Unpacking unboxing

This post was prompted by an email from Bart Simon on this topic that reminded me about previous thoughts I had about unboxing.

At some point not to long ago and amongst the endless minutiae of everyday life that gets reported online through ‘home made’ or ‘user generated’ video people started to film and upload the first opening of their consumer purchases in order to share the experience with others. According to Wikipedia, in 2006 this practice was given the name ‘unboxing’ and that name has stuck. Typically the genre may be understood as videos  (often a first person) of a new technological consumer good being carefully and fully removed from it’s packaging, often including delivery materials as well as the consumer packaging.  Each item in the box is carefully removed and shown to the viewer. This includes the warranty form, instructions, accessories, power leads, even internal packaging. The video may even show the item being delivered, or brought into the home. Packaging gets special attention and all sides are shown. Often specific aspects of pack design are read out and/or commented on. Usually the climax to the video is the item itself, slowly stripped of all packaging and turned on. Sometimes the film is silent. At other times the commentary is packed with expressions of excited, pleasurable anticipation and final satisfaction and peppered with notes on buying decisions, and/or the technical spec of the item.

Perhaps not surprisingly this practice was quickly labelled ‘geek porn’ (see the Register article on this). For the viewer it may feel like a titillating, voyeuristic gaze directed at a fetishised item of desire.  If it’s not porn, then it could be like the filming a birth.

Such videos can now be seen in there thousands on youtube. They have been ‘profesionalised’ by magazine reviewers and even by the companies that manufacture such goods, (such videos may be labelled ‘official’) so that they are now a mix of everyday consumer life and advertising message. They de-differentiate these two things. They also include competitive games to be the first to unbox and detailed commentary on the quality of the effort.  And they also invite parody and flame wars. They therefore seem to fit nicely with other aspects of individualised but social online performances. The audience for such videos runs to hundreds of thousands.

So how might we understand these videos? Here are some ideas:

1. The consumer researcher in me immediately thinks of possession rituals (Grant McCraken’s work and others). Here is a way to publicly mark a mass produced good as one’s own. A way to transform a good from something mass-produced to something unique and owned by an individual. The unboxing therefore represents a special moment for the consumer and is made more special by capturing it on film and presenting that moment publicly.  Again, unboxing as capturing a newborn’s arrival, a once only event. The words used in the ritual may be important here. A new owner declares ‘I’ve just got…’,’ here is my… ‘I chose this…’, etc.  In saying these things they make the commodity a personal thing.
2. This also then seems like a form of memorialising. A moment is captured forever. Why this moment though? Why these goods. Firstly, these goods are usually hyped online long before they are available.  Their release into the market is therefore itself a special kind of ritual celebration of technological progress. They are – for a while at least – the latest and best thing, delivering the promises of modernism (greater efficiency, a better life and more for less). Unboxing videos allow consumers to say ‘I was there, I was part of it’.
3. The importance of unboxing also seems to speak to what consumer researchers call the ‘cycle of desire’ (see Russel Belk’s work with Güliz Ger and Søren Askegaard or Colin Campbell’s work). The argument here is that consumption is driven by the desire to desire – the pleasurable experience of anticipation. New technological consumer goods present such a good opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of desire that the moment of satisfaction of that desire is then captured in an unboxing ceremony. Again, it’s memorialised and this is important because the same line of argument suggests that the desire for a good fades soon after its acquisition. With unboxing we may share  the desires of others and remember our own.  These moments are so fleeting that they must be captured and now we have the technology to do so.
4. So this is also a public celebration of progress and what Victor Turner might argue as a liminoid moment for the consumer – conjured by their own initiative rather than gifted by society. Similarly these events may mark what Zygmunt Bauman describes as ‘episodic progress’ – an indiviualised sense that things have got better. To make such rituals significant – the ritualised performance of technological progress – Youtube provides an audience.
5. Unboxing is very visual and this makes me think of the consumer scopic regimes involved. It invites a particular type of gaze that is familiar yet artificial – we don’t actually open goods they way it is done in an unboxing video. The emphasis in these videos is a longing gaze and one that appreciates packaging as an aesthetic form. This feels like ‘experiential marketing’. We see that packaging has become part of the experience of consuming a product. It is there to be appreciated = designed for unboxing. For certain the gaze that is invited by an unboxing video would soon give way to a more casual glance with the item is in everyday use.  Until then we simply enjoy the ‘newness’ of it all – its spectacle.  Unboxing is then a little holiday, or escape from the mundane reality of consumer goods. This reminds me of John Urry’s work on the gaze and Jonathan Schroeder’s work on visual consumption. We might see unboxing as a version of taking photographs of a new car or dress in order to keep a treasured moment of when something is new.
6. There is also some technological aesthetic shared. Where there is commentary, this may be dominated by the ‘coolness’ of technical specifications.  As we look at the technology we are invited to see power, speed, storage capacity, etc.
7. We might consider what people think about the world based on these videos. For example they have learnt about advertising and especially the ‘product shot’, and they have learnt the purpose of the ‘voice over’.  They may even think in these terms, understanding the world as a series of marketing experiences and may hope to capture some of the glamour of that industry for themselves. They may hope for fame through the goods they buy and show.  They certainly get an audience.  So here is a form of consumer identity work. A way of understanding who one is by filming and presenting the things one buys.
8. As many of these technologies are bought online from home and used in the home – as the shopping experience as become entirely privatised, here is a way to make the experience public again. To represent the home as the store and to bring others into it. So there are also issues of public and private space in unboxing videos. The home is made into a setting for the presentation of the latest consumer good to others.

Many of these perspectives are complimentary.  They suggest that there is a lot going on in unboxing and that this one strange product of participation culture might tell us a lot about aspects of our contemporary, technological consumer culture. They seem to point to unboxing as celebratory of technology as progress and a reaction against a physical isolation in the shopping experience. Shopping can be once more social through the construction on online ritual.

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Tagged: consumer behaviour, everyday life, participation culture, ritual, shopping, unboxing

Posted in: consuming life, Uncategorized