Abstract
In this paper, we explore digital overconsumption as a lived experience of modern consumers and a vicious circle in which consumption excesses are constantly produced and reproduced within the contemporary digital environment. Drawing on Franco Berardi’s critical writings on market-capitalist cyberspace and its intensive interactions with individuals, we theorise digital overconsumption as a cyberspace-prompted consumption practice. We reject the individualised conceptualisation of digital overconsumption and argue that this phenomenon is increasingly fostered and perpetuated by ubiquitous, desirous, and invasive cyberspace, from which many ordinary consumers find themselves unable to break free. Using 32 in-depth interviews with consumers who self-identified as engaging in excessive digital use, and netnographic data on digital overconsumption, we trace the three main contours through which consumers’ entanglement in cyberspace manifests itself: (1) cyberspace’s inescapability and networked attachment; (2) cyberspace’s modulation and automated attachment; and (3) cyberspace’s seduction and escapist attachment. In tracing these contours, we highlight the lived reality of digital (over)consumers as increasingly underpinned by perpetual tension, struggle, and entrapment. We call for further exploration of the widespread phenomenon of digital overconsumption, which deserves more attention from marketing theorists.
Introduction
In today’s hyper-connected and algorithm-driven society, digital overconsumption has become a widespread phenomenon, affecting an ever-growing number of individuals – perhaps even the majority (Gui and Büchi, 2021). With the rapid proliferation of smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearable devices, smart home systems, and AI-driven platforms, the normalisation of constant technology use has reached unprecedented levels (Van Dijk, 2020). The issue has evolved into a global challenge, impacting people across various ages, genders, professions, and regions (Büchi et al., 2019; Taylor, 2024). At its core, digital overconsumption refers to individuals’ (felt) excessive engagement with digital media and technology, which can have detrimental effects on their physical, psychological, and social well-being (Büchi et al., 2019). The concept of “excess,” in this context, is understood as “too much of something”; an amount felt to be more than necessary, expected, or reasonable (Abbott, 2014: 2). As Lambert et al. (2024: 1) warn, “Digital technologies are pervasive and ensnaring, resulting in widespread dependence of their varying forms and functions.” From endless scrolling on social media to compulsively checking emails or being bombarded by a constant stream of news and entertainment, increasingly more individuals find themselves tethered to their screens – often at the expense of their mental health, productivity, and meaningful social connections (Reyes et al., 2015; Turkle, 2023). Far from being an isolated concern, excessive digital interaction has emerged “as a widespread experience among digital users, strongly connected to the features of digital devices and [their] social environment” (Gui and Büchi, 2021: 4). Digital overconsumption, we must recognise, represents a significant societal challenge, demanding an urgent, nuanced, and comprehensive analysis to address its far-reaching consequences.
Despite the widespread nature of digital overconsumption, both public and academic discourses have, ironically, tended to frame this phenomenon as a personal pathology affecting only specific subsets of the population (Lyvers et al., 2022). Much of the research on digital overuse comes from psychology and psychiatry, often adopting a pathologisation model that locates the causes, processes, and symptoms of overuse within the individual – attributing them to undesirable traits, negative emotions, or various psychological issues (Shapira et al., 2000). Numerous scales have been developed to assess digital “addiction” or “disorder,” typically focusing on individuals most likely to develop addictive behaviours (Harris et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021; Lyvers et al., 2022). In Billieux’s (2012: 299) well-cited study on problematic mobile phone use, the author defines it as “an inability to regulate one’s use of the mobile phone, which eventually involves negative consequences in daily life.” Similarly, social media overuse is often linked to “self-control failure” (Du et al., 2018: 68); it belongs to “a minority of individuals” who “have difficulty controlling it” (Musetti et al., 2022: 2). More broadly, excessive use of digital media and the Internet is frequently framed as “an individual’s inability to control his or her use” (Shapira et al., 2000: 1), prompting substantial research into “self-control interventions” for (over)users (Li et al., 2021: 12). In contrast, “individuals with high self-control” are often depicted as those capable of “avoid[ing] maladaptive behaviours in a repetitive pattern” (She et al., 2021: 273). Some marketing studies also conveniently follow this individualised approach, implicitly casting the “evil” of overconsumption as residing within the individual consumer (Peters and Bodkin, 2007; Sharif and Yeoh, 2018). Here, individuals’ capacity to exercise agency over their consumption decisions is leveraged to a significant level, reinforcing binary distinctions of appropriate/inappropriate behaviour, while placing the responsibility for regulating consumption squarely on individuals themselves (Reith, 2004; Taylor, 2024). Meanwhile, broader sociocultural and technological forces that influence consumption are rarely, if ever, explored within such vast, dominant literature.
Against this backdrop, critical marketing and consumer research has remained largely silent about the debates surrounding digital overconsumption, although different streams of studies can be located concerning the intimate connection between (over)consumption and the wider market-capitalist and technological environment (Hietanen et al., 2022; Kjellberg, 2008). On one hand, critical marketing studies have challenged the mainstream individualised view of (over)consumption, instead highlighting how consumption ideology, marketisation processes, and “contemporary marketing activities contribute to create and maintain a market system encouraging an ever-growing consumption” (Kjellberg, 2008: 152; Fitchett et al., 2014; Shankar et al., 2006). On the other hand, a growing body of critical marketing literature has explored various tenets of today’s global technological landscape (e.g., Big Data surveillance and algorithmic control) that work alongside marketing apparatuses to shape, influence, and intervene in consumers’ choices and behaviour (Cluley and Brown, 2015; Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Wood and Ball, 2013; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). However, the clear connections between individuals’ tendencies towards digital overconsumption and their broader sociocultural-technological context remain under-explored in these studies.
As a notable exception, Lambert, Rome, and Fornari (2023: 1) have recently offered an introspective account of digital dependency and called for further marketing research to explore the market-mediated algorithmic mechanisms that perpetuate people’s digital reliance, more particularly, “how digital technologies… exploit our vulnerabilities to propagate an addictive logic toward aims of capital accumulation.” Relatedly, Scaraboto and Fischer (2024), in their theorisation of consumers’ “platformance” (i.e., prosumers’ efforts to reshape platformised markets in ways that suit their purposes), stress how this phenomenon has the unexpected effect of increasing consumers’ platform dependence. The authors argue, “it encourages devoting ever-greater portions of the prosumers’ time to participating in platforms of some kind” (p. 60). Moreover, Denegri-Knott et al. (2023) repeatedly employ the term “fidelity” in their discussion of consumers’ attachment to platformised possessions, to emphasise a kind of platform reliance designed to be ubiquitous and perpetual (cf. Hoang et al., 2022). Such studies, however, have not focused on the processes by which digital overconsumption is generated and proliferated within today’s technological capitalist landscape – or rather, in Kjellberg’s (2008: 151) words, on the mechanisms through which (digital) “over-consumers [are] constituted in practice.”
