Chapter 3: Consumption in the Network Age: Solicitation, Automation, and Networking - Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

Chapter 3: Consumption in the Network Age: Solicitation, Automation, and Networking

Overview

As the mediated world becomes increasingly cluttered with commercial appeals, corporate America has responded with a wholesale downsizing of jingles, slogans, and logos. Where there was once Kentucky Fried Chicken, there is now only KFC. Where General Hospital and The Young and the Restless once graced our screens, there is now simply GH and Y&R. Similarly, from the increasingly pervasive sphere of advertising, we now find logos, trademarks, and miniaturized symbols accompanying the promotional mantra of such disparate entities as Nike (‘‘Just do it’’), Pepsi (‘‘Get free stuff ’’), the nation-state of Canada (‘‘True north strong and free’’), or ‘‘the artist formerly known as Prince’’ (‘‘Party like it’s 1999’’). Today, however, a select group of corporations (largely blue-chip stalwarts such as Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, and McDonald’s) have bought so much space in various media—on football pitches, on the ice in ice hockey rinks, on Tiger Woods’s T-shirts, or at the eye level of our daily commuter routes—that they have effectively become a natural element of the landscape itself. Although the strategic placement of such condensed trademarks is a relatively recent phenomenon, other marketing techniques have for over a century attempted to locate, interact with, and capitalize on the habits and routines of probable consumers of particular products.

In their pursuit of demographic and psychographic information about relationships among producers, retailers, and consumers, advertisers and market researchers have condensed complex economic concepts into catchy buzzwords. An article in the Journal of Advertising Research, for instance, discusses the economic repercussions of the industrywide growth in ‘‘linkage advertising’’ in which particular images, symbols, or words become distinct messages that also provide consumers with complementary coupons, promotional contests, and 1–800 telephone numbers. The article notes that ‘‘two-thirds of all advertising in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other developed nations includes one or more ways for viewers, listeners, or readers to . . . request additional information on the product/service being promoted’’ (Woodside 1994, 22–32).

In his comments on the increasing importance of customer feedback on services and products, Rob Jackson (1993, 25) has argued that contemporary marketing techniques and strategies should implement an overall ‘‘out-in philosophy’’ based on a system of ‘‘in-bound production.’’ The active search and diagnosis of consumer and customer desires ‘‘out there’’ have been driven in part by obvious shifts in demographics, tastes, and trends and in part by a rethinking of the nature of the consumer market itself, which seems to mark a shift in contemporary marketing culture. With increased competition, market deregulation, and increased global trade, an advertising approach that targets its strategies and techniques to a single mass market is now viewed as increasingly costly and ineffective in a world defined by segmented markets. Building on a concept of the mass market that has played a pivotal role in the history of marketing and sales, market researchers have repositioned and redefined the concept within a production, distribution, and sales loop that seemingly incorporates the desires of the individual consumer. For instance, Stanley Davis (1987) coined the phrase mass customization to explain ‘‘the use of flexible processes and organizational structures to produce varied and often individually customized products and services at the price of standardized, mass produced alternatives’’ (Hart 1996, 13).

Christopher Hart (1996, 10) similarly argues that a comprehensive marketing strategy that builds on advertising must address the notion of ‘‘customer sacrifice’’—‘‘the gap between the ideal product-and-service benefits desired by customers and what they actually are able to purchase.’’ That there exists an ‘‘ideal’’ product or service would, however, presuppose an objective set of consumer desires, abstracted from the messages and values cultivated by the advertising industry. Davis’s notion of mass customization likewise suggests an ability to customize unique products for individual consumers—that is, to service markets of one.

