Inventories of material self, or object-oriented social networking

Some results from a small survey: 30 out of 56 people would like a better overview of their personal possessions.

8 min readMar 26, 2022

A while back, I asked a few friends, fellow students, and family members to help out with a small survey (14 questions) to shed light on my preliminary research questions — and I’m happy to share a couple of key takeaways here.

The survey is live and available here. Please feel free to have a look and answer the questions if you would like to help out and/or use it to ponder your digital-material self (if so, I recommend that you answer the survey before reading the information below).

Total respondents

Countries

Question: Which country do you live in?

Denmark: 38
United Kingdom: 8
United States: 6
Australia: 1
The Netherlands: 1
Luxembourg: 1
France: 1

Age

Question: What is your age?
Average age of respondents = 35 (Lowest = 19; Highest =73)

Gender

Question: How do you identify?

Female: 29
Male: 27
Non-binary: 0
None of the above: 0

How many (companion) objects ?

Question: How many physical objects that you would call ‘mine’ do you estimate that you currently own? If necessary, please take a minute to think about your answer.

~60% (34) estimated between 200 to 2000.

I want to dwell on this estimate for a bit, since it’s related to my interest in the number of objects people buy and live with, and how they relate to these objects through digital media (as I write about here about Dunbar’s number and the ‘material self’).

In my view, this is quite literally a form of object-oriented social networking — a person 👤 using a digital device 📱 to connect with objects 🎲 . Moreover, I’m interested in this kind of digital-material networking, because I also believe that it is important to enhance our understanding of how digital media mediate the participation of things in everyday life so as to build on Karin Knorr-Cetina’s understanding of ‘object-centered sociality’ or ‘object-oriented culture’ (Knorr-Cetina 1997) and Noortje Marres’s thesis of ‘material participation’ (Marres 2012; Marres 2010).

However, in contrast to fixating on the role of material objects in mediating human involvement in various activities and politics, I’m focusing on the role of digital media in getting people involved with objects.

Interestingly, the estimates provided here by 56 respondents are quite far from Frank Trentmann’s working assumption that an average German owns around 10,000 personal possessions, which might not be very different from the average among people living in other high-income OECD countries (which all our respondents do).

However, we do not know how accurate the respondent’s estimates are, and I also do not know how accurate Trentmann’s number is [1]. Notwithstanding, I find the estimates interesting. Presumably, most people in high-income countries share a similar material footprint (amount of primary materials used, which might reflect number of object owned) of around 0.3–0.4 kg per unit of GDP in 2017 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs).

On that note, the British artist, Michael Landy, made a rather remarkable piece of performance art in 2001, when he decided to inventory and destroy all of his possessions. At the time, he was 37 years old and owned 7227 objects — not far from 10,000. Indeed, since humans assembled in hunter-gatherer tribes around 12,000 years ago, we have produced, traded, used and collected artefacts for instrumental, aesthetic or spiritual reasons. This behaviour continues today on an increasingly massive scale.

Our intricate relationship with and fascination of things fuels cultures of production and consumption around everything from vital goods to instruments and quasi-sacred items of fashion [2]. Fields of human waste in Earth’s oceans and the global South are but two indications that societies are struggling with the accumulation of things, and the scope of this challenge is not decreasing: as was recently underscored by a group of researchers who found that global human-made mass now exceeds all living biomass (2020). To me, this finding clearly indicates that we need to improve our capacity to manage and live responsibly with nonhuman human-made stuff — that is, ‘companion objects and/or little monsters’.

Interest in overview of things people call “mine”

Question: Which of the following statements do you most agree with?

12,7% (7) agree: “I would like a better overview of ALL the physical objects that I call ‘mine’”
41,8% (23) agree: “I would like a better overview of SOME of the physical objects that I call ‘mine’”

Familiarity with RPG inventory management

Question: Are you familiar with inventory management systems in computer-based role playing games (RPGs)? (see examples in image below and please scroll down to answer)

I found this question particularly interesting, since the RPGs I have played somehow worked their way into my imagination and remains a frame of reference for my thoughts about digital-material selfhood and my research project. You can read more here about my thoughts on RPGs, material self and the digital-physical divide in the world of things, or tokens of the self.

