Surprise Consumerism
Analysing the commodification of surprise temporally, affectually and economically.
Joost Dofferhoff (10574204) 0657202269
Joost.dofferhoff@student.ru.nl Research Master Media Studies
University of Amsterdam 28th June 2019
Supervised by: dhr. dr. T. (Thomas) Poell Second Reader: mw. dr. C.M. (Catherine) Lord
2 Acknowledgements
I would firstly like to thank dhr. dr. T. (Thomas) Poell for being my supervisor during this thesis and for knowing how to give constructive feedback but most of all point out what he thought was good
about the thesis. Because of this I was very motivated to continue writing and working. Secondly, I wish to thank my fellow students, especially Mari and Yarden, who gave feedback and
were pleasant company during the writing process.
Thirdly, I wish to thank my brother, Maarten, for his extensive feedback on the introductory chapter. And lastly, I wish to thank my partner, Lonneke, for the discussions we had about this topic from
3 More and more people seem to be surprising themselves and purchasing boxes filled with curated goods that get delivered on a monthly basis. This phenomenon, named Surprise Consumerism, is the object of study in this thesis and will be analyzed through three characteristics of the concept; temporal, affectual and the economical aspect. Temporality frames surprise consumerism in uncertainty, anticipation and surprise and shows how surprise is no longer disruptive (Simandan, 2018)) but has turn in a commodified product that people crave (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009). Affect shows how surprise consumerism monetizes upon self-care issues but offers only temporary solutions instead of fixing problems (Lorde, 1997; Ahmed, 2014). The affectual chapter also goes into the promises surprise consumerism makes and the critiques of those promises (Berlant, 2011) The economical part of surprise consumerist is framed within neoliberal society and shows how unboxing videos have gained popularity and use surprise consumerist products as the subject. These ways of generating income using surprise consumerist fit into the current society of “millenarian capitalism” (Pedersen, 2012). Lastly the thesis looks at how surprise consumerism is structured and how people structure it within their own lives. Derrida’s thoughts on the event show that surprise consumerism is build around the concept of completion and makes it so that people keep consuming until they have everything. Wendy Chun and Renata Salecl (Chun, 2011; Salecl, 2011) show that people in neoliberal society need to map a totality of their daily lives in order to feel agency but are too overwhelmed with choice to do everything themselves. Therefore, surprise consumerism takes choice away from people which might be time-saving and productive but also open people up for exploitation.
4 Index
1) Surprise Consumerism ...5
2) The Temporality of Surprise ...10
2.1 Surprise ...11
2.2 Anticipation ...13
2.3 Uncertainty ...15
3) Surprise Consumerism in Affect ...18
3.1 The promises of surprise consumerism ...18
3.2 Indulgent self-care ...19
4) Surprise consumerism in late capitalism ...23
4.1 Watching and being watched ...23
4.2 Platform specificity within surprise consumerism ...25
4.3 Controversies and parodies ...27
5) The structure of surprise consumerism ...29
5.1 Surprise consumerism and the event ...30
5.2 The sharing event ...32
5.3 Emotional capital and the micro celebrity ...33
5.4 Too many niches, too many choices ...36
6) Conclusion...39
7) Bibliography ...44
5 1) Surprise Consumerism
The anticipation of receiving a gift or the joy of seeing another person be surprised by a gift of your own is something people look forward to for days. The gifts you received as a kid—boxes filled with toys— or even the envelope of money you receive as an adult. While the act of opening something surprising is usually an exciting moment, it seems that people are no longer waiting for others to surprise them, but rather they are spending more and more money and time on surprising themselves.
What I mean by surprising themselves is the act of purchasing items without having the knowledge of the item’s content beforehand. I will call this Surprise Consumerism in this thesis. Anecdotally, my first encounter with Surprise Consumerism took the form of trading card games (TGC). Card games such as Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokémon were popular on the schoolyard when I was a kid, and there were plenty of activities associated with these cards other than simply playing the game: You could trade them, place bets on matches or even battle with them. The most exciting part, however, was opening the card packs you are your friends had bought. The excitement stemmed from no one knowing beforehand what the pack would contain. They would be different for everyone, so we all gathered around anyone unpacking them. This was a marketing strategy as well because, as Ito says in his paper on the engagement kids have with card games, this “strategy fuels a constant stream of purchases well beyond what most kids will actually use in their game play, as they try to acquire, in most cases unsuccessfully, the most coveted cards” (Ito, 2002).
The activity of buying and trading cards has not kept to the schoolyard but have migrated to the internet and are now playable online. Starting in the late 90’s within video games that took the classic designs of trading cards games or collectible card games (CCG) and remade the games to work on a computer. Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh were along the first digital versions of trading card games, as they both had ports for the Nintendo Gameboy in 1998. However, these did not yet work online and didn’t give the player the opportunity to spend real-life money within the game. This came later, in the early 2010’s, with games such as Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering: Online. Hearthstone is one of the cases this thesis will look at, since it’s interesting that this card game solely exists online, and not in material form. Games such as these give the player an in-game currency to spend on card packs to collect them this way. However, since earning in-game currency is slow and people can be inpatient, there’s usually also the option to purchase this in-game currency with actual money to collect the cards you need much more quickly.
It wasn’t only packs that the video games world embraced and used for greater income, another entity which made more than just an impression on the industry are loot boxes. These Loot boxes are similar to card packs in that they contain random items that are used within a game. Aesthetically they differ in that they are box shaped instead of card-pack shaped. The contents of the loot boxes differ per video games, but they are usually cosmetic items to change your character’s appearance or the color of
6 items and weapons. This is where they differ from card packs: Cards actually define what you can and cannot play, but these cosmetic items do not change the way the game can be played.
Surprise consumerism does not stop at trading cards and video games but presents itself all kinds of markets and genres. Let’s go from loot boxes to LootCrate, which is one of the cases that this thesis will look at. LootCrate is a monthly service that delivers pop-culture themed toys and other items to you on a monthly basis, with a specific theme for that month. These themes can run from superhero movies to video games and everything usually considered nerdy. The things that LootCrate promises are the following:
- Items with a market value of at least 45$, while people pay 28$ per month. - Items that fit the theme
- Free shipping included - No repeating items
These kinds of promises are common for surprise consumerism, especially the first one, as most surprise consumerist services pride themselves on getting you things cheaper than if you were to buy them separately from one another. This is only the case with services that actually offer material products that have an individual price, surprise consumerist services that offer immaterial products like the beforementioned loot boxes or card packs have a more difficult making this promise because they have a product which cannot be easily labelled with a market value.
