade system where, for instance, the US imports 41409 tons of coffee and exports
42227, imports 953142 tons of beef and veal and exports 899834, imports 365350 tons of potatoes
and exports 324479.
•Does it make sense to organise our lives around such nonsense?
•If we need a measurement, why not use alternative measurement of progress.
•The GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) has been developed to provide a more balanced measure of
the economy taking into account such ‘inefficient’ things as leisure time, unpaid voluntarism and
housework.
•It subtracts value for crime, family breakdown, resource depletion, traffic accidents, pollution, and
other negatives.
•Ultimately, the GPI takes into account people and recognises the importance of family, community,
nature and leisure in economic well-being that the GDP totally ignores.
•Thus while the GDP has been steadily rising since the 1950s, the GPI levelled off in the 1970s and
has even experienced prolonged dips.
•This begs an obvious question: are we going forward or backwards?

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Ecological Footprint
•Environmental problems seem to be out of the individual’s hands, as it is large multinational

corporations which seem responsible for the majority of these problems.
•Yet, the use of cars is probably the single biggest polluter, something most of us do every day.
•Aside from obvious things like recycling, a very simple way for individuals to contribute to
environmental concerns is to make an effort to shrink your ecological footprint.
•An ecological footprint is the amount of productive land area needed to sustain a human being.
•There is about 1.9 hectares per person available in the globe.
•But, already the average footprint is 2.3 hectares which means we need 1.5 Earths to live
sustainably.
•On average, the Western world has much larger footprints than the rest. The United Arab Emirates
has the largest Footprint in the world at 9.9, but 8 of the top 10 are Western countries.
•The US has a footprint of 9.57 hectares needing 5 Earths to sustain everyone if we all consumed like
them. Australia’s is 7.7. Bangladesh has the smallest footprint at just 0.5 hectares.
•China is 1.36 hectares. If the Chinese continue to embrace consumer capitalism and reach the
current levels of the US, we will need 25 Earths to sustain us. Can anyone see a problem here?
•It is not up to the so-called developing world to catch up to our consumption levels for everyone’s
future to be ensured. It is up to us – the apparently developed world - to slow down and to consume
much more responsibly.

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•Individuals reducing their ecological footprint are one way to facilitate this process. There are
multinational corporations attempting to do this, so it shouldn’t be too hard for one person to do
their bit.
Lecture 3:
The value of
Nothing
Waste’ and ‘Value’: Social Constructions?
•Our social system based on spiralling consumption has waste built in to it: we are encouraged to
constantly buy goods which often have ‘built in or planned obsolescence’ (designed to fail after a
short time) or ‘perceived obsolescence’ (influence of fashion, status etc).
•99% of the stuff we buy is put in the trash within a year.
•Waste is seen as stuff that no longer has ‘value’.
•But the concept of value in this regard is highly contested.
•Waste can be seen as “offensive” if it is in the wrong place.
•Our waste is largely ‘invisible’ as it is collected and dumped to where we don’t have to deal with it.
•This is even the case between countries: the Majority World is increasingly used as a rubbish dump.
•As anthropologist Mary Douglas has shown, it is not the object itself that is waste of rubbish, it is
the context: dirt is matter out of place in the house, but in the right place in the garden.
•The same can be said of waste: importantly though, we need to change the very way we consume
in terms of our huge level of waste if the planet has any chance of survival in future generations.
•Waste is socially constructed: One person’s may see ‘cow shit’; another may see fertilizer
•Raj Patel’s recent work brilliantly shows how our concepts of value have nothing to do with what
things cost.
•For instance, water is really cheap despite its importance and waning supply, yet diamonds are
really expensive despite the fact that they have virtually no use value.
•He also points out the ‘new kinds of free’: for instance most watched the 2010 World Cup ‘free’ on
SBS but what is the real cost?
•While South Africa has spent an estimated $2 billion on hosting, what is not in the figures includes
the forced removal – slum clearance – of people to areas with no jobs, schools or health facilities.
•These social costs are not borne by the viewers.
•We will be forced to sit through barrage of ads that encourage consumption with excluded
externalities from the cost: Sony’s e-waste, Adidas and Nike sweatshops, Visa and MasterCard's
encouragement of toxic debt, car and airlines encouraging the burning of fossil fuel and Coke and
McDonalds junk foods that have obvious health/obesity implications.
•The social cost of these are not included in the price.
•Our very system depends on the real cost – the social costs - being hidden.

