David Beer and Roger Burrows

Scholars Beer and Burrows suggested in the Journal of Consumer Culture in 2010 that there was a new type of consumer influence by Web 2.0. Beer and Burrows hypothesized that there are patterns of capitalism on the web. These trends are similar to the ones reflected in what could be considered physical reality.

They mention that the new consumer should be called the craft consumer. The craft consumer is grappling with the inchoate conception of identity that arises when the traditional lines between the producer and consumer are blurred. Beers and Burrows briefly suggest that this is a stable consumer identity.

I cannot help but compare them to Walter Benjamin when he hypothesizes that the writer Baudelaire is pre-occupied with the self-same individual. The self-same individual is the literary subject and self-subject. who strives for individuality. Incidentally, both the postmodern and modern individual attempts to distinguish their own identity within a miasma of information.

For Benjamin, this was the world of the novel taking place amongst the death of poetry. For Beer and Burrows, it is against the backdrop of the modern web. The literary field has been transmuted to the web. Given the cult-like morning of Jobs that has occurred in the media of this past week, we can assume that the web is the new utopia of our society. In order to further investigate the web, we should look to the scholars who have studied utopias.

Scholar Christine Buci-Glucksmann published a piece back in 1984 that mentioned three types of utopia.

Buci-Glucksmann's Three Types of Utopia:

'Catastrophist' utopia

Anthropological utopia

Transgressive utopia

Her writings and further elaboration on the these themes are discussed in "The Utopia of the Feminine," an essay that appeared in Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Basically, Buci-Glucksman posits that there is a connection between the idea of the feminine and the perception of space, notably, how utopias are presented in writing. I would like to posit that her third type of utopia, the transgressive utopia, is what characterizes the current cultural genesis on the web.

This last type of utopia is contingent upon a "praxis of purely imaginal space" that "forces people to think together a number of apparent opposites" (94). Welcome, then, to the transgressive commericial utopia, emphasis mine with influence cited to Buci-Gluckman, Beer, Benjamin, Burrows, Jobs et al.