Buy It Now: Lessons from eBay - Softcover

White, Michele

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822352400 ISBN 13: 9780822352402

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2012

Synopsis

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

About this title

About the Author

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

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Buy It Now

Lessons from eBayBy MICHELE WHITE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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

Contents

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

Chapter One

Between security and distrust

EBAY'S BRAND, FAN, AND VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES

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

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

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

Producing eBay community

eBay uses the term "community" to articulate connections among members, participants and employees, people and consumption, users and the site, and constituents and the brand. The term informed initial conceptions of the site and continues to be an important structuring feature. Early versions of the setting, when Pierre Omidyar was still calling it AuctionWeb, encouraged individuals to "join our community." The setting was "dedicated to bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace." Omidyar added the "AuctionWeb Bulletin Board" asynchronous message system in 1996, which allowed people "to communicate with the rest of the AuctionWeb community." eBay thus produces community by informing people that they are part of it, suggesting that individuals have a responsibility to their community, providing asynchronous text-based boards where participants can communicate, establishing stable identities and consumer records so members have a recognizable position within the setting, and giving buyers and sellers the opportunity to evaluate transactions and establish trust among members.

The menus of ebay.com and many of eBay's country-specific sites contain a "Community" link. The menu usually remains constant and suggests that people are a part of the eBay community as they view different parts of the site. eBay also commits to individuals and personalized features by including a "My eBay" link before the Community link. Yet the My eBay link provides individuals with ways to track items, bids, and purchases rather than an array of methods for structuring the site around personal interests. Jon Lillie explains that eBay "was one of the first to successfully apply the principles and technologies of online community toward the dominant regime of commerce and consumption." These practices and features establish community as an organizational aspect of the site. Individuals are thereby made into a collective and citizenry with shared values and obligations to the site and company. At the same time, the tendency to associate community with people and sentiments minimizes the technological and organizational aspects of the site, encourages participants to feel comfortable, and assuages concerns about engaging in transactions with unknown individuals. A related series of community narratives are a part of other Internet settings, including Dell computers, craigslist, Second Life, Weight Watchers, and YouTube.

Omidyar and Whitman use the phrase "Dear eBay Community" and further the idea that the site facilitates intimate connections between members, executives, and the setting. Members' engagements are characterized as "social selling" and "social commerce"—"a powerful combination of commerce, communication and community that enhances traditional buying and selling." The concept of social selling, which is conveyed through accounts about sellers such as raglebagle and unique-find, emphasizes friendly connections between people rather than profit, market forces, and isolated viewing. It remakes the work members perform while selling products into a communal dialogue and commitment to the site and participants. Social-selling principles include providing personal descriptions that bond people, emailing prospective buyers with special notes about items, identifying as stay-at-home mothers and encouraging buyers to support this role, marketing listings by communicating in the bulletin boards, and passing out items at eBay Live! imprinted with the sellers' ids. eBay's notion of social selling is connected to its production of brand community and attempts to link people to the company and get them to work for the site because of shared forms of identity and collecting. Members, as I show in more detail in chapter 2, assist eBay in producing this community engagement. They do such things as reshape eBay's text-based board engagements into tea parties, plan events at conferences, and offer assistance to other members.

eBay encourages members to help each other. The options and social contracts in other early Internet settings, such as Usenet, influenced this model of community work. Omidyar included forums and provided members' contact email addresses because he was unable to maintain the site alone. For a period of time, many individuals used email addresses as eBay ids, and their availability and willingness to engage were thereby a part of their system identities. Community is thus articulated so Omidyar and other employees can detach, disinvest, and transfer a lot of the work to unpaid members. This results in community having different personal and economic meanings or even being an altogether different structure and discourse, for different constituencies. All of this suggests that co-production and brand community opportunities include decreased rather than amplified commitments from corporations. This is certainly the case with brand communities for the Apple Newton personal digital assistant and Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, because the initiating companies stopped supporting the products. However, it is also likely to be the case with commodities that are available on the market and garnering increased value from brand community members.

virtual communities

eBay's community, as Adam Cohen argues, is one of the company's "greatest assets." The records individuals provide to consumer communities, which includes demographic data, shopping habits, detailed reviews of products, critiques of the company, and indications of how site design facilitates connections, are highly valuable. This information allows companies to understand consumers better, meet their needs, sell individuals more products, and encourage customer loyalty. Jay Marathe, who works with startups and corporate ventures, identifies Internet-facilitated communities as "central to a sustainable business model," because they bring people to the site, keep them engaged, provide assurances that companies meet individuals' needs, lower the costs of customer support, and pinpoint successful strategies. The detailed information members provide allows companies to mirror people's interests and constitute stronger brand community ties.

