We’ve had some fun trying to interpret them. More on that later

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.

I got back from CCT5 in Madison about a week ago and I only now find time to provide a reflection.  I want to comment on four aspects of the conference: putting faces to words and the CCT ‘community’; angst about the status of CCT and its purpose; most memorable presentations, and; our presentation and its aftermath.

At a conference like this you get to see and meet people whose work you have read and cited for a few years. Sometimes they are exactly what you expect; other times they are very different. But there is always something different about hearing people present and you find that when you then read their work you can’t help but imagine them speaking.  There is more to this though.  Conferences can be dehumanising. They can easily become reduced to an efficient performance of academic presentation and career-focussed networking. The ACR seemed very like this, but the size of CCT and possibly the lack of explicit methodological conflict mean that CCT felt more friendly. In this respect it reminded me a lot of DiGRA.  The poetry readings added to this and I wonder if the conference would be even better if there was more attention on deliberately introducing elements that deviate from standard paper sessions. More playfulness from which ideas, debate and just a different perspective on the work of CCT might emerge. In a quick private exchange after the poetry John Sherry noted that there was a lot of talent in the assembled group. He didn’t just mean academic talent. So wouldn’t it be good if a smallish group like this could break free of the requirement to enact ‘work’ as dull but worthy? During one of the lunchtime talks Craig Thompson mentioned the CCT website and this has the same problem. There’s nothing wrong with it but it just doesn’t quite capture to complexity, warmth and excitement of the group I met. I mentioned that I’d like to see a site that allows researchers, students, and actually just anyone to engage with the ideas discussed at CCT.

This leads me to think about the purpose of CCT and this seemed to be a feature of several sessions. I note a tension that is also similar to DiGRA – the desire to legitimise, organise and  ‘progress’ the influence, status and reputation of the group. This leads to calls about what CCT should research, who they should be researching for, which methods should be used (and dropped), and who they might align with. It was also clear that a cannon of sorts is emerging with key texts and ideas that are almost ritually cited as the basis for CCT. Tied up in this are important things such as tenure (or more broadly status in the academic community), access to top journals, consultancy, department standings, etc. But I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that these things might matter so much. If CCT started as a kind of counter-culture in consumer research it’s interesting to see such paidia transformed to ludus by institutional influences. If I had a vote it would be to resist such change and to attempt to maintain a space where the work of CCT researchers is simply critical, playful and in opposition to whatever trends and fashion dominate marketing theory and practice.

So which presentations stand out as I write this? I write these in no particular order. I enjoyed the session on public goods and the call to think more about what is private and what is public and the ideological work done in pushing for either. This is a theme that seems to be emerging in a complex way in the DVC book I’m working on with Janice. Aspects of online games, communities and social networks seems to promote the public  shared aspects of space, but only within a context that carries a profit motive and so inevitable guides such acts towards market behaviours. This is, it seems, also a tension in consumer research. We might automatically think of private goods when we think of consumers. The link to marketing (and distance from politics) might be usefully reflected on and in this respect I would agree that CCT might be more usefully aligned with cultural studies and sociology and business and economics.  This theme also prompted a conversion with Lizzie and Becky about the degree to which consumption (of private goods) really does matter to people.  It could be that in consumer research the explicit focus on market-led consumption behaviours easily over-states the dominance of consumer culture in everyday life. 

This is particularly interesting given the likely cuts in public services we are going to experience in the next few years. A problem is that when we enjoy a park, river, public buildings or historic site it doesn’t seem like consumption (nor does public transport, education or health). The path of money from tax to council or government to groundsman, nursery, teacher or GP seems too distant so that we can’t connect then. This means that it’s hard to feel that our money has been well spent and instead just feels like it was taken from us. As I write this our new government proposes that the split between public sector cuts and tax rises in the emergency budget will be 77% cuts and 23% increases in tax. In effect (and not surprisingly) the bias here is to protect private spending (on private goods) and to retreat from public spending (on public goods).  The budget has been framed as ‘reducing public sector waste’. A further example is that council tax has been frozen. I note that this is presented as a ‘good thing’ – at least local taxes can’t go up – but there is seemingly no reflection that this means councils must cut back on spending on public goods. Yet VAT has also been increased – a direct tax on the consumer and private goods. I think it would be worth  further unpacking tax and spending policy in relation to public and private goods

I also liked Dewhirt and Kozinet’s paper about anti-smoking ads. It seems that smokers enjoy advertising aimed at smoking and aimed at not smoking. At time they may not distinguish the two. At other times they get the message but shrug. This seemed to me to be about the ritual of smoking and how hard such a ritual is to break with propaganda, but also about the way people understand smoking and understand ads. There is complexity here. We must now deal with ads for things, government ads ‘against’ things and a range of parodies and homage that has much less certain origin and motivation and maybe people just jumble these all up and separate them from much of the practice of consumption. Maybe the point about culture jamming is to break advertising itself rather than to work on the level of individual brand messages? The problem is that I’m not sure where that leaves the project of social marketing. Talking to Rob Kozinet’s afterwards I also reflected that his data seemed to suggest that the smoking ritual seems to be a psychologically important part of people’s day – a reflective, or contemplative time. If this is so, then there may be unforeseen consequences to systematically eliminating this. Anti-smoking legislation is a deliberate attempt to destroy culture, but of course offers no alternative. Culture Jamming has the same problem. It’s fine to undermine large corporations, but where is the replacement culture (other than a culture of culture jamming)? If not the market, where can new culture now come from. This theme also speaks to another side of policy – the attempt by the state to dictate ‘correct’ behaviours. This time ‘free choice’ is under attack.  So on the one had we must decide how governments spend on our money on public goods, but on the other hand we must decide how far governments can go to restrict our private vices and so also our cultures.

Linda Scott’s sensitive review of the introduction of market-based development schemes in developing countries was also about the destruction of culture – or rather the displacement of cultures with consumer cultures. For me one of the strongest points made was the hypocrisy of attempting to impose only ‘worthy’ goods on developing markets (clean water, soap, etc), whilst denying, or at least being suspicious of consumption that seemed to be about conform (sanitary towels) or desire and luxury (perfume, for example). We could see this as some strange global enactment of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I think this is a useful point of reflection for consumer culture in general and it links to the idea of public goods. It seems natural to reject the idea that big business ‘exploits’ developing markets by selling them useless conveniences and luxuries when what they really need is improvements in health and sanitation, yet the system of marketing that we assume to underpin our standard of living in the West has no such qualms – quite the opposite. At the same time I’m still depressed at the possibility that all societies should be reproduced in the image of neo-liberal, individualised, free markets. As we think about how to share wealth across the globe is our only choice between sanctimonious aid agencies and the ethics of global enterprise?