This study seeks to move beyond the predominant individualised framing of digital overconsumption (e.g., Peters and Bodkin, 2007; Sharif and Yeoh, 2018; She et al., 2021) and instead explore the “systemic and structuring influences of market and social systems” on the emergence and perpetuation of this widespread phenomenon (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011: 381). Building on the critical marketing studies mentioned above, we aim to bridge them by exploring how the market-capitalist system (Fitchett et al., 2014; Shankar et al., 2006) and global technological forces (Hietanen et al., 2022; Lambert et al., 2024) coalesce to (re)produce digital overconsumption in contemporary society. The theoretical toolkit of the Italian theorist Franco Berardi (2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021), and particularly, his extensive writings on market-capitalist “cyberspace,” should prove useful in this regard. Berardi’s critical work draws from a rich blend of intellectual traditions, with his concept of cyberspace encapsulating the growing influences of market-driven and socio-technical forces on modern individuals in their everyday digital interactions. This concept thus offers the potential for a deeper understanding of digital overconsumption – its complex lived reality and the broader macro-social framework that underpins it. Market-capitalist cyberspace is defined in this paper as the amalgamation of proliferative digital technologies, intensive digitally mediated interactions, and the overarching market-capitalist logic that shapes these technologies and interactions (Berardi, 2015). Our theoretical approach is informed by empirical data from 32 in-depth interviews with individuals who self-identified as engaging in excessive digital use, and netnographic data on digital overconsumption. We ask: How is digital overconsumption experienced by individuals in their everyday interaction with digital technologies? And, how is individuals’ excessive digital interaction promoted and reproduced within market-capitalist cyberspace?
In answering these questions, we trace the three main contours through which consumers’ entanglement in cyberspace manifests itself: (1) cyberspace’s inescapability and networked attachment; (2) cyberspace’s modulation and automated attachment; and (3) cyberspace’s seduction and escapist attachment. These three contours constitute a form of what we call cyberspace-prompted consumption (CPC), which, we argue, increasingly emerges as a natural outcome of the contemporary digital capitalist landscape. By theorising CPC and the continual reproduction of digital excesses within cyberspace, we reveal how consumers grapple with a pervasive sense of tension, struggle, and entrapment in their everyday digital entanglement. Despite their desire to exert agency over their consumption decisions and maintain responsibility for their choices, their perceived sense of “control” is, in many cases, negated by cyberspace and its unassailable forces.
The contributions of our study are threefold. First, we advance our understanding of digital (over)consumption by exploring consumers’ lived experiences of an enduring attachment to cyberspace, and theorising the processes by which such attachment is (re)produced (Denegri-Knott et al., 2023; Lambert et al., 2024). Second, we extend the discourse on the relationship between individuals’ digital consumption and the broader socio-technical forces that mediate it (Ashman et al., 2018; Kozinets et al., 2017; Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2024). Particularly, we show a form of “enforced” digital (over)consumption that is often disaffectedly accepted, as consumers increasingly find themselves acquiescing to the profound influences of cyberspace on their everyday actions and social relations. Third, and relatedly, we problematise the individualised framework of digital (over)consumption – and its associated concepts of agency, choice, and responsibility – by illustrating how these elements are increasingly negated, or paralysed, in consumers’ everyday interactions with the digital realm (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022; Hoang et al., 2023; Lambert, 2019).
In the following sections, we first present the theoretical framework of market-capitalist cyberspace that builds on Berardi’s writings. Next, we describe our research methods and present our findings. We then offer a discussion of cyberspace-prompted consumption and our theoretical contributions to marketing and consumer research.
Theoretical framework: Cyberspace and its all-consuming forces
Market-capitalist cyberspace: A brief background
The concept of market-capitalist “cyberspace” is primarily informed by the works of Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021), a contemporary Italian philosopher and critical social theorist who has written extensively about the interaction between modern individuals and their digital environment. While the term “cyberspace,” first introduced in 1984 by science fiction author William Gibson, has been widely used in public discourse and academic literature, it often lacks a precise definition (Steiger et al., 2018). In popular usage, cyberspace is sometimes equated with “virtual reality,” which emphasises artificial, constructed, or unreal environments created by the Internet and its users (LaValle, 2023). It has also been described as the mental space humans experience as they engage with digital technologies (Strate, 1999). However, this paper does not aim to delve into the various definitions of cyberspace. Instead, our understanding of the term builds upon and expands Berardi’s conceptualisation of human interaction with the digital landscape, alongside his critical observation of global market capitalism.
Cyberspace, for Berardi, is an unbounded sphere “that includes mechanical and organic components” (2009a: 40), which are continually connected and reconnected with each other “in unlimited expansion” (p. 69). These mechanical/physical elements (e.g., computing and related technologies) and organic/human elements (e.g., users who are connected to and interact with these technologies) are driven to incessantly weave into each other, as Berardi observes: [C]yberspace [is] the global universe of the infinite possible relations of a rhizomatic system which virtually connects every human terminal with every other human terminal, and which simultaneously connects human and machinic terminals. (2009a: 69-70)
Building on Berardi’s observation, we may argue that contemporary cyberspace functions as a seamless conduit, binding humans to (and through) the digital realm. This process engenders an “infinite excess” (2009a: 108) of digitally mediated interactions and connections, signalling a profound mutation in modern society over recent decades (Berardi, 2009a, 2021). The excess of digital interactions, we contend, is central to the operation of market-capitalist cyberspace and its “relentless expansion” (Berardi, 2015: 36). It enables the continuous flow, circulation, and amplification of productive and desiring energies, which, crucially, allows global market capitalism to “accelerat[e] without limits” (2009a: 40; Hietanen et al., 2022). Understanding the characteristics and dynamics of cyberspace, therefore, may offer crucial insights into how digital overconsumption is (re)produced by broader structural forces that often transcend the individual’s capacity for control or responsibility. Against this backdrop, we now explore three interconnected facets of market-capitalist cyberspace, which can deepen our understanding of the complex lived reality of digital overconsumption shaped by various sociocultural and technological influences.
Cyberspace’s inescapability, modulation, and seduction
The first defining feature of cyberspace is its inescapability. For Berardi (2015), this inescapability signifies a ubiquitous, proliferative, and invasive presence of digital technologies, as well as the spiralling forces exerted by digital artefacts and stimuli (e.g., information, images) across many aspects of today’s network society (Van Dijk, 2020). These ubiquitous forces, Berardi (2021) argues, work progressively to incorporate themselves into the social psyche, engendering modes of digitally mediated social interaction that have become ever more extensive. These modes, following capitalist injunctions of hyper-competition and the emergent protocols of the network age, are gradually naturalised and normalised as “inescapable” ways of living, which modern individuals, oftentimes, can hardly avoid (Berardi, 2012: 15). In the age of technologically mediated global capitalism, Berardi (2009a: 42) points out, “[i]f you want to survive… you must be connected.” Under these socio-technologically imposed pressures, saying “No” to being digitally connected, for many, is no longer a choice (Berardi, 2015). Never-ending streams of information, accelerating fluxes of digital stimulation, and intensifying calls for instantaneous online interactions are manifestations of how cyberspace exerts its mounting pressures on human beings and increasingly “trap[s]” them (Berardi, 2009a: 7) in its “ubiquitous intensity” (Hietanen and Andéhn, 2018: 543).
Moreover, for Berardi, cyberspace’s inescapability is evident in how it engenders myriad channels that absorb individuals in its “permanent mobilization of [their] productive energy” to the service of capital (Berardi, 2015: 42). Their feelings and emotions, passions and desires, fears and imaginations, Berardi (2009b: 9) argues, are routinely “put to work” as a kind of cognitive-affective energy that fuels the endless expansion of capitalism. Whether through the drive to curate an attractive profile on dating apps (Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022) or the compulsion to engage with platformised activities and maintain social connections (Denegri-Knott et al., 2023), individuals appear to be incessantly driven by cyberspace and its imperatives for productive engagement in its system. On this point, Berardi envisions cyberspace as a kind of digital capitalist laboratory within which various fragments of digital stimulation and social anxiety for “infinite productivity” (2009a: 44; 2015) are continually (re)combined, thus creating inescapable loops of digital interaction and capitalist expansion.
