Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible: Framing political engagement through the Buycott app

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIn this article, we explore the discursive constructions of Buycott, a free mobile app that provides a platform for user-generated ethical consumption campaigns. Unlike other ethical consumption apps, Buycott's mode of knowledge production positions the app itself as neutral, with app users generating activist campaigns and providing both data and judgment. Although Buycott is not a dedicated food activism app, food features centrally in its campaigns, and the app seems to provide a mobile means of extending, and perhaps expanding, alternative food network (AFN) action across geographies and constituencies. Thus, as a case study, Buycott unveils contemporary possibilities for citizen participation and the formation of activist consumer communities, both local and transnational, through mobile technologies. Our analysis shows, however, that despite the app's user-generated format, the forms of activism it enables are constrained by the app's binary construction of action as consumption or non-consumption and its ethos of 'voting with your wallet'. Grounded in texts concerning Buycott's two largest campaigns (Demand GMO Labeling and Long live Palestine boycott Israel), our analysis delineates how Buycott, its campaigns, and its modes of action take shape in user, media, and app developer discourses. We find that, as discursively framed, Buycott campaigns are commodity-centric, invoking an 'ethics of care' to be enacted by atomized consumers, in corporate spaces and through mainstream, barcode-bearing, retail products. In user discourses, this corporate spatiality translates into the imagined materializing of issues in products, investing commodities with the substance of an otherwise ethereal cause. This individualized, commodity-centric activism reinforces tenets of the neoliberal market, ultimately turning individual users into consumers not only of products, but also of the app itself. Thus, we suggest, the activist habitus constructed through Buycott is a neoliberal, consumer habitus.

Digital food activism: Values, expertise and modes of action

“…App users generate activist campaigns, and provide both data and judgment; other users join those campaigns. When a user scans a product with Buycott, the app alerts the user to conflicts between the campaigns the user has joined and the politics of the company behind the product (see also Eli et al, 2016). In our analysis of Buycott, we focused on consumer, app developer, and news media framings of Buycott's two largest campaigns (Eli et al, 2016).…”

“…When a user scans a product with Buycott, the app alerts the user to conflicts between the campaigns the user has joined and the politics of the company behind the product (see also Eli et al, 2016). In our analysis of Buycott, we focused on consumer, app developer, and news media framings of Buycott's two largest campaigns (Eli et al, 2016). To obtain additional information about the operations of Buycott, Inc., the company behind the app, we conducted a brief Skype interview with company founder Ivan Pardo in February 2017.…”

“…The analysis that follows draws on our detailed investigation of these three case studies (Eli et al, 2015;Eli et al, 2016;Schneider et al, under review), to identify key features that define digital food activism.…”

Ethical consumption applications as failed market innovations: exploring consumer (non) acceptance of ‘quasi’ market devices

“…Previous research has revealed how the promotion of 'food citizenship' through Good Guide, a system that ranks and grades products according to ethical criteria (Lyon 2014), relies on opaque metrics and an authoritative design, supplying norms that reproduce ethical consumerism as an individual act. Similarly, a study of the Buycott app (Eli 2016) argues that the app's design and the particular discursive and practical construction of ethical consumerism within the system shape representations of individual forms of ethical consumerism rather than supporting collective projects through interacting with the app (Eli 2016). Bringing issues of ethical consumption closer to the examination of information and communication technologies (ICTs), Gabriel and Lang (2015) argue that ICT has the potential to blur the definitional boundaries between consumers and producers and create new types of 'consuming work' (2015, p. 214), whereby acts of consumption expand to include not only procuring products but also generating and sharing product-related data.…”

“…Although there exists a rich body of research about a plurality of choice prescribers and other market devices, this literature often lacks two important components for analysing ECAs. First, there is seldom any discussion about the particular material artefacts through which choice information is disseminated, and, secondly, the mechanisms of consumer acceptance or resistance towards devices are often missing from recent accounts of similar devices (Lekakis 2014, Hansson 2017, Eli 2016.…”