Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T19:59:24.693Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 16 - #CovidArcadia: The Pandemic Conditions of the Emergence of Digital-Affective Atmosphere

from Part IV - Markets in Motion: Places and Spaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2024

By
Kath Bassett ,
Elif Buse Doyuran ,
Liz McFall  and
Addie McGowan
Edited by
Susi Geiger ,
Katy Mason ,
Neil Pollock ,
Philip Roscoe ,
Annmarie Ryan ,
Stefan Schwarzkopf  and
Pascale Trompette
Susi Geiger
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Katy Mason
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Neil Pollock
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Philip Roscoe
Affiliation:
University of St Andrews, Scotland
Annmarie Ryan
Affiliation:
University of Limerick
Stefan Schwarzkopf
Affiliation:
Copenhagen Business School
Pascale Trompette
Affiliation:
Université de Grenoble
Get access

Summary

This chapter draws on a mixed-method project that explored retail market encounters in Edinburgh during the pandemic. It borrows from Walter Benjamin’s methodological and conceptual approach in the arcades project to explore how online settings, notably Instagram, function as market spaces. Arcades, for Benjamin, work by using their architecture to create atmospheres conducive to specific actions – lingering, browsing and purchasing. Arcades and Instagram share material and technical features that are orchestrated to shape action and in this both parallel the functions of ‘market devices’. The significance of space, as an element in ‘the equipment and devices’ which give market ‘action a shape’ has long been acknowledged in market studies (Callon 1998: 22) but how retail space works to devise action has had little attention. In describing how Instagram provided ‘digital-affective premises’ during the pandemic we advance three broader propositions. First, that market spaces are necessarily market devices because they are designed to produce action. Second, that while scholarship has exposed the material and technical elements of market devices, it had said much less about their sentimental or affective elements. Finally, that market spaces showcase how technical-sentimental, digital-affective elements interact in giving action its shape.

