Consumer Voice

The Democratization of Consumption Markets in the Digital Age

S. Umit Kucuk

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030539825
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030539832
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

This book proposes a new type of consumer called a voicing consumer, or a voicesumer. This type of consumer is shaping our markets and marketing interactions with the advent of social networking sites in the digital markets. Described by the author as "real establishment of market democracy," consumer voice is gaining more importance in today's world, especially with the changes in communication technologies in markets. In defining the equalizing and democratic relationship between ordinary consumers and corporations, or any other regular company, the book highlights recent transformative experiences and cases in consumption cultures and consumer behaviors. Current theory discusses new types of consumer complaint behaviors, such as consumer activism and boycott, but this book fills a void by defining how these changes have created a new type of consumer. This new conceptualization of consumer behavior will advance scholarship for consumer behavior, psychology and marketing researchers.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. U. KucukConsumer Voicehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53983-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Voice

S. Umit Kucuk¹

(1)

University of Washington, Tacoma, WA, USA

Abstract

This chapter first discusses the physical or natural form of voice. The chapter defines the voice by discussing its relationships with the concepts of silence and noise with anecdotes in a holistic view. It explains when voice can turn noise and how silence can be reached through noise normalization when there is still perceived noise present. The chapter ends by discussing the differences between physical and inner voices as well as narrative or written voice to emphasize the importance of true value of voice in social relationships. Changes and potential transformation on these concepts with digital revolution are also discussed.

Keywords

VoiceSilenceNoiseInner voiceNoise pollutionNoise normalization

End Abstract

How wonderful is the human voice! It is indeed the organ of the soul. The intellect of the man is enthroned visibly on his forehead and his eye, and the heart of a man is written on his countenance, but the soul, the soul reveals itself in the voice only.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In the first seconds of a birth, first thing a newborn does a scream to push her/his lungs to get a fresh breath and hence a push-start for lungs to the duty will last for a lifetime. This is the first struggle to kick-start a baby’s little lungs, the first step to a new life, the first sign of the existence and hence the first shout out to a life. This is “voice.” The voice tells everybody in the operation room that the baby is alive and is here in this world. We all start our lives with this crying scream that brings joy and happiness to many. Nobody thinks that the new one is uncontrollably noisy and loud, but it is perhaps seen as a joyful and an uplifting voice. Either it is heard by many or not, this is the moment when the first voice has unconsciously just formed and filled everybody’s hearts and ears. This is the celebration of adding another breath and voice to the society. The one who might open the windows to the future filled with optimistic uncertainties and new expectations, hopefully to a happy one.

What happens when there were no baby screams and there was total “silence” in the operation room? What happens to those dreams about the new coming? Are they all gone and dead now? Everybody wishes to hear that first sound as that is the first sign of life, the first voice at that very moment. Otherwise, all the positivism and excitement turn into silence and anguish. What would you think? You probably think that there is something is wrong, perhaps the baby is not breathing, or she/he is dead. All the struggles and dreams are gone and hence wasted. A bad fortune for that little body and those who are waiting to hear that crazy crying screams, that sign of life. We all get sad if we do not hear those crazy high-pitch screams, and we all get silent. Thus, no sound, no voice means no life, no existence, no presence, no future, just a sheer nothingness and death for the creator of the voice and the others as well. It is just a stagnant moment, a simple dot in time points out nowhere without any purpose and direction. There is no continuum, it is just a dot, not a line. No noise, no voice means that you are simply not there at that moment at that space. You are nonexistent or are perhaps somewhere else, in another dimension, but just not there. Thus, we all die to hear that first sign of existence no matter how much loud it gets.

This was, in fact, the case of the first seconds and minutes of my life. My mom still tells the story that when I was born there was no baby screams no sound or no voice in the operation room. Mom still cries whenever tells this story and shares her joy she felt in her heart after doctors made me able to breathe and brought me back to life after a couple of seconds or a minute of complication. She says “when your screams echoed in the operation room, those are the best screams I’ve ever heard in my life. It was like music to my ears.” It was some point ironic to hear this story from my mom who she later always advised me not to raise my voice too much or jump into conversations unexpectedly, and in fact, asked me to be a calm-headed person all the time. Well, I turned a little bit vociferous than my peers in my early adulthood and got into some troubles, but I must admit that my incredulous nature helped me to be who I am now. Thus, I started to believe that we need to hear from rebellions and vociferous people in our societies so that we feel like we are alive and have different perspectives. We need to hear from everybody or every sector of the society so that we cannot fall into lies and deception in our constantly evolving societies. The more voices raise, the freer and more prosperous we, as a society, become. Voice, either peaceful or painful, is the sign of existence and is the window opening to unknown and future that we afraid to step into most of the time. In other words, if you kept your thoughts to yourselves, then there would be no progress and understanding what is right and what is wrong in the society. Thus, our problems will grow and grow until they control our lives and perhaps destroy our peace and everything value to us. Thus, voice is needed as it is one of our major life sources that shapes our lives, yet it goes unnoticed at most of the times. Why is that? And why can’t we appreciate the role of voice plays in our lives? How can we understand the importance of voice in our lives? I think we can get some answers to these questions by discussing and defining voice from different angles.