Bryant Simon’s keynote provided a critique of Starbuck’s motives for introducing cafés in poor US neighbourhoods (that would be black neighbourhoods). This is really the politics of consumption again, but was something of an alien debate to someone from the UK. Starbucks doesn’t connect with diversity in the UK – it seems to simply celebrate American café culture. ‘Our’ concern is the issue of  the destruction of local businesses and therefore local character to be replaced by clone towns of American coffee shops and fast food outlets. For us Starbucks is a different type of cynical. But I still connected with Bryant’s arguments. Starbuck’s seem to have spotted that for their customers there is a problem in how you demonstrate that colour doesn’t matter to you without explicitly stating that it doesn’t (which would of course suggest that it does). This seems to be the story of collaboration between cynical marketers and savvy consumers.  Consumers want to demonstrate that race doesn’t matter, but this requires thought and work. They must set out to show that race doesn’t matter and Starbucks provide a solution.  This is insight into complex consumer cultures where a public impression is managed through deliberate and calculated marketplace decisions and where corporations delve deep into the psychology of consumers to construct subtle communicative offerings masked in something as simple as a coffee shop. Yet for me the presentation lacked some sensitivity to the everyday experience of such activity.  It perhaps presented Starbuck’s as too cynical and consumers as too savvy.  So I might have liked more on the uses of these spaces and the experiences of the people in them and the people who avoid them, a more complete answer to how race politics could be performed in the marketplace would have been interesting. Perhaps more on the alternatives. If not through Starbucks, how might we enact equality in everyday life? If this isn’t ‘good’ CSR, then what is?

John Deighton’s lunchtime talk dealt with the JCR and CCT and brings us back to more parochial concerns.  Two things of particular interest to CMC (the department I’m in) stood out. Firstly he noted that the critical and cultural bias at CCT produced the best papers in the JCR and was, in his view, the best approach to consumer research. So we have good support for our methods and approaches. Secondly, he playfully suggested that ‘marketing’ should be replaced as a term (only he couldn’t think what a good replacement might be). I followed up that last point with other delegates and the best anyone could come up with was ‘consumer cultures’, or ‘consumption and cultures’. That’s interesting because that was what Janice and I thought might be a focus of a new degree programme to replace our marketing course. But this is also marketing isn’t it? We are being asked to rebrand ‘marketing’ if we are not careful and we are trend-spotting for cool ideas that might give us the edge in a competitive HE marketplace. And that’s political because we are thinking of a public good in terms of promotion and target audiences, i.e., as if education was a private good. My edited collection  on the Marketisation of Higher Education with Richard Scullion and Lizzie Nixon covered that ground in detail.

Finally for now I want to comment on James Fitchett’s determination to remind us to take a critical view of the object of our studies. To me this complex argument that we pay too much attention to the subject (the consumer) and ‘other’ or relegate to what John Law calls a ‘hinterland’ the ideas, texts and things that construct the field of consumption is a more useful reflection than the calls to ‘progress’ CCT’s methods or areas of study. So the idea might be that consumer culture theory becomes more complex, critical and reflective rather than ‘better’, ‘more comprehensive’, or ‘more influential’. James manages to make listeners (including me) uneasy partly because of the fluid way he draws from the writings of people like Baudillard and Foucault at such a pace that your brain can’t keep up with the arguments, but I noted that he also mentioned ANT as a useful alternative and that fits with my current project to explore the sorts of distributed agencies – and ontological politics – that Latour, Law, Callon, and Mol write about. James has also offered to work on a videogame paper with me and I hope that this will be an opportunity to think more about these issues and approaches.

There are plenty of other presentations that I could write about and I might pick some up later.  These include the more general attention to ANT and ANT-like discourse, the idea of gentrifrication, of coziness and of the construction and performance of space, and of co-construction (although that seems to be an object that needs more critical reflection).

What of our presentation and its aftermath then? Our paper was a combination of a particularly strong theme in Becky’s PhD data and Lizzie’s thoughts on resisting or refusing the market.  We were lucky to be in a strong session with Lanier and Rader’s review of Fantasy ( Scott Rader’s presentation very much reminded me of Ted Castronova’s thoughts on Tolkien and online games – also a chapter in the book Janice and I are working on), and with Press and Arnoud’s review of pastoralism in the US which seemed to present fantasy very similar to the desires proclaimed by our participants. I think there is much more to all this and I expect we will be exploring the themes that emerge over the next few months as Becky write up her thesis.  In the mean time our paper has been selected for a special edition of the Journal of Consumer Culture and we now have some work to get it right. John Sherry who seems to be working on complimentary ideas also contacted Becky and he has kindly offered to share some of his work in progress. We can certainly look forward to this. This sort of thing is  for me key to conferences. You come away having had your ideas tested and challenged, but also with a renewed sense that you are on to something – that there is something to be understood and that (unlike some colleagues seem to hint) conferences are not wasteful or peripheral when compared with our other work, but actually at the heart of how a department generates and captures knowledge.

Cultural scripts suggest that success in life is predominantly expressed in terms of acquiring new and ‘better’ objects and an upscaling lifestyle. Visions of the perfect future tend to be underpinned by financial or material wealth as we draw from the consumer culture around us to make sense of our lives.

In consumer research, such fantasies are recognised as part of the overall consumption experience. Consumers daydream about things they do not possess and material possessions emerge triumphant as the most common objects of desire, with better houses being the most important objects, followed by cars and luxury goods, then consumer experiences such as travel and exotic vacations. Only after these come ‘ideals’ that are less material and more lifestyle-focused such as successful careers, family, happiness, health and philanthropy which are again above more general dreams of ‘wealth’.

However, these studies ask specifically about consumption, bringing consumer experiences to the fore. In contrast, we seek to explore the roles that goods and experiences take on in broader imaginings such as those described by Cohen and Taylor in their 1992 text ‘Escape Attempts’

We draw on data from part of a phenomenological study that takes ‘positive future’ daydreaming as the starting point. Although daydreaming is not restricted to such a mood and temporal structure, this focus is interesting since it tells us something important about the nature of everyday life. Considering previous consumer research, we expected the desire for and acquisition of consumer goods to form a central role in how daydreams were described, but what we found was quite different.

Beyond consumer research we find broader descriptions of the relationship between the imagination and everyday life. For example, Cohen and Taylor view daydreams as a form of resistance to daily routine, an ‘escape attempt’ that may also vary from cognitive engineering such as distancing or self-awareness, to life-encompassing endeavours that teeter on the edge of madness. However, each attempt is underpinned by the notion that we may imagine the future to be different and better than the reality we live each day. This approach may illuminate our understanding both of the ubiquity of imaginative scenarios in everyday life, as well as what this might tell us about the world ‘left behind’ by dreamers. Cohen and Taylor refer to ‘paramount reality’ as a way of capturing the density, urgency and intensity of the demands of the everyday on our consciousness. For them daydreams offer a temporary escape from such a reality and, akin to summer holiday, facilitate the continuation of routine life with renewed commitment.

