Overview
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.
Full Product Details
Author: Michele White
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Weight: 0.617kg
ISBN: 9780822352266
ISBN 10: 0822352265
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 10 July 2012
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Temporarily unavailable
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Reviews
Buy It Now is an excellent, solidly researched book on the ways in which online communities are formed within a context of commodity consumption. There is no other book that I know of that engages eBay community formation and member identity in such a thorough way. Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Authentic & trade: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture [White] She asserts that gendered, raced, and sexualized subjects are imbricated in Internet settings, and wants to see further critiques along these lines within new media studies. While the scholarly examination of organizational and cultural logic is likely to have limited appeal to the casual reader, the book presents an intriguing look at sociological implications of new media. Publishers Weekly, May 21st 2012
Buy It Now is an excellent, solidly researched book on the ways in which online communities are formed within a context of commodity consumption. There is no other book that I know of that engages eBay community formation and member identity in such a thorough way. Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of Authentic & trade: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture
Michele White explores eBay as a brand community of monetary and affective circulation that encourages certain uses and, indeed, configures its users as certain kinds of consumers. By doing so, she makes a compelling argument for how identity categories and historical layers of representation are played out on eBay as an assemblage of sellers, buyers, lurkers, information architecture, interface design, business concepts, acts of branding, and item depiction. Critical and astute, Buy It Now pulls the rug out from under those who consider online marketplaces as the instrumental means to an end. --Susanna Paasonen, author of Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography
Author Information
Michele White is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. She is the author of The Body and the Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship.
