Household Consumption on the Internet: Income, Time, and Institutional Contradictions.

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Household Consumption on the Internet: Income, Time, and Institutional Contradictions.

The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past.

Thorstein Veblen, 1953

In the September 1997 edition of the Journal of Economic Issues, Frank Ackerman provides an outline of mainstream and alternative approaches to the economics of consumption. Ackerman's timing is propitious. It comes at the dawning of what is popularly called an "information revolution" but, more accurately, can be described as a new phase in the transformation of information into a commodity. The Internet now appears to be the essential infrastructure of this latest thrust of com-modification. In this paper, I refer to the Internet as the whole assemblage of what the U.S. executive branch calls "electronic commerce" activities [United States Department of Commerce 1998]. In spite of great optimism about the growth of this form of commerce, I will argue that it faces potential barriers, if not outright contradictions, as a result of questionable assumptions regarding human capacities in a Brave New World of online consumption.

The quote from Veblen shown above frames my thinking on this. Through his emphasis on "habits of thought," we are reminded of Veblen's conceptualization of institutions: complex structures of habits of thought and practice. According to Veblen, institutions are inherently conservative constructions, and consumption, I believe, can be viewed as one such institution.

Consumption is like other institutions (such as religion or the law) in terms of this structuring, but it is relatively unique in terms of its extraordinary p...

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