Media Materialism Research Articles

Exploring the influence of instagram use on materialism and situational intrinsic learning motivation: An online experimental study

AbstractIn recent years, social media such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have become an essential part of the everyday lives of children and young adults. Integrating elements of these social media into higher education may have the potential to enhance situational intrinsic learning motivation through the emotional design and proximity to students' lives, but this also poses the risk of fostering a situational materialistic focus due to the ubiquitous materialistic content on especially Instagram, undermining situational intrinsic learning motivation. In the present study, we examined if the primary use of Instagram is associated with higher materialism and how exposure to Instagram-framed pictures influences situational intrinsic learning motivation. The current study conducted an online experiment. Participants (N = 148) were randomly assigned to one of three groups after they rated items about general and problematic social media use and materialism. In the first two groups, participants were asked to rate the pleasantness of luxury or nature Instagram-framed pictures. A third group received no pictures. Afterwards, the situational intrinsic learning motivation was assessed through a mock working task. The findings prove that people who (primarily) use Instagram tend to be more materialistic than people who (primarily) use another social medium and that exposure to Instagram-framed pictures neither positively nor negatively influenced situational intrinsic learning motivation but moderated the relationship between problematic social media use and situational intrinsic learning motivation. Limitations, implications, and future directions for social media use inhigher education are discussed.

How Social Media Shapes Our Happiness: Exploring the Mediating Effects of Social Comparison and Materialism

Despite its widespread presence, social media’s impact on happiness remains unclear. This study investigates the intricate relationship between social media use, happiness, materialism, and social comparison within the specific context of Saudi Arabia. It examines whether materialism and social comparison mediate the association between social media use and happiness. Data were collected through surveys focusing on popular social media platforms used by Saudi adults. These surveys measured social media use, happiness levels, materialistic tendencies, and the propensity for social comparison. A sample of 250 Saudi nationals residing in Riyadh, encompassing various genders and age groups, participated in the study. Statistical analyses using advanced software (SPSS, AMOS 26, and PROCESS 4.0) were conducted to assess correlations and potential mediating effects. The findings revealed a significant positive association between increased social media use and both higher materialism and social comparison. Surprisingly, a positive correlation was also observed between social media use and reported happiness levels. Interestingly, both materialism and social comparison significantly mediated the relationship between social media use and happiness. This suggests that these factors play a crucial role in explaining the observed connection. The findings imply that content presented on social media platforms might cultivate materialistic desires and a drive for upward social comparison, ultimately impacting happiness through these indirect pathways. This research contributes to the existing body of knowledge by proposing and testing a model that links social media use with happiness directly and indirectly through the mediating roles of materialism and social comparison. The study concludes by discussing the practical implications of these findings and outlining potential directions for future research.

Social media usage, materialism and psychological well-being among immigrant consumers

The acculturation process of adjusting to life in North America comes with challenges and often leads to culture shock. To promote subjective well-being, immigrants with an ingroup (vs outgroup) orientation may cling tightly to their original culture (integrate with the mainstream). Both paths can be facilitated by social media usage, and through reference group influence, both may foster materialism. Leveraging psychological theories connected to self-concept, we examine how minorities’ subjective well-being and materialism are indirectly (through social media usage) and directly related to ethnic identity, acculturation to mainstream society, identification with global consumer culture (IDGCC), and cosmopolitanism, using a sample drawn from two immigrant communities. While ethnic identity and acculturation did not foster social media usage, cosmopolitanism, and identification with GCC did. Materialism, which was encouraged by IDGCC, was negatively linked to subjective well-being. Social media usage did not exacerbate materialism, and it was independent of subjective well-being.

