ABSTRACT
My exploration of the marketing discourse surrounding the interactive nature of the Internet has demonstrated that academic marketing theorists have been using the confl uence of Web technologies, relationship management concerns, and increasing perceptions of marketing ineffectiveness to construct a rhetoric of salvation around the prospect of creating conversations with newly ‘empowered’ connected consumers. As I have shown, this rhetoric is heavily infused with assumptions of control (it is a rhetoric of management, after all) and the models of communication that are constructed as part of this rhetorical discourse betray their origins in transmission or conduit paradigms. This chapter moves away from the academic discussion of interaction and examines an area of more practitioner-orientated discourse generated by marketing professionals, consultants, and software developers. I hope to show that there are signifi cant superfi cial differences between rhetorics of consumer interaction constructed by marketing academics and practitioners and that many of these differences can be located in the extent to which each discourse engages with the detail of technological implementations of interaction strategies. At a deeper level, however, I will demonstrate that practitioner and academic assumptions of control are identical. In arguing that current marketing practice’s engagement with interactive technology is constructed around discourses of measurement, management, and control, I am echoing comments from an increasingly vocal set of observers who are noting that the emancipatory and egalitarian potentialities of the Internet are, for all the twittering, blogging, and Digging, not yet very apparent in practice.