Keywords

Affectivearchitecturecovid-19digitalretail
Type
Chapter
Information
Market Studies
Mapping, Theorizing and Impacting Market Action
 , pp. 256 - 279
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, B. (2009) Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bassett, K. (2022) (Digitally entangled) touristic placemaking: locative media, algorithmic navigation and affective orderings. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.Google Scholar
Berndt, C., and Boeckler, M. (2012) Geographies of marketization, in Barnes, T. J., Peck, J., and Sheppard, E. (eds.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 199–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, W. (1985a) One-way street, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings. London: Verso, 45–104.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. (1985b) A small history of photography, in One-Way Street: And Other Writings. London: Verso, 240–257.Google Scholar
Benjamin, W. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Bissell, D. (2012) Mobile testimony in the information age: the powers of travel reviews. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 15(2), 149–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boy, J. D., and Uitermark, J. L. (2017) Reassembling the city through Instagram. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 42(4), 612–624.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bronsvoort, I., and Uitermark, J. L. (2021) Seeing the street through Instagram: digital platforms and the amplification of gentrification. Urban Studies, DOI: 10.1177/004209802110465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castigliano, F. (2022) Flaneuring the buyosphere: a comparative historical analysis of shopping environments and phantasmagorias. Journal of Consumer Culture, DOI: 10.1177/14695405221111454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Çalışkan, K., and Callon, M. (2009) Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization. Economy and Society, 38(3), 369–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Çalışkan, K., and Callon, M. (2010) Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets. Economy and Society, 39(1), 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, M. (1998) The embeddedness of economic markets in economics, in Callon, M. (ed.), The Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–58.Google Scholar
Callon, M. (2007) What does it mean to say that economics is performative?, in MacKenzie, D., Muniesa, F., and Siu, L. (eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 311–357.Google Scholar
Callon, M. (2010) Performativity, misfires and politics. Journal of Cultural Economy, 3(2), 163–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Callon, M. (2021) Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods and Innovation. New York: Zone Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cochoy, F. (2008) Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer. Marketing Theory, 8(1), 15–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cochoy, F., Deville, J., and McFall, L. (2017) Markets and the Art of Attachment. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Contois, E. J. H., and Kish, Z. (2022) Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Denis, J., and Pontille, D. (2010) Placing subway signs: practical properties of signs at work. Visual Communication, 9(4), 441–462.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eiland, H., and McLaughlin, K. (1999) Translators’ foreword, in Benjamin, W., The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, ix–xiv.Google Scholar
Entwistle, J., and Slater, D. (2014) Reassembling the cultural. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(2), 161–177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grandclément, C. (2004) Climatiser le marché: les contributions des marketings de l’ambiance et de l’atmosphère. Ethnographiques, 6 November. Available at www.ethnographiques.org/2004/Grandclement (accessed 10 August 2023).Google Scholar
Gregory, K. (2021) ‘My life is more valuable than this’: understanding risk among on-demand food couriers in Edinburgh. Work, Employment and Society, 35(2), 316–331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hennion, A. (2017) Attachments, you say? … How a concept collectively emerges in one research group. Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(1), 112–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmes, T., Fernandes, J., and Palo, T. (2021) ‘Spatio-market practices’: conceptualising the always spatial dimensions of market making practices. AMS Review, 11(3/4), 316–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Independent Thinking (2020) Helping others to build their brands and the role of pop up spaces on our high streets with Space at Seventeen, Edinburgh (podcast). 7 December. Available at https://open.spotify.com/episode/7zAuL238tguaOmzC25xB4O?si=15xpAnH2Ti-WRi2oOGAUeQ (accessed 1 May 2024).Google Scholar
Kaplan, F. (2014) Linguistic capitalism and algorithmic mediation. Representations, 127(1), 57-63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kefford, A. (2022) The Life and Death of the Shopping City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kendall, G., and Wickham, G. (2001) Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering. London: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kjellberg, H., Hagberg, J., and Cochoy, F. (2019) Thinking market infrastructure: barcode scanning in the US grocery retail sector, 1967–2010, in Kornberger, M., et al. (eds.), Thinking Infrastructures. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 207–232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kornberger, M., Pflueger, D., and Mouritsen, J. (2017) Evaluative infrastructures: accounting for platform organization. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 60, 79–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langley, P., and Leyshon, A. (2017) Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. Finance and Society, 3(1), 11–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larkin, B. (2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lesteven, G., Cissokho, D., Pochet, P., Diongue, M., and Sakho, P. (2022) Daily mobility in urban peripheries: the role of clandestine taxis in Dakar, Senegal. Sustainability, 14(11), DOI: 10.3390/su14116769.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McFall, L. (2014) Devising Consumption: Cultural Economies of Insurance, Credit and Spending. Abingdon: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McMahon, L. (2020) ‘I would have laughed in their face’: how Covid led Edinburgh chef Roberta Hall-McCarron to start a food truck. The Scotsman, 7 December. Available at www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/food-and-drink/i-would-have-laughed-in-their-face-how-covid-led-edinburgh-chef-roberta-hall-mccarron-to-start-a-food-truck-3057182 (accessed 1 May 2024).Google Scholar
Mellet, K., and Beauvisage, T. (2020) Cookie monsters: anatomy of a digital market infrastructure. Consumption Markets & Culture, 23(2), 110–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mende, M., and Noble, S. M. (2019) Retail apocalypse or golden opportunity for retail frontline management? Journal of Retailing, 95(2), 84–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muniesa, F., Millo, Y., and Callon, M. (2007) An introduction to market devices, in Callon, M., Millo, Y., and Muniesa, F. (eds.), Market Devices. Oxford: Blackwell, 1–13.Google Scholar
Pink, S. (2016) Digital ethnography, in Kubitschko, S., and Kaun, A (eds.), Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 161–165.Google Scholar
Ranganathan, M., and Bonds, A. (2022) Racial regimes of property: introduction to the special issue. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 40(2), 197–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shin, J., and Ognyanova, K. (2022) Social media metrics in the digital marketplace of attention: does journalistic capital matter for social media capital? Digital Journalism, 10(4), 579–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slaby, J. (2019) Affective arrangement, in Slaby, J., and von Scheve, C. (eds.), Affective Societies: Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge, 109–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stark, L., and Crawford, K. (2015) The conservatism of emoji: work, affect, and communication. Social Media + Society, 1(2), DOI: 10.1177/2056305115604853.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, E., Nonhebel, A., Möller, C., and Bassett, K. (2022) Doing ‘our bit’: solidarity, inequality, and COVID-19 crowdfunding for the UK National Health Service. Social Science & Medicine, 308, DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115214.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Warde, A., Paddock, J., and Whillans, J. (2020) The Social Significance of Dining Out: A Study of Continuity and Change. Manchester: Manchester University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wetherell, S. (2020) Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wrigley, N., and Dolega, L. (2011) Resilience, fragility, and adaptation: new evidence on the performance of UK high streets during global economic crisis and its policy implications. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43(10), 2337–2363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zukin, S. (1989) Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New York: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Zukin, S. (2021) Planetary Silicon Valley: deconstructing New York’s innovation complex. Urban Studies, 58(1), 3–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zukin, S., Lindeman, S., and Hurson, L. (2017) The omnivore’s neighborhood? Online restaurant reviews, race, and gentrification. Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(3), 459–479.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×