Surprise consumerist companies and products come in many different styles and genres. Another very popular subsection of surprise consumerism is aimed at self-care. Three of the cases within this thesis fall within this category, namely TheraBox, Bath Bevy and HopeBox. These surprise consumerist products, or boxes as they will be referred to within this thesis, are interesting cases because they are among the top twenty self-care boxes as listed on CrateJoy. CrateJoy is one of many online services that lists, reviews and ranks surprise consumerist boxes and is also one of the cases this thesis will look at. The way CrateJoy describes these boxes, which they call “Self-Care Subscription Boxes”, is as follows:
“Want to live your best life in 2019? Self-care subscription boxes are a great way to make a commitment to your physical self, take care of your mental health and lower your stress levels with an all-in-one kit loaded with the best wellness products.
Self-care is about more than just face masks and bubble baths, it means prioritizing your health and wellness, happiness, and emotional needs. And now your self-care routines are made simple with the help of these specially curated boxes.
7 This group of self-care subscription boxes is guaranteed to take you from spa to "ahh." See our top boxes for health and wellness routines to pamper yourself and discover new brands you'll love. You won't even recognize yourself come summer!” (Raico, 2019)
In this quote one can see that these products are mainly aimed at people who need to reduce stress and those who take or need to take time to care for themselves. An interesting phenomenon to look at resides in the second line; “and now your self-care routines are made simple with the help of these specially curated boxes”. The promise of time-saving is something that is often seen within the business of surprise consumerism. Productivity promises are made through taking choice out of the hands of consumers and promising them the best products. Also, in this quote one can see the promise of “health, wellness, happiness and emotional needs”. Often these boxes claim to help with mental or physical health problems but seem to do this through material products like bath bombs and face creams. Further on in the thesis this link between self-care, productivity and surprise consumerism will be looked at further and problematized.
The aforementioned services gave you something of a material nature, like a box of objects, toys or cards in a video game, there are other services that do not give you anything to own. Rather, there are\ surprise consumerist that give access to content like movies or television shows. This is similar to platforms such as Netflix that give you access to their catalogue of shows. The difference with these surprise consumerist services is the added feature of surprise in the service. The correlating case discussed in this thesis will be Mubi. Mubi is a website that offers a new film every day of the month. These films will be on the platform for a month and will then disappear. The films that arrive on the platform are not announced and therefore a surprise to the user. The films usually appear within a certain theme, which is a characteristic of surprise consumerism same as with LootCrate. These can be films from a certain director. They did a run of Agnes Varda films when she passed away earlier this year and at the time of writing they are offering an overview of Jean-Luc Godard films. The temporal selling point of a movie per day and the aspect that it only stays a month is an economical move that goes in two directions. Firstly, it makes sure that users have to come back to the site daily but secondly, it also means that Mubi only has to pay the license for the film for a month. Therefore, they can give users a cheaper price on arthouse films than usual and also offer the notion of surprise as a selling point.
Looking at the cases and examples above one can try to define surprise consumerism and try to put it in a frame of reference. Surprise consumerism can be defined simply as all the monetary consumption that revolve around surprise, anticipation and uncertainty. However, this might be too simple for the sake of this thesis. At this point in the thesis it is important to define the difference between “classic” gifts and surprise consumerism. In the classic sense of gift-giving there are two sides, those
8 being gift-giver and gift-receiver. An important factor is that the gift-giver knows what they are getting the other person in that gift, this is not the case within surprise consumerism. Within surprise consumerism the one who buys the content and receives it is the same person usually. One may notice a small grey area that exists between gift-giving and surprise consumerism. This “area” happens when an item that can be considered surprise consumerism isn’t bought by the person who also receives it. This can happen when someone gifts another person a subscription to one of these services or gifts someone something like trading cards. For the purpose of this thesis this specific grey area within this phenomenon is considered surprise consumerism within this thesis because both actors in the process, gift-giver and receiver, still do not know what the precise content of the gift will be. If the gift-giver does know exactly what they are gifting, then the term surprise consumerism does not apply.
There are a couple more specificities to put upon surprise consumerism to define the term more clearly. One of these specificities is that for something to be considered surprise consumerism it has to be paid for by actual money. There are however also forms of surprise consumerism that are not paid for. In video games, this can take the form of free loot boxes there sometimes loot boxes that are not paid for and therefore are not considered surprise consumerism. Take for example the game: Trials Rising (Ubisoft, 2019). This game rewards players after they complete levels with the chance of obtaining a loot box. However, what differentiates it from regular boxes is that there is no possibility for players to purchase these loot boxes—which contain in-game content—with actual money. For this reason, these forms are not considered surprise consumerism. Another grey area within this phenomenon are games wherein it is possible to purchase loot boxes or packs without using your real-life money. An example of this is the online card game Hearthstone. In this game players collect currency after winning, called coins, that can be used to purchase the card packs from the in-game store. This in-game currency can also be bought with real life money and therefore the player has the choice of collecting the cards without or with paying with actual money in the game. Paying for the cards is in most cases, with most games, a quicker way of collecting the cards. Therefore, a benchmark for surprise consumerism is that the products have to be paid for with recurring purchases instead of a single purchase like with the example of Trials Rising.
“Every possibility contains a certain impossibility” (Derrida, 2007). This quote was said by Jacques Derrida during his talk on constructed events, surprise and impossibility. What this means is that within every possible thing or event one knows that there is impossibility connected to it. An example linked to surprise consumerism would be a subscription box. A one by one-foot cardboard box can contain almost an infinite selection of things just as much as it cannot contain another infinite selection of things. We know, when looking at the cardboard box, what fits and what does not. This gives the box both impossibility and possibility which, for Derrida, is one of the main aspects of the concept of surprise. For Derrida, surprise is an event and so is surprise consumerism
9 These examples and theories lead us into the central questions of this thesis. How does surprise consumerism work and what does it offer and promise us? Another main question this thesis tries to answer is why do we go out of our way of to construct this surprising event for ourselves? Lastly, I will try to conceptualize and answer what surprise consumerism tells us about the habits of capitalist consumption in this age of capitalism inhabited by millennials?
In the cases, examples and the research questions set out earlier there are three interesting characteristics that return across all types and genres of surprise consumerism. These three traits are temporal, affectual and economic traits. These traits also represent the three theoretical chapters of this thesis. The temporal chapter will look at how surprise consumerism works. By splitting the concept of surprise consumerism into three temporal moments, those being surprise, anticipation and uncertainty, we can analyze in depth how the process of subscribing and staying subscribed to these services works. These concepts all revolve around knowledge and (not) knowing what is coming (Simandan, 2018). Therefore, concepts like speculation and (im)possibility (Derrida, 2007; Dastur, 2000) are a common occurrence during surprise consumerist moments. Lastly, surprise consumerism and the concept of (un)knowing can also be connected through the act of winning or losing. This connection is usually made through comparisons with gambling (Griffiths, 2018). The most common popular critique on surprise consumerism is that loot boxes can be considered gambling as it costs real money and the results are based on luck just like in a casino. All these critiques and arguments will be taken under the name of the temporal process of surprise.