The second feature of cyberspace is its modulation. Modulation, according to Berardi (2015: 28), refers to the constant transfiguring, reshaping, and formatting of individuals and their subjectivity, following which they are increasingly fused with – and “become attuned to” – cyberspace and its machinic code and rhythm. “The self,” Belk (2015: 28) points out, “is now… jointly co-constructed” by the digital. It might increasingly become, in today’s age of digital ubiquity, a modulated reflection of the pre-written scripts driven by machines, algorithms, and Big Data (Berardi, 2009a). The individual gradually fades away, and his/her subjectivity is diminished (also Cluley and Brown, 2015). As Hietanen, Andéhn, and Wickstrom (2020: 746) critically observe, what we encounter here is “a subjectivity in desperate flux, whose desire has become subsumed in the machinic tendency itself.”
Crucially, for Berardi, this gradual erosion of the organic texture that characterises human subjects is increasingly accompanied by what he calls “the automatisms that rule individual choices” (2009a: 7). Being entangled in cyberspace and its modulating mechanisms, Berardi (2015) argues, one’s choices of opting in and out of the system, and acting on their willpower, are increasingly ruled out. Their “reason and will… can no longer process and decide in time,” because market-capitalist cyberspace and its unlimited expansion do not allow for such time (Berardi, 2015: 28). Rather than making organic decisions in line with their conscious reflection, individuals might gradually tune themselves into automated, machine-driven courses of action (Hietanen et al., 2022).
Berardi (2021: 7) also notes how such automatisms work in favour of unchecked digital excesses, becoming “devices for total control… based on the (growing) amount of data extracted from the digital environment.” Within an algorithmic, data-driven digital landscape, marketised means of surveillance work to maximise the possibilities of modulating individual behaviour – predicting, manipulating, and ultimately automating them towards an excessive engagement with the system (Darmody and Zwick, 2020). Sophisticated technologies, algorithms, and increasingly aggressive corporate schemes are designed to play into people’s desires, anxieties, and vulnerabilities, ultimately intensifying their digital exposure (Lambert et al., 2024). Hoang et al. (2022), in their conceptualisation of “high-fidelity consumption,” highlight a near-machinic consumption type that is designed to be attuned with – or fidelitous to – surveillant market actors’ means of behavioural manipulation. At the centre of such fidelity, corporate “mechanisms of control” (Berardi, 2009a: 7) and consumers’ anxieties are mashed up for more of one’s digital engagement to be triggered and fed into the surveillant marketing system (Hoang et al., 2022).
The third feature of cyberspace is its seduction. Seduction, at one level, denotes the captivating nature of the digitalised sphere – its capacity to unleash human potential for desiring; an “excess of [desirous] possibility” that becomes the sticky texture binding the desiring subject to it (Berardi, 2021: ix). This excess of possibility works, in Berardi’s terms, as a circuit of “machines for liberating desire” (2009a: 7) through which one’s fantasies for radical self-expression, self-experimentation, and social connectedness might be pursued. Whether it is to follow the status of “micro-celebrities” on social media (Ashman et al., 2018) or immerse oneself in the world of digital gaming (Molesworth and Denegri-Knott, 2007), digital technologies appear to be capable of potentially releasing subjects’ capacity to desire and project their desirous energies onto the multiple objects and stimuli within the digital landscape (Berardi, 2021: 123-125).
At a deeper level, however, cyberspace’s seduction does not simply mean its desirability (with its attractive objects of desire). Such objects, Berardi (2021) envisions, “d[o] not exist” but are continually projected – and chased after – by the desiring subject (p. 125). On this point, Berardi (2021: 125) notes how cyberspace is perpetually alluring precisely as its desirous possibilities remain illusory – working as an “attractor” or “myth” that simultaneously excites and frustrates consumers’ further rounds of digital interaction (Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016). Cyberspace’s seduction, for Berardi (2021: ix), should therefore be better understood as the mixture of its illusory “promises of enjoyment” and the impossibility for the desiring subject to reach a point of fulfilment through their engagement in it. This is because, Berardi (2021: 126) argues, market capitalism continually “pushes [people] to desire,” yet at the same time it “interdicts pleasure, and above all cancels the very time for pleasure… because all [their] time must be spent on… desiring, virtually and endlessly”. Whether it is to seamlessly participate in instantaneous image exchanges (Kozinets et al., 2017) or continually work on optimising the self through emergent streams of data analytics (Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018), consumers appear to be impelled by the urges to keep looking, searching for sources of enjoyment, and interacting with the desirous digital sphere. Multiple streams of captivating stimuli and individuals’ illusory fantasies of enjoyment are mingled seductively, creating constant waves of attraction that, in Berardi’s critical terms, “forc[e] the desiring body into submission” (2009a: 7).
Together, these three key features of cyberspace allow us to envision the image of a largely “de-agentic” subject – one increasingly shaped, mediated, and overwhelmed by the pervasive forces of their socio-technical milieu. Within this environment, individuals’ choice, agency, and personal responsibility for consumption – concepts central to mainstream literature on digital overconsumption (Harris et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021; Lyvers et al., 2022; Peters and Bodkin, 2007) – may become largely elusive. It is crucial, therefore, to move beyond the individualised framework that emphasises the primacy of these concepts (Håkansson, 2014; Kjellberg, 2008) and develop a more comprehensive conceptualisation that captures the complex, multifaceted nature of individuals’ tendencies towards excessive digital interaction. As argued above, this shift requires a critical examination of the deep interconnections between digital overconsumption and the broader market and social systems that drive its emergence, spread, and persistence. Here, we must reiterate, Berardi’s critical framework – particularly his insights into how market-driven and technological forces coalesce to entrench individuals within cyberspace – offers a valuable lens for this exploration. In the following sections, we aim to ground Berardi’s theorisations in the narratives of our informants, exploring their lived experiences with persistent digital attachment. We now describe our research methodology before delving deeper into these ideas in our findings.
Research methodology
Participants’ Information.
The interviews were conducted in person or via digital means (Teams, Zoom, Skype, Gmail). Each interview began with several grand tour questions (McCracken, 1988), followed by a series of open-ended questions around themes of digital interaction, how it becomes excessive, and how individuals attempt to regulate their digital consumption (Belk, 2006). Ethical approval was obtained before any data collection occurred. Necessary measures were put in place to mitigate the potential for the interview to trigger emotional distress related to the participant’s digital overconsumption, such as (1) the first author was prepared to offer information regarding various sources of emotional and well-being support to participants; (2) she was mindful of the interview responses and prepared to not follow them up, or change, adjust, and drop certain questions; and (3) an atmosphere of empathy and non-judgement was created for participants to feel listened to and cared for (Rapley, 2004). The interviewing process ended when it reached a point of theoretical saturation, that is, no new thematic categories emerged from the additional data being collected (Dolbec et al., 2021). The interviews lasted between 45 minutes and 2 hours, and were audio-recorded with each informant’s permission; pseudonyms were used to ensure confidentiality. All interviews were transcribed by a research assistant, resulting in 592 pages of textual data.