Contributors

Contributors

Collective Tissue

The trick about breath is that what goes in does not come out. Alveoli, dendritic sacs in the lungs, collect oxygen and exchange it for carbon dioxide, the fuel and waste of cells respiring at microscopic scale. Breath mediates in the word’s fundamental sense. In an unfolding ecological crisis and acute respiratory pandemic, twin technobiological catastrophes, we now face the question: What do media make us?Breath offers provisional models. In an inhale, we become storage media, collective tissue recording trace inscriptions. Take the ultrafine dust sloughed off a 3D printer, whose heady aromas testify to a technocultural vanguard. In the nozzle’s heat, thermoplastic metastasizes into vapor and particulate matter. Under a tenth of a micrometer—five times smaller than smoke—these particles pass through the lungs and into the blood. With each breath near a 3D printer, its users accrete a plastic materiality. Two decades of media materialism have taught us what media are made of: rare earth metals exhumed in Inner Mongolia, aluminum refined from Australian bauxite, all fated to the e-waste trash dumps littering the global South. Breath maps this circuit’s expansion. The mediated logics of its imperilment, as Jean-Thomas Tremblay forcefully argues, are “as much a phenomenological statement as a historical and cultural one.”1While multicellular life has always been an assemblage of matter, media technologies activate new dimensions of impurity. When standing near a 3D printer, each breath lodges the fine dust of progress deeper in the body. On a fundamental level, digital mediation relies on the careful management of gaseous impurity. Through an industrial technique called “vapor-phase epitaxy,” microprocessor manufacturers introduce arsenic or gallium gas to silicon, rendering it a semiconductor. Various combinations of thus-treated silicon comprise diodes, foundational technologies to modern computing architecture, including that of the 3D printer. But who poisons, and who is poisoned? The “clean rooms” of Silicon Valley, where microprocessors are born, filter and recirculate air to mitigate dust’s impact on chips. Yet the humans who work in those rooms, disproportionately women and ethnic minorities, suffer higher rates of cancer, aneurysms, and birth defects due to their proximity to toxic gas.2 Of course, these are “new” media relations only for some. Marx wrote of the “mephitic” atmospheres of cotton mills, Carolyn Steedman of anthrax spores in parchment sparking meningococcal “archive fevers.”3 Without (un)willing flesh, there are no media.There is a temporality to breath’s vulnerability. Over time the printer’s metal body will rust, its rubber wiring degrade, its silicon chips tarnish. Some of its plastics may biodegrade, while others, effectively immortal, may linger in sea and air, blood and cells. Even if the early twenty-first-century thrill of 3D printing wears off and we resign the technology, like so many before it, to the dust heap of gimmickry, our planet—and our selves—bear its signature. These are interlocking times of birth and decay, mediation piling on itself. Breath teaches us to hold on to simultaneity: a circle, a cycle, a somatic rhythm that requires attention and sustaining care.

Eco-media Events in China

AbstractThis article brings together recent writing on eco-media, media materialism, and racialized Otherness to rethink the place of China and Asia in debates about the Anthropocene. We begin by examining the nonwhite postapocalyptic futures imagined in Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi film Snowpiercer and argue that the film problematizes a persistent Western-centric bias in both the environmental humanities and the literature on media materialism. Inspired by the metaphoric power of Kronon, the industrial-waste-turned-explosive in Snowpiercer, we theorize the instantaneously mediated and circulated chemical dust explosions in Kunshan and Tianjin in 2014–15 as eco-media events—that is, spectacular and ephemeral moments in which the material processes of digital production link the old forms of resource extraction with our new lives of electronic gadgetry and media tool dependency. Writing against the discourse of Yellow Eco-peril, which depicts such events (in both academic and journalistic writings) through a racialized Eco-Otherness, we offer a counter-politics to reconnect mainland China to the very systems of globalized production and consumption—the deep earth mining, the slow violence of black lung disease, the factory work, the digital consumption practices—that have propelled and intensified the country’s stupendous development as well as its ecological challenges. We find new work on eco-media and media materialism most productive, as it sheds light on three closely intertwined dimensions of eco-media events: time, body, and matter. Probing the deep entanglements between the human and the nonhuman, a critical engagement with these events presents new possibilities to think anew environmental humanities in China, across Asia, and globally.