The next chapter of this thesis will delve into affect studies. As shown before with the self-care boxes many surprise consumerist services try to monetize upon people’s emotion and affectual states. Some even promise that they can offer help to people with mental health issues, as is the case with TheraBox. Most of the promises that surprise consumerist services make are affectual in nature. On the about-page of LootCrate, for example, it says this: LootCrate promises the consumer that “You can count on us”, and that “They are fans first” and “Powered by fun” and lastly that “They love you”. Interesting here is the amount of affectual marketing and promises going on. Even though they start their mission statement with facts about the number of crates sold, their promises do not contain information about actual content that the costumer is getting but only the feelings that are associated with it. The chapter will go into the critiques given on promises and self-care from the field of affect studies and the works of Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed and Audre Lorde.
The last two chapters of this thesis will revolve around the third characteristic of surprise consumerism which is the economical part. The main questions that this chapter will try to unravel revolve around why this type of consuming has become so popular. The first chapter of the two will look into how people monetize upon this phenomenon. This will be done through an analysis of unboxing and unpacking videos. These are videos in which people open surprise consumerist products for the entertainment of others. Some are reaction videos while others try to make it more of a
10 professional review. This chapter will also look into how there is a difference within this phenomenon based on which platform the videos are posted. The two platforms that will be analyzed are Twitch and YouTube. The thesis will also touch upon controversies and parodies in surprise consumerism, most of which are linked to gambling, which will be looked at to show how surprise consumerism can be miss-used for illegal monetary gain and what critiques people have of this. The second chapter that deals with the economical trait will focus on the phenomenon of sharing surprise consumerism online, such as making the videos. This will be linked to Derrida’s concept of the event (Derrida, 2007; Smith, 2015). By doing this the thesis shows how surprise consumerism creates a recurring event and gives people opportunity for monetization. This is what we can call “millenarian capitalism” as Pedersen calls it (Pedersen, 2012). Lastly this thesis will focus on an important possible reason that this phenomenon is gaining popularity; the concept of the society of choice and the society of abundance. In her book The Tyranny of Choice Renata Salecl claims that if people are confronted with too many choices, they will get anxious and will more quickly look at others to make the choices for them (Salecl, 2011). This then can be the reason that people opt for curated surprise consumerist product because they will not have to make the choice for products themselves. On the flipside however, as Salecl claims, this makes people vulnerable for exploitation because they have paid for something before knowing what they are getting. Concluding this thesis will summarize the findings and bring the three traits together and pose questions for further research.
2) The Temporality of Surprise
Surprise in academia is not a well-covered area of study, or at least not the phenomenon of surprise itself. Surprise, in academic writing, has been researched in the aspect of it being a shock and has been researched in the study of the unexpected. In these studies, surprise has often had synonyms like the unexpected, disaster, event, risk and many others (Simandan, 2018). Surprise also often has been named in the same breath as anticipation (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009) and uncertainty (Ainslie, 2003). The three terms uncertainty, anticipation and surprise are the three main aspect I will focus on in this chapter. These words, however, do not mean the same even though they take place in the process of surprise. The process of surprise can be said to consist of two aspects namely a temporal aspect and an affective aspect (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009). The temporal aspect of the process of surprise can be explained by using the example of receiving a gift.
Let’s think of the holiday season for this example. This is a time of the year where gift giving and gift receiving often takes place, however one can never be sure if one is actually going to receive a gift. This first part of the process of receiving a gift can be seen as the uncertain temporal state. Simandan explains the difference between uncertainty and surprise by saying that when someone is uncertain, they ‘’didn’t know for sure that something would happen” as opposed to surprise when one
11 could say “I never saw this thing coming” (Simandan, 2018). In this definition one could also claim that surprise has a material aspect to it and uncertainty a cognitive aspect.
Between uncertainty and surprise lies the temporal aspect of anticipation. Anticipation starts when uncertainty ends and when surprise begins. It is the moment where one knows that something is coming but not what it is going to be or contain. It often is paired with speculation in the sense that people have a yearning and needing to know for what it is that is coming (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009) and will therefore often speculate or try to guess what they will get. An example of this is the shaking of the gift box just before opening it to hear what’s inside or to squeeze the gift while it is still gift wrapped to feel if the contents are hard or soft.
In summarizing the temporal process of surprise one can say that it begins with uncertainty which gets followed by anticipation and often gets ended with surprise. This temporal chain can both be linear but also circular in nature. If the surprise is a one-off event this temporal can be seen as linear, but if the same kind of surprise (like the example of holidays gifts) appears more often in one’s life this chain can be seen as circular or non-linear. However, the chain might not always look the same. Going back once more to the example of holidays gifts, if one knows that one receives a gift every year from the same person the aspect of uncertainty is not a part of the chain any longer. In this case the circular temporal chain is reduced to just anticipation and surprise. The aspect of uncertainty might come back in this particular chain if one misses a year of gifts or if there are any changes within the entire process.
Next to the temporal aspect of these three concepts within the process of surprise all of them also have an affective side to them. These concepts of affect can all be linked to the affectual state of knowledge. What this means is the feeling one has during every step of the temporal process of surprise. This can both be negative or positive if one, respectively, is anxiously awaiting something or if someone has a healthy yearning for this state of knowledge (Adams, Murphy, Clarke, 2009). What will follow is a more in-depth discussion on what has been written on all three concepts mentioned above and within all three further work out the affect state of each.
2.1 Surprise
Seeing as surprise is the endpoint of the entire process it makes sense to start exploring this concept first because the others are linked to it. Surprise has been written about in many different ways from social studies and behavior studies that research how surprise effects humans to research on what constitutes surprise and questioning if it can event exist at all. This last aspect, questioning if surprise can exist at all, has mainly been discusses by Derrida and academics who continued his train of thought.
12 Surprise in the Derridean sense is in a certain way the antithesis of the concept of surprise that is offered in this thesis, however it is interesting to explore to see the different kinds of surprises. Derrida defined surprise as an event that implies surprise, exposure, and the un-anticipatable (Derrida, 2007, 441) meaning that in his opinion surprise cannot ever be planned or thought of beforehand. Derrida hereby also uses the example of the gift and defines this as follows: “Consider the gift. Giving should be an event. It has to come as a surprise, from the other or to the other; it has to extend beyond the confines of the economic circle of exchange. For giving to be possible, for a giving event to be possible, it has to look impossible” (Derrida, 2007). How surprise links to the event will be elaborated on later in this thesis but let’s first look at his notion of (im)possibility.