To triangulate the narratives of interview participants with more spontaneous data, an “observational netnograph[y]” (Kozinets, 2020: 194) was conducted by the first author between October 2023 and February 2024. Observational netnography allows the researcher to access naturally occurring data without disrupting the flows of online interactions, and has been advocated by qualitative consumer researchers (e.g., Cronin and Cocker, 2019). Following Kozinets’s (2020) criteria for selecting relevant sites, the first author identified several public sites (i.e., online sites that anyone can access without registering or a password log-on) (p. 182), of which Reddit proved highly suitable for her netnographic enquiry. While other online (public) spaces with some relevant discussions could be located (e.g., Quora), Reddit was identified to be the site with the most interactional, rich, and deep content. Reddit is a popular social media site constitutive of highly active discussion boards divided by themes (Subreddits); there can be hundreds of active users frequenting popular Subreddits each day. Within the site, people can submit posts, exchange advice, ask questions, post comments, and upvote/downvote posts. Reddit is known for its “open culture”; it “maintains an old-style resistance to overt commercialization” and is considered a public site (Kozinets, 2020: 76), making it a rich cultural space for observational netnography. While Kozinets (2020) himself suggests that the act of collecting data from a public site like Reddit “do[es] not require special ethical procedures,” he also emphasises the researcher’s additional need to consider the potentially sensitive nature of the research topic (p. 182). Following Kozinets’ (2020: 234) guidelines, the first author carefully assessed how the potential public benefits of this study on digital overconsumption might outweigh some relatively minimal risks that the study might pose to Reddit posters. Simultaneously, while evaluating online data, she tried to use her empathy to judge what content to exclude, with posters’ risks in mind; and ensured their anonymity was protected by removing personal and related information that could identify the informant from the dataset (Kozinets, 2020: 179–182).
On the site, the first author used the “search” function with a combination of keywords related to digital overconsumption (e.g., “excessive Internet use,” “excessive digital use,” “Internet overuse,” “digital overuse,” “Internet addiction,” “digital addiction,” “too much tech,” “technology overuse,” and “tech overuse”). The term “addiction” was used as part of the search due to the popular public perception of the phenomenon; the term has entered the mainstream and is used widely amongst individuals, oftentimes to critique their excessive digital usage and/or the consumption practices of others (see Taylor, 2024). Excluding this term from the search would mean we might miss highly interactive, rich, and “deep data” (Kozinets, 2020: 284) that comes from people’s self-disclosure on the topic. Overall, our search resulted in several Subreddit threads (i.e., a series of connected posts and comments coming from an original post) that were then carefully read and evaluated by the first author. Subsequently, 46 Subreddit threads, which were posted between January 2020 and February 2024 and had a high level of interaction (with a total of 2074 comments/replies and 12,646 upvotes), were engaged with. Only relevant, “rich” comments were included, resulting in 166 pages of textual data. No photos were used in these posts. The first author also maintained an immersion journal to consistently document her impressions of the Reddit community and its discussions, capturing her observations of community interactions, and reflecting on the evolving ideas and themes related to the issue of digital overconsumption (Kozinets, 2020: 282-283).
The netnographic data and interview transcripts were integrated, and a thematic analysis of the entire textual dataset was conducted by the first author (Spiggle, 1994). Using a hermeneutical “back-and-forth” and “part-to-whole” approach, the first author iteratively navigated between smaller data segments and the emerging, holistic understanding of the entire dataset (Kozinets, 2020; Spiggle, 1994). This process led to the identification of thematic categories rooted in participants’ lived experiences of digital overconsumption, and the ways in which digital excesses are (re)produced. As these categories evolved, both authors engaged in regular discussions of emerging insights and consulted the literature to connect theoretical ideas with the developing themes. Through this iterative process, three key themes emerged: networked attachment, automated attachment, and escapist attachment. These themes were refined and updated over time. Simultaneously, the authors explored and deepened these insights using the theoretical lenses of cyberspace’s inescapability, modulation, and seduction (Dolbec et al., 2021), which helped frame consumers’ lived experiences in relation to the forces of cyberspace. As the analysis and interpretation progressed, the themes were woven together into a coherent narrative, which enables the theorisation of cyberspace-prompted consumption practice. We now elaborate on these insights further in the following section.
Findings: Cyberspace-prompted consumption and its lived reality
In the following sections, we theorise digital overconsumption as a cyberspace-prompted consumption (CPC) practice, which is increasingly promoted and reproduced by various intertwining forces within the digital environment. First, we show how cyberspace’s inescapable nature fosters a ubiquitous digital attachment amongst socio-technically connected individuals, who often feel compelled to conform to the growing pressures of their networked lives (i.e., networked attachment). Here, CPC spreads widely as one’s digital interaction routinely drives others into a further attachment to the network, adopting “multiple strategies of contagious proliferation” (Berardi, 2021: 15). Second, we analyse how cyberspace’s modulating mechanisms work to cultivate consumers’ increasingly automated, machinic, and non-reflexive attachment to the digital sphere (i.e., automated attachment). Here, CPC is continually reproduced, as cyberspace and its corporate-driven control mechanisms deliberately push consumers “towards a swarm-like automation,” and in many cases, paralyse their capacity for reflexivity and resistance (Berardi, 2017: 131). Third, we explore how the seductive nature of cyberspace, and its uncanny capacity to simultaneously excite and frustrate consumers in their ongoing escapist quests, can further bind them to excessive digital engagement (i.e., escapist attachment). Here, CPC is perpetuated as consumers are continually captivated by cyberspace and its illusory “promises of enjoyment,” but often find reaching a genuine point of fulfilment “ultimately… unattainable” (Berardi, 2021: ix).
In tracing these three key contours of consumers’ entanglement in cyberspace, we reveal their lived experiences as often being underpinned by a sense of perpetual tension, struggle, and entrapment. We now delve into the three main ways in which CPC is (re)produced in consumers’ everyday reality.
Cyberspace’s inescapability and networked attachment
The primary theme emerging from our data is cyberspace’s inescapability and the mode of “networked attachment” that it fosters. Networked attachment denotes consumers’ acceptance of the mounting socio-technological demands imposed on them in their networked lives, accompanied by an awareness of how their digital attachment is widely spread across their digital communication circles. As Berardi (2017: 55) argues, cyberspace’s inescapable nature provokes the mutation at the level of the individual’s self-perception, which “integrates it in the connective framework of the socio-technical continuum of the net,” thereby increasingly forcing individuals into conforming to their surrounding digital network and its emergent connection demands. The narratives of many informants convey a sentiment of dissatisfaction and tension that must be eschewed in favour of further engagement with network technologies; a disaffected acceptance that must be lived with (Hoang et al., 2023) despite consumers’ recognition of problems associated with their excessive consumption: “Everyone I know is on there [the digital]. My job is on here, YouTube. So it’s kind of hard to not be on there…” (“Ashley,” 28); “It’s not easy to get out of the game. If you want to live, if you want a job, you would need to use it [digital technology]” (“Don,” 28); “[P]retty much everything that I do relies on some kind of digital media… It’s yeah, it’s woven into absolutely everything” (“Maria,” 29). For these individuals, digital communication and networked interaction have become unavoidable aspects of life. Whether it is to develop their career, to remain competitive in the market, or simply to maintain the connection with family and friends, digital technologies are experienced as an inevitable medium through which individuals can still be part of their network: I want to get rid of FB [Facebook] but have actually been asked by my family what is wrong with me that I gave it up. As in “Is everything OK? You deactivated your page.” I also worry about losing connections with friends and groups I’m in that are still using FB. (“Gia,” Reddit)
In this Subreddit thread, “Gia” shares her nostalgic feelings for the pre-social media age, while disclosing her frustration with “how toxic social media is” and with her own excessive digital usage. Simultaneously, her narrative reveals a deep sense of fear – just thinking about resisting her social media usage. As the digital network becomes deeply entrenched in her every social relationship and interaction, her option of rejecting a connection to it is increasingly denied. To not “feel left out,” or “out of the zone,” a constant investment of her “productive and nervous energies” into the network (Berardi, 2009a: 136) must be maintained, as another informant (“Clara,” 33) shares with us.
