Use Value as a Cultural Strategy against Over-Commodification: A Durkheimian Analysis of Craft Consumption within Virtual Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Craft consumption is a precarious practice since consuming mass commodities can inadvertently reinforce the overly commodified world craft consumers are seeking to balance and address. Conceptualizing guitar players as craft consumers, this article illustrates the struggle for balance within musical virtual communities. Virtual communities’ commodity discussions can fuel commodity desire and foster a type of consumptive anomie that members call ‘GAS’ (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). This anomie is countered by images, norms, and evaluative standards that critically invoke ‘use value’ to regulate member’s consumption. Using Durkheim’s concepts of ‘social facts’ and ‘discipline’, the article examines how online actors ‘use use value’ to curb their anomic consumption, differentiate craft from mass consumption, and critique problematic consumptive acts. Durkheim’s work, however, illuminates how Campbell’s individualistic and psychological account of consumptive desire limits his own analysis of craft consumption, for such an individualistic understanding cannot account for the collective phenomenon witnessed throughout this article.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".