For Derrida possibility and impossibility are the same in a way. The ultimate gift has to exist beyond the boundaries of gift giving. It has, according to him, to overreach gratitude and therefore has to appear to be impossible. For this to happen a gift has to come as the most literal form of surprise meaning that has to appear out of nowhere. The gift-giver cannot know the gift-giving has taken place and the gift receiver also need not know that the gift-receiving has taken place. In this definition of surprise there is no anticipation, prediction or speculation because this means that the process of surprise has been fore-seen, or as Derrida says, the process of surprise has been “fore-said” meaning it has been pre-established.
One might argue that such a definition of surprise is counter-productive because something that cannot be established cannot be researched or analysed. However, it is interesting to link Derrida’s concept of the “ultimate” surprise or the logical-extreme of surprise against other notions of surprise that will follow because it shows how constructed surprises, which will be elaborated on in later chapters, never really reach to potential of what surprise can be.
Another definition of surprise that is useful to look at is that of Simandan. He claims that “surprises are violated expectations and therefore an inevitable concomitant of errors of anticipating the future” (Simandan, 2018). The interesting thing about his definition is the choice of words and cadence within his definition. Words like “violated”, “inevitable” and “errors” make it seem like surprise is a violent and disruptive event. Another word that is often linked to surprise is the term ‘’unexpected’’ (Loewenstein, 2019). This term goes together well with the term ‘’disruptive’’ to further strengthen the claim that surprise is something out of people’s control. In psychology this is often explained as violations of expectations or schema incongruity (Schützwohl, 1998) meaning that it, again, disrupts expectation and the human psyche in a certain situation and then also creates another situation in which this disruption can be fixed.
However, these are not necessarily the forms of surprise that this thesis will deal with. The type of surprise that is argued for within this paper is one that is planned and constructed, a form that is craved and expected, a form that is purchased and consumed over and over again. Loewenstein in his article also touched upon surprise that is created when he is writing on recipes for surprise. He writes:
13 “Not all surprises are accidents. There are professions that appear to rely heavily on surprising others, such as comedians, talk radio hosts, and social media writers. It is possible that these people simply generate many communications and stumble into surprising ones. But it is also possible that there are formulae, methods, templates, or recipes for producing surprise in others. It is possible to design experiences that surprise others” (Loewenstein, 2019)
Loewenstein’s claim that not all surprise are accidents is the first step into agreeing that surprise can be created and that they not necessarily have to disrupt or violate any situation. For example, opening a gift at Christmas and being surprise by the contents is not a disruption or violation but maybe even the standard expression at that moment in time. Loewenstein defines this type of surprise as “minimally counterintuitive entities” and means by this that this is the type of surprise that people can deal with and can crave over and over again.
Summarizing, in short, surprise is the third and shortest temporal moment in the process of surprise. Surprise for this thesis is not a disruptive event but will be seen as an affectual moment that people structure and crave within their own lives. Therefore, further questions that this thesis will deal with are questions concerning how people structure this event within their lives and maybe more importantly why they would do this. The second to last chapter will build upon those questions and analyse how the moment of surprise is being capitalized upon.
2.2 Anticipation
Anticipation, of the three temporal moments, might be the one that has been analysed and researched the most. Especially within philosophy and psychology this term can often be found. It is often described using the terms (un)expected, waiting (Dastur, 2000), (im)possibility (Derrida, 2007; Dastur, 2000) and speculation (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009). In all of these before mentioned concepts the future plays an important temporal role as it the thing or time which people are anticipating. Adams, Murphy & Clarke describe anticipation as an instantiation of “modernity (that) offers both a promise of certainty (that the truth can be known for certain in a way that applies across time, into the future) coexistent with the acknowledgement of an ongoing deferral of truth as ever changing (as more sophisticated ways of knowing it continually emerge)”. This is interesting because of the paradox involved. People who are anticipating know that something is coming which means that the future that they will encounter will be a certainty, however at the same time people are constantly denying this future because of the (im)possibility involved in the future. This paradox revolves around the concepts of unknowing and guessing because people will try and guess what it is that is coming. However, every time someone guesses more than once the previous guess will be nullified and therefore that possible future is denied. Adams, Murhpy & Clarke use this phenomenon, which they call “predictable uncertainty” to claim that this exact thing “leads to anticipation as an affective state (…) As an affective state, anticipation is not just a reaction, but a way of actively orienting oneself temporally” (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009).
14 Because of the aforementioned, anticipation is also often seen as something political, or in some cases economical. The latter is mentioned when people speak of speculative forecast which is often found in discussion around finances and especially virtual currency like Bitcoin. Virtual currencies make anticipation and speculation a financial good and, in a way, make it a tangible “thing” worth trading. “As much as speculative finance has become both a dominant mode of capital accumulation”, as Adams, Murphy & Clarke say, “anticipation has become a common, lived affect-state of daily life, shaping regimes of self, health and spirituality”.
In politics, mostly in neoliberal discussion, anticipation is seen as something every person needs to optimize. Nikolas Rose argues that this, which he calls “politics of life”, is heavily increasing in daily life and “depends upon the optimization of future citizens by way of their ever more complexly geneticized psyches and molecularized biologies” (Rose, 2007). Another interesting thing about anticipation is how it is always looking to the future but still very much grounded in the present. It predicts the future with the knowledge we have in the now, in the present.
Anticipation is also a state which people are forced into. This is often the case when something is unavoidable. In contemporary society examples of this are the constant threat of terrorism and global warming of which we are reminded daily on the news. About global warming Adams, Murphy & Clarke say that ‘’Global warming and oil crises, predicted extinctions and biosecurity preparedness infuse a sense of looming time limits that generate urgency and anxiety about acting now to protect the future”. The same goes with the threat of terrorism to the western world post-9/11 when we see armed forces in metro stations or big concrete blocks in busy shopping street to prevent cars crashing into the people (Grusin, 2010). This type of forces anticipation has also had a lot of criticism because it has been linked to politicians pushing an Islamophobic agenda and using the fear of the population to spread xenophobic ideas (Grusin, 2010). It is what Grusin calls premediation, and what Sara Ahmed calls affective economies and used to describe distributed anticipation (Ahmed, 2004; Grusin, 2010). Distributed anticipation, they describe, “can become politicized, mobilizing and something creating states of war, national communities and economic productivity” (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009). Just as with premediation it means that the future is already inhabited in the present.
