This is a comprehensive and critical academic work that investigates how consumerism has become a structuring force for subjectivities, social relationships, and inequalities in the 21st century. Based on an interdisciplinary approach that articulates social psychology, critical sociology, digital technology, and consumer theory, the book offers an in-depth analysis of the symbolic, affective, and algorithmic mechanisms that shape consumer behavior in the age of digital platforms.
Starting from the origins of hyperfragmented consumption, the work examines central topics such as compulsive buying, performance anxiety, algorithm and big data influence, emotional marketing, influencer culture, attention economy, gender and symbolic representations, structural racism in access to consumption, financialization of subjectivity, surveillance capitalism, and the growing commodification of emotions and relationships.
Through analyses grounded in authors such as Pierre Bourdieu, Shoshana Zuboff, Eva Illouz, Byung-Chul Han, Judith Butler, and Zygmunt Bauman, this work reveals how consumption not only reflects social desires but structures, anticipates, and manipulates them through algorithmic technologies and architectures of digital persuasion. The book is especially relevant for researchers and professionals in the fields of consumer psychology, communication, social sciences, digital anthropology, gender studies, and contemporary culture.
Ideal for those seeking to understand the psychological and political impact of digital consumption, this book also anticipates the economic and subjective ramifications of predictive consumption, algorithmic influence, and the transformation of intimacy into symbolic capital. It is an essential reading for anyone wishing to critically examine the limits of consumption as a way of life and the possibilities of resistance to hyperconsumerism in contemporary societies.