Voice

Voice is generally defined as sounds we, humans, produce in our local folds in the larynx. It is as unique as our fingerprints and carries some identification features of our personality, mood, and even health [23]. Sometimes such sounds can carry limited meanings and understandings such as screams that create sound waves that can create some sorts of physical awareness for every living object around us. In prehistoric times, we produce sounds to scare the predators away to hold our ground. That simple sound waves tell the approaching danger that “hey I am here, and this is my ground and I am ready to protect my ground, back it off.” Thus, it is the first signal to others other than visually just being there. Some roars scarier than others, thus reflect a fearless and confident stand while some others do not. Soon we discovered that the loudest the sound gets, the scarier we get and the safer we feel as we hopefully scare the approaching danger away.

Later we learned to train the sounds we make and classified such sounds in various categories so that everybody can easily differentiate peoples, ideas, and concepts from each other. Thus, different types of sounds can carry different meanings as we were able to attach different meanings and names to those sounds to objects, people, and concepts. This common agreement and understanding in sounds eventually helped us to develop languages and hence delicate and advance communication systems. The archaic function of voice helped us from our enemies in prehistoric times but can also be used as a communication tool when we are dealing with our own kind. In other words, voice is more than just a sound or a vocal expression, it carries meaning that has communicative value in a social setting. It carries the signs of intelligence other than just being a vocal sound with sheer emotions. It also reflects our emotions, fears, happiness, anger, and so on. Thus, voice is the backbone of our social systems, and the source of our collective conscious, in fact, is the very reason of our social existence. Without voice, there will be no communication and no social and individual existence, we would simply be destined to die out and extinct slowly and silently in time; and nobody would know it. All the intelligence and emotions we leave to the world after our time ends can only exist if they can communicate with other generations and hence voice quality. Such as the thousand years of old carvings on the walls of the Peck-Merle cave in Europe, the Sumerian tablets are carved in Mesopotamia, the hieroglyphics carved in pyramids in Egypt, basically everything said and thought before and after us. If those did not share their voices with us, we would not know what our ancestor were up to in old times. Thus, voice goes beyond present, and it could be a window opening to ideas, thoughts, opinions, stories and to the “time.” In some sense, the voice is a voyage in time and in fact into infinity. Yet, we do not understand the wisdom and the value of the voice we created in our society all the time.

Silence

Another way to discuss voice is by discussing the silence. General belief assumes that when there is no voice, there is silence. Or, if voice is 1 or a sign of existence, then zero is nonexistence or nothingness. But this might not be true all the time as silence can have various meanings and hence function in different ways compare to voice.

Silence is a relative subject and is more than just absence of sound or voice, and many times we don’t realize it until we have it. Similarly, Clifton [4] defines silence by using a metaphor of the space between trees in a forest. Most of the time, we do not notice the space between trees like silence and thus silence can be only understood through indirectly or contradictions to voice [17]. This, in turn, indicates very important and contradictory relationship between voice and silence. None of them can be defined without existence of the other as I will try to explain in this section.

Many believe that silence can be used as a sign of nothingness. But is there any difference between silence and nothingness? This view is defined by Clifton [4, p. 163] very well as follows: “If silence is distinguishable from nothingness, it is because silence is fundamentally not autonomous. In this respect, “made” silences are different from “real” silences, e.g., the silence of outer space.” In other words, if there is silence there could be something making noise, but in nothingness there is nothing that have potential to generate any sound or voice. Thus, nothingness is less than silence. In the “made-silence,” what you hear is actually the sounds in your ears, but in “real-silence,” you hear things in your mind. Those are two different things in this perspective. For example, I used to go camping by myself. I used to climb up mountains and find a peaceful spot to camp. A spot that is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Voice
• 2. Consumer Voice
• 3. Voicesumers
• 4. How to Voice
• 5. Voiceconomics
• Back Matter