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The Hidden Cost of ‘Domestic Duties’
•The main hidden cost of consumer capitalism is so called ‘domestic duties’, what has been referred
to as ‘women’s work’, which for some reason is performed free.
•In 1995, it is estimated that if this free women’s work was actually paid for it would cost $15 trillion.
•That’s $15 000 000 000 000!
•As Patel points out: ‘It’s because this reproductive work has been naturalized as women’s work, and
because women’s work is unpaid, that there can be such a large paid economy”
The $200 Dollar Hamburger
•What is not paid for when you buy a Big Mac? A 1994 report in the Financial Times reported:
•The carbon footprint and energy costs of 550 million Big Macs a year is 2.66 billion pounds of C02.
•The broader social and environmental impacts are also not factored: water use and soil
degradation; hidden health costs of diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
•None of these things are in the drive-thru price, but the costs still have to be paid by someone:
which according to the 1994 report should be $200 per burger!
•But Patel goes even further, pointing out that also not factored into the cost is the way consumers
in the US subsidise the cost through their tax dollars: the meat is ‘fattened up’ on government highly
subsidized corn; the average fast food wage is below US$15000, which is below the poverty line and
are supplemented by Medicare, food stamps and many other government services; antibiotics are
becoming less effective due to widespread prophylactic use in livestock; pesticide run off and
nutrient run off is also destroying soil where future generations will pay the cost.
•These real costs make the true cost of the burger even higher.
The Real Cost of Petrol
•In 2007 Americans paid 92c a litre, but the price at the pump does not contain the estimated 1.16
trillion dollars Americans pay every year in hidden costs: tankers defending the Persian Gulf; oils
supply disruptions; forfeiting US jobs and tax revenue to overseas oil production; cleaning up oil
related pollution; treating asthma caused by smog etc.
•Therefore, the real cost should have been more like $2.64 a litre.
•If we paid the real cost, we might use less...
The Politics of Waste
•As Woodward points out, ‘waste’ becomes a political issue: how do we deal with it? Where should
it go? Why should I be responsible? etc.
•Examples of ‘rubbish rage’, reluctance to recycle and where rubbish dumps should go... let alone
when it comes to dangerous medical or nuclear waste.
•These are examples of NIMBY politics: not in my back yard.
•For Beck, it is the politics of risk management that dominates more and more today, especially as
the class politics of redistribution seems to have subsided:

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•who wants the medical waste to be trucked through their suburb?
•who wants the new rubbish dump near their backyard?
•Who pays for recycling?
Material Culture
•Waste therefore seems an implicit, but largely ignored part of material culture.
•But is doesn’t have to be this way: if sociology is to make the normal seem strange, then the
examples in today’s lecture should go some way into changing the way we think about these issues,
or hopefully to start to be concerned about them!
•One of the contributions here could be about contributing to people seeing what the consequences
of our choices are...

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Topic 12 - Globalization, Consumerism

& Inequality.
Or, how inequality makes us all scared, sad and anxious
Lecture 1:
Global Inequality
Inequality within countries
We will focus here on global inequality, but here’s a nice hidden example of how there are deep and
often subtle inequalities relating to consumption within nations, in this case how the poor subsidise
the rich’s use of air conditioners.
•http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/an-air-con-when-the-poor-pay-to-cool-the-rich-20120904-
25cjh.html
•For another representation of inequality within nations, see this Four Corners episode:
•http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/09/20/3594298.htm
Illustrating Global Inequality
•For an interesting representation of global inequalities, see Danny Dorling’s ‘Worldmapper’ project:
•http://www.worldmapper.org/
•http://www.youtube.com/user/viewsoftheworld
Human Consequences
• We looked at the physical waste our system of global economics and consumer culture creates.
• For many people around the world, life has not moved beyond Thomas Hobbes’ famous quote
from Leviathan (1651) that in a so-called ‘state of nature’, life would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish
and short.
• The ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’ of the developed world, and its imposition of ‘efficiency’ and market
economics on the developing world is doing very little to fix problems of hunger, violence, and
health.
• Violence in this sense has to be understood in a number of ways: physical (murder, torture, rape,
domestic etc.); symbolic (language, culture, colonialism, ‘development’) and systemic (both caused
by the economic system itself while also producing the economic system).
Statistics and Figures
• It’s easy to represent global inequality and suffering through figures - you have all heard them:
billion people living on less than a dollar a day; half the world’s population has not made a phone
call; mortality rates; differences in GDP etc.
• Ulrich Beck: “It is a brutal irony that the inequality between poor and rich in world society takes the
form of a champagne glass (Held 2007). The 900 million people privileged by the grace of birth in the
west are responsible for 86 per cent of world consumption; they use 58 per cent of its energy
supplies and have 79 per cent of world income at their disposal as well as 74 per cent of all
telephone connections. The poorest 1.2 billion, one-fifth of the world’s population, are responsible
for 1.3 per cent of world consumption, use 4 per cent of its energy supplies and have 1.5 per cent of

