Society | DOI: 10.1145/2160718.2160725
Digitally Possessed
Virtual possessions play an increasingly important role in
our daily lives. How we think about them and deal with them
is changing the way we think and interact with others.

IT IS NINe o’clockintheevening and a young woman, nestled in a sofa in her living room, is uploading photographs to Facebook and listening to music streaming from her iPad. After a few minutes, she flicks and pinches the screen to navigate to an ebook that she begins reading. An hour later, the woman clicks into the online game FarmVille to check on her cows, chickens, and cornstalks and see how much money she has accumulated since last logging on a couple of days ago.

Today, there is nothing incredibly remarkable about this scenario— unless you consider that every item the woman has viewed, heard, and interacted with resides entirely within a virtual world. She will never actually touch the photos, handle a CD, or feel the currency she has earned in FarmVille. These possessions do not exist in the physical world. They are simply bits and bytes that have been arranged to look and sound like actual objects.

Virtual possessions are changing our world—and our perception of reality. Today, ebooks outsell paperbound books, digital downloads have surpassed CDs in sales, and more than 2. 5 billion people around the world use digital cameras to snap a seemingly endless array of photos. Meanwhile, video and audio streaming services such as Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify deliver content on demand, and social media sites like Facebook document our lives in a way that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

“Our lives are becoming increasingly digital… more of the things we possess reside inside computers,” states Janice Denegri-Knott, a senior lecturer in consumer culture and behavior at Bournemouth Media School. “As possessions become virtual, we think about them and interact with them in entirely different ways. We find new

how we define ourselves is changing as the nature of our possessions changes.

 

ways to assign meaning to them and incorporate them into our lives.”

Virtual objects take shape

For nearly half a century, researchers have studied the way people view possessions. What is clear is that possessions help define who we are and what story we present to other people. What is easily overlooked, says Susan Kleine, associate professor of marketing at Bowling Green University, is that virtual possessions are very real—even if they reside only within computers. “There is a psychological appropriation that takes place as an individual connects to an object, item, or idea,” she points out.

In the past, bookcases, record racks, and framed photos strategically positioned around a house or office told the story of how we think, what and whom we consider important, and, ultimately, what type of person we consider ourselves. However, to a certain extent, physical objects such as vinyl LPs and photographic paper

Samuel Greengard

have always been a way to package content and put it into our hands.

Today, how we define ourselves is changing as the nature of possessions changes. Instead of creating a carefully constructed library in our house, we assemble a digital library on Goodreads.com and share it with others. Instead of creating photo albums, we post pictures on Facebook and YouTube. It is estimated that Facebook users upload 2. 7 million photos every 20 minutes. The average person has about 350 pictures at the site.

Further complicating things, entirely new artifacts exist. This includes online gaming avatars; instant message and text message streams; email; virtual currency and social media feeds, badges and awards. Increasingly, these things define our lives and our legacy. “They serve as psychological anchor points for our self-narra-tives, like souvenirs collected during the course of a journey,” observes Vili Lehdonvirta, an economic sociologist who is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics.

Nowhere is this transformation
more apparent than among young peo-
ple who have grown up in a digital world
and, in some cases, cannot relate to the
physical objects of the past. “A digital
photo or song has value for what it is,
but also for what you can do with it,”
says John Zimmerman, associate pro-
fessor of human-computer interaction
and design at Carnegie Mellon Univer-
sity. “The ability to tag a digital item,
comment on it, and share it makes it
more meaningful to some people.”
In fact, when Zimmerman and oth-
er researchers studied a group of 21
teenagers ( 12 girls and nine boys) in
2011, he found there is a growing be-
lief that digital possessions are more
valuable than physical possessions—
and that the social interaction sur-
rounding online objects can dramati-