Thy also point out that such escape attempts are seldom unique. Although we are invariably the hero in our imagined future, even those keen to shirk the predictable life scripts of falling in love, succeeding at work, and having children, may draw from the films, TV and novels of popular culture to construct their fantasy. In the search for a ‘real self’, this stock of symbolic material reveals a painfully soap-opera, cliché-ridden narrative.

So how might this be related to consumption and the imagination? Pre-consumption imagining in consumer behaviour theory tends towards a future orientation theorised as ‘desire’ and the symbolic value attached to goods (for example see Campbell, Fournier and Guiry, Christensen, Belk et al., and d’Astous and Deschênes).

In our consumer society commodities and experiences are markers of status and aspiration; the objects that star in our daydreams apparently tell us who we want to be holding ‘magical meaning’ by concretising abstract concepts that are then realised through purchase. To use McCracken’s example, the desire for a rose covered cottage represents a desire for a happy family life, financial security and perhaps a slower pace of life. A desired good then acts as a bridge between the real and the ideal, so when we imagine owning a particular object, we imagine that it will bring with it our ideal circumstances. Whilst this suggests that the ready availability of marketing symbolism makes commodities useful imaginative resources, we might also note the seemingly insatiable appetite for novelty, and new experiences that is assumed to underpin such desire.

Despite these compelling narratives, there are few empirical studies on the contents of the imagination and if we look elsewhere we may note that individuals also dream about personal ideals where it is not objects that are at the centre.

Surveys show both a desire for higher income and materialism, but also revealed the importance of relationships in life satisfaction and well being. There may also be a current cultural trend towards low consumption, high fulfilment lifestyles, for example as reflected in Soper’s work on alternative hedonism. She theorises that attitudes toward consumerism are changing, not least because of the disaffection with a ‘work and spend’ lifestyle and associated ecological degradation. And as Thomas notes in his review of television programmes on the subject, this ambivalence to consumer desire is beginning to form part of British culture.

In summary, consumer research has put emphasis on consumption as the focus of daydreaming, yet broader arguments see it as a way to resist everyday life, including the consumer lifestyles that dominate ‘paramount reality’. Daydreaming still has its scripts but these may focus on cultural trends such as a desire for community and simple living. 

Phenomenological interviews have allowed us to capture the experiences of imagining. We now draw from the stories of 12 individuals, some of whom were going through specific life events (such as expecting a baby, retiring, buying a house) that are likely to focus their hopes for the future.

Our data supports the ubiquity and prominence of daydreams in the experience of the everyday and here we organise them into two main themes. We argue that the role of consumer goods and experiences was apparently unimportant. Instead daydreams draw from cultural stock for ideal relationships with others. In doing so however, they may support the continuation of everyday life where consumption is much more prominent.

Let’s start with the ‘othering’ of consumer goods in daydreams. Here we see goods receding into the background, ‘there’, but not referred to or imagined in detail. Instead, relationships were the primary focus. This is captured Emily’s story about imagining her new flat:

Home is the way I think about it, I feel home because I can see myself walking through the front door, chucking my keys down on our front door dresser that’s going to be by the front door and walking in, probably with food bags and you know sorting out the kitchen and stuff like that, just normal and homely.

The goods that she mentions – a dresser, groceries and kitchen – form part of the background for the action that instead centres on the notion of ‘home’. In this way goods take on a rather different role in daydreams than in our daily lives, which may be preoccupied with them. For example we might consider explanations of goods as markers of social events, and compare this to goods in the imagination. Douglas and Isherwood (1979) use Christmas as an example. Christmas is differentiated from other days because of the markers that we use and associate with it (turkey, decorations, gifts, the tree etc). A daydream about Christmas however may centre on the warm feeling of family gathering together. The material paraphernalia is all ‘there’, but in the background, not enjoying the same importance as they do in real life. We might imagine a decorated tree in our imaginative escape that focuses on the family, but not the other things that go with it, such as buying new decorations, untangling fairly lights, and spending hours decorating. Although goods take on a prevailing role in the paramount reality of Christmas, our imaginings resist such everydayness.

In our interviews desires for strong and happy relationships, facing personal challenges and daydreaming of achieving them were particularly prominent even when an anti-materialistic sentiment was not explicit. In instances where we might have expected daydreams to consist of elaborate details of consumer goods, relationships directly surfaced as an overriding concern. For example, Sally tells us that she has imagined and re-imagined her wedding and describes the importance of ensuring her fiancé is happy with all aspects of the day:

I would hate that Mark resented any part of our wedding, for anything you know… I think a lot of weddings…especially this expensive wedding that I went to, it was so much about ‘I’ve got to have this dress, got to have this and this food’ and I just didn’t want that. I just wanted a day that was about getting married and plus Mark doesn’t like being centre of attention at all, which is I think probably part of the reason why he didn’t really want to get married at all when we first met.

We may contrast the materialism of a wedding Sally attended – the paramount reality of weddings – with her own imaginings that resist such a reality. The fact that relationships are acknowledged as a priority introduces the notion that individuals desire, imagine and prioritise the things that goods may help to symbolise over and above their possession. Although McCracken and Campbell theorise that people daydream about the symbolic meaning of goods for them the goods always seem to remains central. Yet we find that it is experiences and relationships that individuals talk about most when discussing their hopes for the future.

For instance, interviewees quite happily talked about the fact that they wanted to settle down and have a family, that they were looking forward to being a Mother, or embarking on life as a couple ‘warts and all’, or escaping the rat race to enjoy a quieter life. Emily explains further;

I think that’s one of the images and kind of a memory and a future that James and I both had is when we’ve been lying on a bed, in my room and the sun’s coming through the window and we’ve just been lying on top of the duvet, reading a paper or just chatting […], and James has turned to me and said ‘I want this, I want us to be lying on a bed with a white duvet, and I want the sun coming in and I want to be able to hear our kids and our dogs playing in the back garden’ and to me, that’s what home is. It’s like us being comfortable, knowing they were all safe, it’s a cosy place,

We note that Emily does not seem to desire the white duvet, even though it is part of how she symbolises a happy home and this contrasts with Belk et al’s study of consumer passions where one of their participants claims; ‘I wanted this car so bad I could taste it!”. Perhaps consumer goods are more likely to form the focus when consumption is the starting point for research? We find that goods have a different presence in the imagination than they have in paramount reality and that non-materialistic, traditional roles and scripts were prominent in the daydreams of the people we spoke to.

The second theme is the apparent lack of imaginative ambition. Participants took pleasure from daydreaming about traditional roles and common cultural scripts that referred to more fundamental ways of living rather than elaborate fantasy. For instance, Vicki talks about wanting to be a mother:

[I’m looking forward to] just being at home and baking and cooking, looking after the baby, all of that…I think that’s why I got married quite young and am having a baby quite quick…From when I was about 14, I was going to get married at 24, have my first baby at 26 and my second one at 28. That was always what I wanted…. I think I’ve had such a nice home life, home and family life…I just want exactly the same thing and Sean has a lovely home life, a lovely family, we’re both just really lucky.