IGeneration well-being in the workforce: a conceptual model of materialism and social comparison

PurposeThis conceptual article applies Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory (SCT) within a materialism and social media environment to assist organizations with improving the well-being among iGeneration employees. By identifying SCT, this article proposes a conceptual model based on how iGeneration engages in upward and downward comparisons and how these comparisons influence materialistic consumption. Rather than altering human behavior, this article addresses how organizations can tap into their employees’ natural field of play and advantageously leverage these innate traits.Design/methodology/approachThis article illustrates path analyses to elevate the iGeneration’s well-being through the following: exposing themselves to materialism via social media, comparing themselves among similar and dissimilar people, and possessing materialistic items to set themselves apart. This article then provides future research.FindingsThis study reveals how organizations can harness SCT within a materialistic and social media landscape to improve employee well-being.ImplicationsThis theoretical model helps to develop organizational well-being strategies to produce lower employee turnover and higher productivity.Originality/valueThis article contributes to academic research by providing a theoretical model based on natural social media behavior and materialism.

The mediating role of parental mediation in the relationship between media use and materialism

The mediating role of parental mediation in the relationship between media use and materialism

The mediating role of parental mediation in the relationship between media use and materialism

The present research endeavours to firstly examine and compares the direct relationship of materialism initiated by television and internet use and secondly, as how use of multiple parental mediation strategies simultaneously mediate the effect of TV and internet on cultivation of materialism among youth. The findings of the present study reveal that media to inculcate materialism in youth but the magnitude of the impact of television is stronger in promoting materialism as compared to internet among youth. Besides, the results of parallel multiple mediation models reveal that co-viewing and restrictive styles of parental mediation fully mediate the relationship between TV exposure and materialism, while, internet exposure was partially mediated by path that involved active co-use and monitoring styles of parental mediation styles. The role of parents endorses in the present study could help children in developing their attitude towards media content and enable them to become mature media users.

Media Use and Materialism: A Comparative Study of Impact of Television Exposure and Internet Indulgence on Young Adults

Media exposure is often witnessed to promote materialism in youth. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to investigate and compare the level of materialism in young media users due to television exposure and Internet indulgence. A sample of 714 young media users (15–24 years) has been taken from schools and colleges of Punjab (India) and data have been analysed through hierarchical regression analysis and independent sample t-test through SPSS 19.0. Using a three-factor structure to measure materialism—material success, material happiness and material centrality—the findings reveal that media (TV and Internet) strongly inculcates materialism in young media users, when effects of child and family variables are controlled. But, magnitude of the effect of media (TV and Internet) is more prominently visible on material centrality construct than other two constructs of materialism. Also, groups of child and family variables showed significant differences across materialism constructs. Internet indulgence coupled with socio-oriented family communication significantly contributes to materialism. Because of the highest influence of media on material centrality, the leaders in the media industry should be more involved in scrutinizing the content and encourage their clients to develop more socially responsible depictions in media.

Radical Media Archaeology (its epistemology, aesthetics and case studies)

Media Archaeology is both a method and an aesthetics of approaching technical objects. Within a broad range of such academic and artistic practices, radical media archaeology will be presented against the soft archaeological metaphor, with an emphasis on Foucault’s approach and the non-human meaning of media-active archaeology. One characteristic of Media Archaeology is its focus on media materialism, analytically or creatively bound to practices like circuit bending. Seductive events like the excavation of once buried computer game cartridges (the E. T. case) request a more code-oriented, critical resistance to the archaeological metaphor, just like media archaeology as artistic research, such as the "Dead Media" project, requires a media-epistemological counter-reading. Diagrammatic Media Archaeography will be proposed as an alternative to culturally familiar narratives of media historiography. A special focus will be placed on video art and preservation where algorithms themselves become the archaeologists of archaic video recordings. The media-archaeological method is about signal "re-presencing" (Sobchack) rather than historicising (as in the cases of early television recording and the Voyager space mission "picture disc"). Media Archaeology as a method of techno-logical research stays close to the signal (be it analog waveforms or digital pulses). Media Archaeography as a mode of representation has been written about already (e.g. Ina Blom’s Autobiography of Video). For the challenge of media time heritage, video art preservation is applied media archaeology.

