Consumer Practices in Transition: Negotiating Social Norms and the Democratization of Digital Consumption

With digitization, consumer practices have changed significantly. Consumers no longer need to enter stores physically, but this has also shifted how they express their consumption preferences and, thus, their social status. Individuals can express their lifestyle choices more prominently on social networks than ever. The digital goods we consume also represent a form of lifestyle expression and transfer meanings. These goods no longer need a tangible form; instead, they can take hybrid forms and be experienced physically in different ways. Therefore, this thesis will investigate the role of consumers’ agency in technological transformations and how they negotiate the constitution of social norms and practices. It examines various phenomena to explore how this negotiation process unfolds and its implications for the potential democratization of consumption through technology. Through the following four studies, I aim to critically reflect on democratization, social distinction, and the formation of practices and social norms of digital consumption and lifestyles: 1) Breaching the Social Order: An innovative card game method is introduced to explore breaches in digital privacy norms. This method provides insights into negotiating digital privacy “common sense” and the constitution of social order. 2) Digital Ownership beyond the Sharing Economy: This study investigates how consumers perceive digitally shared physical goods without “possessing” them. This phenomenon redefines the boundaries of sharing and challenges the concept of social distinction. 3) Digital Mediated Practices: This study presents the practice of digitally mediated wine tasting, which combines established and emerging consumption practices and raises questions about democratization and the senses. 4) Designing for Taste as a Social Practice: Using the case of a click-dummy taste app, this study explores how food consumption and taste are conceptualized as social practices within the field of digital consumption. Through these studies, I identify various practice elements that underlie the reproductive, transformative, and emergent dimensions of Digital Consumer Practices. Therefore, this work contributes to the heterogeneous research field and bridges the discourses of Consumer Culture Studies, Verbraucherinformatik as a discipline within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and Practice Theory.