ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines how digital technologies interact with consumer society in a broad range of processes that can be termed the digitalization of consumption. It addresses the larger implications of digitalization processes for society and markets, including the social sciences, companies, consumers and citizens. The book also examines the processes of human and non-human entanglement in everyday consumer practices. It also explains how commercial applications and systems inscribe functions designed to enact discovery and chance encounter as part of the shopping process in order to increase levels of purchase in an e-commerce website environment. The book addresses the material-discursive construction of consumer subjects and their relation to questions of power, more specifically regarding gender, and ethics. It analyses the Facebook group "Conscious Consumption" and specifically focus on how ethical consumption is shaped by the technical affordances of the Facebook platform.
