The World of Daily Life

Abstract

Within social scientific research searching for products is overwhelmingly reduced and represented as an activity that is embedded in decision-making processes. This study shows that searching is extremely multimodally rich and complex and that structured stages of searching are the product of customers’ efforts to order this complexity in and through concrete actions. Importantly, it also shows that customers carry out these actions un-hesitantly in both physical Brick-and Mortar (B&M) shops and in web-shops. The paper concludes that descriptions of searching need to take the nature of the multimodal environment as well as customers’ approach and engagement with it into consideration: searching for products is multimodally rich and complex and yet it is simple. The study is situated within the broad fields of EMCA and Social Semiotics in multimodality. It is based on video-recordings and eye‑tracking recordings of customers’ buying practices in different kinds of (web)shops.