Digital Virtual Consumption

Digital media present opportunities for new types of consumption including desiring, buying, collecting, making, and even selling digital virtual goods. To these activities we can add those taking place in virtual communities of consumption, online shops, brand websites, and online auction houses that together amount to a vast new landscape of consumption. Digital virtual consumption motivates concatenated practices which produce meaningful experience for their users as well as market opportunities to profit from them. Consumers create and maintain elaborate wish lists, engaging with simulations of brands on websites and in videogames, coveting items for use in online games and even spending ‘real’ money on these, undertaking entrepreneurial activity in virtual worlds, conjuring nostalgia via online auctions, engaging in playful consumption in other new retail formats, writing reviews of products as part of the consumption experience, engaging in online activist activities, and many other emerging behaviors.

Analyses of consumption in the digital virtual realm are however limited. This collection brings together experienced researchers from the fields of consumer research, digital games, and virtual worlds to provide conceptual and empirical work that helps us understand these new and significant consumer activities. Online communities negotiate the ‘correct’ use of goods and offer technical advice, consumers develop new products, individuals create and distribute their own promotional material for their favorite brands, and entrepreneurial consumers marketing and selling their own products online. Here we may see a blurring of consumption and production, or work and leisure activity that requires further thought about what makes it meaningful for individuals. The chapters in this volume take stock of the emergence and likely importance of digital virtual consumption for consumer culture, including a review of both new and existing conceptual and methodological tools as well as a resource of key examples and analyses of practices.

Janice Denegri-Knott is Lecturer of Consumer Culture and Behaviour at the Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University, UK. Since 2001 she has been researching and publishing in the areas of digital virtual consumption and consumer/marketing research. Her research interests span from conceptualising and documenting digital virtual consumption and its practices, the emergence of media technology, the socio-historic patterning of consumption and more generally the subject of power in consumer and marketing research.

Mike Molesworth is a Senior Lecturer at Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University, UK where he teaches and researches online culture, behaviour and consumer culture. He has published papers in international journals on topics relating to both consumer culture and videogames, and is co-editor with Richard Scullion and Lizzie Nixon of The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer (Routledge, 2010).