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Predicting what you'll do tomorrow: Panspectric surveillance and the contemporary corporation

Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: In an economy of rapidly mutating consumer preferences, new forms of surveillance have been developed within contemporary business. Increasingly, so-called “panspectric” techniques of predicting consumption choices, and tracking the shifting customer desires, are proving crucial for corporations trying to compete on the market place. Using the Deleuzian concepts of “assemblage” and “societies of control” as a point of departure, this paper explores how a new societal “diagram” is currently actualised in the marketing practices of contemporary corporations. This diagram emerges as the result of the concatenation of technological architectures (increased digital logging of everyday behaviours and data mining) and new perspectives on the human constitution; perspectives that dovetail nicely with contemporary social theory. Thus, social scientists are already complicit in the emergence of new modes of marketing-cum-surveillance.
Author: Karl Palmås
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1530648473
FWCI: 8.793
Cites: 59
Cited by: 54
Related to: 10