Kim Humphery

Mobile moralities: ethical consumption in the digital realm

Ethical consumption, as a realm of production and exchange, a framework for purchasing decisions and as political activism, is now well established in a range of nations. As a politics, it points to an interconnected but divergent set of concerns centred on issues of environmental sustainability, local and global economic and social justice, and community and individual wellbeing. While the subject of sustained critique, not least because of its apparent privileging of the ‘consumer’ as the locus of change, ethical consumption has garnered increasing attention. This is most recently evident in the development and widening use of ‘ethical consumption apps’ for mobile devices. These apps allow the user to both access ethical information on products and, potentially, to connect with a broader politics of consumption. However, in entering the digital realm, ethical consumption also becomes embroiled in the complexities of digital technocultures and their ability to allow users of apps to be connected to each other, potentially building communities of interest and/or activism. This article explores this emerging intersection of the ethical and the digital. It examines whether such digital affordances affect the way ethical consumption itself may be conceived and pursued. Does the ethical consumption app work to collectivise or individualise, help to focus or fragment, speak of timidity, or potential in relation to an oppositional politics of consumption? In confronting these issues, this article suggests that contemporary ethical consumption apps – while full of political potential – remain problematic in that the turn to the digital has tended, so far, to accentuate the already individualising tendencies within a politics of ethical consumption. This speaks also, however, to a similar problematic in the politics of digital technocultures; the use of the digital does not automatically enable – merely through greater connectivity and information availability – forms of radical politics.

The Time of Consumption

If there is one phrase that I most dread to hear, it’s ‘price check’. We all know this term by now; it is, in fact, definitive of the contemporary landscape of everyday shopping. We all know the routine as well. As the sound of this phrase floats in the supermarket air, having been spluttered into a public address system by some frazzled kid at the check-out, everyone in the queue slumps on one leg and breathes in frustration at the fact that we are going to have to wait. Meanwhile, the cost of the offending article is ever so slowly ascertained. This is not what computerised scanning was meant to be all about. Bar codes are supposed to put a bar on delay. But, of course, they don’t; they bolster an efficiency of stock control with no promise of quick service. And in a world of fast consumption, a delay of any such kind becomes more and more intolerable. If it’s not there in the shop or online; if it’s not quickly purchasable or deliverable; it’s not worth having. If the systems and technologies of consumption fail — and the queue moves too slowly — it’s an excuse for consumer outrage.

Consumer Culture and Personal Finance: Money Goes to Market

In The Tender Cut, Patricia Adler and Peter Adler present the largest, to date, qualitative sociologically-grounded investigation of the lived experience of a non-clinical population of people who self-injure. Drawing on data from over 135 in-depth life history interviews, the authors go beyond the interpersonal and psychological dynamics behind the ‘‘self-injurer’’ to examine the larger world that situates, provokes, and even reinforces the need to engage in self-injury for people who clearly are not a homogeneous population. The social transformation of the practice of self-injury as it has increased in social acceptability and moved beyond the act of an isolated individual to that of a person embedded in a ‘‘real’’ or cyber community (where they note it is still possible for a self-injurer to feel excluded) is documented, as well as the self-presentation of self-injurers on the internet (e.g., the roles different people take in the groups) and the relationships between people who self-injure. The patience, empathy, and understanding of the authors is also evident as they neither demonize the act, nor stigmatize or alienate those who shared their stories; rather they expose in a dignified manner the turmoil, angst, fear, impulsivity, ritual, stress and pain, among other factors, behind the act of self-injury. The strengths of the book are multifold. Adler and Adler present self-injury (broadly defined to include behaviors such as cutting, burning, hair pulling, picking, and bone breaking) as a way some people cope with the challenges, stresses, and difficulties they experience in life. They explain that there is no typical self-injurer or typical start to the injurious career; the only commonality among many self-injurers is the experience of stress. They note the role of social living and personal experiences or exposure in the instigation of the self-injurious career. The authors also take into account how selfinjuring has moved from a psychological ‘‘disorder’’ into a learned social trend— a ‘‘sociological occurrence’’ (p. 3) situated in subcultures and, even at times, resembling a ‘‘fad.’’ It is established, via sampling a ‘‘sociological population’’ of self-injurers that ranged from youths to persons in their mid-fifties, that self-injury is more common among the population than the authors initially anticipated. They noted similarities and differences between the struggles of self-injurers across all ages and described the increased alienation felt by older selfcutters, as the normative attitude suggests these older self-cutters should have ‘‘grown out of it’’ (p. 34). Theoretically, the manuscript adds support to the feminist critique of the medical model’s ‘‘disempowerment of self-injurers,’’ theoretically addresses the gendered context in which self-injury is framed, and expands interactionist and other theoretical views. Although methodologically strong, the authors do not provide an overview of the demographics of their sample. Given that the experiences of people who self-injure appear, on many levels, to parallel those of people who self-harm through other means or use other negative coping behaviors (e.g., alcoholics, drug users, bulimics, anorexics, etc.) and that some interviewees were noted to practice other negative coping behaviors, extended reporting of demographics could assist the reader to substantiate the sample. Moreover, providing additional information on these explicit factors may clarify what aspects of the self-injurer experience result from their injurious career, or if some part of their experience or motivation to continue to self-injure is more appropriately viewed as a consequence of other negative coping mechanisms. The weakest point of the book is the lack of an explicitly embodied analysis of self-injury. The reader is left wondering how the scaring

Beyond Borders: The Politics and Place of the Global Shop

Global retail spaces, from the Body Shop and Benetton, to Gap and Ikea, are a common feature now of urban streetscapes and shopping precincts throughout the economically developed and developing world. Together, this group of retail outlets constitute a kind of global ‘high street’. Indeed, the global shop, as I will call it, can be understood as a very particular retail space — not one which is spatially or even managerially innovative compared to other retail environments, but which is certainly unique in being defined through its geographical spread, the globally branded merchandize within it, and its involvement in the making of a sense of global place. These environments of consumption and social relations have an everyday prominence in many people’s lives, and they are moreover the subject of sometimes intense public debate and political opposition. In this chapter, it is this second element of opposition with which I will be concerned, most especially in relation to exploring the presence of and critical public response to the global shop in Australia.