This article examines corporate struggles to reorganize retail environments around the data capturing and processing affordances of digital media. We argue that ongoing transformations in digital retailing reflect and extend the rise of social discrimination around what might be called ‘the quantified individual’. By quantified individual, we mean the hyperfocus on the qualities of the individual person rather than on even the communities or segments relating to people. Drawing on the writings of Charles Taylor, Antonio Gramsci, and Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, we use the ongoing corporate refashioning of the general meaning of ‘loyalty’ via the discourses and technologies of retailing as an important example of how a new social imaginary takes form and instantiates social discrimination as normal. For consumers, mobile apps and social-media profiles become venues for performing loyalty and accumulating rewards. For retailers and marketers, digitalized storefronts become like factories for generating data about where individuals go, what they buy and how firms define them. The process is transforming the architecture of physical and digital retailing, and the relationship between the two, in ways that make the selling environment increasingly dynamic and mutable for the individual prospect. We argue that shorn from their 20th century role in the democratization of pricing, stores will become centers of discrimination-related stress as dueling shopper and retailer technologies reach sometimes diverging conclusions about how to encourage loyalty, whom to reward for loyalty, and how.

This article develops a critical analysis of Instagram’s influencer economy by introducing and unpacking a phenomenon we call shoppable life. The term shoppable life is intended to capture the ideas that: (a) social media users perform lifestyles whose constituent elements can be bought; and (b) sociality increasingly unfolds within platforms that encode marketplace logics and capacities into their designs. Drawing on literatures about consumer culture, celebrity, and digital labor; interviews with 25 participants in Instagram’s influencer economy; and industry texts, we elucidate the power dynamics and contradictions manifested in constructing a shoppable life. We emphasize how social media users navigate the imperative to produce an “authentic” but branded and monetizable self, the personal risk they bear in doing so, and the stakeholders who mediate and profit from these productions. We also highlight conceptual points of entry for critical attention to the logic of shoppability, which increasingly pervades spaces and cultures.

Programmatic advertising describes techniques for automating and optimizing transactions in the audience marketplace. Facilitating real-time bidding for audience impressions and personalized targeting, programmatic technologies are at the leading edge of digital, data-driven advertising. But almost no research considers programmatic advertising within a general history of information technology in commercial media industries. The computerization of advertising and media buying remains curiously unexamined. Using archival sources, this study situates programmatic advertising within a longer trajectory, focusing on the incorporation of electronic data processing into the spot television business, starting in the 1950s. The article makes three contributions: it illustrates that (1) demands for information, data processing, and rapid communications have long been central to advertising and media buying; (2) automation “ad tech” developed gradually through efforts to coordinate and accelerate transactions; and (3) the use of computers to increase efficiency and approach mathematical optimization reformatted calculative resources for media and marketing decisions.

Ubiquitous connectivity to networked information-communication technologies increasingly mediates social experiences of markets and retail environments. These conditions lead some marketing scholars to conclude that digital media are reaching their inevitable culmination: an omnipresent marketplace. They call this “ubiquitous commerce” (u-commerce). U-commerce annihilates constraints over markets; borders, cultural differences, and geography cease to impose friction on exchange. As part of a broader understanding of new media and marketing, u-commerce deserves attention from critical communication studies. In foregrounding concerns of space, time, and consciousness, u-commerce exemplifies a commercial theory of media and invites critique at the nexus of medium theory and political economy. The work of Harold Innis is uniquely suited to this task. This article contextualizes and identifies biases in the conceptual systems and infrastructures of u-commerce.

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