The author of Media Today offers "a trenchant, timely, and troubling account of retailers' data-mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics" ( The Philadelphia Inquirer ). By one expert's ...prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives' drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants—including Macy's, Target, and Walmart—is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations.Eye-opening and timely, Turow's book is essential reading to understand the future of shopping. "Turow shows shopping today to be an exercise in unwitting self-revelation—and not only online."— The Wall Street Journal "Thoroughly researched and clearly presented with detailed evidence and fascinating peeks inside the retail industry. Much of this information is startling and even chilling, particularly when Turow shows how retail data- tracking can enable discrimination and societal stratification."— Publishers Weekly "Revealing... Valuable reading for shoppers and retailers alike."— Kirkus Reviews
The Internet is often hyped as a means to enhanced consumer power: a hypercustomized media world where individuals exercise unprecedented control over what they see and do. That is the scenario media ...guru Nicholas Negroponte predicted in the 1990s, with his hypothetical online newspaperThe Daily Me-and it is one we experience now in daily ways. But, as media expert Joseph Turow shows, the customized media environment we inhabit today reflectsdiminishedconsumer power. Not only ads and discounts but even news and entertainment are being customized by newly powerful media agencies on the basis of data we don't know they are collecting and individualized profiles we don't know we have. Little is known about this new industry: how is this data being collected and analyzed? And how are our profiles created and used? How do you know if you have been identified as a "target" or "waste" or placed in one of the industry's finer-grained marketing niches? Are you, for example, a Socially Liberal Organic Eater, a Diabetic Individual in the Household, or Single City Struggler? And, if so, how does that affect what you see and do online?
Drawing on groundbreaking research, including interviews with industry insiders, this important book shows how advertisers have come to wield such power over individuals and media outlets-and what can be done to stop it.
Abstract
The communications field must challenge traditional understandings of media in the face of a transformation in the dynamics of capitalism that prioritizes the generation of value from data ...based on continuous surveillance. New advertising and data-processing developments mean that while the term media may continue to attach to the distribution of narratives, researchers must now conceive it as the convergence of message-circulation technologies with data-extraction-and-analysis technologies that are linked to everyday objects increasingly typical of our new mobile personalization era. In fact, nothing less than a radical revision of the boundaries of the communications field is required to adequately address the fundamentally altered social and economic order emerging from this ferment in the field of everyday life itself.
The voice intelligence industry is an emerging sector of society that involves smart speakers, car information systems, customer service calls to contact centers, and "connected-home" devices such as ...thermostats, home-security alarms and other tools. Linked to it are advanced machine learning and deep neural network programs that can discriminate prejudicially among individuals in ways that benefit the firms using their voice. This commentary explores the implications of these activities for journalism. For example, combining inferences about an individual's voice with a raft other information collected about that person might lead to a rearranging of the agendas of news articles, news videos, commercial messages, and even discounts differently for different people on the fly. The rise of voice will likely reshape programmatic advertising marketplaces as well as the more private ways journalism organizations work with a variety of branding engines to identify and persuade prospects. As these pieces of the new environment move into place, it is important for people who care about the future of journalism to consider how an era centering on voice-profiling might shape news agendas individuals receive, commercial messages that come with them, and interrelationships between journalism and commerce.
The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical framework for studying digital resignation, the condition produced when people desire to control the information digital entities have about them ...but feel unable to do so. We build on the growing body of research that identifies feelings of futility regarding companies’ respect for consumer privacy by suggesting a link between these feelings and the activities of the companies they benefit. We conceptualize digital resignation as a rational response to consumer surveillance. We further argue that routine corporate practices encourage this sense of helplessness. Illuminating the dynamics of this sociopolitical phenomenon creates a template for addressing important questions about the forces that shape uneven power relationships between companies and publics in the digital age.
We have all been to Web sites that welcome us by name, offering us
discounts, deals, or special access to content. For the most part, it feels good to
be wanted--to be valued as a customer. But if we ...thought about it, we might realize
that we've paid for this special status by turning over personal information to a
company's database. And we might wonder whether other customers get the same deals
we get, or something even better. We might even feel stirrings of resentment toward
customers more valued than we are. In Niche Envy, Joseph Turow examines the
emergence of databases as marketing tools and the implications this may have for
media, advertising, and society. If the new goal of marketing is to customize
commercial announcements according to a buyer's preferences and spending history--or
even by race, gender, and political opinions--what does this mean for the
twentieth-century tradition of equal access to product information, and how does it
affect civic life?Turow shows that these marketing techniques are not wholly new;
they have roots in direct marketing and product placement, widely used decades ago
and recently revived and reimagined by advertisers as part of "customer relationship
management" (known popularly as CRM). He traces the transformation of marketing
techniques online, on television, and in retail stores. And he describes public
reaction against database marketing--pop-up blockers, spam filters,
commercial-skipping video recorders, and other ad-evasion methods. Polls show that
the public is nervous about giving up personal data. Meanwhile, companies try to
persuade the most desirable customers to trust them with their information in return
for benefits. Niche Envy tracks the marketing logic that got us to this uneasy
impasse.
"Links" are among the most basic---and most unexamined---features of online life. Bringing together a prominent array of thinkers from industry and the academy, The Hyperlinked Society addresses a ...provocative series of questions about the ways in which hyperlinks organize behavior online. How do media producers' considerations of links change the way they approach their work, and how do these considerations in turn affect the ways that audiences consume news and entertainment? What role do economic and political considerations play in information producers' creation of links? How do links shape the size and scope of the public sphere in the digital age? Are hyperlinks "bridging" mechanisms that encourage people to see beyond their personal beliefs to a broader and more diverse world? Or do they simply reinforce existing bonds by encouraging people to ignore social and political perspectives that conflict with their existing interests and beliefs? This pathbreaking collection of essays will be valuable to anyone interested in the now taken for granted connections that structure communication, commerce, and civic discourse in the world of digital media. "This collection provides a broad and deep examination of the social, political, and economic implications of the evolving, web-based media environment. The Hyperlinked Society will be a very useful contribution to the scholarly debate about the role of the internet in modern society, and especially about the interaction between the internet and other media systems in modern society." ---Charles Steinfield, Professor and Chairperson, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University Joseph Turow is Robert Lewis Shayon Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. He was named a Distinguished Scholar by the National Communication Association and a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2010. He has authored eight books, edited five, and written more than 100 articles on mass media industries. His books include Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age and Breaking up America: Advertisers and the New Media World. Lokman Tsui is a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. His research interests center on new media and global communication. Cover image: This graph from Lada Adamic's chapter depicts the link structure of political blogs in the United States. The shapes reflect the blogs, and the colors of the shapes reflect political orientation---red for conservative blogs, blue for liberal ones. The size of each blog reflects the number of blogs that link to it. digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
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