Netnography and the digital consumer: the quest for cultural insights

Who is the digital consumer and what do we need to know about her? Although this exciting new volume is filled with digital dialectics, critical cyborg-oriented conundra, intellectualized information processes, networked New Humans, and postmodern posthumanist post-portraiture, I am going to argue upfront and unabashedly that I see the concept of the “amazing” “new” “digital” consumer as somewhat of a crashing bore. Posthuman cyborg? Come on. Look up from this book (and I hope you are reading it on a

screen), take it to the street, and get real. Do you see that teenager walking down the street with her head completely buried in her mobile phone (maybe she is reading this book too)? That university student cramming for an exam online, texting on Facebook, and simultaneously checking the Patients Like Me online forum for medical information? That grandmom shopping on eBay, paying for it on Paypal, checking her bank balance on her BlackBerry and then Skyping her sister on another continent? Who are these people, these much-lauded, much-sought, much-studied “consumers” of

information and communications technologies? They are the digital consumer, and the digital consumer is, of course, us. That is because digital consumption is nonstop, daily, broadening, local, so constant and invisible it is almost inevitable and indispensable; it is an already inextricable part of our routines and our culture. And so the digital consumer is mundane. But just because she is mundane does not mean that she is unimportant. In fact, I would like

to argue that it is the very mundane and everyday nature of the online-to-offline-to-online consumption of the digital consumer that makes the deep and penetrating understanding of her and her behaviors so vitally important to our understanding of contemporary culture and society. For it is within the crumbs and corners of our daily lives, in the routine conduct we so often take for granted, that lie the deeper clues about our motivations, our values, our social structures, and the meanings that underlie them all.