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all telephone connections... That fifth of the world’s population that is doing worst (they have less
money altogether than the richest man in the world) lack everything – food, clean drinking water and
a roof over their heads.” (2010: 167).
The Problem of Stats...
• The problem with using these figures is that it takes on the dominant economic logic itself – if
these figures improve then lives will improve.
• Many economists from moderates to market fundamentalists argue that the so-called ‘trickle down
effect’ benefits everyone – as wealth generally rises the bottom rises as well improving standards of
living – and if that is the case, the amount of inequality does not matter.
• This can be shown to be pernicious on several fronts.
• Firstly, statistics of wealth, esp. GDP, household wealth figures and average wages, are obviously
based on average figures which distort reality – the top 1% of populations generally hold the vast
majority of wealth rendering these figures as illusions.
• Secondly, it has been increasingly shown that equality itself matters when it comes to happiness,
quality of life and health (see The Spirit Level and also the work of Clive Hamilton, Danny Dorling and
Raj Patel for instance).
• Thirdly, the figures hide the true human consequences of balance sheets on paper - exploitation,
violence, contamination – that is, the environmental and human externalities.
• Statistics hide the necropolitics and gore capitalism.
• Therefore, this mode of thinking could easily be labelled the ‘trickle up effect’.
Transnational Capitalist Class
• The transnational capitalist class can be analytically divided into four main fractions.
• (i) owners and controllers of TNCs and their local affiliates;
• (ii) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians;
• (iii) globalizing professionals;
• (iv) consumerist elites (merchants and media).
• For Sklair, it is these groups of people who benefit from globalisation and are the actual drivers of
it.
20:80 Society?
• The concept of the 20:80 society (Martin & Schumann, 1997: 4) emerged at a 1995 political and
economic conference as the probable globalised future.
• Here, 20% of the population will suffice in keeping the world’s economy and production going,
leaving 80% on the periphery. Therefore, with 20% of the world’s population actively participating in
life, earning and consumption, the remaining 80% are either in work that does not pay enough to live
or are unemployed.

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• A concern for those at the conference was would the 20% adopt a benevolent position in regard to
the 80% and redistribute some wealth, or would they continue the current trend of the rich and
attempt to insulate themselves from the 80%?
• It was here, in an attempt to prevent violent revolution, that Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US
security advisor, suggested the idea of “tittytainment”. Not referring to adult entertainment, it is a
combination of food aid (“tit” referring to mother’s milk and nourishment... not porn!) and
entertainment, similar to the Roman idea of “bread and circuses” (Martin & Schumann, 1997: 4).
• This rather shocking concept is as a stark reflection of the dominance of neo-liberal thought and its
possible destructive and inhuman consequences.
• Has this come closer to fruition since 1995?
Lecture 2:
Tourists and
Vagabonds
Liquid Modernity
•Zygmunt Bauman sees modernity as ‘liquid’, a state somewhere between ‘solid’ and ‘air’ – a
metaphor for the demand of flexibility in all aspects of life and the growing role of consumerism.
•This creation of a permanent sense of impermanence increases social suffering as the ground shifts
beneath the feet of a burgeoning number of people, but leaves them with nowhere to go.
The Creation of Desire
• “Goods and services must arouse desires, seducing prospective consumers.
• Once this process takes place, new desires must be created in the constant search for profit. As
desire never survives its satisfaction, a constant chase after new desires must be produced, rather
than their satisfaction.
• For this process to work, people must want to be seduced” (Bauman, 1998, 77-79).
• Here, Bauman points to the specter of false consciousness; the impossibility of living one’s life as
anything else than a consumer, reveals itself to them in the disguise of the free exercise of will
(Bauman, 1998, 84).
Consumers as commodities
• He sees consumerism as becoming so pervasive that it has reached the point where consumerism
is ‘consuming life’ itself (2007).
• ‘Individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they
promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the
travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the
term ‘the market’. The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires
them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and
pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the
society of consumers’.

