The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising

Description

The Mood of Information explores advertising from the perspective of information flows rather than the more familiar approach of symbolic representation. At the heart of this book is an aspiration to better understand contemporary and nascent forms of commercial solicitation predicated on the commodification of experience and subjectivity. In assessing novel forms of advertising that involve tracking users' web browsing activity over a period of time, this book seeks to grasp and explicate key trends within the media and advertising industries along with the technocultural, legal, regulatory and political environment online behavioural advertising operates within. Situated within contemporary scholarly debate and interest in recursive media that involves intensification of discourses of feedback, personalization, recommendation, co-production, constructivism and the preempting of intent, this book represents a departure from textual criticism of advertising to one based on exposition of networked means of inferring preferences, desires and orientations that reflect ways of being, or moods of information.

Dr. Andrew McStay is Lecturer at Bangor University, UK, and author of Digital Advertising (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). He maintains a blog at: http://advertising-communications-culture.blogspot.com/

The confusing yet omnipresent world of digital media require analysis of specific sites and types of content. One could do no better than turn to Andrew McStay's The Mood of Information to learn about some fascinating yet troubling developments in the region of "behavioural advertising," the tracking of marketing activities by consumers. I endorse this volume for those interested in the reconfiguration of privacy that its topic explores. -- Mark Poster, Professor Emeritus, Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California, Irvine