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Shopping and the Datafied World

Sun, May 27, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton Old Town, Floor: M, Mozart I

Abstract

This paper will describe the gathering momentum and social implications of data-gathering technologies for shopping in the home and outside the home. As online shopping has accelerated, the competition between brick and mortar merchants and internet sellers for customers is centering increasingly on the belief that ‘personalization’ is a key to shopper ‘conversion’. Retailers and their consultants believe that successful personalization means the application of as many data points as possible about individual shoppers to complex algorithms that can then suggest the best tailored rhetoric with which to surround the individual. The result has been the development of technologies that use various tracking tags online and in apps along with WiFi, GPS, cellular triangulation, RFIDs, BLE, and other technologies in physical stores to gather data about individuals and send personalized discounts and other messages to their digital devices at algorithmically-determined appropriate moments. Complementing these development is the rise of a domestic ‘internet of things’ — that is, home-based connections of everyday objects such as televisions, thermostats, lights, and refrigerators to the internet (and sometimes to each other) via embedded chips. Increasingly central to these activities are digital assistants (most prominently Amazon Echo and Google Home) that act as central switchers for the various interconnections as well as sales vehicles through nascent voice-driven artificial intelligence. Both the switching and sales activities allow Amazon, Google and other hub creators to add data points to their understanding of people’s interests and lifestyles. Taken together, the multifaceted retailing activities are reshaping the ways companies construct shoppers, and creating a new environment of discrimination through which shoppers will be purchasing products. Moreover, the developments have profound implications for the ways people see themselves and their opportunities in society—issues that lie at the heart of democracy.

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