The Social Form of Napster: Cultivating the Paradox of Consumer Emancipation

Abstract

Consumer emancipation of consumption-related yet market-distanced social entities is developed and explored in this paper as a process conditioning communication about ideologies, meanings, norms, and values in the social form of emancipation. A social form of emancipation is theorized as an operationally closed, self-referential, and consumption-related social system, which, by social communication, is engaged in a permanent process of ensuring a social distinction between itself and its environment, which is the only device to be used to reproduce itself in the course of time. Interviews conducted with Napster consumers, netnographic fieldwork, observations, and archival data were collected over the past two years to map micro-emancipatory consumption discourse and practices and build an understanding of the moderato social processes constructing Napster as a subculture community. Our findings reveal that consumer emancipation is the reassurance of social difference through communication, and the implicit self-paradoxification of centering into the cultural crosshairs of the social form of emancipation those entities it wishes to distance from. Implications for consumer research are considered in a concluding section.

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