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• Bauman here is referring to Global North individual’s branded existence: how we are forced to
become promoters of ourselves in job interviews for instance; and how this logic pervades leisure
practice and everyday life: think MySpace & Facebook or reality TV shows.
The Tourist and the Vagabond
• Bauman metaphorically refers to globalised classes “tourists” and “vagabonds” (Bauman, 1998, 77-
102).
• Tourists and vagabonds have such a totally different outlook on life (what Bourdieu would call
habitus) that they can barely understand each other.
• Time and space mean very different things for the tourist as opposed to the vagabond.
• Globalization is geared towards satisfying the tourist’s dreams and desires, pushing the vagabond
into a position where they cannot be a tourist but also cannot stay put.
• The vagabond is subjected to the ‘living death’ of necropolitics and gore capitalism, while the
tourist ironically spectates on the very technologies this exploitative relationship provides.
• ‘What this means is that vagabonds do not have the means to engage with the benefits of the
globalization process, yet the rise of temporary labour and the ability of companies to simply move
production to cheaper areas of labour denies the possibility of stability. Vagabonds are either forced
to move (refugees and forced emigrants) or cannot move but feel like the ground is being pulled
from under their feet (low-skilled workers)’ (Bauman, 1998, 87).
• ‘It is not that the tourist and vagabond live in a different culture, it is just that global culture is for
those who can afford it. Economic growth exacerbates poverty but creates even more consumer
wonders for the tourist to consume and the vagabond to be enchanted by’.
• The tourist needs the vagabond to make their world more savory; they do not dislike the vagabond
for what they are or for their public costs, but for the possibility that the tourist may become one.
The less appetizing the vagabonds fate, the more savory the tourist’s existence. The vagabond is the
tourist’s nightmare while the tourist is the vagabond’s dream’ (Bauman, 1998, 77-102).
• For Bauman, “The widely noted, increasingly worrying polarization of the world and its population
is not an external, alien, disturbing, ‘spoke in the wheel’ interference with the process of
globalization; it is its effect” (Bauman, 1998, 93).
Wasted Lives (2004)
• Bauman describes ‘wasted lives’ – best understood as the human externalities of global consumer
culture.
• ‘The production of ‘human waste’, or more correctly wasted humans (the ‘excessive’ and
‘redundant’, that is the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be
recognized or allowed to stay), is an inevitable outcome of modernization, and an inseparable
accompaniment of modernity. It is an inescapable side-effect of order-building (each order casts
some part of the extant population as ‘out of place’, ‘unfit’ or ‘undesirable’) and of economic
progress (that cannot proceed without degrading and devaluing the previously effective modes of
‘making a living’ and therefore cannot but deprive their practitioners of their livelihood)” (5).
Bauman on the London Riots

