The Mood of Information: A Critique of Online Behavioural Advertising

Andrew McStay

Apr 2011 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

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.

About the author

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/