Algorithmic consumer culture

ABSTRACT

This article conceptualizes algorithmic consumer culture, and offers a framework that sheds new light on two previously conflicting theorizations: that (1) digitalization tends to liquefy consumer culture and thus acts primarily as an empowering force, and that (2) digitalized marketing and big data surveillance practices tend to deprive consumers of all autonomy. By drawing on critical social theories of algorithms and AI, we define and historicize the now ubiquitous algorithmic mediation of consumption, and then illustrate how the opacity, authority, non-neutrality, and recursivity of automated systems affect consumer culture at the individual, collective, and market level. We propose conceptualizing “algorithmic articulation” as a dialectical techno-social process that allows us to enhance our understanding of platform-based marketer control and consumer resistance. Key implications and future avenues for exploring algorithmic consumer culture are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Algorithms
• consumer culture
• AI
• digital platforms
• surveillance
• consumer resistance

Acknowledgments

An early version of this paper was presented at the 10th EIASM Interpretive Consumer Research workshop, hosted in 2019 by EMLYON Business School, France.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The notion of agency here refers to “the physical or mental ability, skill or capability that enables actors to do something. The actor is assumed to proceed under his or her own volition, or at least without the permission of others” (Arnould 2007, 97).

2 We propose algorithmic articulation to differ from “articulation” as broadly defined by du Gay et al. (1997) before the advent of algorithmic media. While articulation refers to any cultural negotiation process that connects disparate elements together in a specific cultural circumstance (for instance, a lifestyle expression), thus privileging human sense-making, algorithmic articulation is a techno-social process mediated and actualized by the opaque, authoritative, non-neutral, and recursive actions of automated systems. A characteristic of algorithmic articulation is the sheer speed of calculation and computing power, that allows to extract and connect elements in a blink of an eye – which is likely to accelerate the articulation processes at hand.

3 As Mary Douglas (1966, 94; cited in du Gay et al. 1997) puts it: “order implies restriction; from all possible materials a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize it is destructive to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power.”

4 See Mark Zuckerberg's statement on the change of the Facebook newsfeed in 2018: about.fb.com/news/2018/01/news-feed-fyi-bringing-people-closer-together

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Massimo Airoldi

Massimo Airoldi is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan, Italy. Previously he worked as researcher and Assistant Professor at the Lifestyle Research Center of EMLYON Business School, France. He is the author of Machine Habitus: Toward a Sociology of Algorithms (Polity, 2022).

Joonas Rokka

Joonas Rokka is professor of marketing and director of Lifestyle Research Center at EMLYON Business School, France. His research examines consumer culture, experience, busy lifestyles, digital technology, brands, and creative visual research methods.