To turn back to aforementioned phenomenon, the fact that the future is already inhabited in the present is also the case with using anticipation as a means to organize the neoliberal daily life. This is also something that Wendy Chun analysis in her analysis on interfaces. She sees this obsession with organizing our future is mapping and as something that is often done through online interfaces and programs. She says that “maps and mapping are also the means by which we “figure out” power and our relation to a larger social entity” (Chun, 2011). It, according to Chun, is a way to understand and respond to postmodernist disorientation because postmodernism was driven by a loss of modernist certainty (Chun, 2011). Thus, by mapping and over-organizing one’s life people try to go back to this affectual state of modernist certainty. In neoliberal society it is seen as failing if someone does not have their agendas full of plans. Chun says about this that “we are constantly called on to map and to value
15 mapping in order to experience power/agency. This constant mapping signifies a new/neo condition, one that both recalls the power of the subject, supposedly dispersed by postmodernism, and places the subject/user in a different position than the liberal subject with respect to the invisible hands of the market” (Chun, 2011). What this means is that the neoliberal subject must know themselves at any time and must map or connect all their actions to this totality of the self they have created. This way of life is promoted because planning every single aspect of your life is seen as positive, in a neoliberal society, because it supposedly increases your human capital and with that the chances of capital or financial wealth in the future.
Anticipation is the temporal and affectual state of waiting. It is the period before knowing and having and revolves around expecting and speculation. Anticipation is weaponized by politicians into certain expectations of terroristic events and used to promote views of anti-immigration and xenophobia. On economical levels anticipation is a strategy into predicting where capital and value will be and where it will go in, for example, online cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Lastly anticipation, like surprise, is a craved affectual, temporal and economical state. This craving is quite recent within neoliberal society as it’s expected for people to constantly have something going on their life and structure their lives in such a way to know and create a totality of the self (Chun, 2011). The interesting question that this raises is why people also structure surprise into their lives if they are creating a totality of the self? If the temporal process of surprise revolves around unknowing and neoliberal mapping is an extreme into knowing all of a totality, how and why do these co-exist. One reason for this may be that surprise and curation is an easy way to take choice away out of your life and give the task of planning and mapping life to someone else. This argument will be continued in a later chapter, for now let’s discuss the temporal process of unknowing; uncertainty.
2.3 Uncertainty
Uncertainty, of the three concepts, is the one most closely related with unknowing as opposed to knowing or knowledge. Anticipation and surprise both hinge on the fact that someone knows that something is coming or happening. Uncertainty, oppositely, rests upon the fact that one does not know if an event is even happening or not. It lies in the limbo between knowing that something is happening and knowing that something isn’t happening. Words used for this are, for example, probabilistic instead of guarantees as well as the word risk which already implies that there is chance of loss (Duke, Goldsmith & Amir, 2018) For this reason uncertainty is often the concept that is used in describing gambling. With uncertainty there is also the added chance that they might not get anything at all. This is similar within gambling where one invests money or something else that is of value and has a chance that they might get it back or might even got more back then they had invested, however there is also the chance that the gambler loses all of his investment. The loss of monetary investment is something that cannot happen within anticipation or surprise, but within anticipation of surprise a loss can be felt when speaking of disappointment or something not meeting your expectations. There someone can feel
16 like they lost their money and didn’t get their value out of their money, within uncertainty there is the chance of actual monetary loss.
Whereas before I talked about anticipation and mapping being a concept in neoliberal society that gives people the chance to improve their human capital and with it their financial wealth and daily lives, this type of neoliberal thought is also often linked to uncertainty. The context in which this is often used is the financial market and mostly the speculative financial market like bitcoin that was mentioned before. Another example that was mentioned before of this is the buying of loot crates and loot boxes in video games. Both these examples have links to anticipation and uncertainty because they deal with unknowing, speculation and expectation. Uncertainty, compared to anticipation, however, also has a connection with gambling and the concept of loss. These connections make it that loot boxes and other forms of surprise consumerism often get critiqued for their closeness to gambling.
Derek Mei, on the site Medium, wrote a piece on how (game) companies get players to buy into loot boxes and other forms of surprise consumerism (Mei, 2018). Mei, for this, uses Nir Eyal’s book Hooked which supplies an economical model for companies that want users to keep coming back to their products (Eyal, 2014). This model contains four steps; trigger, action, variable reward and investment (see Figure 1 in appendix). The trigger, which can be both internal and external, is the thing that make a person purchase. In the case of loot boxes this is often a special event or an exclusive deal. Hearthstone, for example, is a video game that gives new players a ‘welcome pack’ which consists of ten card packs for half of the regular price. This kind of ‘deal’ or welcome package is what Eyal calls a trigger because it might convince a person to start subscribing or buying a product. The actual purchasing is what Eyal calls the action. Eyal says that the way in which this works best is if the purchasing is a very fast and simple action. In Hearthstone, to stay with this example, this purchasing in made very easy because people link their game-account to their PayPal-account. They only have to do this once and after this they can buy card packs with one click of the mouse without even exiting the game. This purchase leads into the variable reward which in the case of Hearthstone are the cards that one receives from the packs. The important thing from this step is that the reward is variable, meaning that they need to be slightly different each time. In the case of surprise consumerism this is true because it is always a surprise that one is getting and almost all of the companies promise that customers will never receive duplicates. The last step, investment, is the most relevant step for surprise consumerism because it is the step that determines why people stay subscribed to a certain service or keep coming back to the same type of purchase.
The step of investment is the last step in the Hooked model that is the most interesting because it is the step that makes sure people stay subscribed to surprise consumerist services. Investment in this context means that people who have already purchased once are more likely to return to the product and purchase it again. This is the same kind of rhetoric as sayings like “in for a penny, in for a pound”, meaning that once you have invested, you have to keep investing until you win. This is also called, as
17 an academic concept, the escalation of commitment (Milkman & Kelly, 2013). This concept has often been brought in with analysis of gambling addiction because it can mean that people keep saying “just one more” until they have nothing left and has recently also been connected to the purchasing of loot boxes.
Loot boxes do not just contain what you want but have a chance to contain the items you are looking for. Items often differentiate in rarity going up from common to legendary, often using different colors to denote to which category an item belongs. Items with a higher rarity have less of a chance to show up in a loot box than an item of a common rarity.
For many years already there have been discussions on this questioning whether or not this kind of purchasing of loot boxes should be considered gambling. If it were to be considered gambling it would mean many changes to the gaming industry because gambling is illegal for people under 18. People who claim that microtransactions, as they are also often called, should be considered gambling make direct comparisons between the two. Just as in gambling, they say, there is a chance that someone can get what they want or get what they do not want, therefore it should be considered gambling especially because people have an actual financial stake in the matter (Griffiths, 2018) and if they display escalation of commitment it can have devastating consequences.
