Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

The central unifying theme in the Manuscripts is the alienation of labour under capitalist conditions of private ownership and its transcendence and abolition under communism. The doctrine of total emancipation which, as I have argued, was crucial in enabling Marx to assimilate ‘class’ and the ‘division of labour’ in his work is much more clearly articulated here and eloquently expressed. Communism, Marx argues, is ‘the positive transcendence of all estrangement’; the abolition of private property, communism: 
is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature — the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and knows itself to be this solution.27
The vision of communism Marx unfolds in the Manuscripts derives much of its force from his remarkable analysis of the alienation of labour and is clearly underpinned by a preconception of truly human, free productive activity. Man’s productive interchange with nature is in fact taken as the defining characteristic of the species: ‘the productive life is the life of the species’; and Marx is careful to point out that while an animal can also be said to engage in production it ‘only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young’.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Purity and Danger

A large part of the global population is now connected in online social networks in social media where they share experiences and stories and consequently influence each other’s perceptions and buying behaviour This poses a distinct challenge for destination management organisations, who must cope with a new reality where destination brands are increasingly the product of people’s shared tourism experiences and storytelling in social networks, rather than marketing strategies This article suggests a novel interpretation on how these online social networks function with regard to generating engagement and stimulating circulation of brand stories by offering a conceptual framework based on the sociological concepts of storytelling, performance, performativity, and mobility These concepts are characterised as ‘technologies of power’, for their role in shaping the social mechanisms in social media VisitDenmark, the DMO of Denmark, is used as a case to put the framework into practice The case demonstrates how DMOs can use the framework to strengthen their ssocial media branding, and five practical recommendations for how to do so are provided

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The power of social media storytelling in destination branding.

Examining online social brand engagement: a social presence theory perspective

This article develops understanding of consumer work at the primary level of sociality in the context of social networking sites. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and netnography, we reveal these sites as distinctive spaces of consumer-to-consumer work. To explain this work in consumption, we introduce the concept of social labour which we define as the means by which consumers add value to their identities and social relationships through producing and sharing cultural and affective content. This is driven by observational vigilance and conspicuous presence, and is rewarded by social value. This draws attention to the variety of work consumers enact within their social lives, indicating that consumer work is broader than previously acknowledged.

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Social labour Exploring work in consumption

Previous consumer research on waste has prioritized disposable and low-involvement possessions. The authors extend scholarship into the context of obsolete buildings as a means to better engage with the complex materiality of waste and to explore the role anti-consumption plays in consumers' valuations of end-stage consumption. This study focuses on the phenomenon of urban exploration, a subculture who seek to discover and explore derelict buildings. Drawing on an ethnographic study including in-depth interviews, the authors reveal how anti-consumption manifests in the urban environment in terms of alternative understandings of value. In contrast to the economic valuations that often dominate public policy decision making, this study highlights the need for policy makers to consider diverse, and perhaps conflicting, value regimes. The authors propose an Obsolescence Impact Evaluation that enables a systematic assessment of the stakeholders potentially impacted by redevelopment and demolition, differing re...

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"They were built to last": Anti-consumption and the materiality of waste in obsolete buildings

We propose that focusing on the death of buildings has much to offer in terms of our understanding of consumer culture. The aim of this paper is to explore the death of buildings from the perspective of consumers who have an interest in exploring obsolete buildings. Drawing on an ethnographic study of urban exploration, we uncover consumer understandings of death and mortality. We make a number of contributions. First, we demonstrate how death terminology is appropriate to material culture. Second, we reveal how consumer fascination with derelict buildings opens up opportunities for otherwise suppressed thoughts and conversations about death. Third, we recognise the multidimensional nature of death and introduce the concept of cultural death in consumer culture.

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Death of buildings in consumer culture: natural death, architectural murder and cultural rape

In line with calls to explore the consumption in and of place we reveal conditions of third place to be susceptible to conflict. Through the context of a British pub, we demonstrate that third place is a fragile condition by identifying three forms of emergent conflict: misuse, misappropriation and misalignment.

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“It’S Like Somebody Else’S Pub”: Understanding Conflict in Third Place

Recent years have witnessed increased interest in anti-consumption with various conference and journal special issues devoted to clarifying our understanding of the concept (Lee et al. 2011; Lee, Cherrier, and Belk 2013). This body of research reveals that anti-consumption is manifested in a variety of ways, some more extreme than others. Lee et al. (2011) identify three non-exclusive types of anti-consumption: reject, restrict and reclaim. A review of relevant literature reveals theoretical advancements in relation to rejection and reclamation, but restriction has received significantly less attention. To address this imbalance, this paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of restriction as a form of anti-consumption. The context for our study is Facebook. Social networking sites have been shown to facilitate anti-consumption (Hutter and Hoffman 2013), but research has yet to investigate anti-consumption of social networking sites themselves. The contribution of our paper is twofold. First, we demonstrate that restriction may be more wide-ranging than currently acknowledged and we illustrate how restriction enables consumers to negotiate tensions between their anti-consumptive discourses and their decision to continue to consume. Second, while previous research favours more extreme examples of anti-consumption such as dumpster diving (Fernandez, Brittain, and Bennett 2011), Freeganism (Pentina and Amos 2011) and boycotting (Friedman 1999), we contribute by demonstrating how anti-consumption develops within mundane, daily practices.

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Stephanie Anderson

Papers

Social labour Exploring work in consumption

"They were built to last": Anti-consumption and the materiality of waste in obsolete buildings

Death of buildings in consumer culture: natural death, architectural murder and cultural rape

“It’S Like Somebody Else’S Pub”: Understanding Conflict in Third Place

"I regularly weigh up just getting rid of Facebook": exploring restriction as a form of anti-consumption