ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the growing digitalization of consumer practices from a perspective of how human and non-human actors come together in configuring some practices. It draws on practice theory – an accepted and growing area of work in consumer research – to introduce the foundational concept of human–non-human hybrids. The chapter focuses particularly on the ways in which consumers' cognitive abilities are apparently extended by and externalized to digital technologies and use the concept of the extended mind to develop this line of thinking. It also focuses on particular ways in which digital devices/software applications extend the mind, in terms of knowledge related to particular practices and their role in relation to imagination and memory. Inspiration for objects of desire is acknowledged as something that can be generated externally, for instance from the media, via observation of other people, through the Internet and various platforms associated with it.
