Oregon Humanities

Belonging in Belongings

From photographs to virtual reality, media technologies have changed the way we shop and live.

Louise Bishop

The Christmas shopping season of 2008 began with death by shopping when, at the 5:00 a.m. opening of a Long Island Wal-Mart, an onslaught of customers fatally trampled a store guard. It happened on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, so-called not because of its potential for deadly stampedes, but because the day’s relentless shopping frenzy ostensibly puts retailers into the black for the holiday season. Still, the Christmas shopping rush isn’t supposed to include death as part of the equation.

The tragedy can’t help but make one wonder: what drives Americans to shop and buy? There are, no doubt, plenty of explanations for why Americans are often considered the world’s ultimate consumers. What is it that makes us susceptible to a sometimes-mad desire for belongings? I propose an idiosyncratic history of the reasons why we Americans shop—and shop so much—as well as how the Internet plays a role in changing the very nature of these shopping habits for the next generation.

The common uses of the word “belongings” and its root, “belong,” refer both to the feeling of belonging and to the stuff we own. In the fourteenth century, the primary meaning of the verb “belong,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was “to go along with or accompany, to be appropriate, or to pertain to.” At that time, “belonging” had less to do with material objects than with dependency or membership, relationships between people. In fact, the word “belongings,” in the sense of “stuff,” doesn’t appear in English until the nineteenth century.

If you believe, as I do, that how language is used can both reveal and create behavior, then you might agree that, since its inception in fourteenth-century English, “belonging” points to a central feature of our emotional selves: we want to belong. A sense of belonging shapes self-understanding and confers a sense of place in the world. Belonging satisfies a deep, recurrent desire to integrate and affiliate with others. But at the same time, we also crave individuality.

Our self-understanding moves dynamically between these two desires: to individuate and feel our individuality, and to belong to a group or groups. Sometimes our desires for both group and individual identity overlap, as exemplified by the trope of the rugged American individual—the loner cowboy, for instance, a stereotypic staple of American books and movies. Ironically, these media—movies perhaps more than books—trade on group experience to successfully implant admiration for radical American individualism. Another example: think of the intensity with which teenagers insist on their individuality, then wear identical styles and fashions in their high school corridors or yearbook, learning from magazines, television, radio, and the Internet. In both of these examples we catch a glimpse of the role media play in modern identity.

Much as we might laugh at these acquisitive teenagers, we must admit that, like them, our belongings—clothes, cars, CDs, and the other many carefully chosen extensions of ourselves—play central roles in our individual and group identities. Both extremes on identity’s continuum—a desire for belonging and affiliation, or group identity, and a complementary desire for individuation and differentiation, or individual identity—use belongings to let us simultaneously extend our inner selves for others to see and reinforce our senses of individuality. We, like those teenagers, depend on others to recognize the meanings invested in and proclaimed by our belongings, while we simultaneously use belongings to signal our individuality. The ease with which belongings produce belonging—the T-shirt printed with your favorite band’s name, the baseball cap emblazoned with your team’s logo, your Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin button—highlights the deceptively simple yet enormously powerful and inescapable emotional links between stuff, self, and society.

The connection between belonging and belongings, of course, is not quite that simple. Our belongings also mediate our relationships with others: they convey explicit meanings (a political button, for instance), and they also carry implicit, emotional meanings—the feeling of belonging. In the nineteenth century, the first era in which the word “belongings” was used in its plural form to mean “things one owns,” technological advances in media were turning ephemeral experiences—performances, images, voices—into stuff, things you could hold in your hand. Photography, invented in 1825, made the visual even more real than drawing and painting did for years before. The telephone, invented in 1876, provided a means for transporting the voices of loved ones via wires. Edison’s phonograph, invented in 1913, solidified sound the way photography did with the visual world. Such media, new to an era marked by technological invention, made reality tangible in a new way.

These media technologies rapidly became sophisticated. Records, tapes, CDs, and DVDs are twentieth- and twenty-first-century materializations of ephemeral sounds and images. We’ve quickly learned to take these technologies, and their abundance, for granted. Yet because they are so easy to acquire, we have failed to recognize the psychic accommodation that materialized experiences require. We have been led to expect material permanence for nearly everything, despite our understanding that the nonmaterial has value, too. An abundance of materialized ephemera and the seductive permanence of media such as a CD or DVD help us deny that we individual Americans are limited in our material existence: none of us are here permanently. Conversely, our material belongings seem hard-pressed to produce those senses of intangible belonging—dependency, membership, relationship—on which our emotional selves depend.

Other media invented in the twentieth century also affected people’s sense of belonging. Radio and television came to serve as agents of belonging, tying together message and goods, and selling both to us as a package deal. Radio and television also extended our emotional and social desires to belong well beyond our local communities, as they consciously created and amplified our need for more belonging(s). The phrase “mass media,” coined in the 1920s to refer to these emerging electronic media, only obliquely refers to the sense of belonging brought to a viewer by radio and TV.

Coupled with increasingly available material belongings, electronic media not only carried messages of belonging, but also the notion that the latest models are “must-haves” for every American home, from the radio needed to listen to Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats to the television needed to watch Roots. In particular, the black box in the living room nevertheless reshaped our desire to belong. A good three generations of Americans have grown up with television continually and increasingly providing emotional meaning and desire for belonging(s). Mass media’s ubiquitous presence has naturalized and deepened the connections between stuff and feelings, even as it has cheapened individuality, overridden community, dampened originality, and undermined authenticity. Mass media have sold ourselves and our society back to us in an endless, commercially controlled, seemingly inescapable, yet ultimately empty, media loop.

