A history of the digitalization of consumer culture

It is frequently argued in sociology that consumption has become a central part of life in contemporary post-industrial societies, also known as “consumer societies” (Baudrillard, 2002). More recently, the rapid diff usion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in everyday life has inspired discourses on “information society” (Castells and Himanen, 2002). There is a relative dearth of scholarship addressing the intersection of these two major paradigms. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how information society interacts with consumer society in a broad range of processes that can be termed the digitalization of consumption.