This housewife role is not (yet) experienced as a mundane routine but offers a sense of pleasure and this theme of simple, perhaps nostalgic, daydreaming was shared by Anna as we imagines life with a new baby:

There’s lots of stuff I could do and throw myself into in the village and things to keep me socially active and involved…if you had a church and a nursery network you could make quite strong links…even our relationship with people in this block has changed since I’ve been pregnant…we’ve been a bit more social with people, so you get into a different mindset about the value of having your neighbours around.

Our participants’ descriptions overwhelmingly emphasised non-material aspects of life based on better relationships with others. A further example is provided by David who with his partner, is currently planning ‘escape’ to rural Italy:

…this is a change in the lifestyle, better healthier diet and more activity in the lifestyle, whereas here I get to work about 8.30, 9 o’clock, I don’t even take a lunch, someone will get a sandwich for me so I’m pretty much sitting down until 7 o’clock at night, then I go home, because I’m so knackered I fall asleep and I go to bed by 10 most nights, that’s my life now and that’s just not good, mentally or physically…Certainly there will be a lot more activity, such as chopping wood and all those things, I think it will be a more outside existence because the weather’s so much nicer as well, […] we’re going to have a big vegetable patch, like I say we’ve been experimenting with tomatoes and courgettes and things here and I just love the idea of doing that…I think there will be some interesting changes…

As Cohen and Taylor (1992) propose, daydreams here enable individuals to engage in identity work, imagining and planning who they will be and what life might be like in the future. Our participants described daydreams that depicted them in a preferred situation, but that resisted current consumer lifestyles, or other unsatisfactory aspects of everyday life. Emily provides a further example. She is currently frustrated by a difficulty in finding somewhere to live and explains that she turns to her imagination to play out various ‘ideal’ marriage proposal scenarios.

In my mind’s eye I’ve got ideals of when he’s going to propose and how he’s going to propose. I mean they’re all wrong but it’s just my way of controlling the situation…… we’re going on a UK holiday this year rather than abroad and we’re walking up Scafell Pike [an area of outstanding natural beauty]…, he loves walking and camping and being outdoors like that and I do it for him, and I just, in my head I’ve got an ideal that you know, we’ll own the flat by then and we’ll be on top of that mountain and have reached it at the end of our holiday… and he’ll just drop to one knee and propose on top of the mountain in the sunshine and you know amazing views [laughs] but again you know I’m building up this massive picture in my head…

Here we see that despite the important purchase of a new flat, Emily’s imagination focuses on non-material things. Even in the various proposal dreams, material things such as the ring are absent. Her daydreams serve to construct an alternative ‘better’ reality providing a compensatory function. 

Initially we were surprised by the seemingly minor role played by consumption. Daydreaming may play a key role in understanding consumption, but consumption seems to have only a cameo role in these daydreams.

We heard descriptions that prioritised ‘more important’ ideals of life; love between newlyweds, slower and healthier lifestyles abroad, and a concern for family-orientated living and of community. Here values were not contained in the daydreams of goods, but rather goods were relegated to props in the background. They were there, but ‘othered’. Our approach didn’t emphasise a consumer study and we allowed participants to define the reality of their own lives. It is of course possible that for others – especially perhaps those without prominent future events to articulate – consumption is a ‘fallback’ resource from which to conjure desire. This in itself would be significant. It would mean that we most desire goods when we have few relationship scripts to work on.

If the everyday is made up of consumer matter this reality may be escaped in the imagination where other roles can be grasped. And yet our interviewees’ daydreams appeared to lack ambition. They were the predictable scripts of relationships, marriage and a happy home life that Cohen and Taylor (1976) wrote about nearly 40 years ago. They seemed to favour some more enduring cultural values of living with others, scripts that participants came across in the media, or remembered from childhood.

It could be that they only revealed the more ‘normal’ or socially acceptable, predictable scripts in an interview situation, so perhaps there are other fantastic desires that are much harder to reveal in research. Nevertheless, we may have stumbled upon ‘latent’ non-materialistic values waiting to emerge from everyday frustrations with our consumer society in the form of daydreams that can then be actualised. We could see this in the context of calls for alternative hedonism for example, and hope that these participants represent a desired escape from an overly materialist society in favour of ‘simple’ values. Could it be that these are the ‘green shoots’ of more substantial resistance to the normalcy of consumer desire and a work and spend culture?

Maybe, but we must also recognise that these participants still live consumer lifestyles. Through the interviews and their arrangements the everyday weight of consumer culture presented itself – from fitting interviews around work and leisure activities (including shopping trips), to recognising that even when (and if) some of these dreams are actualised, the market may suddenly present itself as more prominent. For example, Emily might not dream of a diamond engagement ring, but we may be certain that at some point her partner and her will imagine buying one, and then go shopping.

We must therefore acknowledge Cohen and Taylor’s observation about the conservative role of daydreams. These non-materialistic desires may act as a ‘coping mechanism’, or distancing of the self from the everyday for the purpose of allowing the everyday routine of our consumer society to continue.

So in conclusion, we have contrasted the prominence of commodities in narratives relating to daydreams, with a broader view of everyday imagining and the possibility of non-materialistic desires. Drawing from phenomenological data we have then noted the apparently peripheral role of commodities in consumers’ hopes for the future, and the centrality of non-material living in daydreams. However in making sense of this we have noted Cohen and Taylor’s observations about the imagination as a form of resistance to everyday life that helps to manage rather than transform paramount reality.

I realise that I do this rehearsal thing a lot. Sometimes it’s thinking about something that will happen today, but also, often, it’s thinking about something a few weeks or even months from now from now. The point of the later is that it helps me to keep in mind important things that might otherwise get lost in the complex daily business of life. I could, if I wasn’t careful, spend all day replying to emails, responding to texts, or monitoring updates on social networks and RSS feed. I could remain in the present all day.

So the imagination – if given space – serves a strategic planning function when it comes to everyday experience. It helps us to prioritise the important and long term over the immediate and ‘now’. It’s like investing current time to ensure the future happens as we would like it. It literally brings the important future into the present.

But when I look at the log files on here and the internal student support sitesI start to wonder if at least for some technology is producing some form of ‘interruption’ of that longer-term planning role.  I’ve noticed, that students (and I’m sure it isn’t just students) for example can’t seem to keep a diary. They seem to have got used to planning everything at the last minute and relying on using technology to find out what is happening day-to-day rather than ‘keeping in mind’ important information. They are also endlessly distracted by instant (but usually irrelevant) updates, posts, emails and messages. The anecdotal evidence for this is the very sudden peaks in log files just before an event, exam or assignment, the last minute flood of emails that ask me about things that have been discussed and sorted weeks or months ago, and the semi-permanent presence of students on the very technology that provides the information they need at the very last moment. It’s like the important stuff was never committed to memory. Students  seem to have come to rely on the ability to download things at the last minute and check details by email but a result is that they seem to have adopted ‘just in time’ thinking – only paying attention to information at the very point they have to act on it. This possibly also accounts for the apparent failure to multitask. So it’s like life comes along in a rush of new and un-thought-about events emerging from a jumble of distractions that dominate the ‘now’.