The sense of anxiety and fear that many digital consumers express reflects a lived consequence of what Berardi considers to be the mandatory protocol of today’s network age – “[i]f you don’t react to certain stimuli in a way that complies with the protocol, you don’t belong to the network” (2015: 222). Rather than rejecting digital excesses outright, these consumers often find themselves hanging on dearly to the emergent network “rules,” that is, interacting with network technologies in ways that are in tune with other individuals and groups’ digital consumption patterns: Because everyone is using it [their phone], that’s like you have to respond to messages immediately… Like, it’s like I’m forced to have a reaction at all times. (“Sara,” 29) My parents would, you know, would lose their minds if I wouldn’t be reachable at all times…. they... um, most people expect you to be online at all times. (“Franco,” 22)
As Athique (2013: 17) notes, “[t]o exist within a network society is to be subject to ever-increasing pressures of mobility… and constantly shifting patterns of connectivity.” While “Sara” feels “forced” to perform constant rituals of digital reaction following her ever-connectivity with others via the phone, “Franco” shares a sense of obligation to remain “reachable at all times,” being “compatible with” the pressing demand from his “connective environment” (Berardi, 2009a: 131). Elsewhere, “Nora,” a 24-year-old undergraduate student, tries to justify her continual engagement with the social media platform TikTok: I also thought about how when I kind of tried to stop my Internet consumption, my relationships with my friends kind of suffered. They were kind of like “Where did you go? Why aren’t you on TikTok? I’m sending you things.” That kind of thing that keeps us in this loop. Because our social relationships are also really based on social media interactions now […] so it’s like one person’s addiction affects others, like my friend consumes videos and sends them to me, then I have to reply to that or else I’m not a good friend. (“Nora,” 24)
Being located within a vast, ever-expansive network within which her social relations are continually deterritorialised and reterritorialised (Kozinets et al., 2017), Nora finds herself constantly shifting between material and digital realms. Within this “loop” of social connections, Nora seems to feel “trapped into regular and inescapable patterns of interaction” (Berardi, 2012: 15-16) – such as communicating through TikTok videos – which for people of her generation build the foundation for their relationships to be maintained. Crucially, Nora sees no genuine escape from this loop, as her excessive digital consumption is deeply tied to the practices of others: “one person’s addiction affects others.” As the videos are exchanged and consumed, digital excesses are amplified and spread throughout the network.
In the below excerpt, “Ruth,” a 33-year-old employer consultant, similarly expresses a sentiment of entrapment deeply linked to the ubiquitous presence of network technologies in her life, and her recognition of how one’s digital usage continually shapes others’ tendencies of digital reliance within their network: So you know, everybody uses it [digital technology]. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t […] Nowhere in this country [the UK], or even in this world, I doubt now, could you get away from digital technology. It is everywhere and everyone relies on you having some form of digital technology. (“Ruth,” 33)
For Ruth, and many other informants, to resist or “get away” from network technologies has become a largely unrealistic and impractical, if not impossible task. Digital excesses are “everywhere,” making it ever harder for Ruth, and others around her, to not be pulled along by pervasive network forces. “Everyone uses it” is also the statement we repeatedly hear across our data, signalling the network forces that boundlessly spread across people in their digital communication circles. As Berardi (2009a: 124) puts it, “[a]t the point of the virtual intersection of the projections generated by countless issuers, cyberspace is unlimited and in a process of continuous expansion.”
In short, we observe how individuals may become trapped in a circle of socio-technically imposed pressures of digital interactions, from which they constantly struggle to break free: “The self is both pressured from the outside world and replicated by the surrounding world of other minds” (Berardi, 2017: 131). If we conceive of each individual’s networked attachment as a point of digital excess within cyberspace, CPC can be seen as spreading from one point to another, with each point connecting, influencing, and amplifying the others. In the following section, we explore how CPC is further promoted and reinforced by the modulating mechanisms of cyberspace.
Cyberspace’s modulation and automated attachment
The second theme that emerged from our data is cyberspace’s modulation and the “automated attachment” that it fosters. By automated attachment, we refer to how consumers are increasingly shaped and reshaped by control mechanisms embedded within the surrounding digital architecture, leading them to develop deeply ingrained, machinic, and non-reflexive tendencies towards excessive consumption. As Berardi (2015: 28) critically observes, digital architecture and its control mechanisms have increasingly “rendered impossible… the conscious coordination of willful individual agents.” Enmeshed in this pervasive architecture, individuals’ capacity to coordinate their will and behaviour, or to act in line with their consciousness, is increasingly denied. Across our data, we observe many instances of consumers being repeatedly drawn into the digital sphere, in a largely automatic manner – reaching for their phones, tablets, or opening and scrolling through specific apps, often without being fully conscious of their actions (Hoang et al., 2022). Often referring to these digital activities as “mindless,” “endless,” “compulsive,” and “out of control,” consumers share a sentiment of frustration over how their ability to make autonomous decisions is overshadowed by uncontrollable urges to keep consuming. In a post about the TikTok app and people’s excessive engagement with it, “Eunice” reflects on the automatic behaviours she has developed: I found myself mindlessly opening the [TikTok] app every time I felt even the tiniest bit bored, and I literally mean mindlessly because I wasn’t even aware I was doing it until I changed the position of the app on my phone screen and my thumb was reaching to its old spot on reflex without a conscious thought. (“Eunice,” Reddit)
For Eunice, digital technologies have profoundly shaped both her mind and body at a subconscious level (Tadajewski, 2019). Even the slightest hint of boredom triggers “mindless” bursts of digital interaction, with her “attention becom[ing] disconnected from [her] consciousness” (Berardi, 2017: 52). In these moments, parts of her body engage in repetitive digital actions “without a conscious thought.”
Like Eunice, many other participants describe how their excessive digital consumption intensifies at the very moment that their ability to reflect or resist is largely paralysed. “Juan,” a 30-year-old PhD candidate in education psychology, describes his digital consumption routine as a series of habitual and automated behaviours: one action after another, without a clear intention in mind: So when I wake up, you know, I would turn YouTube on and all these things, I would do without really knowing I wanted to do them. You know, I’m waking up, I’m not even totally conscious and I’m already doing things on the device. You know, it could just happen. I would wake up with my device in my hand. I would go to the bathroom watching something. I would then have breakfast while watching something. […] And then after breakfast, I would go to my room and the first thing I do without thinking is turn on my computer, open a game and that’s it. (“Juan,” 30)
As a researcher deeply immersed in technology-related topics, Juan is profoundly concerned about manipulative technologies and strives to leverage his expertise to combat them. However, in hindsight, he feels that his efforts often fall short of making any genuine impact, regardless of his knowledge. If anything, his consciousness seems to be largely dissolved into the flows of digital “automatisms that structure [his] behavior” (Berardi, 2009a: 141). He reflects on how his reflexivity has become “numbed” and subsumed by the pervasive digital landscape, with parts of his body being “fused with” it (Berardi, 2009a: 35) – illustrated by his experience of “wak[ing] up with my device in my hand”. Juan further elaborates on how he is consistently drawn back into the digital realm, unable to escape its pull: I’ve seriously attempted to break this cycle quite a few times… I’ve read a lot about this and I’ve experimented with many things to make a change. But eventually, I always fell back into the hole, you know. It’s repeated trial, then failure. (“Juan,” 30)
Juan’s narrative reveals a feeling of powerlessness that is shared by many other informants. Repeated resistance and failure are what many of them disclose when being asked about their strategies for managing their digital usage. Consider “Diann,” a 25-year-old undergraduate student in psychology, and her ongoing struggle to resist her uncontrollable consumption impulses: It’s difficult to stop, really, like I’ve done everything to make it less addictive, like this grayscaling thing, or putting my phone somewhere that’s, uh, that’s not visible to my eyes like in my drawer. I just go and grab it again… you know, the urge to scroll is incredibly powerful. I feel, you know, I feel defeated. (“Diann,” 25)
In Diann’s constant attempts to fight against the “addictive” temptations of her digital devices, we again see a sentiment of powerlessness (“I feel defeated”). Here, the subconscious, habitual energy that pulls her back into the digital sphere largely supersedes her ability to exercise self-control – driving her into further automatic courses of action: “I just go and grab it again.” “The impotence of subjectivity is an effect of the total potency of power when it becomes independent from human will… when it is inscribed in the automated texture of [technology],” as Berardi (2017: 21) rightly reminds us.