Both assumptions, however, incorrectly assume that consumer feedback is consciously and willingly offered by consumers, consists of unadulterated opinions on products and services, and directly informs the production of commodities. In an age of networked computers, ‘‘consumer feedback’’ is continuously cross-referenced with production-related data as well as information on the distribution and sales of goods and services. As a result, consumer feedback now incorporates transaction-generated information that specifies the time, place, and ‘‘means’’ of purchase (credit card, check, cash, rebate)—information that can be used to refine the circulation and promotion of products and services toward probable consumers. This networked ‘‘multilogue’’ between marketers, consumers, and products has been greatly enhanced by computer and database technology (Loro 1995).

Recently, scholars of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have argued that the database is a new media form (Cubitt 2000, Manovich 1999, Poster 1991). We might even consider the database to be the unifying medium that binds together ‘‘multimedia’’ or computerized networks, particularly the personal computer and the Internet. Given the relatively decentered nature of the database, particularly compared to film and television, critics have tended to problematize traditional notions of authorship, narrative, and ownership (including intellectual property and copyright). Not surprisingly, many media and literary critics have argued that databases offer uniquely open-ended narrative possibilities, where readers inherently become writers and consumers become producers (Landow 1992). In other words, users read hyperlinked documents and also create links (and sub- sequent ‘‘paths,’’ narratives, or stories) of their own making. However, as I have recently argued (Elmer 2001), database technologies today, particularly hypertext-enabled ones, increasingly redefine cultural production in decidedly passive terms. Likewise, simply ‘‘browsing’’ the Web is now frequently equated with producing or writing (Wakeford 2000). Similarly, with respect to the collection of personal information in consumer databases, individuals are now more apt to have their behaviors, likes, and dislikes passively (or perhaps automatically) integrated into proprietorial (commercial) databases than to decide (pro)actively and consciously to offer their personal information.

Historically, consumer information has nonetheless played a significant role in rationalizing the spheres of production, sales, and distribution. James Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (1986), for example, traces the history and role of ‘‘mass feedback technologies’’ in American ‘‘commercial research’’ (the forerunner to marketing research). Early techniques of gathering customer feedback included magazine questionnaires (1914), house-to-house interviews (1916), attitude and opinion surveys (1929), indices of retail sales (1933), A. C. Nielsen’s media-audiences measuring system (1935), and George Gallup’s opinion poll (1936). And while researchers have used many of these techniques to question consumers about their likes and dislikes, recent attempts at gathering consumer intelligence have become increasingly more subtle and networked. Some would like to believe that responses to such solicitations have been largely voluntary, but the business sector— in its historical pursuit of full rationalization of all facets of business—has actively sought to automate the collection of personal information, increasingly within the very act of consumption. In short, the business sector has sought to bundle and automate the retail sale together with its solicitations for personal information from the consumer.

Of course, the bundling of solicitations into sales and increasingly other everyday ‘‘duties’’ (such as banking, making flight reservations, or renting a DVD or video) depended on a series of technological breakthroughs in computer technology. For example, the tabulation of demographic information in the ninth U.S. census (1870) offers an early glimpse into the power of collecting machine-readable data and of cross-referencing different sets of data to create increasingly timely demographic ‘‘pictures.’’ Although the technologies used in that census were often described in objective, mathematics-related terms (such as counting machines or tabulators), they categorized statistics that reflected a population that had already been limited by sex and race. The process of collecting information, in other words, assumed a degree of demographic coding that did not accord equal value or status to the pool of possible respondents.

The value of such demographic relationships was later enhanced when information about commodities and services was integrated or cross-referenced with consumer or sales data, eventually leading to real-time data-management systems. Changes in any element of production, distribution, or sales could subsequently inform others. The digitization of inventories themselves would, in the form of early bar-coding technology, pave the way for the identification of mobile commodities (via bar codes) and consumers (‘‘machinereadable’’ credit cards, discount memberships cards, and other forms of consumer identification cards). Thus, as commodities and consumer purchases could be traced and cross-referenced with geographic and temporal specificity, ‘‘point-of-sales’’ techniques began to sort consumers into taste groups, ‘‘clusters,’’ or ‘‘profiles’’ to continuously suggest like-minded commodities and services.