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“These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers”
“Whatever else those youngsters may say when pressed to explain why they are angry (mostly
repeating the explanations they heard on TV and read in the papers...) the fact is that when looting
and burning shops they did not attempt to “change society” – replace the present order with
another, more humane and more hospitable to decent and dignified life; they did not rebel against
consumerism – but made a (misguided and doomed) attempt to join, if only for a fleeting moment,
the ranks of consumers from which they have been excluded. Their mutiny was an un-planned, un-
integrated, spontaneous explosion of accumulated frustration that can be only explained in terms of
“because of”, not in terms of “in order to”; I doubt whether the question of “what for” played any
role in that orgy of destruction”.
• http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/interview-zygmunt-bauman-on-the-uk-riots/
• http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/
Lecture 3:
The Effects of Inequality
Violence
• Zizek argues that physical violence and suffering are supported and perpetuated by what he calls
‘systemic violence’, a hidden violence that is at the heart of the economic imperatives of neo-
liberalism.
• This violence is not always performed by a clearly identifiable agent: it is the system and its
structures itself that are ‘often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our
economic and political systems’.
• In this sense, physical violence is presented as a break form the ‘normal’ rational, peaceful state,
but the systemic violence that underpins society can be understood as a key cause of the ‘real’
violence that often seems like irrational outbursts.
• Zizek distinguishes between subjective and objective violence.
Subjective and Objective Violence
• Subjective is ‘real’ corporeal and emotional violence.
• Objective is the hidden symbolic and systemic violence of culture, politics and economics.
• “The catch is that subjective violence and objective violence cannot be perceived from the same
standpoint: subjective violence is experienced as such against a background of a non-violent zero
level. It is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal’, peaceful state of things. However, objective
violence is precisely the violence inherent in the ‘normal’ state of things. Objective violence is
invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as
subjectively violent. Systemic violence is thus something like the notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics,
the counter-part to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it has to be taken
into account if one is to make sense of what otherwise seem to be ‘irrational’ explosions of
subjective violence”
Example: FOXCONN Factory, China
•The Gore Capitalism of iPhones

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•This is a photo of Foxconn’s response to the growing suicide problems at their plant which makes
Apple products.
•Not fix conditions, but put up a net to catch the people that jump off!
•It was reported (25/09/2012) that there was a major riot involving over 2000 people that shut the
plant down. About 79 000 people work there.
Example: Coltan
• The necropolitics of our digital devices
• The story behind tantalum or ‘coltan’ is one of the most compelling of all those concerning natural
resources. Yet, a decade ago, hardly anyone had heard of this obscure mineral, used to manufacture
the cell phones and laptops that have become so central to our daily lives. Then, in 2000, reports
emerged about mines deep in the Congo jungle where coltan was being extracted in brutal
conditions watched over by warlords. The UN team sent to investigate revealed how international
competition for coltan was contributing to the ongoing collapse of the DRC and the continuation of a
war that has cost millions of lives. The politics of coltan involves rebel militias, transnational
corporations, determined activists, Hollywood celebrities, the rise of China as an economic and
political superpower, and the latest communications gadgets. Michael Nest unravels a complex story
to offer a clear and compelling analysis of the relationship between coltan and violence in the Congo,
and the battle between activists and corporations to reshape the global tantalum supply chain. The
political significance of coltan, he argues, is not simply its causal link to violence; it is the extent to
which it exposes the underbelly of economic globalization linking ordinary people and transnational
corporations to Congo’s coltan industry and its conflict. Nest concludes by drawing out broader
lessons from the politics of coltan for the geopolitics of other key global resources (From Coltan book
jacket by Michael Nest).
• There’s an excellent series of books called ‘Resources’ from Polity Press that analyses many of the
essential elements that which upon our globalised consumer culture depends, and the complex
human rights, political, economic and ethical issues around them: Coltan, Timber Fish, Water, Oil,
Food
Are we happy?
One of the main criticisms of consumer culture is that it is not making people happy or satisfied.
• This is not just the exploited in the Majority World, or the poor in the Minority.
• Many key indicators of happiness (there is an area of research called ‘happiness studies’) have
tended to plateau or even dropped in recent decades.
• This seems to be the case as our wants increasingly become needs and our image of the good life
gets more and more material.
• Michael Pusey (2003) has found that ‘middle Australia’ finds that there is a large gap between the
rhetoric of neo-liberal consumer happiness that espoused by our politicians and economists, and the
experience of the reality of this system that seems to manifest in high levels of unhappiness,
dissatisfaction, stress, uncertainty, insecurity, fear and meaninglessness.
Growth Fetish and Affluenza