In short, we observe many informants’ pervasive feelings of powerlessness and resignation to the dominance of manipulative digital technologies, coupled by a recognition of how their digital overconsumption is increasingly (re)produced in an automatic, non-reflexive manner. Here, CPC could be understood as a kind of market-induced consumption excess that is deliberately promoted to the service of capital (Berardi, 2009a, 2015). In many cases, consumers’ capacity for reflexivity and resistance is largely paralysed, giving way to further bursts of automatic action increasingly disconnected from individuals’ volition and consciousness. In the following section, we explore how CPC is (re)produced as consumers are entangled in cyberspace and its alluring, seductive influence.
Cyberspace’s seduction and escapist attachment
The last theme that has emerged from our data is cyberspace’s seduction and the “escapist attachment” that it promotes. By escapist attachment, we mean a kind of excessive digital consumption that is engendered at the junction between consumers’ ongoing quests of escapism into the desirous digital sphere, and their felt impossibility of reaching a genuine point of fulfilment through such digital engagement (Berardi, 2021). For many consumers, the image-saturated, hyperreal digital reality seems to continually excite them in their attempts to seek out desirous venues for self-expression, self-exploration, or social connection. Whether it is to “hang out with cool people…[and] engage in cool games” (“Ashley,” 28), “[act like] different people and… experiment with that kind of personality formation” (“Matteo,” 29), or simply “read triggering materials” (“Jules,” Reddit), many consumers seem to be continually attracted to the excess of “possibilities of imagination and experience” (Berardi, 2021: ix) that the digital realm can offer. Nevertheless, their escapist journey of engaging with these possibilities is, in many cases, punctuated by a “frustrated hyper-excitement” (Berardi, 2011: 49), which drives them into further rounds of digital escapism.
Beneath the surface of their seemingly thrilling escapist pursuits lies a profound sense of insecurity and precariousness, a “disturbed psychosphere” (Berardi, 2015: 88) that pervades their daily lives (Lambert et al., 2024; Reyes et al., 2015). Channelling this energy into the digital realm, with its constant flow of stimuli, or, as Berardi (2015: 88) puts it, entering “a state of permanent electrocution,” allows them to momentarily escape the pressures of their everyday concerns, as shared by “Leo”: There’re colours and sounds and videos and posts. In real, in real life, there’s nothing… I’m feeling discontent, I’ll gravitate towards the Internet because of these flashing lights and sounds and …all sorts of obnoxious content that could take my mind off of things I don’t have to face. You know, all the problems in my life… It makes me feel slightly less bad. Staring at these things, you know, it just keeps my mind off, from things that make me unhappy. (“Leo”)
In a long interview with us, Leo insisted on wearing a face mask and declined to reveal his real age. As an unemployed man living in an American city, Leo feels that his real life is largely “empty” – a “nothing[ness]” where anxiety and fear dominate his existence. Leo told us long stories about his daily problems; how he struggles to find any genuine friendship, community, and a sense of security in the world around him. His unhappy memories and traumas from early childhood are carried on to his present days, making his physical presence hardly bearable. The digital sphere, on the other hand, offers him streams of images, sounds, videos, and “all sorts of obnoxious content” that allow him to seek sensory-emotional arousal and briefly escape the insecurity that defines his reality. Later in the interview, nevertheless, Leo struggled to admit how the digital sphere could allow him a genuine escape: “No, it [digital content] doesn’t make me happy. I just keep doing it, because it makes me feel slightly less bad. At the end of the day, it doesn’t bring me joy... I just feel empty.” Facing his amplified feelings of emptiness, mirrored by endless rites of digital stimulation that do not bring him a sense of genuine “joy,” Leo appears, paradoxically, propelled into even deeper quests for escapism (“I just keep doing it”).
Here, we note that, despite the seductive pull of constant digital stimulation, these streams do not alleviate the “lack of being” expressed by our informants – particularly their yearning for something beyond what the digital world can provide (Reyes et al., 2015: 113). In a separate reflection, “Maya” shares her ambivalence towards digital activities in a Subreddit thread, describing them as a repetitive, escapist ritual that ultimately “does not fulfil its aim” (Berardi, 2015: 87): When I’m anxious about something and I want to avoid dealing with it, I just procrastinate by endlessly browsing Reddit, forums, social media, etc. My mind goes into a feedback loop of doom and despair. (“Maya,” Reddit)
In this online discussion, Maya characterises her excessive Internet usage as “Internet addiction,” justifying it as a coping mechanism to “avoid dealing with” her real-life concerns. However, underlying her narrative is a deep tension, as she grapples with the inability to achieve genuine escapism. Rather than offering relief, the “accelerated nervous stimulation” (Berardi, 2021: x) that she seeks only seems to ensnare her in a “feedback loop of doom and despair,” perpetuating endless cycles of digital interaction.
As Fitchett and Cronin (2022: 5) aptly note, the mainstay of today’s (digital) consumer culture is “one of perpetual contest… to starve off feelings of ‘lack’ but is incapable of imparting any durable satisfactions.” For many of our informants, the surrounding cyberspace seems forever attractive – yet its “never-ending promise” of enjoyment cannot offer them a fulfilling point that stops their search and consumption (Hietanen et al., 2022: 173). Entrapped in a vicious circle of loneliness, anxiety, and endless scrolling, these consumers keep searching, looking, and attaching themselves to further sources of digital stimulation: I think that I have like anxiety and some maybe depression issues so like, TikTok is like a way to just turn off my brain… with TikTok and Reddit, you’ll sometimes stumble upon such a great video or such a great post. And I feel like the feeling now when I go back to them is like hunting for that. Oh, maybe the next one will be so good. Or maybe I’ll really learn something or I’ll stumble upon something that will help me or fix me or whatever. So it’s almost like the potential of fulfilment as opposed to fulfilment. (“Isabella,” 34)
Isabella, a 34-year-old digital marketing manager, reflects on her ongoing journey of chasing after an elusive desire – one that always seems to vanish before it can be truly experienced. In her ceaseless quest for the next new thing that promises fulfilment, she is driven by a fleeting longing, constantly seeking to attach herself to ever-newer digital objects and sources of comfort that she believes might “help” or “fix” her. These objects, however, remain illusory, as much as her understanding of what she desires, which drives her deeper into further digital escapism. Her present, in Berardi’s (2017: 125) terms, continues to “shif[t] away… as the flows of neuro-stimulation push forward, towards a never-coming future.”
Overall, we observe how cyberspace and its excess of desirous possibilities, combined with consumers’ struggle to derive genuine satisfaction from their digital interactions, drive them to seek deeper escapism in the digital realm and its alluring promises of enjoyment.
