I have always wanted unboxing to get more attention than it does. It’s not just the fetishization of the object that seems so intriguing to me, but also what almost amounts to an unexpected rebirth of the object’s ‘aura’.
Thankfully, my pal Greg J. Smith, who writes the great Serial Consign, has tackled the subject. Rather than the glib Russell Smith-esque treatment (sorry, Matt!), in this great post, he gives it a more subtle, careful look.
The post has some great videos, including artistic takes on unboxing, that make it well worth the read, particularly because it also thinks about unboxing’s partner, the teardown (which it seems is a different sort of fetishisation dedicated to deymstifying the ‘aura’ of devices like the iPhone).
There is still lots of things to think about too. The public nature of unboxing feels key; why is there this performance for other people? Is it conspicuous consumption. Or, is it related to what Greg astutely points to as the quasi-religious nature of the reverence involved? Is there some shared sense of awe in the fetishization of the objects in play? (It has to be objects in the plural too, right? It’s not just the thing in the box. It’s the box itself, the packaging, the manual etc.)
Anyway, I would write on this more but I just connected Walter Ong, Descartes and #hashtags while on the bus a couple of hours ago, so I’m gonna’ put my rather limited brain capacity toward that right now…
#1 by Greg J. Smith on August 12, 2010 - 11:15 am
I hadn’t seen the Russel Smith piece, it is indeed quite harsh. I do find unboxing quite troubling but I think it might be more productive to consider why some of these videos have 750,000 views than proclaim “the losers making the videos live in dumpy basements.” Frankly though, I’m baffled as what is going on within this practice. In drawing from my own experience the only point of reference I have is the excitement of Christmas when I was about 10.
Maybe what unboxing really represents is acknowledging that the branding of an object extends beyond the device itself and that the ‘first moments’ with a gadget are now somehow important. On that note, I wonder if people making these videos film the birth of their children.
#2 by Melissa on August 12, 2010 - 5:30 pm
Interesting that you’ve got a photo of Mme Tour Eiffel heading this post. Are you suggesting that there is an objectum sexual aspect to people’s relationships with their technology? I certainly know people who name and anthropomorphize their phones and computers, although that seems to be about as far as it goes. Have you seen the documentary? Weird and lovely.
#3 by m on August 16, 2010 - 6:53 pm
Apology not excepted. I think Russel Smith is close, but he doesn’t really explain the fetish. The fetish (as opposed to the symptom) is the thing we KNOW isn’t actually what we want, but which nevertheless contains enough residue to please us anyway. It’s a conscious fooling of our pleasure systems. We all know money isn’t real, for example, but it works very, very well within the particular fantasy frame of capitalism, so we’re ok with that. It’s really the same phenomenon as teenagers sitting around a table taking “facebook porn” pictures of each other all night. The actual experience is entirely emptied out in favour of the public display of happiness in the images. Those teenagers KNOW on some level that the pictures are fake, but they also know that the experience through the lens will, in some sense, be more satisfying than the unpredictable disappointments of reality. I think we all know the weird near-disappointment of opening something we’ve wanted for a long time. Unboxing videos, in making it fake, making it a performance, actually assure us that the experience will function on some level as real, as “good enough.” You can tell exactly who they’re “addressing” when you consider what they do. To the consciousness they imagine watching, EVERYTHING about the experience gains real meaning and value, even the warranty card.