Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay - Softcover

White, Michele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822352400 ISBN 13: 9780822352402

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

In Buy It Now, Michele White examines eBay and its emphasis on community and social norms, revealing the cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that are reinforced throughout the site. She shows how instructional texts, rule systems, and advertisements "configure the user," allowing eBay to indicate how the site is supposed to function while also upholding particular values and practices. White details how eBay reinforces stereotypes about gender and sexuality, looking, for example, at descriptions included in wedding dress listings, and how eBay directs individuals to the "Adult Only" part of the website when they use the search terms "gay" and "lesbian." She discloses the ways that eBay promises a caring community but its "Black Americana" category reproduces racism by allowing sellers' narratives that excuse and romanticize slavery and insult African Americans. White also looks at how participants challenge eBay's categories, rules, and values, examining widely used strategies of resistance by sellers and buyers in the lesbian and gay interest listings. By analyzing the organizational and cultural logics present in eBay, White emphasizes how other Internet settings, including craigslist, are not as transparent, community-oriented, and empowering as they claim. She proposes methods for researching and reconceptualizing new media sites.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michele White is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is the author of The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship.

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Buy It Now

Lessons from eBayBy MICHELE WHITE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5240-2

Contents

Figures.............................................................................................................................................viiPreface and Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction. Lessons and Methods from eBay.........................................................................................................1ONE Between Security and Distrust: eBay's Brand, Fan, and Virtual Communities......................................................................24TWO Pins, Cards, and Griffith's Jacket: Producing Identity and Brand Communities through eBay Live! Conferences and Collecting.....................52THREE You Can "Get It On" eBay: Selling Gender, Sexuality, and Organizational Logic through the Interface..........................................84FOUR eBay's Visible Masculinities: "Gay" and "Gay Interest" Listings and the Politics of Describing................................................110FIVE eBay Boys Will Be Lesbians: Viewing "Lesbian" and "Lesbian Interest" Vintage Photography Listings.............................................143SIX Re-collecting Black Americana: "Absolutely Derogatory" Objects and Narratives from eBay's Community............................................168Afterword. Everything in Moderation: The Regulating Aspects of craigslist and the Moral Assertions of "Community Flagging"..........................203Notes...............................................................................................................................................219Works Cited.........................................................................................................................................289Index...............................................................................................................................................309

Chapter One

Between security and distrust

EBAY'S BRAND, FAN, AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

eBay uses narratives about community to transform its visual and textual representations into people and spaces, connect members, provide reasons for participants to invest and work for the site, and turn the company into a neighbor and friend. eBay labels parts of the site with the term "community" and makes it a key structural and emotive feature. For instance, notions of community are conveyed through eBay's "Group Gifts" feature. With this option, people make partial payments and "Give bigger, give better, give it together." The Group Gifts site depicts members in eBay's color scheme collaboratively supporting a large gift box and underscores the power of eBay groups, caring, and that this is a site-based community practice. These characteristics are emphasized in eBay's newsletter when an employee, Nino, describes lildivasboutique*com giving minimaxshow an extra item along with a listing, getting a gift in response, and the two women becoming friends and business partners. Two other female members featured in the newsletter, raglebagle and unique-find, form a vital connection that incorporates social selling, "a special friendship," and "countless emails every day" until raglebagle "cannot imagine living life without unique-find." While there is an image of "raglebagle with husband" and assertion of heteronormativity, the article also describes people "meeting their future spouse on eBay," the women knowing "exactly what to say to each other on good days and bad," and plans for "the two friends" to "finally meet in person – after three years of waiting" at eBay Live! The newsletter thus evokes intense eBay-facilitated female friendships, or even queer romances.

eBay references passionate attachments and uses accounts of community to constitute members as normative citizens—individuals who freely give to each other, take an active part in society, do good work, and perform traditional roles. The concept of the eBay citizen and the company's relationship to citizenship, sexuality, and governmentality should be examined in depth. eBay's linking of these social structures includes eBay-facilitated weddings and Meg Whitman's campaign to become governor of California. By rendering community, relationships, and citizenship, eBay makes the setting matter, addresses everyone, coaxes individuals to invest and work for free, and institutes a series of norms that are productive for the company's profile and profitmaking capabilities. Members' engagements, whether they are fans of the site, outcome-oriented shoppers, or critics of the company and its interface—are always filtered through eBay's community discourse and establishment of norms. Members are envisioned, and sometimes act, as co-producers of the technology and community, especially when their own positions match that of eBay. Therefore, a full understanding of eBay is not possible without considering how the company and members deploy the term "community" and related features.

In this chapter, I consider eBay's rendering of community, consumer citizenship, and sexual citizenship; the importance of consumer and organizational critique; and how members support and resist these configurations. According to Margaret Scammell, "Consumer critique is fundamental to citizenship in the age of globalization. It brings into the daylight the dangerously hidden issue of the political power of corporations." Such critiques are vital because organizations such as eBay and their values get attached to contemporary behavior, discourses, and politics. The journalist John C. Abell connects Whitman's gubernatorial candidacy to eBay's auction processes by titling an article "'Buy It Now' fail: Former eBay ceo Whitman Is the Biggest Loser." leapord420 continued the company's investment in heteronormative unions when commenting on a wedding at the convention and asking, "Does anyone know what I have to do to get married at Ebay live?" The literature on sexual citizenship, brand communities, and configuring the user provides powerful methods for examining the ways organizations such as eBay produce and engage members. eBay's production of community and norms informs my studies of members throughout this book. My analysis also offers methods for reconsidering the critical literature about community and discourses about virtual communities, which were common in early Internet studies research and continue in slightly reorganized versions. A reassessment of this literature is vital because popular culture often accepts that communities are essential and inherently good. However, the eBay company's community, when it works, transforms individuals into privileged insiders, enforcers of norms, unpaid workers for the company, and promoters of the brand. eBay's managing of members and profiting from community, which can be conceived as the company's community, is sometimes different from and a threat to members' community structures and reasons for engaging.

Producing eBay community

eBay uses the term "community" to articulate connections among members, participants and employees, people and consumption, users and the site, and constituents and the brand. The term informed initial conceptions of the site and continues to be an important structuring feature. Early versions of the setting, when Pierre Omidyar was still calling it AuctionWeb, encouraged individuals to "join our community." The...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822352400
• ISBN 13: 9780822352402
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 330
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland