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Infrastructure: Orchestrating Action

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Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture

Abstract

This chapter continues to develop the concept of calculative participation by developing a detailed account of how the orchestration of consumer action generates value for brands. It advances the literature on branding, brand value creation and audience labour by illustrating how this emerging mode of branding makes the participating audience productive beyond just performing the ‘work of watching’ or making themselves available for surveillance (‘the work of being watched’). The authors introduce the notion of brand machines for capturing a new branding paradigm that rests on the simultaneous performance of cultural and computational work. Brands develop devices that prompt audiences to tune their experience, attention and bodies into the calculative capacities of media infrastructure.

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Brodmerkel, S., Carah, N. (2016). Infrastructure: Orchestrating Action. In: Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49656-0_5

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