People sometimes use the term "community" to resist the idea, which persisted through the 1990s and still occasionally appears today, that only poorly socialized individuals choose to communicate without physical co-presence and use the Internet to shop. When people portray Internet settings as communities, they emphasize the complex and important activities that occur in these settings and make them seem more spatial and real. For instance, "The Power of All of Us" campaign portrays eBay as a physical location, community, and "a place where people love the things you love." Part of this advertising site depicts a rural landscape where an eBay "neighborhood," and brand community with shared attributes, is being constructed from very similar houses. eBay also situates people in community spaces by naming the discussion boards "The Front Porch," "The Homestead," "The Park," and "The eBay Town Square." Members support this spatialization and materialization of the setting when they perform popcorn parties and group teas in the forums.

eBay's rendering of community, which is envisioned as collaborative and intermeshed because of common desires and values, is related to larger social drives to resuscitate preindustrial communities. Robert Putnam argues that a variety of technological and social factors have destroyed community. With eBay, old-time community is supposed to be remade from porches, unlocked doors, and communitywide celebrations, features that are simultaneously virtual and material. eBay's rendering of small-town values and trust are related to its marketing of sentimental goods. eBay's "The Power of All of Us" campaign asks, "What if nothing was ever forgotten? What if nothing was ever lost?" The campaign promises that a community incorporating the power of all of us, including the labor of participants, can replace these purportedly lost emotive states. eBay remakes people's economically motivated sale of goods and casting off of mementos, which could mark items as valueless, into the community's maintenance of history. Everything thus has value, and sellers are doing good work by looking for the right owners. For example, eBay's Toy Boat advertisement depicts a ship's crew finding a boy's plaything and using the eBay interface to return it to the adult who is still longing for it. In a similar manner, sellers of antiquarian photographs try to remake people's family albums by matching individuals with the photographs they have lost or through "instant ancestor" replacements. All of this suggests that everything is loved, saved, remembered, and saleable within the community.

eBay also represents harmony and concord as attributes of the site and community. For the theorist Alphonso Lingis, community mandates that "each one, in facing the other, faces an imperative that he formulate all his encounters and insights in universal terms, in forms that could be the information belonging to everyone." Images of eBay's community of cookie-cutter homes, figured in "The Power of All of Us" campaign, and its string of handholding paper-doll-like members insistently evoke a community in which all members are the same. This is in line with community investments, including the community's alignment with "unity, commonality, and agreement," that the social philosopher and political theorist Linnell Secomb describes. Community is associated with consciousness of a kind, but disagreements and discrepancies are also inherent and important aspects of communities. A number of theorists have come to question the philosophy of community with its bias toward sameness and tendency to distinguish between self and other, or even to expulse the other.

Many texts about Internet communities describe the utopian possibilities of collectivity and caring that happen in these settings. At the same time, theoretical writings declare that community, as we know it, has or should end. Such theorists as Benedict Anderson and Jean-Luc Nancy chronicle the regional conflicts that are spurred by conceptions of community and how purportedly supportive groups ostracize individuals who are identified as not belonging because of ethnic, racial, religious, or other identities. Brand communities are also usually described as supportive structures that enable individuals to identify and engage, but participants articulate norms and position themselves as opposed to other products and cohorts. For instance, consumer research by Thomas Hickman and James Ward describes how members have a "tendency to seek information that positively discriminates" their "own brand community from others" and "either seek or accept negative information" about other groups. In a related manner, eBay's discourse about community gets members to do such patrolling and ostracizing work as questioning the legitimacy of listings and directing participants to value eBay that would otherwise be associated with the company. Community seems to be an Internet structure that gets people to do the corporate and state work of rejection and hate.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Buy It Nowby MICHELE WHITE Copyright © 2012 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822352400
• ISBN 13: 9780822352402
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330