ABSTRACT
You open your Internet browser and make your way to https://www.amazon.com. Before you even reach your destination, you are under surveillance. Cookies in your computer, there since your previous visits to the website, identify you to personalize your return to Amazon.com’s homepage. “Hello, Peter. We have recommendations for you!” The list of default advertisements is customized to a rubric of your tastes and interests based on your purchase history. One offers photo albums. This reminds you of a conversation with your son the day before. He suggested that you upload your personal photographs to SmugMug for easy online storage. You open a new tab in your Internet browser and make your way to the SmugMug homepage. “Hello, Peter. Click here to donate.” How do they know your name? You empathize with the charitable request for donations and get your credit card details ready. But there is no need. Even though you have never before visited this website, it already has a record of these personal details. This illustrative consumer experience with Amazon.com and one of its partner websites is not
mere fiction; neither is it conspiratorial. While the aspects of ‘being watched’ are not specific to Amazon.com, this e-store’s ubiquity in the realm of digital consumption renders it an apt case study. It serves to highlight the relationship between digital consumption and surveillance. The intention of surveillance studies, as we show, is not to assume that technologies, such as those of Amazon.com, are necessarily invasive or even sinister. Neither is it to suggest that the effects of surveillance, as discussed in this chapter, are assumed in all cases where the technological potential of surveillance exists. Rather, the aim of this field of study is to situate a deeper understanding of technology within the realm of the socio-political and economic consequences of ‘surveilling’ and of ‘being surveilled.’ Here, then, surveillance refers to a focused and systematic attention to personal details for the purpose of marketing, of producing purchasers, constructing consumers. Although the effects of the database-driven ‘gaze’ are reduced when paying with cash at a
downtown store, doing so is less convenient for many people than paying with debit, credit or
loyalty cards. In cases of embodied transactions, there is neither a record of who buys what nor of the relationship between the buyer and the good that is purchased. However, when paying with plastic at a local store, or online, the electronic mediation of the transaction renders it digital consumption. The relative ease of anonymity which is possible when purchasing with cash is absent once transactions are digitally mediated. In the same way that every use of, for example, an e-book generates a copy which enforces control for copyright owners, the digital mediation of transactions generates footprints of the respective activities (Lessig 2005, p. 50). This digital mediation not only serves the interests of convenience and security for many consumers. It also seems to create incentives for the influence over, as well as the management and control of, information flows; assiduous attention to consumer habits by those with vested interests; customized marketing, and objectifying consumers to be willing agents of such marketing (Lyon 2002; Andrejevic 2004). What are the sociological characteristics of these surveillant dimensions that have come to
shape digital consumption? Eli Pariser’s (2011) popular “filter bubble” analysis provides a useful starting point for a large part of our argument. Pariser argues that social media create “filter bubbles” that, technically, are the creation of matrices of individualized web-user information by codes. More directly, they are the result of companies using algorithms to guess through selection what information users would like to see, based on their past clicking, search behaviour and location. Much so-called self-looping and fragmentation does indeed occur as a consequence of personalization. However, there are further social consequences of digital consumer surveillance. Thus this chapter begins with “customized consumer surveillance and categorical marketing,” moves to “the naturalization of surveillance” and then asks “who benefits from Amazon.com?” The intention is that these sections will provide clear overviews of the most recent literature in the field, the relationship between digital consumption and surveillance, and the likely direction of this relationship. This is a social understanding of surveillance rather than one that is technical and software-driven. The first task, however, is to briefly outline key moments in the history of database marketing.
