Marketplaces are complicated object-rich systems. They consist broadly of three components: the items for sale, the physical space of the market itself, and the people performing the transactions. The basic marketplace theme is quite flexible and the manifestations of marketplace components changes depending on the medium of the market. Our society is moving from a completely physical real-world market to marketplaces that exist largely without physical manifestation.
The prototypical traditional marketplace is the bazaar, garage sale, swap meet, flea market, farmer's market. These marketplaces are composed entirely of physical objects and real-world interactions. The goods for sale are real physical objects, objects that a buyer can inspect and consider before purchasing. The marketplace is a physical meeting place, a space set aside for the particular purpose of trade. And the actual transactions are carried out in simple real-world interactions between people; the buyer and seller meet, shake hands, discuss prices, and settle the deal. The process is entirely physical and social.
In a typical transaction the commodities sold consists of items whose value is represented entirely by the physical object itself. When a loaf of bread is sold, the value of that commodity is the loaf of bread itself. But (except in barter) the opposite side of the transaction is money, tokens whose value is not in the physical form. The connection between currency and its value is tenuous. Its acceptance is now so widespread that we take it as second nature, but from an object point of view it is curious. The objects of money themselves, the bills and coins have no intrinsic value. Since the end of the Gold Standard they are not even proxies for some valuable object, their value is entirely by consensus. Even in the simplest most physical form of marketplace, we already accept one virtual aspect of the system: the value of currency.
Modern marketplaces have changed some of the shopping experience but have largely left the physical aspect of the traditional marketplace intact. The commons has been replaced by the mall. We no longer buy our oranges from Farmer Joe, they now come from somewhere else where oranges grow better and are sold to us in a supermarket. The specifics have changed but the marketplace is still largely physical. The purchased items are real objects, the arena of commerce is a physical space, we still make our purchases by talking to real people.
New communications media is making it possible to virtualize most of the aspects of the marketplace. We no longer need to go to the mall to buy a new shirt, we can now order it from a catalog. There is no need to walk down to the shop of a dollmaker, hundreds of porcelain dolls are available for sale on cable TV channels from the convenience of your home. It is now possible to shop from anywhere with a telephone.
Shopping at a distance creates a different consumer experience from the traditional marketplace. The physicality, the realness of the experience changes radically. The objects being purchased are no longer tangible, they are simply pictures in a catalog or on a TV screen. The money used to buy things is not even meaningless physical tokens: credit card numbers that point to some account in the financial networks are all that is needed. There is no longer a physical environment for the transaction, no space. The social aspects of shopping are largely absent other than the brief conversation with a salesperson in a phone call.
But companies that sell items to customers in their home make various efforts to replace the missing realities of the traditional marketplace. Home shopping channels on television, for example, make many uses of the affordances of their media (television and telephone) to create the feeling of a lively, social marketplace. Foremost, the objects themselves are displayed as well as they can be on television, lingering tracking shots on well-lit objects rotating for a full view along with elaborate, redundant physical descriptions. There are bizarre analogs of physical currency such as the ``video coupon'' displayed on the TV screen that is used for a special discount. The coupon is really just a special numeric code but it is presented as a section of the picture you could cut out and hand to the salesperson.
The sales milieu is carefully constructed to create a feel of place and sociability. The television sets tend towards homey comfort, a pleasant room that feels like an extension of the audience's livingroom. The salespeople are friendly and personable and address the audience directly: ``You're just going to love these Diamondique earrings, we chose them specially for this sale and you will look wonderful wearing them.'' Other people are brought into the home shopping experience in the form of counters showing how many shoppers have bought the object for sale. Even the voices of other shoppers are present, giving long testimonials of how wonderful the products are. The shopper is brought into the television marketplace, made to feel like it is a place inhabited by other people.
Shopping is poised to change again with the rise of Internet communication. The characteristics of the Internet medium are still very much undecided. Web pages somewhat resemble printed pages only there are many more publishers and the pages themselves can be hypertext structured and contain multimedia. Email lies somewhere between postal mail, telegraph, and telephone as a personal communication medium but email has unique characteristics of its own. And on the edges of the Internet there are realtime interactive services, chat systems and virtual worlds. All of this technology has the potential to enable many different shopping experiences.
But most of the marketplaces online today are unimaginative phantoms of the traditional private stores, classified ads and auction houses in the impoverished virtual space of the Web. Online stores are typically just a listing of items for sale along with prices and a salesperson contact (via telephone or email) to make the purchase. A buyer's experience in the online marketplace is removed from the physical reality. The objects are non-present (at best, represented with a picture), there is only the barest of environment (the disembodied world of the Web), and social interaction is limited to the necessary details of making the transaction.
The physical richness of a traditional marketplace or even the simulated marketplace of television shopping networks suggests various ways to augment shopping on the Internet, make it more familiar and comfortable. But before speculating on what shopping online could be like, one more step in the virtualization of the marketplace will be examined: Kasbah, a market where humans do not need to interact to make a transaction.