Discussion
The dominant discourse on digital overconsumption is individualistic in nature. A significant body of literature attributes the root causes of digital consumption problems to individuals, emphasising the primacy of self-control and personal responsibility for consumption management, regulation, and repair (e.g., Du et al., 2018; Harris et al., 2020; Li et al., 2021; Lyvers et al., 2022; Peters and Bodkin, 2007; Sharif and Yeoh, 2018). According to this view, individuals “who are deficient in self-regulation,” or those prone to “addiction,” are to blame for excessive digital engagement (David et al., 2015: 1661). Meanwhile, the immense influence of sociocultural, technological, and corporate forces on digital overconsumption is largely ignored in this vast literature.
In this paper, we reject this predominant individualised framework. Through Berardi’s critical lens of market-capitalist cyberspace, supplemented by the narratives of self-identified digital (over)consumers, we have shown how self-control is largely irrelevant in many cases of digital overconsumption. The complex lived reality of many digital (over)consumers, as our findings illustrate, reveals how digital overconsumption is shaped by forces far beyond individual control. Contrary to the assumption of agency in mainstream literature (Musetti et al., 2022; Shapira et al., 2000; She et al., 2021), these consumers routinely find themselves ensnared by a web of socio-technically imposed forces that compel them to continually (re)produce their excessive digital interaction. Rather than exercising control over their consumption (Du et al., 2018; Li et al., 2021), many of our informants experience a persistent sense of tension, struggle, and entrapment in their digital lives. For many, this tension is a result of being continually pulled into the digital sphere – its pressures, automatisms, and allurements – while, simultaneously, grappling with the negative emotional consequences of excessive digital consumption. At the same time, the struggle is felt as these consumers often find themselves unable to assert genuine autonomy over their digital consumption decisions, despite their desire to cling to the notion of an agentic and responsible self. Ultimately, the mixture of their futile attempts at self-control and an enduring attachment to the digital sphere fosters a nagging sense of entrapment, which, in many cases, can hardly be overcome through willpower alone.
Moving beyond the predominant discourse of digital overconsumption and its emphasis on individual agency and responsibility, we theorise this widespread phenomenon as a cyberspace-prompted consumption (CPC) practice increasingly promoted and sustained within the contemporary digital capitalist environment. We define CPC as individuals’ continual attachment to various forms of digital connection and interaction, which is intimately linked to their increasing embeddedness in market-capitalist cyberspace and its ubiquitous forces.
Our analysis identifies three primary ways in which CPC is constantly (re)produced. First, CPC is (re)produced as consumers are increasingly enmeshed in the inescapable demands of their networked lives. We demonstrate how networked living, which has been normalised, naturalised, and widely embraced in modern capitalist society, often traps ordinary consumers in what Berardi (2015) describes as “a frenzy of enforced [digitally-mediated] socialization” (p. 42). In this connective environment, consumers typically accept, and even deepen their attachment to, various forms of network connectivity and the interaction protocols they entail, rather than resisting them. This digital attachment, in turn, influences and intensifies others’ engagement with the network, creating a vicious cycle that ensnares many in cyberspace and its ubiquitous presence. Second, CPC is (re)produced through the modulating mechanisms of cyberspace. We examine how digital technologies and their market-driven control mechanisms increasingly subject consumers to machinic codes, often compelling them to (re)produce automated actions that are largely detached from conscious reflection (Berardi, 2009a). These automated behaviours, as we have shown, arise from a stark imbalance between consumers’ perceived capacity for agency and resistance, and the growing power of contemporary algorithmic, data-driven technologies. Finally, CPC is (re)produced by the seductive nature of cyberspace. The digital realm’s uncanny ability to continually lure consumers into cycles of escapism, coupled with their sense of never reaching genuine fulfilment, often drives them to deepen their attachment to cyberspace and its desirous possibilities. In this context, excessive digital interaction persists as consumers’ repeated attempts to “escape from the disturbed psychosphere” are never truly resolved within the dematerialised, desensitised, and untouchable digital sphere (Berardi, 2015: 88).
Overall, we argue that CPC increasingly emerges and persists as a natural outcome of contemporary market-capitalist environment, driven by the ubiquitous, invasive, and desirous technological forces central to its operation (Berardi, 2009a, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2022; Wood and Ball, 2013). CPC could be imagined as the materialisation of digital excesses that are meant to be proliferative within a marketised society which promotes – and arguably depends on – unrestrained consumption of various forms (Fitchett and Cronin, 2022; Reith, 2004). It is, figuratively speaking, a proliferative excess that is increasingly foisted upon the sociocultural relations and practices that ordinary consumers are enmeshed in, the everyday scripts of action that they subconsciously interact with, and the enduring personal fears and insecurities that they yearn to escape from. Put differently, CPC is increasingly constituted, intensified, and reinforced at the point of confluence between multiple obligations, anxieties, and automatisms that market-capitalist societies seek to impose upon modern consumers (Berardi, 2009a). These insights allow us to make several contributions to marketing theory, which we will discuss below.
Theoretical contributions
First, we are one of the first critical marketing studies to explicitly explore the phenomenon of digital overconsumption (Lambert et al., 2024). While marketing theory has a longstanding tradition of criticising (over)consumption and its links to consumer culture, marketisation processes, and marketing practices (Fitchett et al., 2014; Shankar et al., 2006), much of this research remains theoretical and lacks empirical substantiation (Kjellberg, 2008). On the other hand, critical marketing research has made diverse efforts to underscore the problematic aspects of today’s market-capitalist cyberspace, which increasingly shapes, reshapes, and constrains consumers and their everyday behaviour (Cluley and Brown, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2022; Wood and Ball, 2013). Such research has, however, largely focused on different abstract mechanisms (e.g., algorithmic control) that underpin today’s digital landscape, along with the power imbalances between consumers and technology. Scant attention has been paid to the phenomenon of digital overconsumption as a direct lived consequence of these problematic tendencies. In bridging these related streams of literature, we have brought the phenomenon of digital overconsumption to the fore, and explored – both empirically and theoretically – individuals’ lived experiences of digital overconsumption, and the combined influences of various sociocultural and technological forces on the complex (re)production of this phenomenon. Beyond the power and control that an algorithmic marketing milieu exerts over consumers’ everyday choices and behaviours (Darmody and Zwick, 2020; Zwick and Bradshaw, 2016; Zwick and Denegri-Knott, 2009), it is of equal significance to highlight how this power manifests in consumers’ ongoing attachment to the digital realm – especially in their experiences of excessive digital consumption, and the enduring challenges that come with it.
Specifically, our theorisation of digital overconsumption contributes to Lambert et al.' (2024) critical assessment of the subtle impacts that marketing and technology have on digital overconsumption. Their introspective account on digital dependency provides fruitful insights into the complex interplay between algorithm-driven technology, marketers’ profit motives, and consumers’ fragile psychosphere. The experiences of our participants, who grapple with digital overconsumption, further support the authors’ observations, particularly the idea that persistent digital attachment is often driven by “our psychic wounding” – interwoven with our deep yearning for social acceptance, approval, and connection (Lambert et al., 2024: 360). Moreover, we extend their account by illustrating the complex “process[es] through which over-consumers are created” in practice (Kjellberg, 2008: 160). Beyond the algorithmic apparatuses exploiting consumers’ vulnerabilities and maximising their digital exposure (Hietanen et al., 2022; Lambert et al., 2024), our analysis reveals a broad range of interconnected forces contributing to excessive digital engagement. Sociocultural norms, peer pressures, and the insecurities of living in the modern-capitalist world, amongst others, all play a role in driving digital overconsumption. In many cases, the social anxieties surrounding connectivity, productivity, or simply survival in today’s modern network society, continually push consumers into the further circulation of digital excesses (Ashman et al., 2018). In other cases, loneliness and social isolation prompt them to seek solace in digital connections, which one hopes will bring them a sense of distraction, relief, and comfort (Reyes et al., 2015). The story that we are telling here is complex: There are multi-layered sociocultural, technological, and corporate forces that intertwine with and reinforce each other in creating the vicious circle of digital interaction.
