Oberon Copeland
@veryinformed.com
Two-year-old Ayaansh Kumar went on a $2,000 shopping spree. How could a toddler go shopping? By playing with his mom’s cell phone. Mother, Madhu Kumar, loaded a lot of furniture into her online Walmart shopping cart. However, like many of us, she was engaging in what e-commerce gurus call “cart abandonment,” the phenomenon in which consumers put items in their virtual shopping carts and let them sit. Mrs. Kumar hadn’t decided to purchase the items and was surprised when box after box started arriving at her home. A bit of family detective work led to Ayaansh.
From a sociological perspective, Ayaansh’s mischievousness gives us an opportunity to shine a light on the concept of culture, the socially learned and shared ideas, behaviors, and material components of a society. There are two overarching categories of culture for us to consider. First, there is material culture, the physical artifacts that represent components of society. All the stuff in our collective virtual shopping carts not only costs e-commerce businesses upward of $18 billion in losses annually; they also fall under the rubric of material culture. Shoes, laptops, cat toys, chocolate candy, and water bottles are all examples of material culture. Simply put, material culture consists of those things humans create that you can physically touch.
In contrast, we have nonmaterial culture, ideas and symbols that represent components of society. In other words, nonmaterial culture is made up of those things humans create that you cannot physically touch. Marriage, democracy, and capitalism are all nonmaterial things you can’t touch, nor can they be added to a shopping cart, be it virtual or otherwise. As an aside, nonmaterial culture often has its material counterpart. For example, you can’t touch the concept of marriage, but you can touch a marriage license. You can’t touch democracy, but you can touch a voting booth. You can’t touch capitalism, but you can touch paper money.
There are several categories under nonmaterial culture. First, there are norms, established guidelines and expectations of behavior. If Ayaansh were older, one could argue that hitting the purchase button on someone else’s virtual shopping cart without their knowledge or consent would be a violation of a social norm. Next, there are values, collective ideas about what is desirable and undesirable in society. Values are what justify norms. The contents of Mrs. Kumar’s shopping cart didn’t just have economic value, they also had social value associated with the notion of having a nicely decorated home. After values, we have beliefs, ideas generally held to be true within society. The U.S. is a society based on consumerism and the belief that shopping or consuming goods and services is important to keep the economy working. Finally, the term consumer is an example of language, words and symbols used to communicate. Arguably, language is the most important characteristic of the human species because it allows us to communicate.