The future is then lost to us as we: a) rely on being able to get information about what is happening in ‘real-time’ by emailing, texting or phoning someone, and; b) can’t deal with the volume of real-time information and so can’t find time to think carefully about the future. The future becomes compressed into a shorter and shorter horizon. We might have a vague idea about a brighter future where we have a good job, family, house, or whatever, but the demands of the present mean that the planning or rehearsal function of the imagination is undermined.

I also wonder if this produces a form of passivity. Because much of the course was never really reflected on at the time – it was never seen as part of an important future event – students didn’t engage in debate much. Now, at the last ‘minute’ before the exam, there is no time for reflection and therefore debate – it’s just a rush to take it all in.  So I see loads of stuff being viewed and downloaded, but in a sort of silent panic.

The point of offering this advice is to get you to think about your approach to the exam by reflecting on what you did and didn’t do well in the assignment.  It differs from the page or so of individual feedback you will get in that it covers a wide range of issues and that might be useful given that the exam questions are unlikely to be the same as your assignment. I do wonder what readers who are not students might make of it? Probably there won’t be many of them, but it perhaps gives them some insight into what this group of students have achieved over this unit. So here goes (I’ll try to write in such a way that I don’t sign-post anyone’s work in particular).

As a group I think you covered pretty much all the important and contemporary issues relating to online marketing. So we had assignments on website design and navigation, on usability, on search and especially paid search, on behavioural targeting, on social networks, on online communities, on viral approaches, on new business models (especially long tail models), on digital goods, on recommendations and review, on affiliates, on blogging and micro-blogging, on mobile apps, and even a couple of adventurous forays into regulatory issues. Conspicuous by it’s absence was any real interest in vanilla banners (I think in future I’ll see if I can shift them to the media planning unit). In this respect the assignments as a whole covered and probably exceeded the syllabus and I’d expect that in the final year. I also note that many of the assignments acknowledged important aspects of online culture and behaviour. I think this bias towards a ‘cultural understanding’ is important because it is likely to provide insights that are not limited by the latest online fads. If you can share your assignments, you should go into industry capable of talking about any of the big issues and/or techniques that might concern online marketers, but also about the underlying behaviours and cultures. Of course the better assignments tended to dig into these tools and trends. They asked questions about their effectiveness, their legacies, their ethics and their place within broader strategy. Some (rightly I think) attempted to place tools in an historical context and this often led to more critical approaches and debates. Others got into questions about who benefits most from different tools (client, agency, service provider, or consumer) and this also led to good debates.

The extent of engagement with specific and practical examples was if anything even more impressive. Many students (more than I expected) drew from complex projects that they had undertaken including the Google Adwords competition, attempts at site design, attempts at community development and engagement, attempts at viral work, and even attempts at setting up an online business. Other students also drew from direct experience with using communities, social networks or the sites that they had reviewed. And others effectively used ‘key’ examples from core texts and lectures as well as new examples. Again, if you manage to share your work, you could go into industry able to talk with confidence about a range of specific successful online marketing campaigns, website designs and broader online strategies.  But I note that as I previously suggested, it tended to be clear where a students was writing from direct experience of a site or project and this often resulted in better explanations and illustrations. Given the word length, a few detailed examples worked better than attempts to mention every possible site or approach.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the theory part of assignments was more varied in terms of quality. Some reports provided convincing arguments without much theory and that seemed fine. They were well argued business reports (often based on practical work such as the Adwords competition). Others demonstrated ambition in terms of the complexity of theory used. I noticed analysis of the long tail (and its criticisms), lots on play and playfulness, plenty of references to ‘flow’, engagement with uses and gratifications, analysis based on diffusions of innovations, use of sociology of consumption (especially identity work and desire), discussions based on performance theory, and even consumer behaviour models (like ELM, or TRA) as well as more ‘mundane’ marketing and communication theory.  However, despite my previous advice I think that some students used theory only anecdotally. The more convincing theory-based assignments tended to deal with one theoretical area and then as a central part of the arguments presented. Some assignments seemed to ‘get out of hand’ in terms of the number of different and competing theoretical perspectives introduced but not developed. In just a few cases it was also clear that the theory has not well understood. My advice in the past has been that you should avoid explanations using theory unless you are pretty sure that you understand it. I think this stands for the exam.

Presentation was generally good (as I’d expect) although there was a little too much evidence of rushed, last minute writing and frankly I despair at the errors in citation and referencing at this stage. I think a number of students need to pay attention to dates and date order when citing competing and/or consistent views, and I think a few need to make clearer distinctions between general points made by a cited author and their own specific points that might be consistent with the authors position. I also think some of you need to rethink your use of appendices. Don’t bung in every diagram and figure; if it’s important to your argument, it should be in the body of the report.

By the way, I recently had a paper rejected from a large conference. I had rushed the paper because I wasn’t going to submit anything, but at the last minute I thought I would. I had just a few days to write the paper. I didn’t really have time to check the paper once written and I knew I had been light on the literature review. I also knew that my arguments where not complete and fully thought through. And that was exactly what the review feedback said. I had behaved like some (or even many) students do and the result was not good. It reminded me that even if you think you know what you are writing about, you have take time and care to write things up. And if you don’t really know what you are writing about, you can’t easily ‘blag it’. You can try to convince yourself that it will be OK, but really it probably won’t. I’m sure the same is true in business. The best thing would be to avoid the situation by actually preparing work properly.

So far then contexts and examples are generally good,  and theory and presentation are more patchy (at least in part because some/many simply left things too late to produce their best work), but the most patchy aspect of the assignment was the development of meaningful arguments. Some students seemed to have a clear idea about what they wanted to say in their 2.5k words. They signposted this at the start and then systematically introduced their key arguments and evidence. They then concluded, often with specific, detailed advice or recommendations. Even if I didn’t always agree, or if I saw flaws in the logic, I felt I got something from the work. However for others I was never quite clear what was being argued (and in a few cases I was convinced that the student wasn’t either). Many of the later type still had good examples and even plenty of citations, but they didn’t seem to have a point other than to ‘complete the assignment’. I’d think about that for the exam too. You will be asked about an issue, or problem, or for advice and you need to have a position on the question that you are able to argue for. I think the same is true when you are in the workplace. It’s not just what you know, it’s the arguments and insights you can create with that knowledge. I know I’ve made that point before.

This really is the last ‘IMS2009/2010’ post so I want to thank you (IMS students) all for your efforts in this unit. In the last 3 weeks I have read 200,000 words of your work and written 16k words of feedback. That was the culmination of 24 lectures/guest lectures (including the review lectures), 22 seminars, about 25 hours of individual tutorials, 28 blog posts and over 300 individual emails (I kept a tally).  If you did the recommended reading you could add over 250,000 words of journal articles and book chapters. If you came to the seminars and lecture you might also add about 200 different websites that we have visited. Seems quite a lot of work when you add it up like that and I hope that you will take something useful from it all. If you find yourself working in online marketing you might consider coming back for a guest lecture, but of course any of you might ‘chip in’ on this blog next year and beyond as well.

