Advertising: Materiality and Banal Political Economy

The Department of Sociology is pleased to invite you to a public lecture on Tuesday December 5th (CSS 2.0.63, 13:00-14:30) by Professor of Sociology Donald MacKenzie (University of Edinburgh) titled 'Online Advertising: Materiality and Banal Political Economy'.

Around 400 billion online ads are shown daily worldwide, many of them finding their way to users via near-instantaneous, automated auctions of each individual advertising opportunity. This lecture examines this giant-scale, technologically highly sophisticated activity via two closely related analytical lenses. The first is the material politics of centralised versus decentralised configurations of these auctions, which involves issues ranging from challenges to Google’s market power to the environmental politics of online advertising’s carbon emissions. The second is banal political economy: the routine ways in which money is made, especially via occupancy of crucial material positions in digital advertising. The lecture will end with a speculation: that each of us carries ‘material micromonopolies’ around with us all the time, each deeply embedded in the apps on our mobile phones.

The Department of Sociology is looking forward to seeing you!