Nevertheless, in line with Lambert et al. (2024), we must recognise that in our multiple life circumstances, our various uses of technology, – and our very vulnerabilities and troubles that make us human – there exists a deep market logic that has shaped, fuelled, and intensified our embeddedness in technology and its destructive tendencies (cf. Scaraboto and Fischer, 2024). While technology, culture, and the market constantly co-evolve, influencing and reshaping one another (Kozinets et al., 2017; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2024), the corporate-driven interventions in individuals’ lives and actions remain deeply problematic. Algorithmic, data-driven business schemes, which increasingly “proliferate and insert themselves in the social mind” (Berardi, 2017: 20), create the impetus for the digital to be ever-present; for networked ways of living, sociocultural pressures of digital usage, and personal desires for digitally mediated escapism to be ever-intensified. Remove the manipulative logic embedded in digital technologies, and we might see forms of consumption that are less excessive, harmful, and destructive.
Second, our study extends and complicates prior critical theorisations of the relationship between individuals’ digital consumption and the broader socio-technical forces that shape and mediate it (Ashman et al., 2018; Denegri-Knott et al., 2023; Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2024). Such studies have tended to highlight consumers’ active interaction with digital technology, typically for entrepreneurial, relational, or other productive pursuits in modern-capitalist society. By contrast, we have revealed a kind of enforced digital “engagement” that is, in many cases, passively endured and accepted. This engagement follows normalised consumption patterns, which are adopted by the masses, shaped by pervasive market manipulations, and constrained by troublesome living conditions that foreclose genuine choice.
In these instances, digital (over)consumption is not merely the result of consumers’ willingness to invest their productive and desiring energies into the system in their dedicated pursuit of convenience, connectivity, and enjoyment (Berardi, 2015; Hietanen et al., 2022; Kozinets et al., 2017), but should perhaps be understood as the lived consequence of a disaffected acquiescence to a life permanently wired into the inescapable digital realm (Hoang et al., 2023). For many consumers, a seemingly “enthusiastic” participation in the digital landscape is embraced as the only viable option: a more meaningful life outside the digital realm does not appear to exist. In many cases, a “hyper-connected” lifestyle (Berardi, 2019: 34) is marked by a profound sense of resignation, where consumers “feel that they have no choice” but to continue maintaining their digital hyper-connectivity (Denegri-Knott et al., 2023: 16). In the absence of genuine alternatives to digitally mediated lives (Hietanen et al., 2022; Hoang et al., 2023), many consumers often find themselves tuning into their hyper-connective environment – acting in conformity with societal norms and expectations, as well as the deep market logic that intensifies such conformity along the way. Like Denegri-Knott et al. (2023), we observe how consumers’ negative emotions – fear, guilt, anxiety, loneliness – can become the texture that perpetually binds consumers to the digital realm (Ashman et al., 2018; Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022; Hoang et al., 2022; Reyes et al., 2015). In addition, we also show how feelings of powerlessness are pervasive in many consumers’ enforced digital engagement and their repeated, often futile attempts to escape cyberspace and its ubiquitous, manipulative, and seductive nature.
Third and relatedly, we further problematise the predominant framework of consumer sovereignty by showing the lack of agency that many ordinary consumers experience in their everyday digital entanglement (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Bandinelli and Gandini, 2022; Hoang et al., 2023; Lambert, 2019). The voices of many informants reveal growing frustration with the digital sphere, its problems, and their own excessive consumption practices. We also observe their repeated efforts to mitigate, negotiate, or resist the increasing presence and influence of digital technologies in many aspects of their lives. Nevertheless, as our findings have shown, consumers’ micro-acts of resistance are often negated, or paralysed, thus creating a vacuum for further digital consumption acts to fill. Our position is thus clear: it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for many consumers to resist, challenge, or escape from the dominance of market-driven cyberspace. Even when consumers attempt to enact change within the digital market in pursuit of personal goals, their acts of resistance remain firmly embedded within the market itself – thus reinforcing rather than disrupting their ongoing digital engagement. Lambert (2019), in her psychoanalytic exploration of modern consumer subjects, offers a nuanced understanding of consumers’ complex lived experiences as they strive to embody the neoliberal ideals of agency and responsibility within consumer culture. These women consumers, the author argues: …seem to feel trapped in the hamster wheel of consumption […] feel as though they should have agency, thus feeling responsible for their self and life course, although when reflecting on their life they do not feel that occurrences were necessarily under their control or their choice. (p. 342, emphasis added)
Similar to Lambert’s perspective, our analysis of digital overconsumption highlights how consumers are often “dragged along” by the forces of cyberspace, rather than exercising genuine control over their interactions with it. Embedded within pervasive networked environments, corporate mechanisms of control, and endless digital stimulation, consumers’ agency and ability to make autonomous choices are, perhaps, negated before their consumption even takes place. Here, the image of the sovereign consumer – one who can draw on critical reflexivity and radical resistance strategies to confront the challenges of digital consumer culture, as we would agree with Ahlberg et al. (2022: 667), might be reduced “into a myth at best.”
Limitations and recommendations for future research
Our analysis is limited by the perspectives of self-identified digital (over)consumers and a small sample of online discussions from Reddit. The predominantly pessimistic views of informants who admitted to excessive digital usage – including those who label themselves as “addicts” – somewhat restrict our understanding of digital overconsumption as a broader societal issue (Gui and Büchi, 2021; Taylor, 2024). Future research could compare these perspectives with those of consumers who voluntarily engage with certain digital technologies, thus “naturally” embracing digital (over)consumption for various life purposes (e.g., Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018). We also encourage future marketing theorists to explore alternative theoretical frameworks (e.g., psychoanalysis), diverse research settings (e.g., public urban spaces), and varied research methods (e.g., diary studies and videography) (Hietanen and Andéhn, 2018) to further investigate aspects of digital (over)consumers’ lived experiences that may not be fully represented in this paper.
Future studies could also explore various possibilities for consumers to successfully – or perhaps more productively – resist or escape the pervasive influence of digital technologies in their lives. Some consumer groups may be in a better sociocultural and economic position to initiate more radical, collective efforts to limit or manage their digital interactions, and the lived reality and outcomes of such resistant attempts deserve attention from future research (cf. Hoang et al., 2023; Scaraboto and Fischer, 2024). Additionally, digital overconsumption may be experienced differently across age groups, genders, and social classes. We have theorised how feelings of perpetual tension, struggle, and entrapment pervade consumers’ excessive digital interaction and their ongoing quests to lift themselves out of the digital sphere; but there might be other (perhaps more positive) feelings that characterise different groups of consumers’ everyday digital reality.
We also recognise the limitations of our analysis, which, framed through Berardi’s radical perspective, may convey a pessimistic tone and affect. However, we sincerely hope that this necessary pessimism (Ahlberg et al., 2022; Hietanen et al., 2022) will inspire future marketing researchers to focus more on – and continue exploring – the pervasive nature of digital overconsumption and its deep connections to marketing practices, capitalism, and consumer culture (Fitchett and Cronin, 2022). Lastly, we encourage future marketing theorists to further unpack how cyberspace pervades and inserts itself into the fabric of sociocultural connection amongst consumers, and how the proliferation of technology might reinforce digital overconsumption tendencies and exercise market-mediated control over consumers’ thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors sincerely thank the Editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive feedback, which has helped us develop a stronger paper. We also extend our appreciation to our research assistant for her support during the interview process.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
