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In her chapter Community and Class Order, Carolyn Marvin discusses a number of sentiments that people in the late nineteenth century felt because of the rise of electricity. In particular, one shift that she touched on was the worry that many individuals, specifically families, felt regarding their loss of privacy with the rise of electricity and technology. She explains that this new technology “had less than amusing consequences for those who found themselves trapped by the great new machines of publicity” (Marvin 67 – full chapter here).
I was very interested by this part in Marvin’s chapter because this feeling of being trapped and watched by technology is a feeling that has only escalated since that time in the late 1800’s. Internet privacy is a hot topic in today’s world because of how intertwined we are with our technology. One specific area where we experience a significant loss of privacy is online shopping.
I’m sure that everyone has experienced something similar to the image below, where you can tell your online shopping habits are being tracked because of the related ads you continually see.
But going beyond just advertisement, another interesting point that a recent Forbes article (read the full article here) makes is how online shopping can allow retailers to uncover each individual’s personal demand curve. Online retailers achieving this, the article argues, would mean that online shopping could essentially make us poorer. If all online retailers were able to discover exactly how much each individual was willing to pay for a given good or service, they could perform perfect price discrimination, mitigating any utility gains that consumers might experience if they were able to purchase a given good or service for less than what they were willing to pay. While we have not yet reached this point in the realm of online shopping, continual technological advancements and data storage make this a distinct possibility moving into the future.
Posted from Digital Studies 101 Blog by Patrick G.