Materialism, Happiness and Social Media Addiction among Adolescents

Social media use among youngsters is on the rise. More and more people are using social media to connect with each other socially, to share information and to express views. Increased use of social media exposes them to many advertisements and posts by friends and acquaintances of their various achievements and acquisitions of material goods. This kind of exposure may lead to an urge for owning and acquiring more material goods and achieving life goals. The study examined the relationship between social media addiction, happiness and materialism among high school and college students. The study also investigated if there were any gender differences in social media addiction, happiness and materialism among students. 200 high school and college students from two schools and two colleges in Chennai city completed the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire -OHQ (Argyle & Hills, 2002), the Bergen Social Media Addiction (BSMAS; Andreassen et al, 2012) and Material Values Scale Short form (Richins,2004). Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to investigate the relationships between variables. Independent samples t-test was computed to examine gender difference in the three variables. The analysis revealed that social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness and significantly, positively correlated with materialism among students. Among female students social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness and significantly, positively correlated with materialism. There was no significant relationship between happiness and materialism among female students. Among male students social media addiction was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness. The relationship between social media addiction and materialism was non-significant. Materialism was significantly, negatively correlated with happiness. There were no significant gender differences in social media addiction, happiness and materialism.

A Cross-National Study of Consumer Spending Behavior: The Impact of Social Media Intensity and Materialism

ABSTRACTThe ubiquity of Internet, mobile devices, and online social media platform has undeniably altered consumer lifestyles and business conduct globally. To explore the influences of social media on consumer behavior, this study applied the “self-regulation” concept and a cross-cultural conceptualization of “self” to propose a model explicating how social media intensity directly and indirectly—through materialism—impact consumers' credit overuse, conspicuous consumption, and impulse buying. Using data collected from the U.S. and South Korea, social media intensity strongly influences consumer spending in the American sample but has no effect on credit overuse behavior in the South Korean sample.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous: Celebrity Media Diet and the Cultivation of Emerging Adults’ Materialism

The present study used cultivation theory to explore the relationships between celebrity media diet and materialism for a sample of 224 emerging adults. Results indicated main effects between both celebrity magazine consumption and celebrity TV news consumption on materialism. Total celebrity media diet was also significantly related to materialism. Findings suggest that a media diet high in celebrity culture and lifestyle has significant impact on emerging adults’ preoccupation with consumerism, particularly for women. This research contributes to a growing body of literature on the effects of a celebrity-saturated media environment and the cultivation of materialistic attitudes.

“Enwebbed Complexities”: The Posthumanities, Digital Media and New Feminist Materialism

“Enwebbed Complexities”: The Posthumanities, Digital Media and New Feminist Materialism

Why ABC Matters: Lexicography and Literary History

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to discuss the origins of The Swedish Academy Dictionary against the backdrop of the social and cultural history of lexicography in 18th and 19th century Europe. Second, to consider material aspects of lexicography – the dictionary as interface – in light of German media scientist Friedrich Kittler’s “media materialism”. Ultimately, both purposes intend to describe how letters and writing have been constructed and arranged through-out the course of history. In Kittler’s view, “the intimization of literature”, that took place during second half of the 18th century, brought about a fundamental change in the way language and text were perceived. However, parallel to this development an institutionalization and disciplining of language and literature took place. The rise of modern society, the nation state, print capitalism and modern science in 18th century Europe necessitated (and were furthered by) a disciplining of language and literature. This era was for these reasons a golden age for lexicographers and scholars whose work focused on the vernacular. In this article the rise of the alphabetically ordered dictionary and the corresponding downfall of the topical dictionary that occurred around 1700 is regarded as a technological threshold. This development is interesting not only within the field of history of lexicography, but arguably also, since information and thought are connected to the basic principles of mediality, this development has bearings on the epistemo-logical revolution of the 18th century witnessed in, among other things, Enlightenment thought and literature.

Radical Post-humanism

This article uses the work of Friedrich Kittler to address the ways in which media technologies underpin and structure the basis of ‘human’ existence and understanding. Kittler’s ‘media materialism’ is explored through four main influences: the information theory of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, the media analysis of Marshall McLuhan, the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault’s work on power and discourse. These figures are used, in turn, to draw into question the materiality of information technology, and, following this, to develop a post-human approach to media analysis. The final section of this article considers the challenges such an approach poses to the humanistic bias of mainstream sociology and media studies.