Well just look at that log file! Note how there was much enthusiasm in October (or actually I simply made people go on the site in the seminar). This ‘engagement’ lasted until Christmas. After that other assignments kicked in and all went quiet, until about a week before the assignment. Then it went mad again (actually the peek was on the Saturday before the Monday hand in). See how I can interpret student behaviour from the log file? I also note that the assignment advice was the most popular post and that very few people use the tags, or categories to explore older content. Never mind. This is normal. So here is my last ‘teaching material’ post for this academic year.  

In about 6-7 weeks IMS students (you) will have a 2 hour exam, with 2 sections with 3 questions in each. They (you) must answer 1 question from each section. So that is 2 one-hour essays they (you) have to write including time to think and plan each one. This also means that each essay is likely to be around 1000 words. Not very long really.  If you were talking, it might take you 20-25 minutes to say everything you might write in such an exam. 

It’s easy to dismiss exams as irrelevant anachronisms from dated pedagogy. They certainly seem out of academic fashion. But there are analogies that might help to restate their validity as a form of assessment. An exam could be seen as a written version of an interview, or may a meeting, where you are asked to explain in detail your view on a few important aspects of interactive media, or the response to a client request for advice. If you can quickly provide an informed and convincing argument, the interview or meeting will have gone well. Same with the exam.  To do this you must be able to quickly understand the question, or topic, and bring to mind a range of theories that might help you to construct an argument, and examples that might help you to apply, or illustrate your ideas.  So a ‘good’ answer in the context of this unit is based on an understanding of interactive marketing, probably supported by theory and probably illustrated by examples.  The more you talk to each other about online marketing, the more ‘naturally’ these arguments and ideas might come. So when you revise you might get into the habit of reading, thinking, writing, talking, going online, reading, thinking, writing, talking, going online, etc.  If you have not already done so, I suggest you subscribe to some of the online news sites suggested in the unit guide. I like the Register because the coverage is good and the style is accessible. You may note that I have also set up a ‘#imsrevision’ tag on Twitter. You could usefully add links and observations to the tag. Remember also that I’ve been blogging about may of the topics we have covered and that the lectures can be downloaded from this site and from MyBU.

It’s worth thinking more about the exam and the style of questions. You might think of the exam questions relating to two or more of the three categories I have suggested above (technologies, theories, context/examples).  For example, you might be asked (implicitly or explicitly) to consider a theoretical perspective as a way to assess technologies or approaches (blogs, or search, or behavioural targeting, for example). You might also be given a context (i.e., assess strategy for a new business, or for an online retailer, or for a marketing plan).  Remember that you can bring in examples and theory from any other unit, or other reading.  If you think about it you may note that your degree includes different types of theory. Some come from sociology or psychology. Others are more specific to marketing. And some are specific to interactive media or online marketing. You can combine these and you should aim to illustrate that you can connect and apply them. You think ‘with them’. You should also have built up a range of specific examples. Again, some might be ‘broad’, for example an understanding of different industries, others are more specific, such as good marketing case studies, and others are more specific to online marketing (for example specific online forums, or viral campaigns, or corporate blogs, etc). You should expect to be confident about these most specific examples.  If you think about it, in the lectures we have usually focussed on technologies and theory, and in the seminars we have focussed on specific examples and on application. Some of these examples may therefore be from your direct experience. You might check back through your notes to connect these things.

So as you revise, try to combine elements as an act of ‘sense-making’, but consider that the technologies are the key bit because that is what we have been building knowledge of this year in this unit.  So, again, the theory is there to help you develop your analysis and argument, and the context is where we apply this knowledge as marketing/advertising practice (put that way you might see the context as key. This unit has practical value if it allows you to see how online technology helps address marketing contexts). To put it another way, it’s the technologies that you are meant to leave this unit knowing something about, but that ‘something’ should help your marketing/advertising practice.  So you should be able to talk to online reviews, online advertising, social media and community technologies, search approaches, blogging, etc, as it applies to your discipline.

Here are some of the technologies, theories and contexts we have specifically examined and that I have suggested are particularly important. I would suggest that if you focus on these you will be well prepared for the exam. Of course you can probably ‘skip’ a couple that you don’t like, and there might be merit in going beyond these as you revise.  I’ve added questions to each term and you might want to discuss some of these questions (here or elsewhere). I think throughout the year we have discussed answers to all these questions. You might also play a game of connecting the different sections to create you own ‘ideal’ questions. After the exam we can see how was the closest.

Technologies (things like)

Online reviews and review sites. Where are there reviews online? Who writes them and why? How might they be ‘gamed’? What are their value and to who?

Display ads and especially behavioural targeting techniques. How are these bought? How are they evaluated? Why is there particular interest in behavioural ads? What are the potential objections? What assumption about how advertising works are embedded in this technology?

Log File Analysis and other evaluation tools (eyetracking maybe).  What can we get from these technologies? What are their strengths? How do they help us to construct websites, or online experiences? What are their limitations.

Social media and maybe viral approaches. How do organisations engage with social media? What can they get from them? How can they be used for viral campaigns? What are the ‘dangers’ and limitations?

Forums/ MMORPGs and other ‘community’ technology. What do we mean by online community? Why do people form such groups online? What do they mean for brands, or organisations? How should organisations get involved, if al all?

Search marketing approaches. Why has search grown so much recently? What assumptions about behaviour does the use of search suggest? How can search be used in a marketing campaigns?  How is search paid for and evaluated?

Blogging technology, including microblogging. Why do people/organisations use them? What do they ‘say’ on them? What can they be used for? What problems might their use cause?

Corporate/brand/retail websites. For marketers, what is the difference between engaging with consumers on ‘their’ sites, and driving them to ‘our’ sites? Why have a site at all? What should marketers ‘do’ on their sites? What should they not do? How do we understand on-site behaviour?

 Theories (things like)

Progress and technological determinism (maybe versus social determinism). Why is everything so ‘new’ all the time? Are there alternatives? Should such reflection make us critical of much technology? How does interactive media ‘perform’ progress.

The diffusion process. Why do some people ‘run’ to get new technologies, but others shrug? Who is right? Why is some technology much more popular than others? Should we attempt to manage the diffusion process? How can we influence it?

Flow and related motivations for using interactive media. Why do people use interactive media and what exactly do they get from it? Should we (marketers) recognise these motivations? Can we ‘exploit’ them? Is flow always a good thing? Should we aim for it?

Aspects of interactivity. What do we mean by interactivity? Why do we use this term? Do we misuse it? Is interactivity all the same? Is it all good? Are there other terms that explain what happens online?

