Recommender System

This chapter focuses on technologies of personalization. It analyses the functioning and assumptions embedded in personalized recommendations and shows how recommender systems model user behaviour to procure the data that enable the comparison and assessment of user choices against the choices of other users. Personalization inherits some of the rationales of the organizational practice of customization which reframes and develops in several ways. The capacity to shape individual user behaviour online acquires a different force and a ubiquitous presence. As the chapter shows, personalization translates individuals into data profiles and disintegrates the fictional space of consumer choice in an endless repetition of clicks.