Gavin Smith – författare

Many decisions in our lives are decisions we make as consumers and buyers. Analytics- driven marketing underpinned by machine learning and AI has had a seismic impact on the execution of these decisions and on behavioural outcomes. This book dissects processes and issues at the heart of our emerging reality as human actors embedded in a system of exchange driven by fast-evolving technologies. It is a seminal work on a complex but urgent issue in social and behavioural science.

Based on extant and emerging research, the book presents new evidence and innovative theoretical structures and concepts to explore how data analytics and AI can influence consumer thinking and behaviour. It synthesizes consumer research with the relevant literature on computational ‘thinking,’ human– computer interaction, AI, decision delegation and consumer analytics, linking them in a coherent fashion. The authors utilize original exhibits and real- world data in an accessible format to both engage and challenge the reader.

This cutting- edge book is a must- read for scholars and upper- level students researching and studying marketing, consumer behaviour, AI, decision-making and behavioural science.

Many decisions in our lives are decisions we make as consumers and buyers. Analytics- driven marketing underpinned by machine learning and AI has had a seismic impact on the execution of these decisions and on behavioural outcomes. This book dissects processes and issues at the heart of our emerging reality as human actors embedded in a system of exchange driven by fast-evolving technologies. It is a seminal work on a complex but urgent issue in social and behavioural science.

Based on extant and emerging research, the book presents new evidence and innovative theoretical structures and concepts to explore how data analytics and AI can influence consumer thinking and behaviour. It synthesizes consumer research with the relevant literature on computational ‘thinking,’ human– computer interaction, AI, decision delegation and consumer analytics, linking them in a coherent fashion. The authors utilize original exhibits and real- world data in an accessible format to both engage and challenge the reader.

This cutting- edge book is a must- read for scholars and upper- level students researching and studying marketing, consumer behaviour, AI, decision-making and behavioural science.

Being a hero is in his blood.

After he and his wife are murdered, Marine Ray Garrison is resurrected by a secret team of scientists. Enhanced with nanotechnology, he becomes a superhuman, biotech killing machine—“Bloodshot”—without any memory of his previous life.

But some things can’t stay buried, and Ray refuses to back down when his memories begin to surface. Haunted by the face of his family’s killer, he will stop at nothing to take his revenge. And he discovers a conspiracy going deeper than he could have possibly imagined …

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolize the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilize municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how precisely they influence things. CCTV cameras might appear inanimate, but Opening the Black Box shows them to be vital mediums within relational circulations of supervision.

The book principally excavates the social relations entwining the everyday application of CCTV. It takes the reader on a journey from living beneath the camera, to working behind the lens. Attention focuses on the labour exerted by camera operators as they source and process distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in search of disorderly vistas, visualizing stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. But the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice.

Opening the Black Box, therefore, contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated ‘riskscapes’ through the prism of camera circuitry. It probes the positioning of camera operators as ‘vicarious’ custodians of a precarious social order and engages their subjective experiences. It reveals the work of watching to be an ambiguous practice: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal disruptions in the self.

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras are a prominent, if increasingly familiar, feature of urbanism. They symbolize the faith that spatial authorities place in technical interventions for the treatment of social problems. CCTV was principally introduced to sterilize municipalities, to govern conducts and to protect properties. Vast expenditure has been committed to these technologies without a clear sense of how precisely they influence things. CCTV cameras might appear inanimate, but Opening the Black Box shows them to be vital mediums within relational circulations of supervision.

The book principally excavates the social relations entwining the everyday application of CCTV. It takes the reader on a journey from living beneath the camera, to working behind the lens. Attention focuses on the labour exerted by camera operators as they source and process distanced spectacles. These workers are paid to scan monitor screens in search of disorderly vistas, visualizing stimuli according to its perceived riskiness and/or allurement. But the projection of this gaze can draw an unsettling reflection. It can mean enduring behavioural extremities as an impotent witness. It can also entail making spontaneous decisions that determine the course of justice.

Opening the Black Box, therefore, contemplates the seductive and traumatic dimensions of monitoring telemediated ‘riskscapes’ through the prism of camera circuitry. It probes the positioning of camera operators as ‘vicarious’ custodians of a precarious social order and engages their subjective experiences. It reveals the work of watching to be an ambiguous practice: as much about managing external disturbances on the street as managing internal disruptions in the self.

Contemporary forms of capitalism and the state require close analytic attention to reveal the conditions of possibility for effective counter-politics. On the other hand the practice of collective politics needs to be studied through historical ethnography if we are to understand what might make people’s actions effective. This book suggests a research agenda designed to maximize the political leverage of ordinary people faced with ever more remote states and technologies that make capitalism increasingly rapacious. Gavin Smith opens and closes this series of interlinked essays by proposing a concise framework for untangling what he calls “the society of capital” and subsequently a potentially controversial way of seeing its contemporary features. This book tackles the political conundrums of our times and asks what roles intellectuals might play therein.