People who look at it from the other side, however, say that it isn’t gambling because first of all the consumer will always get something guaranteed. Even though the consumer might not receive what they want they will always get a certain amount of some items in every loot box or receive in-game currency if they already own the items in the box. However, one could make the argument that this is equal to making a loss at a casino. Someone who is playing roulette at a casino might not lose all their money but just some of it and this would still be considered gambling. Another argument that people make who do not consider it gambling is that the in-game content that the consumer receives has no actual real-world value and therefore it cannot be considered gambling because there is no winning or losing but just trading your money for items in the game. However, this argument has already been debunked often because there are many websites that sell these in-game items or even whole account for actual money, giving actual value to those items.
Whether or not loot boxes are gambling another interesting aspect about them is that they revolve around surprise, anticipation, uncertainty and are all together temporal. Just as with the slot machines in a casino one has anticipation and speculation about winning or losing and will then be shown the results (the surprise moment) which determines their winnings or losses. This goes for surprise consumerism as well as people wait for their box or card packs to arrive and when they open them know if they got what they wanted. If not, this might be an incentive to buy again and hope that the next one gets what they want. Conversely it might be an incentive as well if you win because one might think or hope that they will get what they want from the next box or pack as well. This has implications for research because one could research if brain activity during surprise consumerism equal that of gambling and if it brings the same kind of euphoria or disappointment. This then could raise
18 social questions as to why people are drawn towards gambling and surprise in all kinds of forms. Especially if we would start considering gambling and surprise as ‘minimally counterintuitive entities’ (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009) that we as a society seem to crave, want and perhaps even need.
In the next chapter this thesis moves from the temporal aspects of surprise consumerism to the affectual aspects and asks the question what does surprise consumerism promise the consumer? Also, the aspect of temporality will be linked to affect. Surprise consumerism is a temporal phenomenon that can come daily, weekly or monthly and therefore brings products of affect on a temporal basis. The question then becomes why do people need these affectual products every so often and why is one not enough? This will be analyzed through cases of self-care subscription boxes and the concept of indulgent self-care.
3) Surprise consumerism in Affect
This thesis has already shown that surprise consumerism offers itself in many different ways. From the ways in which surprise consumerism presents itself temporally on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to the critiques and concepts it has been linked with concerning gambling. As hinted towards in the last chapter surprise consumerist services also create affectual states that lead to people orienting themselves temporally towards something in the foreseeable future (Adams, Murphy & Clarke, 2009). Therefore, in this chapter questions of affectual nature will be posed. Questions like what do these services and products actually promise and offer and what can be the affectual reasons that people stay subscribed and put themselves in a temporal and affectual future-oriented state? This will be looked at through the lens of different cases of services and be analysed critically within the field of affect studies. Furthermore, the phenomenon of unboxing videos and the difference between watching and being watched will be taken into account. How do people film themselves unboxing boxes and what is the role of the surprise consumerism services within this? And finally, how do people watch these videos and react and discuss with them in the comment sections? For these a selection of videos and comments will be analysed.
3.1 The promises of surprise consumerism
In the introduction of this thesis I’ve already shown that companies like LootCrate and other surprise consumerist companies often market their product not only with factual information but also with affectual marketing. It was shown that they promise the consumers a higher monetary value product than what they pay for but also that they promise that consumers will like it and that they will love the company. That promises by companies are often affectual instead of factual is not uncommon, as shown by Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism who says that: “when we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make
19 possible for us” (Berlant, 2011). By making affectual promises, next to more factual promises like getting the value out of your money and the theme, the companies create a certain feeling around their product and try to get people to form an affectual bond with the product. This is what Berlant would call cruel optimism because it can create a situation in which the person cannot “endure the loss” of an object that they have a connection to. Berlant says it as follows:
“What is cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world” (Berlant, 2006).
In taking apart this quote one can see that Berlant says that “one might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being”. This links back to the earlier discussion of investment within Eyal’s Hooked model (Eyal, 2014). Whereas earlier this investment was seen as monetary, such as a gambler continuing to invest money until they are broke, one can also think of investment as something affectual. One might get a positive feeling or effect from a surprise consumerist product, but they might also get addicted to this feeling. Therefore, if they would stop consuming it, it might threaten their well-being as Berlant claims. This affectual feeling might also turn into a habit which, similar to the discussion of investment earlier, might stop people from unsubscribing to a certain service just because they are used to it.
This combination of the “cluster of promises” and an attachment that might “threaten a person’s well-being”, as seen in the quote above, is something that is found in a lot of surprise consumerism products and especially their promises. We saw this in the last chapter when we spoke of CrateJoy’s Self-Care Subscription Boxes and their introduction to these types of subscriptions that promise you that their products can make you feel better. Let us take a closer look to what one of these services, TheraBox, promises and how they formulate their promises.
3.2 Indulgent Self-Care
Therabox is, at the moment of writing this, the number one self-care subscription box in the world. Like LootCrate TheraBox also makes factual promises like worldwide shipping, free cancellations and a content value that is always above one hundred dollars (while costumers pay $35 or less depending on your ‘happiness plan’). The most interesting part of TheraBox’s advertising is their slogan or selling point which is: “Curated By Therapists” (Therabox, 2019). This is followed by their mission statement which states that it was founded “to inspire happier lives through practical joy boosting activities & thoughtful self-care products! Each box is curated by therapists and includes a happiness activity
20 inspired by neuroscience & positive psychology research in addition to full sized wellness items for the mind, body and soul! We believe self-care = self-love” (TheraBox, 2019). Although TheraBox is careful with its promises and doesn’t make claims that it will solve mental health claims it is interesting to look at the way they use therapy as an inspiration and the concept of joy, especially since these are concepts that have often been critiqued for just being a neoliberal style of marketing (Berlant, 2011, Ahmed, 2010, Lorde, 1997).
Audre Lorde wrote about this in her very personal book The Cancer Journals in which she wrote about her personal life dealing with cancer. She said that after her surgery it was important “to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power” and went on to say that it is important for survival to care about yourself but that “a clear distinction must be made between this affirmation of self and the superficial farce of “looking on the bring side of things” (Lorde, 1997). This superficiality is something one can see in the surprise consumerist boxes who seem to claim that just practicing joy and happiness can solve mental health problems. To Lorde however this is just a way of obscuring the real problem, or as she cynically wrote: “Let us seek ‘joy’ rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can protect us from the results of profit-madness’’ (Lorde, 1997). Sara Ahmed, on her blog Feminist Killjoy, writes about Lorde’s thoughts on self-care in current day and notes that Lorde had said that “self-care is not self-indulgence but self-preservation” (Lorde in Ahmed, 2014). This quote is interesting because many surprise consumerist services that theme themselves around self-care use words like indulgence, therapy and self-care in their marketing.