Making ephemera tangible created a new kind of stuff that we thought we couldn’t do without, and mass media’s manipulation of our parallel desires for both individual and group identities has succeeded in selling us more and more belongings. As a result, Americans are drowning in a sea of stuff. Our material things were once imbued with history: each family heirloom told a story. A hundred years ago, a typical family might have two hundred possessions; these days, the average middle-class American family has more than two thousand. A paucity of belongings encourages attention to and emotional investment in a possession’s history; an overabundance of belongings creates confusion and distress, a paradoxical emptiness, paralysis amidst clutter.

For a while now, we’ve been losing our balance between communal and individual belonging, in part because of modern media. Unlike movies, which at least fostered travel and collegiality outside of the home, many scholars, including Robert D. Putnam of Harvard University and author of Bowling Alone, posit that television has exacerbated isolation, leading to the loss of neighborhoods, foot traffic, and community. Forget conversation on the city bus: we’ve lost that interaction to riders whose ears are plugged with earbuds, each one listening to their own beat. Cell-phone users, unlike the silent iPodders, treat their public conversations as if they were private. Our sense of dependency, membership, and relationship has crashed. Computers and cell phones trade on the power of individuality even as they seduce us into thinking that more belongings will satisfy our craving, our need, to belong. Instead, we fall deeper and deeper into narcissistic emptiness. An NPR reporter at another Wal-Mart on Black Friday learned from shoppers that their goal was to purchase things for themselves, not gifts for others. Are we now stuck in an ever-increasing yet ever-degrading cycle of materialism rather than belonging—a cycle that, ironically, leaves us feeling incomplete and empty, stripped of the magical sense of belonging that our things have the potential to give us?

Ironically, the Internet, which has certainly made it easier to acquire more belongings, may also be the tool that can break this cycle. The Internet changed the isolating screen of the personal computer into a portal to a virtual world. While television, photography, phonographs, movies, and radios epitomize the modern age, the Internet ushered in the postmodern era and a potentially different sense of materiality and belonging.

Modernity materialized and commodified fleeting moments for our long-term possession, capturing events in concrete forms that can be experienced individually (playing a CD or watching a DVD) rather than in community (going to a concert or to the theater). Postmodernism has created media that complicate this divide between individuality and belonging in intriguing ways. For example, postmodern media rely on virtual worlds, such as Second Life—a Web-based, three-dimensional, participatory projection in which virtual characters (avatars) act together in real time. In Second Life, millions of people worldwide coexist. Proponents of new media emphasize not the isolation of the computer screen, but its exceedingly broad connectivity, its escape from the limitations of materiality, its unfettered freedom in which to celebrate individualism and, thus, a new sense of belonging. Like the real world, virtual worlds trade on both individuality and social belonging: they are multidimensional, multidirectional, and multicultural.

Second Lifers are quite savvy about the similarities and differences between the virtual and the real. They coined the word “co-presence” to indicate a temporal, virtual, and emotional sense of real presence, or belonging, in a virtual environment. Avatars, by this reckoning, serve the same function as real bodies. Second Lifers find individual identity and a sense of community belonging through fantasy play. Nor is the experience of co-presence limited to online activities. As Mizuko Ito of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California discovered, camera phones impart a sense of co-presence for teen couples in Japan, who use “always-on photo sharing” to mediate their intimacy.

In the virtual world, belongings regain their magical sense of belonging. Blended with reality and co-present with their users, belongings exist in a new way, immaterially real, both inside and outside of commercial interests. Second Life’s residents buy and sell virtual creations—real estate, jewelry, tiki bars—through prices set in Linden dollars, Second Life’s official currency. Yet this virtual economy is fueled by real money: more than $100 million U.S. dollars in 2008. Second Lifers share, manipulate, alter, and make fun of belongings’ codes; they create and exchange virtually real belonging(s), and the magical sense of belonging comes out on top.

Postmodern belonging and belongings are beginning to match up in new ways. When asked how to market overalls, an advertising executive in a recent New York Times Magazine article suggested putting a ShotCode, a kind of barcode that cell-phone cameras can scan, on the garment’s front. When read by a cell-phone camera, the ShotCode displays whatever the wearer wants it to, allowing her to announce her individuality and affiliations, and her sense of belonging in belongings while crafting an extension of the individual’s body: clothes.

Such adaptations indicate that media are now embedded in our very human desire to belong. Ten years ago (a lifetime in media changes), in his book TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, writer and cultural critic Erik Davis argued that new media would return us to a premodern, animistic way of thinking, a “mystical technoculture” that mixes real and virtual in our “technological unconscious.” The concept of co-presence bears out his thesis. Postmodernity plays with modernity’s tendency to materialize experience, from tapes to CDs, in a newly conceived virtual space. New media share belongings at the speed of light, pronouncing things “real” and “virtual” in the same breath. The Internet shifts imagination, individuation, and identity—dependency, membership, and relationship—to disrupt modernity’s attenuated communities, television’s top-down orientation, corporate commodification, and prior media agents of belonging. The Internet can’t ease all of society’s woes, and it may produce new ones, but it has changed our senses of self and stuff, and it can help us reinvent the role of belongings in belonging.