The Customer Commodity: An Analysis of Power Relations Between Companies and Consumers

Abstract

From the Faculty Nominator: While Orwell’s concept of “Big Brother” has served as the dominant metaphor for modern surveillance and concentrated power, in reality contemporary surveillance practices are better represented by the idea of “little brothers” and distributed powers. We often bristle at what we perceive as the intrusiveness of big government into our daily lives, but it is really more characteristic of big business. Large trans-national corporations collect vast amounts of detailed information on populations, consumers, customers, and clients to better enhance their efficiency, predictability and control in a globally competitive market. The databases that result from such data entries become tremendously valuable in themselves and are sold or cross-matched through a dense network of information brokering. Those whose personal information is collected, most often without their knowledge, become abstracted data-subjects housed in impersonal grids of dataveillance. The portent of this exponentially increasing information trove is the subject of Lucie Ferguson’s sober study of the “consumer as commodity.”