Buy It Now
Lessons from eBay
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- $28.99
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
In Buy It Now, Michele White examines eBay and its emphasis on community and social norms, revealing the cultural assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that are reinforced throughout the site. She shows how instructional texts, rule systems, and advertisements “configure the user,” allowing eBay to indicate how the site is supposed to function while also upholding particular values and practices. White details how eBay reinforces stereotypes about gender and sexuality, looking, for example, at descriptions included in wedding dress listings, and how eBay directs individuals to the “Adult Only” part of the website when they use the search terms “gay” and “lesbian.” She discloses the ways that eBay promises a caring community but its “Black Americana” category reproduces racism by allowing sellers’ narratives that excuse and romanticize slavery and insult African Americans. White also looks at how participants challenge eBay’s categories, rules, and values, examining widely used strategies of resistance by sellers and buyers in the lesbian and gay interest listings. By analyzing the organizational and cultural logics present in eBay, White emphasizes how other Internet settings, including craigslist, are not as transparent, community-oriented, and empowering as they claim. She proposes methods for researching and reconceptualizing new media sites.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"arly writings about the Internet tend to claim that everyone can connect equitably because of Internet-facilitated anonymity," writes White (The Body and the Screen), professor of communications at Tulane University, who quickly goes on to dispel this prediction of a new, nonjudgmental Web-based world. Her latest work a dense, academic analysis of how eBay and other Internet sites perpetuate and reinforce stereotypes scrutinizes various aspects of language and communication, including visual culture and organizational logic. Throughout this painstakingly researched text, White provides examples of gender and sexuality stereotypes including wedding dress categorization and symbolism, or "gay interest" sellers who are often linked to underwear and swimsuits within eBay that reinforce traditional gender role attitudes. She asserts that "gendered, raced, and sexualized subjects are imbricated in Internet settings," and wants to see further critiques along these lines within new media studies. While the scholarly examination of organizational and cultural logic is likely to have limited appeal to the casual reader, the book presents an intriguing look at sociological implications of new media.
