metaconsumer

English

Etymology

From meta- +‎ consumer.

Noun

metaconsumer (plural metaconsumers)

1. One who actively shapes the products that they purchase.
   • 1991, A. Fuat Firat, “The Consumer in Postmodernity”, in Advances in Consumer Research, volume 18:

     Some of the implications of the entrenchment of the metaconsumer in the era of postmodernity have been-recently recognized in the field of consumer research by researchers who are at the forefront of major leaps in methodological and theoretical movements in this field.

   • 1994, Leonardo - Volume 27, page 423:

     In a conventional relationship between designer and consumer, the consumer places orders; a metaconsumer works on par with a metadesigner as “co-author.”

   • 1996, Ulrike Schöneberg, Consumer Trends in Banking and Insurance, page 64:

     For "medium customers", the beginnings of the conception of the metaconsumer takes place on the base of many frustrations: the time of mistrust and the loss of privileges.

   • 2006, Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache:

     In the state of postmodern consumption, even producers-as-writers are transformed into metaconsumers whose response to new commodities such as the rental family is always masochistic, but is also highly creative.

2. One who consumes or seeks out aspects of consumerism; a consumer of the experience of shopping and advertising (as opposed to the products bought).
   • 1995, Rob Kling, Spencer C. Olin, Mark Poster, Postsuburban California:

     A metaconsumer is not only a consumer of products and symbols but also an active participant in the shopping spectacle.

   • 1997, Meryl Beth Rappaport, Remodeling Home Care, page 110:

     Increasingly businesses are the market targeted by managed care organizations; as purchasers of health insurance options for their employees, businesses are the new metaconsumers of health care insurance (Sacramento Bee, 1995; Marion Merrell Dow, 1995).

   • 1999, James A. Boon, Verging on Extra-vagance:

     Oh, an ardent hermeneut might try to distinguish his or her own experience as more intensively "pop" than that of less authentic metaconsumers passing through Coke's world.

3. A person, system, or organization that purchases something on behalf of a group of consumers.
   • 1999, Herbert Dawid, Nonlinear Dynamical Systems and Adaptive Methods, page 127:

     Most of these examples assume one producer and one consumer ( or aggregate them into one metaproducer and one metaconsumer ) .

   • 2021 November 2, Jessica Goodfellow, “Who will control the metaverse?”, in Campaign US:

     In other words, metaverse equals 'metacreator' and 'metaconsumer'.

4. One who consumes (destroys) the act or possibility of consumption.
   • 1997, Joseph Litvak, Michèle Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel, page 63:

     If it is possible thus to shift from a generically female consumer to a uniquely male metaconsumer (whose slaughter of the too-desirable peacocks would, however vainly, mark an all-consuming end of consumption itself) , this possibility has everything to do with the trick whereby Thackeray stages his consumption so that its feminizing—in a context of male rivalry, effectively homosexualizing—voractity gets transmuted into the distinguished distance, or the killing melancholic disavowal, constitutive, as Judith Butler has argued, of male heterosexuality itself.