Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

clandestine labour – a love letter written on company time or a piece
of domestic furniture made on the factory’s lathe – clearly have a
material presence in the world and a place within people’s lives. For
de Certeau, writing in the late ‘70s, the steadily increasing systems
of production (television, urban development, commerce, etc.) left
consumers no place in which they could indicate what they made or
did with the products of these systems (Certeau, 1984, p. xii). As de
Certeau states, ‘the television viewer cannot write on the screen of his
set’ (1984, p. 31) – but the situation has since changed. The rise of the
Internet has seen a significant shift in the nature of media production;
many consumers within capitalist societies now regularly ‘write on the
screen’, in the form of blog posts, video uploads, photo sharing and
forum contributions. In doing so they have transformed the contemporary
media environment.
This research finds that consumers actively seek out and create places
in which to speak about the things they consume, whether that be on
the Internet (Torrey, McDonald, Schilit, & Bly, 2007), in the street
(Moorhouse, 1991), within the domestic environment (Atkinson,
2006) or in the pages of hobbyist magazines. These narratives of
consumption add diversity to the discursive space of the object and
expand the possibilities of use. While practices of object modification
are not the unrepresented and unsigned acts of de Certeau’s study,
their position within a consumer environment makes his analysis
particularly relevant. By examining these practices through their modalities
of action we may begin to see the forces that shape consumer
practices and the degree to which consumers can resist or escape commercial
interests.
1.3 Current literature
Literature surrounding the consumer modification of mass-produced
objects has, over the past ten years, become increasingly prominent.
One of the first domains to receive widespread study was the field
of computer game modification. Here, the easily distributed digital
products of consumer production, items such as alternative game characters,
game conversions, and user-generated editing tools, were seen
to have a significant impact on game usage and to play a major role
in the computer game industry (Au, 2002; Kücklich, 2005; Nieborg,
Introduction
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