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

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.

Predicting, securing and shaping the future: Mechanisms of governance in online social environments

“…Thus, governments may seek to mine data, using algorithms, to identify a 'potential terrorist' -someone who has not broken any laws and yet, through algorithmic scrutiny, becomes a target of security forces and may be pre-emptively detained. Palmås (2011) identifies the assemblage of the panspectron as the new mode of surveillance to emerge from all the data mining of our communicative practices. Using as a foundation Deleuze's characterization of 'societies of control' in which 'Human subjects are subjected to continual logging of behaviours as [they] pass through interlocking networks of monitoring' (Palmås 2011: 342), he goes on to outline how these overlapping networks of surveillance are ubiquitous, and thus it becomes more useful to ask not 'what data is being collected?…”

“…The dynamic relations between governments, corporations and citizens are being renegotiated, and it is necessary to consider what forms of government regulation are possible or likely in these new contexts. To analyse how the current practices and discourses associated with the socio-technical assemblages of online social worlds work within the broader political economy this article considers discourses associated with risk and security (Dean 2010), practices and discourses associated with algorithms (Gillespie forthcoming 2014) and the new shape of 'predictive surveillance' in the form of panspectralism (Palmås 2011). Each of these theorists considers the shift in the focus of both governments and corporations to predicting peoples' behaviours, albeit with slightly different ends in mind.…”

Big Data in Organizations and the Role of Human Resource Management

“…The difference in access, however, leads to "asymmetric sorting processes and different ways of thinking about how data relate to knowledge and its application" (Andrejevic 2014(Andrejevic : 1676. Especially in the context of predictive analytics (Shmueli & Koppius 2011), people or algorithms with access to data can potentially influence those without access to such data (Palmas 2011).…”

Equipping entrepreneurs: consuming credit and credit scores

“…This is a problem that is grounded in the history of consumer credit, where previous periods of spectacular step-wise expansion, such as in the 1920s and 1930s, witnessed significant changes in how borrowers perceived and practiced consumer credit (Calder 1999;Marron 2009). It is also a problem which has clear parallels with a broader and somewhat speculative set of questions that are presently being posed about the significance of the on-going development of massive databases and data-mining practices across a range of domains of contemporary life (Latour 2011;Thrift 2011): from post-9/11 national security (Amoore 2011); to customer relationship marketing (Beckett 2012;Elmer 2004;Zwick and Denegri-Knott 2009); and to the ways in which techniques that predict 'what you'll do tomorrow' enable corporate forms of power amidst proliferating market networks (Palmås 2011). As Thrift (2011, 5) has it, confronted by these developments, the challenge for social scientists is to 'detect changes in the way that the world turns up as they turn up', and to 'add to the world we are now beginning to live in '.…”