One of those surprise consumerist products is a holiday advent calendar by a company named Susanne Kaufmann. This company, that specialized in natural cosmetics such as bath salts and body oils made an advent calendar in 2018 with their slogan being: “Treat yourself to 24 days of indulgent self-care with Susanne Kaufmann’s luxe selection of bath salts, body oils and festive teas (Driver, 2018). This advent calendar had a price of three hundred pounds and therefore is not attainable for a large part of the people. This price also shows again how products like this can be seen a cruel, as mentioned by Berlant. If care is preservation, as Lorde mentioned, then logically speaking stopping with self-care would mean stopping with preserving yourself, which goes back to what Berlant mentioned when she said that “people might not be able to endure the loss of an object” (Berlant, 2011). However, if self-care becomes this expensive an unattainable for a large part of the population than lots of people will not have access to self-care. The joy and happiness that self-care is promising to bring therefore becomes only attainable through capitalist consuming.
This leads us to how self-care is depicted in neoliberal society. Sara Ahmed says that Audre Lorde’s work is “full of insight into how structural inequalities are deflected by being made the responsibility of individuals” (Ahmed, 2014). Instead of supporting people to find help in the form of therapy or other ways, neoliberal society makes getting better and being positive a task of the individual
21 and surprise consumerism carries on this notion because boxes are mainly made for individuals. Especially the focus on positivity and happiness is something that, according to Lorde, stops actual political change. She says: “Looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening to the status quo” (Lorde, 1997). Surprise consumerism, and especially the self-care variants of them, are often guilty of this because they focus themselves on escaping mental health problems for a while. Let’s take a look at some more services that do this.
If one goes back to CrateJoy and looks further than TheraBox one can see a box called Bath Bevy, actually the second one is the self-care section of the site. One of the slogans of this box that immediately jumps out is: “Just add water for a blissful escape!” (Raico, 2019). Here again one can see that self-care in surprise consumerism is mostly focussed on happily (blissfully) ignoring (escaping) the problems one might have. Another box that is listed on the site is a box called Fire and Nice which like Bath Bevy also focusses on bath products and other homely self-care. They are described as follows: “If relaxing in a luxurious bubble bath sounds like the ideal way to wash the day's stress away, then Fire and Nice is definitely a subscription box to check out.” (Raico, 2019). While I do not want to make any claims about whether or not these products can actually reduce stress, anxiety and other mental health problems, it is interesting how most of these services follow the logic of hiding the problems for a while instead of actually putting effort into stopping them for good. Even the TheraBox, which is curated by actively working therapists, focus on products that also help the consumer escape from issues instead of solving them. This could be critiqued with the idea that companies do this so that their consumers keep subscribed to these services because they might need these monthly or weekly escapes just to endure (Berlant, 2011) and (self)-preserve (Lorde, 1997). These companies therefore might be critiqued that they keep mental health issues going just to be able to capitalize on them. This rhetoric can be observed in their word use. Words that often can be seen in these services are “escape”, “break”, “treats”, “gifts”, “relaxing moment” and many more. What all these words have in common is that they are temporal moments which have the opportunity to present themselves over and over again and this is exactly what surprise consumerist capitalizes on; the opportunity to sell something over and over again.
Another interesting service in the list on CrateJoy is a box called HopeBox which specializes in boxes that meant to be gifted to others to show empathy. They market themselves using the concept of hope, which is an interesting concept if compared to the way I described anticipation earlier on.
The concepts of hope and anticipation have a lot in common and often overlap each other. Both the concepts revolve around the expectation that something is going to happen in the future. An immediate difference between anticipation and hope is however that hope can also take place in the present. Therefore, hope can be said to be in-between uncertainty and anticipation. Another difference between the two concepts are the connotations that are attached to both. As discussed earlier the words that are often described when speaking about surprise consumerism and subscription services are sayings like “looking forward to”, “anticipate” and “treat yourself” and more synonyms. On the website of HopeBox
22 for example, on their webpage “Our Story”, they list their definition of hope, which is “Hope: A desire with expectation that something good will happen” (HopeBox, 2019). This definition supports the difference between hope and anticipation in the idea that hope is more based in uncertainty and that anticipation has the promise of something actually happening.
The interesting thing about hope is that it has been described as something that happens in the present. In an article by Pedersen’s, which narratively describes the life of a few men in Urban Mongolia, he describes hope as something that is especially common to take place in the temporal present. He writes that “hope is what people do when they have no firm ground, in the form of a stable economic, religious, or political cosmos, on which to build their future” (Pedersen, 2012). The big argument that Pedersen makes in his article is that he sees hope as an activity, “the work of hope”, he calls it. He calls it this because he sees that the ‘’shared activity of hope that momentarily calibrates other disparate realms and scales of their lives by cutting overstretches socio-economic networks down to size (…) It is the ‘work of hope’ that enables people to calibrate their dispersed inner capacities (souls, life forces, and luck) with their equally dispersed outer capacities (loans, credits, and collateral)” (Pedersen, 2012). These arguments that Pedersen makes it something that we definitely observe when we look at HopeBox. Not only is HopeBox aimed at people who are, quote, “going through a tough time” and people who are, quote, “suffering a deep loss” (HopeBox, 2019), they also finish their mission statement with the slogan “Send Hopebox today because where there's hope, there's life.” (HopeBox, 2019). Especially mentioning that people need to send it today shows how hope is more grounded in the temporal present because it is something that needs to happen right at this moment while anticipation is something that people look towards.
With the analysis of hope and anticipation within self-care subscription boxes such as HopeBox and TheraBox one can hopefully see that surprise consumerism tries to bring affectual change through temporality. Through self-care products that seem to bring escapism instead of actual therapeutic help the surprise consumerist companies seem to bring temporary care instead of mental or physical health changes. This is what Audre Lorde also saw in hospitals and she came up with concept of self-preservation instead of self-care. Because surprise consumerist companies seem to offer temporary solutions, they can be said to exploit the consumer because they would need to purchase this temporary care month after month. This links back, again, to the concept of the Hooked model and investment because as Berlant showed people might not be able to deal with their loss of investment because it might threaten their being if they would suddenly stop, conversely it might also threaten their well-being if they continue because they might be exploited or lose money that they cannot afford to lose (Berlant, 2011).
Lastly the concept of the ‘work of hope’ (Pedersen, 2012) was brought up which brings us to the following chapter. Surprise consumerism is not just consumed individually but also has a community
23 aspect to it. In YouTube and Twitch streams people gather around to watch other people unpack loot boxes in video games or watch people unbox their self-care subscription boxes. This is done to make money. Content creators can get sponsorship from surprise consumerist services and get money from the advertising revenue on their videos. Therefore, in the next chapter surprise consumerism will be analysed as a neoliberal way to make money and linked to the concepts of human capital, neoliberalism, the event and the society of choice.
