Marketers justify deep personal tracking with personalization, but the logic is circular.

Evidence

The goal is to cache the social at every available opportunity and then store the cached fragments for use in later targeted messages, offers, or ads. The official justification given by the marketing industry for this deepened personal tracking is not economic advantage but personalization. Because it is now standard to send marketing messages to people’s personal devices, it is argued that those messages need to be personalized—that is, adapted to what available data suggests that person wants right then and there. But the logic is circular, and there is no obvious way out of the circle for the consumer. Increasingly, products (from expensive cars to regular consumer goods) go on transmitting information of marketing value about their usage and user after purchase. The goal for marketers becomes the “persistently connected product” that maximizes revenue per user throughout its life. Marketers describe this personalization as “one-to-one communication” and “one-to-one dialogue.” Yet there is nothing dialogic about the individual’s emerging relation to capitalism or the continuous caching of social life on which it relies. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 413

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘persistently connected product’ concept is a strong angle for an essay on how post-purchase data capture extends the commodity relationship through the product’s whole life, blurring purchase into ongoing surveillance.
• XREF: The ‘persistently connected product’ connects to the CCTV and media framing books on how surveillance embeds into everyday paid goods, and to attention-school debates about whether personalization genuinely serves users. — connects to: Personalization rhetoric makes surveillance attractive, and its critics get cast as irrational. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 97