In short, when I think about personal inventory management, I think of RPG-like inventory management systems. In relation to our small survey here, it would have been interesting if it showed 100% correlation between familiarity with RPG inventory management systems and respondent’s use of digital media to maintain an overview of things they call ‘mine’ (see below) — however, this is not the case. Still, it was interesting to see that some of the respondents actually do use various digital tools to maintain an overview of their physical possessions.

Use of digital media to manage possessions 1/2

Question: Do you use any computer programs (such as smartphone ‘apps’, websites, spreadsheets like Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel or other note-taking programs) to maintain an overview of your physical possessions (such as clothes, furniture, books, board games, tools, kitchen utilities, other)?

87,5% No
12,5% Yes

Use of digital media to manage possessions 2/2

Question: If you use computer programs to maintain an overview of your physical possessions: which do you use? (please provide comma separated answers if you use multiple programs, for example: “Excel, BoardGameGeek, Notion, …).

10 Responses
Some examples include:

Excel
Goodreads
GoogleSheets
Men Closet/Stylebook Men
Inventory folder with pictures on laptop
Apple Notes
Strava

Items people list in their digital inventories

Question: What type of product(s) do you mostly include in the program(s) you listed above? (please provide comma separated answers for multiple products: “Board games, outdoor gear, shoes, …).

7 Responses
Some examples include:

Art supplies
Bike parts
Books
Clothes
Electronics
Furniture
Items in the loft
Kitchen gear
Outdoor gear
Presents
Running shoes
Room decorations/photos

Interest in using a new smartphone or web application to keep an inventory of your physical possessions

Question: How interested would you be in using a new smartphone or web application to keep an inventory of your physical possessions (meaning objects you would call ‘mine’)?

Very interested: 7,1 % (4)
Not interested: 25% (14)

Question answered according to a scale from 1 to 5, where 5 = Very interested, and 1 = Not interested

5
7,1 % (4)
4
21,4 % (12)
3
26,8% (15)
2
19,6% (11)
1
25% (14)

Thank you for reading this far. I will update this article to reflect additional answers or new thoughts about the answers already provided.

To be continued …

[1] The statistical validity and work behind this number warrants a bit of scrutiny. The source of this number is not clearly disclosed by Trentmann. Notwithstanding and perhaps not surprisingly, the number has been reproduced as a talking point in reviews of Trentmann’s book (e.g. Spang 2016). Surely, the number is an illustrative proxy for the material object-saturation of our current social fabric, and Trentmann provided the number for context on the first line of the introductory chapter to his book Empire of Things. How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first (2016). Considering the authoritative appeal of numbers (quantitative data) in practices of knowledge dissemination and meaning-making (e.g. Porter 1995; Law 2009) it is interesting to see this number (’10,000’) travel into consumer research (Heilbrunn 2017:405) and reviews of Trentmann’s book by The Financial Times, The Times, and the Washington Post, who all highlight Trentmann’s statistic without further reference to its origin — as I do here.

[2] Two articles by one of my former teachers made a big impression on me back in 2011–12 on the nature of objects of fashion: Fashion Objects: Breaking Up the Durkheimian Cult (Schiermer 2011a) and Quasi-objects, Cult Objects and Fashion Objects: On Two Kinds of Fetishism on Display in Modern Culture (Schiermer 2011b). At the time, though, I was mostly interested in studying the dynamics of fashion to assess how these played out in the realm of politics and forecasting exercises, where certain facts, figures and tropes become ‘vogue’ and play a performative role in the political economies of climate change and environmental governance. I became especially interested in this perspective after reading Anders Blok’s PhD thesis Divided socio-natures. Essays on the co-construction of science, society, and the global environment (Blok 2010). I also had the pleasure of having Anders Blok as a teacher and supervisor during my sociology studies at the University of Copenhagen.

In terms of education, my journey has been multidisciplinary, fused with themes pertaining to human and nonhuman relations, especially between humans and socio-technical artefacts. My thesis builds on this educational experience and takes particular inspiration from my graduate studies in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance (NSEG) at the University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, and an exam paper I completed under the supervision of Sarah Whatmore in 2014. Whatmore’s class on Environmental Publics especially inspired me to explore what I thought of back then as ‘internet-mediated material participation’. As such, the NSEG programme provided an important stepping-stone in my journey towards developing my PhD project, and my perspective is especially inspired by the notion of more-than-human political philosophy developed by Sarah Whatmore and others (see eg. Whatmore 2002 and Braun and Whatmore 2010).