Online community (construction, behaviour and exploitation). How can something like a community be built online? How is such a thing maintained? What happens in one? Can marketers ‘exploit’ them? Can marketers create and ‘help’ them?

The sociology of play, including the corruption of play. Does it help us to see much of what happens online as a game (not just the obvious games)? Should we think (as marketers) of constructing engaging games? Can games go wrong and does thinking about online business that way help us with our strategy?

DVC (Digital Virtual Consumption) and maybe link to Long tail and/or value system. Can we re-think online consumer behaviour? What drives it?  How does this change the way we think about value, or utility? Does it change what we can sell and the way we think about what we offer the consumer (as marketers)? Are there new things to sell people, or new experiences to provide? Are their critiques of online consumer behaviour?

Ethical frameworks and maybe link with regulatory frameworks. Should we do any of this online stuff? Is it ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? How can we know if our actions are justifiable? Why might we be criticised for online marketing?

Contexts (things like)

Advertising/marketing communications (including planning and evaluation). What are the different tools available to build a campaign? (eg, viral, search, display, affiliate, social media, community). What good examples are there of the different tools? Why are these good examples?

Marketing strategies. What approaches to strategy might marketers take (online). What good examples are there of how technology has been used within specific strategies? Does the web force us to question ‘norms’ of marketing strategy?

New businesses/business models. What new business models are popular? How are they funded? Why don’t they all work? Which ones lead to monopoly and why?

Online retailing. What characterises online retail? What might we even mean by online retail? Does the web force us to rethink what ‘retailing’ means? How are the most successful online retailers and why? What can be sold online? What can less easily be sold?

Services marketing. How can we market services online? Are there new examples of services? How can we gain revenue from new services? Which are the most successful online services and how are they financed?

Remember that a compelling argument that addresses the question is the most important thing because this is the best demonstration of your knowledge and understanding of interactive marketing. I wish you well in the exam and for the future.

Mike

If you suspended your sense of humour along with your Xbox live account so you didn’t get distracted during revision, or if you are easily upset, or cursed with the confidence of a dormouse who just caught their partner in bed with a gerbil, I wouldn’t read on if I was you.

Look, I hate this time of year too. It’s all stress and panic and complaints and rush and hate towards staff (for not giving clues, or making it too hard, or not covering that, or for the library not having the books, or for not being able to find notes online, or not answering that email sent on Saturday night straight away, or the one sent Sunday morning either, or for not being in their office, or for deliberately making the questions too hard, or just for being alive, or just, you know, something. Anyway, whatever, it’s their fault for sure) followed by a couple of weeks of marking that feel like I’ve been given my own special level of the inferno a few decades early.

Anyway, here are some notes on revision (and exams)  in no particular order. As you will see, they are the basis of a rigorous study into student behaviour written over several years.

1. You know how sometimes when we say “I’m going to the bathroom”, what we really mean is “I’m going to have a poo”? Revision can be a bit like that. We say ‘ I’m going to do revision’, but we mean something else. Something like watching TV, or prating about on Facebook. Ten minutes blinking at a set of notes followed by Home and Away and several ‘god I hate revision, lol’ updates isn’t an hour of revision. Don’t kid yourself. It isn’t time for lunch yet either.
2. Have you ever noticed how when you get in a car to drive that you generally don’t have to revise (for example by reading the manual again to remind yourself what the clutch, brakes, indicators and steering wheel all do)? That’s because when we have actually learnt something it means we know it. At worst we need just a little reminder. So catching up on all the reading you should have done but didn’t isn’t actually revision. It means you never learnt it in the first place. If you figure this out early, you might still have time to learn material before the exam (but that’s not revision).
3. Making a revision plan is to revision what masturbation is to sex. However much of the former you’ve done, you’ve not actually done the later.  I know this is a controversial metaphor, but if your revision is painful, done under duress, makes your head hurt, and is over in five minutes, you’re doing it wrong.  If it keeps you up all night talking and laughing, then you’re on to something though.
4. Back to driving. Did anyone ever learn to drive just by reading notes on the Highway Code?  I suspect not. Imagine sitting by the examiner at the start of the test, giving her a bright smile and then confidently declaring that you haven’t actually driven for quite a while, but it shouldn’t be a problem because on the way to the test centre you went over your key, key, summary, summary notes several times and you think you should remember most of them if you get started quickly. I think if you want to write one-hour essays about interactive marketing well, you practice by (hand) writing a lot of one-hour essays about interactive marketing.
5. Did you ever notice that exam questions almost never start with things like “now write down everything you can remember from lecture 5 as fast as possible, but in any order”? It’s funny, because when I read answers I sometimes have to go back to the paper just to be sure it didn’t say something like this. Exams also don’t say “write down a logical argument that a reasonable person would find convincing and that demonstrates that the writer has some specialist knowledge of this subject”. However, I think this would be a much better way to read the questions. Try adding a line like that to every question.
6. Some general once said something like ‘The first causality of any campaign is the plan’. I expect they got somehow killed though so what did they know. I think a plan at the start of an exam is good thing, but only of you actually do stick to it and it is a good plan. Also on plans; it is only very limited consolation to lie there shot, bleeding and dying in a pool of your own lead-ridden entrails, weeping that the plan was really good though.
7. You could write like this: “Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.” But I’d suggest that exams are not the best place to explore stream of consciousness as a technique. Tutors put on the edge of sanity by the marking process might prefer the calm reassurance of structured logic.
8. I often wonder how politicians ever passed an exam (maybe they bribed someone or just lied about them). I watch them on Question Time and I notice that they start every answer with things like: ‘I think the real issue is…’, and ‘the important thing to note is…’, and ‘what people really need to know is…’, and I find myself screaming, screaming at the top of my voice until I’m horse and my ears are bleeding, and I’m banging my head on the wall and I’m still screaming ‘just answer the fucking question will you!’ Sometimes when I mark exams I feel a little bit like that too. Maybe politicians have answers pre-prepared and don’t really listen to the question. Maybe.
9. There is probably an old Chinese proverb that goes ‘ it’s better to remain quiet and be thought a fool than to speak out and leave people in no doubt’. When it comes to final year exams, it’s worth reflecting on that. If you really don’t have a single clue what Baudrillard meant by hyperreality, or why Sutton-Smith sees ‘flow’ as reductionist, or how play is ideological work, or what disintermediation means, or why deontology raises questions about the ethics of behavioural targeting, or whatever, pick another theory, concept or even question.
10. ‘On the plus side, [long list], but on the negative side [long list], so in conclusion there are positives and negatives and you really have to be quite careful’ isn’t much of an argument really.
11. Did you ever try pleading with a cash machine to give you a bit more money because you have tried really hard but just ran out of time this month? Maybe tried to win them over with a bit of humour, lol, or something? Markers are like cash machines. They just look at what you have in your account.

Feel free to ask questions and I wish you well for the exam.

No. 6: “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.”

