Chapter 1: The Culture and Technologies of Profiling - Profiling Machines [Electronic resources] : Mapping the Personal Information Economy نسخه متنی

Chapter 1: The Culture and Technologies of Profiling

Overview

As we begin the new millennium, theories of government, citizenship, and even ‘‘representation’’ are coming under intense scrutiny. The demise of the cold war and the subsequent rise in separatist, ethnic, religious, and terrorist politics have focused much attention on the reconfiguration of social spaces and the new geopolitical order. Such territorial matters are made all the more complex by the rapid colonization of outer space (through telecommunications and weather and military surveillance satellites) and cyberspace (through both the Internet and intranets), the ongoing deregulation and decentralization of Western industrial state apparatuses, and the overwhelming predominance of the market. As a consequence, established definitions of nation, state, territory, citizenship, and consumption—all fundamental tropes of modernity—have been called into question. Thus, at a time when researchers and political pundits continue to discuss the dwindling opportunities for citizens to have their voices heard by government, consumers are increasingly ‘‘solicited’’ for their opinions and desires by geographically ubiquitous consumer feedback technologies.

Taking such technological, topographical, and political changes into consideration, Profiling Machines: Mapping the Personal Information Economy attempts to supplement the dearth of ideological and textual critiques of consumer culture in media and cultural studies with a technological and topographical understanding of consumer profiling, solicitation, feedback, and mapping technologies—highlighting the manner in which ‘‘consuming places’’ (Urry 1995) also serve as key sites of automated demographic solicitations. The analysis of prevalent trends in commercial and popular iconography (on screen, in print, or on strategically placed billboards) is placed within a digitized and networked information economy that increasingly requires consumers to exchange demographic and psychographic information for commodities and services.

In an era where two-thirds of all commercial campaigns ask for some degree of feedback from consumers (via sweepstakes entry forms, bar-coded discount cards, special club enrollment forms, online membership forms, and so on) (Woodside 1994, 26), the lack of any sustained critique of the topography of the new economy of consumption is startling. Based on its title, Andrew Wernick’s Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression (1991) seems to promise a study of the relationship between images, marketing campaigns, and emerging feedback techniques and networks. Although he recognizes a broader playing field and system of production, Wernick (1991, vii) (like many of his peers in the fields of media and cultural studies) restricts his analysis to the textual and ideological aspects of the visual image:

Promotion (my term for advertising and its practices taken in the widest and most generic sense) was a rhetorical form diffused throughout our culture. As such, it had come to shape not only that culture’s symbolic and ideological contents, but also its ethos, texture, and constitution as a whole.

The lack of a critical body of literature on the topography of consumer feedback technologies is not limited to the fields of media and cultural studies. Profiling Machines argues that recent studies on information ‘‘surveillance’’ also continue to downplay the important spatial and architectural dynamics of consumer-profiling technologies and examines (1) the increasing intransigence of consumer feedback techniques in digital and multimedia and (2) the increasingly routinized practices of consumer feedback techniques in everyday life, offering the raw materials for simulated maps of consumer markets.

Theoretically, this book focuses on debates surrounding Michel Foucault’s (1977) panoptic, ‘‘all-seeing’’ model of surveillance. Arguing for a ‘‘diagrammatic’’ method for studying both consuming spaces and consumer profiling and feedback technologies, the book rethinks Foucault’s institutional and architectural framework through Gilles Deleuze’s (1992a) thoughts on the circulation of information in decentralized ‘‘societies of control.’’ In so doing, the book attempts to connect the practices of everyday consumption with a broad information apparatus that forecasts and simulates sociospatial relationships and new media capabilities.

The term surveillance does not adequately capture the multiplicity of processes that request data by surveying and monitoring consumers and also by automatically collecting, storing, and cross- referencing consumers’ personal information with a complex array of other market data (such as production, distribution, and sales data). Nor does the term surveillance alone seem to capture the social significance of requiring the divulgence of personal information as a precondition for using new information and communication technologies such as digital television and the World Wide Web. Ultimately, what both requesting and requiring personal information highlight is the centrality of producing, updating, and deploying consumer profiles—simulations or pictures of consumer likes, dislikes, and behaviors that are automated within the process of consuming goods, services, or media and that increasingly anticipate our future needs and wants based on our aggregated past choices and behaviors. And although Foucault warns of the self-disciplinary model of punishment in panoptic surveillance, computer profiling, conversely, oscillates between seemingly rewarding participation and punishing attempts to elect not to divulge personal information. This blurring of punishments and rewards—subtle requests and not so subtle commands for personal information—is a reoccurring problematic in both social critiques and popular (fictional) treatments of consumer profiling.