Hoang Q and Lascaux A (2024). Technoscape and Digital Dependency: Consuming Technology in a Ubiquitous Digital Era. 12th EIASM Interpretive Consumer Research Workshop.

We are living in a ubiquitous digital era where the latest technologies and their darker impacts are
being normalised, accepted, and embraced in almost all corners of life. In this strange new world,
digital dependency has become a widespread disease, a “normal” condition that increasingly more
people, if not most of us, are experiencing (Lambert et al., 2023). Academic discourses, ironically,
have often treated this phenomenon as a personal pathology, an “addiction” or “disorder”, that
belongs to particular individuals (“there’s something wrong with their body or brain”) (Camiloglu
et al., 2022). Pointing to individuals’ genetic or neurophysiological defects, such research has
narrowly framed digital dependency as a personal matter of (lack of) self-control and
responsibility. That is, certain consumers lack willpower and therefore are unable to impose self-
restraint over their digital interaction (Peters and Bodkin, 2007). Nevertheless, within today’s
pervasive and invasive digital environment, exercising self-control – or consuming “responsibly” –
is an increasingly difficult if not impossible task for an average consumer (Hoang et al., 2022).
Thus, pointing to consumers themselves and their own problems risks missing a nuanced and
comprehensive understanding of this ubiquitous phenomenon.
In redressing this research gap, this study aims to reveal the complex reality of consumers’ digital
dependency by exploring: (1) consumers’ lived experiences of an excessive attachment to the
digital sphere; and (2) how such experiences are shaped by the digital environment in which they
live. Drawing upon previous digital sociology and marketing literature on market-mediated
capitalist technoscape (e.g., Berardi, 2009, 2015; Denegri-Knott et al., 2022; Darmody and Zwick,
2020; Hietanen et al., 2022; Hoang et al., 2022; Van Dijk, 2012) and empirical data from 32 in-
depth interviews with heavy digital users, we seek to understand how consumers’ entanglement in
this technoscape might have various “darker” lived consequences. More particularly, we seek to
bridge our extant critical understanding of various problematic aspects of contemporary
technoscape and consumers’ lived reality of excessive digital consumption, and ask: How is
excessive digital consumption experienced by consumers in their everyday interaction with digital
technologies? and, how is digital dependency produced and reproduced within the contemporary
technoscape?
In answering these questions, we reveal the lived reality of digital dependency as being
underpinned by three key contours which result from consumers’ entanglement in today’s market-
mediated capitalist technoscape: (1) technoscape inescapability and networked dependency; (2)
technoscape manipulation and habituated dependency; (3) technoscape seduction and escapist
dependency. In doing so, we theorise digital dependency as a kind of environmentally induced
consumption (“technoscape-induced consumption”) which is co-produced and proliferated by
various actors and forces within the ubiquitous digital environment. Moreover, we show how
digital dependency is lived and felt as a field of perpetual tension, struggle, and entrapment as
consumers encounter enduring negative experiences with digital excesses yet often find themselves
repeatedly failing to overcome such experiences (also Denegri-Knott et al., 2023). Such
theorisation allows us to move beyond the predominant individualistic and/or pathological
framework of excessive (digital) consumption and treats this as increasingly ungovernable
consumption that emerge as natural products of a market capitalist environment – one that
promotes consumption excesses in the first place (also Hoang et al., 2022; Lambert et al., 2023). In
navigating their entanglement in this technoscape, consumers often feel “trapped” in all-pervasive
sociocultural, interpersonal and market pressures – ones that eventually bring them back to the
digital sphere and perpetuate their digital dependency.