Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing

Advertising has long been considered a manipulator of minds and has increased significantly in coercive power since the emergence of research in behavioural psychology. Now with the deployment of neuro-physiological imaging technologies into market contexts, companies are turning to neuromarketing to measure how we think and feel. Data driven models are being used to inform advertising strategies designed to trigger human action at a level beneath conscious awareness. This practice can be understood as a form of consumer biosurveillance: but what is behind the hype? What are the consequences?

Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing is a critical reflection on the role that technology is playing in the construction of consumer representations, and its encroachment into the internal lives of individuals and groups. It is a work that examines the relationship between neuromarketing practitioners and machines, and how the discourses and practices emerging from this entanglement are influencing the way we make sense of the world.

“A brilliant analysis of our vulnerability to enslavement by advertising in the era of neuroscience. Be warned: knowledge is power, power over us.” (Andrew Feenberg, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University at Harbour Centre, Canada)

“At a time when superheroes, or people with ‘powers’ dominate our screens and our attention, Nemorin has brought together her own cast of characters in a battle of the ages to determine who will govern the lives of Heidegger’s Dasein. Among the contenders, all of whom are armed to the teeth with biomechanical technologies, including affective primes, all of which are guided by algorithmic assessments of the multiple segments and individual differences upon which manipulative strategies are based, the neuromarketers are leading the charge to shape the future of surveillance capitalism. Nemorin’s presentation of this struggle for the right of self-determination, and collective democratic governance uses a masterful critical analysis of the neuromarketers’ discursive representations of their manipulative targets as a way to help us understand how both these objects and their subjective orientations toward ‘the good life’ are being transformed.” (Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, USA)

“Highly readable, this original book presciently outlines one of the most dangerous developments of our modern history: the rise of ‘neuromarketing’ and the manipulation of human desire for the sake of profit. Nemorin expertly draws on critical philosophy, surveillance and cultural studies to reveal the moral and ethical transgressions of what she terms ‘consumer biosurveillance’—advertising’s efforts to reduce our brain to a buy button. With chilling clarity she demonstrates how these discursive techniques of mind management reduce humans to desiring animals, thereby destroying communicative freedoms and imaginative capacities necessary for democracy. Gripping, accessible, comprehensive, Nemorin’s finessed historical and philosophical context provides nuanced cross-disciplinary insight, inspiring hope in the face of the dystopic realities of marketing and consumer biosurveillance…If you read only one book on these pressing questions, let it be Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing.” (Megan Boler, Professor, Department of Social Justice Education, University of Toronto, Canada)

Selena Nemorin is Lecturer in Sociology of Digital Technology with the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at University College London, UK. Her research and publications explore the dynamic between society and technology. More specifically, she is interested in how socio-technical artefacts construct and categorise individuals and groups as objects for governance.