ARC: Connections: ELMAR: Posting

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Consumption Markets & Culture is pleased to announce its Best Paper award for articles published in 2010:

Janice Denegri-Knott & Mike Molesworth (2010): Concepts and practices of digital virtual consumption, Consumption Markets & Culture, 13:2, 109-132.

Abstract

Despite the popularity of online spaces that simulate aspects of consumption-like experiences (online virtual worlds, video games and interactive functions on online retailers) conceptual tools that aim to comprehend such consumer practices are yet to emerge. In an effort to better understand them this paper puts forward a taxonomy that may help us capture emerging consumer behavior in the digital virtual terrain in relation to virtual and material consumption. This may be read as a fluid template that considers the movement between what resides in consumer imaginations as ideal or virtual, its actualization in material and now also digital virtual spaces. We then offer examples of the practices that are emerging, specifically the increase in imaginative resources that interactive media provide; practices that actualize probable, everyday commodities and experiences in the digital virtual and practices that actualize fantastic commodities and experiences in the digital virtual. Finally, we discuss the potential for these to produce new consumer subjectivities and new markets, and as a result we conclude with a discussion of the implications of such developments for consumer cultures, noting the potential for both liberatory/celebratory and critical discourse as well as avenues for future research.

For a limited time, the article is available for free download on the CMC website:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10253860903562130

Rika Houston, California State University, Los Angeles, Markus Giesler, Schulich School of Business, and Güliz Ger, Bilkent University served as judges for this inaugural award.

Consumption Markets and Culture is an interdisciplinary journal published four times a year by Routledge.

Editor-in-Chief:

Jonathan Schroeder
William A. Kern Professor of Communications
Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
Jonathan.schroeder@rit.edu

All volumes are available online via Informaworld. See journal¹s homepage:

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/10253866.asp

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