1. Life has been quantified for some time. I saw Requiem to Detroit at the weekend and that was a nice reminder of the way in which factory work quantified people’s lives in terms of hours worked (clocking in and out), units produced or assembled, wages paid and commodities bought.  And when those numbers go bad, what? We get Detroit as it is today. Time as a measurement is different now of course. Knowledge workers don’t have factory hours; their problem is there is not enough time. They need more technology to distort time so that they can do more. That more is quantified always. That’s business.

2. Even my workload is quantified (academics might have felt they could be outside of this somehow). My marking is measured. My research is scored and counted (things like how many citations as well as the ‘impact’ of the journals I publish in). I have evaluation forms to fill in that are based on scores and productivity measures. I’m even asked how much enterprise money I may have secured. So much for academic freedom. I am measured, scored and placed on a spreadsheet. I am aggregated into league tables (internal and external). Strategy is determined by the direction of these graphs (always they should be upwards). Assessment means are up (this is good), student satisfaction is steady (we need to d00 m00re there), research output is up (but we still need to d00 m00re there), enterprise is low (make this a priority t,000), grant applications are low (find time for these). You get the idea.  It’s targets here, key performance indicators there, evaluations everywhere (but always with the figures, or it didn’t happen). So much for academic freedom.  Management by numbers is imperialistic. It takes over all parts of society. I’m reminded of John Law’s review of management of a large science project – he describes the project really taking place on a spreadsheet on a manager’s computer, quite separate from the actual building work.  Our managers are much the same. Somewhere on the soon-to-be-leaving-us V.C.’s computer there is a graph and that is where the University really is.  But the V.C. needs m00re.

New No.2: “Good day, Number Six.”


No.6: “Number what?” 


New No.2: “Six. For official purposes, everyone has a number. Yours is number 6.”


No.6: “I am not a number, I am a person.”


3. So you would think in private life we might resist a life more quantified, but even here the numbers are after us. One area of private life where we seem to have borrowed directly from business practice is quantifying oursonlineelves so that we can monitor and ‘improve’ what we do online.  Businesses love metrics. The web loves metrics too. We can plan, strategise and implement based on the numbers.  In an earlier post I mentioned how much like a game adwords is. Maybe it would be more useful to note how much like a business strategy many games are. Maybe we should be critical of the way games reduce people to a score (I don’t like the way degrees reduce people to a score either). Too much agon everywhere.

4. But it’s not just games. We can use ‘business-like’ measurement systems to monitor (self-monitor) our interactions online. We can measure posts on Twitter and the numbers of followers (and how many times we are listed), for example. We can measure hits on our blog, and referrals to our blog. We can graph this to see growth, or to rank our ideas by popularity (my more popular ideas are all about the assignment it seems). We can measure the number of posts we have made and the number of comments we get (always more). We can even compare ourselves to others by finding out where we lie on a leisure table of bloggers. Or we can measure friends of Facebook, or number of posts there, or number of pictures.  We can run any number of aps that might tell us even moore about what we are. How are we scored on intelligence, or on knowledge of celebrity, or film, or music, for example? Or we can graph how many views there have been on our Youtube video. We can see the score others give us too. And we can again measure comments. We can monitor, measure and record how others are watching us. And so know ourselves and grow by this.

No.2: “Are you going to run?”


No.6: “Like blazes. First chance I get.”


No.2: “I meant — run for office?”

5. This is more or less what marketers do too. Capitalism is an ideology of numbers on a grand scale. Economics quantifies the world. And so politics does to. Politics is just a bunch of numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s just a graph or a pie chart and then a soundbyte. No time for anything else. Sales are also a number on a spreadsheet and not people making things, with others grateful for that skill and labour. It’s as if we are managing ourselves as a brand. Our daily rounds of sites visited includes the various dashboards that help us to quantify our own impact on the world. We can’t seem escape these. The numbers are always there. How much disc space to I have? How many music files have I downloaded? But also we do it to ourselves. We have learnt to ask ‘how well am I doing’. How well, not what. Not what am I doing. How many friends, or how many important friends (ranked according to their performance on Linkedin). Not what is friendship to me.

No. 6: “You still have a choice. You can still salvage your right to be individuals. Your rights to truth and free thought! Reject this false world of Number Two . . . reject it NOW!!”


6. So more of our time at work and away from it (although that boundary is much more porous) is spent looking at numbers about who we are and what we do. This is our feedback loop. We act on these charts. It’s a life more quantified.  

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It’s easy to be dismissive of email, banners, affiliates (and even search) because they are not only the most obtrusive aspects of online marketing, but also perhaps the least sexy. They end up looking like long spreadsheets of log files (we are going to look at some of those next week). They feel like direct response.  They lack the apparent innovation and creatively of social media, virals, games and new business models. They don’t stimulate intellectual curiosity like online identity construction, social interaction, buying behaviour, flow, or play do.

And then I notice that I often manage my blog and Twitter accounts via email.  I rely on the humble email message to tell me to update things, moderate comments etc. And I get a lot of useful emails about events, conferences, calls for papers and grants. Email may be boring, but we still use it a lot. It certainly hasn’t been twittered away.

Those students that have been doing the Google Competition (and perhaps especially those that attended Dan’s talk) have also spotted that far from being ‘dull work’, actually running these Adwords campaigns can be as compelling as any resource management videogame (I’m hoping I get some assignments along those lines). So game-like structures can work on the business-to-business side too and suddenly what looks like a load of figures is transformed into a highly skilled game keeping knowledge-worker in the office ‘til late in the evening and inviting SMEs to play with the big ad spenders.  Not so dull  then.

Even the much dismissed banner campaign could be invigorated with a bit of behavioural targeting hocus-pocus.  And you very own Elizabeth Harris is going to be talking all about that in the lecture. Elizabeth was the only student to take me up on the offer of a student guest lecture slot. I’ve seen the slides. It should be good. It’s new. It’s controversial. It should lead to debate.

Maybe in our quest for the newness of social media and viral excitement we too easily dismiss these more ‘traditional’ online tools then? I now know quite a few stories about people making very large sums of money from affiliate schemes for example (as well a number of stories about making hardly any money at all though). And surely we have to admire the largely win/win/win game for users/retailers/site owners unfolding on Hotukdeals and the like (even as we produce another critique of our consumer culture)?

Maybe we are just lazy when we reject these things and run to the latest hype? Maybe it’s a sign of a lack of patience or desire to persist until a skill is achieved? Like buying a new videogame when the one we have gets to the tricky levels. Maybe that’s another sign of our consumerly approach to professional practice. It means that there are probably very good assignments still to be written on banners, or affiliates, or search or email.

So there is a broader, meta game going on – ever new online techniques (games) aimed at online marketers (players) and consumers (also players) who get more and more sophisticated ‘schemer schemas’, and that also means they get bored quickly. We can be dragged into the ‘leading edge’ of these games, but we might not forget that there is still much to be done by refining a craft, by playing the older games really well. Same goes for old media?