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•Hamilton and colleague's work argues that economic growth and rampant consumerism is the
cause, not the solution of our problems.
•We aspire to lifestyles beyond our means, work harder to fulfil those materialistic ambitions and
spend less time being with the people we love or doing the things we love.
•We are ‘spending ourselves sick’: wasteful, overworked, stressed, in debt, increasingly subscribed all
kinds of medication.
Desire, but no Satisfaction
• 47% of people in the highest income group claim that they cannot afford to buy everything they
‘need’.
• Only 5% of millionaires regard themselves as prosperous; 50% say they are only ‘reasonably
comfortable’.
• Even among the very wealthy - those with household net worth in excess of $3 million - only one in
five regard themselves as prosperous while 7 per cent say they are ‘poor’ or ‘just getting along’.
• A similar reluctance to describe themselves as prosperous is apparent in households with high

incomes, with only five per cent of those living in households with incomes above $100,000
describing themselves as prosperous.
• At the other end of the spectrum, when asked about their financial situation only nine percent of
those in the lowest income group (less than $25,000) say they are ‘totally satisfied’.
• But exactly the same proportion of those in the highest income group (over $100,000) say they are
totally satisfied.
COURSE CONCLUSION
• Consumption is a way of life
• Many technology developments seem to accentuate this
• Consumption and consumer culture, and its relations of production, are effected by and reproduce
social contours of inequality
• Processes such as gentrification illustrate how consumer practices, geography, mobility, labour
markets and policy advantage some groups over others.
• Our current consumer practices are completely unsustainable.
• Technology is changing how, where and what we consume
• AI utilises data and algorithms to shape what we consume and what we consume feeds big and
small data
• Infrastructure is a crucial focal point for thinking of the ways connectivity works, stalls, harms and
benefits
• Production and consumption of crap reflects low-end globalization but also the fetish for designed,
made and crafted goods
• Local cultures of consumption slip into global through connected networks

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SOCA 3666 Course notes

Consumption And Everyday Life (University of Newcastle (Australia))

Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

Topic 1 - What is ‘Consumption’ and What is ‘Technology’?

• Beyond binaries, consumption and technology influence our everyday lives

• Here, we need to understand the ‘everyday’ as a plethora of dialogues, decisions, moments,

• Think beyond binaries, or at least between them, or with multiple: agency/structure,

Consumption: A Way of life?

• “We are all consumers now”

• “Consumption” here moves beyond just what we eat and drink.

• The act of consumption usually happens in a transaction at a shop or on a computer screen,

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

History of consumer theory

• Anthropological: Gifts and Rituals

• Conspicuous consumption (Veblen)

• Blasé attitudes (Simmel)

• Critical theory (Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin etc)

• Semiotics (Barthes, Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding) – cultural aspects of products rather

“Choice” and Identity

• Do we have ‘choice’? – how many choices do we really have?

• Are you what you wear (or what you don’t)?

• I consume, therefore I am? Ideological idea that we are spoon-fed concepts

• Authentic self vs. Manipulated aspirations

• Choice – Taste – Distinction

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

• These objects generate a feeling of deep transformation in everyday life.

• Two parts to this 'instrumentality' [attempts to control human environments] and

• Air conditioners, controlling our environment.

• Technology is human fabrication.

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

• In the 21st Century, sociological, anthropological and philosophical conversations about

• These questions reflect ideas we will return to during the course.

Technology and Social Science Disciplines

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

• Crucially, despite convergence, there is no universal experience of technology.

• Even now. Technology is experienced in place.

• When viewed globally, technology both overcomes and exacerbates inequalities.

• Yet the technology workforce is global; image tagging in Kenya, click-farming in

Technology and Identity (present)

• Let’s start with the present:

• Possessing these products gives consumers a sense of identity; of belonging, of modernity,

• We can also think of this relationship in another way: contemporary technology is

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

Technology and Identity (Past)

• When materialised as objects technology affords the opportunity to differentiate and

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

TP and the apocalypse

Downloaded by Emily Kelly (emilyk2300@gmail.com)

• Differences between cleanliness and hygiene.

TP: Consumption and Technology

• Cultural dupes of panic buying?

• Rise of 'friendly’ TP: who gives a crap

• Joke and novelty TP

• Some people colour code their TP dependent on their bathroom design

• TP was memeified and satirised (cakes!) in the pandemic

• Different things were panic bought in different countries

TP a deep transformation of everyday life; instrumental

TP entangled in: urban technologies

• Pipes/ Sewage [not all pipes can handle TP]

• Treatment works/ sewage plants / water supply