Chapter 2, for instance, explicitly questions the continued application of Foucault’s disciplinary panopticon as a productive model for the contemporary study of personal information (demographics and psychographics). At the heart of the matter is Foucault’s (and others’, including at times Deleuze’s) insistence on the larger societal, geographical, and simulational dimensions of the panoptic mode of surveillance. Emphasizing the simulational element of panopticism, Foucault refers to the carceral model as merely a ‘‘diagram’’ of power, indeed one that was never realized by its designer, Jeremy Bentham. Other than this one reference, Foucault does not explicitly return to the question of simulation, surveillance, or the geography of new information technologies. It is consequently Deleuze and Guattari, individually and collaboratively, who push the limits of Foucault’s architectural metaphors and who redefine the ‘‘diagram’’ in simulational terms as a process or ‘‘modulation’’ rather than a particular ‘‘mold’’ (Deleuze 1992a, 4). A central metaphor that Deleuze, in particular, mobilizes in support of his diagram is the map, a model (or ‘‘machine’’) of signification that engages in an incessant process of redefinition. This chapter consequently puts the materialist pretensions of Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari’s diagrammatic philosophies to work on the various modes of data accumulation, diagnosis, and simulation in the geodemographic economy.
Chapters 3 and 4 of the book turn to a more schematic approach to the spatial and technological understanding of feedback technologies. Chapter 3 provides a historical perspective on particular technological innovations that originated in the business and government sectors and that have facilitated both the automation and networking of feedback technologies, integrating the consumer’s demographic and psychographic data into a production, distribution, and sales ‘‘loop.’’ Going beyond purely visual critiques of consumer culture and advertising, this chapter traces the various techniques and technologies of consumer solicitations, beginning with the American census in the late nineteenth century. The key component in this historical study is the means by which such solicitations are automated into computer networks, particularly those connected to other spheres of commercial and governmental decision making and marketing. Drawing on other examples— such as warranty cards and point-of-sale technologies such as rebate or membership (bar-coded) cards—the chapter discusses the manner in which the act of consumption is increasingly defined by the decentralization and routinization of various solicitation techniques and by the production of computerized networks of such transaction-generated information (such as consumer databases).
Building on this topographic and networked understanding of consumption, chapter 4 then moves to a discussion of how geodemographic mapping software forecasts or simulates spatial patterns of consumer markets (among a host of other variables relating to production, distribution, and sales). The chapter begins with a basic discussion of the various categories of personal information and moves on to explicate the spatial implications of profiling. The process by which psychographic categories are created subsequently sheds light on the attempt to discriminate individuals by their particular lifestyles—a culmination of many cross-referenced variables. Such categories form the basis or rather the ‘‘target’’ for most if not all contemporary marketing campaigns, services, and products. Yet without geodemographic information, in particular, the diagnosis and ultimately the use of such profiles would be greatly limited. This chapter therefore highlights the means by which such lifestyle-defined, psychographic profiles are cross- referenced with geographical sources of information (such as zip codes or school and electoral districts), continuously producing computer-generated maps of probable consumer markets.
Chapters 5 and 6 of the book focus on a pair of case studies—a marketing event in the Canadian Arctic (Molson’s ‘‘Polar Beach Party’’) and the use of ‘‘cookies’’ to collect personal information from Web users. The Polar Beach Party described in chapter 5 is a marketing event that interrupts the predictable flow of commercial iconography in everyday life. It highlights the tension between the wealthy event attendees from the United States and southern Canada and the demographically authentic, though psychographically insignificant, indigenous peoples of the Canadian Arctic. Chapter 6 takes the hypertextual environment of the Web as its focus. Building on the historical trajectory of automated and networked feedback outlined in chapter 2, this chapter first discusses the manner in which particular technologies (such as spiders, robots, intelligent agents, and cookies) format the hypertextual spaces of the Web in a way that automates the process of demographic solicitation. With these new technologies, a mere ‘‘browse’’ of a particular Web site automates the transfer of certain demographic information (such as address, length of visit, and links followed) from the user to the producer and thereby further redefines the act and definition of ‘‘consumption’’ and the possibilities of discriminatory practices. It is also noted that the tracking and surveillance capabilities of cookies have spawned a series of like- minded strategies by computer and Internet industries. chapter 7) with an attempt to politicize the topographical dimension of the ‘‘habitual’’ (as articulated in the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau). Responses to profiling technologies, as a whole, must take into consideration the more pervasive ‘‘default culture’’—the systematic incorporation of technological choices in absence of consumer responses. These default settings inevitably entrench economic and political interests (consider, for example, the bundling of Microsoft’s Web browser). A critical understanding of the discriminatory power of contemporary, ‘‘cybernetic capitalism’’ (Robins & Webster 1988) is therefore best served by questioning the everyday, spatialized routines that increasingly intersect with networked consumer and governmental databases, computerized maps, and mass-mediated images of the landscapes that we—and so-called others—inhabit.
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