DMCS 2021 — Digital Methods For Critical Consumer Studies

In the last decade Digital Methods established themselves as the main methodological paradigm for studying the Internet from a sociological perspective. Over the years, thanks to Digital Methods, scholars have cast light upon several key and emerging socio-cultural phenomena such as, like economy, echo-chambers, the platformization of the Web, social bots, fake news (just to name a few). Since the beginning, Digital Methods privileged politics as their main field of research -intended as both the politics of the medium (e.g. algorithms) and politics within the medium (e.g. climate change). Curiously enough, consumption and consumer culture received scarce attention within Digital Methods studies. This amounts to be a notable gap, since consumption is not simply one topic among the others that might be interesting to explore through Digital Methods, but rather a key phenomenon that underpins the logic of functioning of the contemporary digital landscape. Consider for example that, among the top applications that dominate the contemporary 2.0 Web (as well as govern its functioning), there are (private) companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, whose business models consist in extracting data from consumers in order to deliver them consumer products, experiences and advertising. Moreover, most of the more interesting current consumer phenomena are natively digital, such as self-branding, influencer marketing or brand publics. Nevertheless, few consumer culture and marketing scholars addressed those phenomena by using Digital Methods. Indeed, a more systematic focus on Digital Methods and Consumer Studies means advancing both the disciplines.