4) Surprise Consumerism in late capitalism
Pedersen, Berlant and Endrissat & Alacovska’s link anticipation and hope to capitalism and more specifically a critique thereof. Pedersen oversees that people in Mongolia “conjure up unrealistic hopes based on the ‘fantasies’ of millenarian capitalism” (Pedersen, 2012). Berlant, equally, equates optimism and hope to the inequal world of (neoliberal) capitalism as she sees that people organize their lives around optimism and hope because they think it will one day give them the careers they have been yearning. This type of neoliberal thinking has often been critiqued and often centres around the question of human capital (Foucault, 2008). This concept of human capital involves anything a person does or has to has the possibility to once in their lives be instrumental to the development of their careers or something else that will bring them higher up the financial ladder.
In the following paragraphs I will analyse the phenomenon of videos and livestreams that deal with surprise consumerism. Whereas it is interesting that people like to surprise themselves with surprise consumerism it is also interesting how people seem to like watching other people be surprised. These videos often fall within the genre of ‘unboxing-videos’. These videos are then for content creators an interesting way of generating income and therefore the argument can be made that purchasing surprise consumerism might be a form of human capital because there is an opportunity for monetary gain through making these kinds of videos. The next paragraph will look at how platform specificity plays a role in this phenomenon and will be analysed how users interact with the content creator. Interestingly this seems to mimic the way that people interact with surprise in non-online life. Lastly this chapter will look into controversies and parodies of the unboxing and surprise consumerism phenomenon which will lead into capitalist critiques of exploitation of consumers.
4.1 Watching and being watched
Watching other people play video games is a phenomenon that has been studied since the content creators on YouTube started to record themselves playing video games. Nowadays this has grown to a massive multi-million-dollar industry with livestreams of e-sports events having up to one million
24 viewers at a time (Mickunas, A, 2018). This phenomenon however is not something new. One can compare it to going to or watching a sports match on television or watching your friends on the school playground playing with Pokémon cards. However, now that this is possible online, content creators and live streamers are gathering massive followings of followers and subscribers to watch them play the latest (or oldest) videogames. An article by Sjöblom and Hamari from 2016 conducted a questionnaire to study why this type of content watching has suddenly become so popular. The five distinct types of motivation they found were “cognitive, affective, personal integrative, social integrative and tension release” and also said that compared to traditional broadcasting livestreaming “is a more manifold and holistic communication channel than mere video media content, particularly due to the high levels of interaction” (Sjöblom & Hamari, 2016). This of course relates to their found types motivation ‘’personal integrative’’ and “social integrative” which in the case of Twitch, the livestream platform that Sjöblom and Hamari studied, can mean that a person can develop a personal relation to the particular streamer but also to the group of people that are regular returning viewers of this particular channel.
This phenomenon of being watched isn’t something of the last couple of years but started, in relation to the internet, at the turn of the millennium. With the popularity of television programs such as Big Brother and Survivor (Expeditie Robinson in the Netherlands) the amount of reality shows both on television and on the internet increased (Andrejevic, 2004). Andrejevic says this when he writes that “Big brother is no longer watching us, people are watching Big Brother, surveillance in itself had become a spectacle” (Andrejevic, 2004). One of the first examples that Andrejevic noticed of ‘regular people’ broadcasting themselves to the internet was a webcam artist called Ana Voog. This artist broadcasted her life from 1997 to 2009 twenty-four hours per day. Although it started with major television programmes and artists, the activity of filming yourself doing all kinds of things from videogames to make-up and opinion pieces to porn has become a job of its own: content creators.
An interesting developed within ‘self-broadcasting’ is the popular phenomenon of watching people unbox or unpack surprise consumerist products. The phenomenon of watching people unpack things is nothing new. Everyone was excited when kids would have new packs of Pokémon cards on the schoolyard and would gather around to watch if they would unpack a rare or shiny card. Around the holidays as well when people unpack their gifts the whole family or friends gather around to watch in excitement as someone unpacks their gifts. However, the difference, between this real-life unpacking and online unpacking is the phenomenon of it being monetized. There are many different kinds of these unpacking and unboxing videos. Many of them are aimed at young children. An example of a very successful one is the YouTube channel DisneyCollector, which unpacks boxes of Disney toys or toys that you can get for free with others thing like Kinder Eggs or Happy Meals (Marsh, 2016). They are estimated to earn between two and thirteen million dollars every year from advertisement revenue (Silcoff, 2014).
25 Jackie Marsh, who did an observation on how a four year old British boy consumed YouTube videos, goes against the idea that these unboxing videos “are just straightforward consumerist practice” (Marsh, 2016) but goes on the claim, when quoting Kirkwood, that it can have an empowering impact to engage in a certain culture “even though their everyday circumstances may otherwise have precluded this” (Kirkwood, 2014). Marsh therefore claims that instead of viewings it as “negative in that it creates in them (people watching the videos) a desire for materials goods, it might be considered as a practice that enables them to participate in a particular affinity space” (Marsh, 2016). She then goes on to describe this type of consumer, people who watch these videos, as cyberflâneurs because they “surf the web, as the flaneur might have strolled the streets of nineteenth century Paris, enjoying the sights but not necessarily purchasing goods” (Marsh 2016). This is what people who watch unboxing videos, or videos in general, do. They check out different content creators or streamers and stick to the ones that are the most likeable or play the same video games or have the same hobbies that the viewers have. Hereby they are creating an “affinity space” with the content creators but also with other viewers who watch the same video as well and who they might have conversations within the comment sections of the videos.
4.2 Platform specificity within surprise consumerism
When talking about these unboxing videos the different ways of interaction can make a lot of difference. When we are talking about a YouTube video or YouTube channel one is (usually) talking about a content creator who publishes a video, usually on a regular schedule, and gives the audience the opportunity to comment underneath the video. The viewers and the channel owner are therefore during the video never in direct interaction with each other. This is different when one is watching and interacting with livestreams. Aesthetic differences are also prominent. On YouTube most popular video makers have high production quality because they use expensive cameras and spend much time editing their videos. On livestream sites like Twitch the most common set up is that the entire stream is just a broadcast of the streamer’s actual computer screen and sometimes they have a small square in the corner of the screen where they also stream live webcam footage of themselves. This difference in aesthetics might say something about the difference audiences as well which could be a difference between people who look for high production quality and a refined product or people who want to casually want to sit and watch someone play games or stream other things.
The other major difference between the two platforms is the direct interaction. On Twitch streams the audience only has a three-second (or longer depending on what the settings of the streamer are) delay between them and the streamer which gives them the opportunity to directly speak and interact with the content creator. This direct interaction in combination with surprise consumerist videos like unboxing and pack openings brings along another interesting phenomenon that happens within surprise consumerism, namely; guessing. This is also not a new phenomenon and can also be found during the
