Journal
JOURNAL OF PUBLIC POLICY & MARKETING
Volume 38, Issue 4, Pages 451-468Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC
DOI: 10.1177/0743915619859852
Keywords
apps; attention; devices; digital addiction; internet addiction
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We spend our days looking at them, talking to them, and touching them. We sleep with them, work with them, and play with them. They increasingly consume our time, attention, and money: we are addicted to our digital devices-or, more precisely, the digital experiences they enable. This addiction is both akratic (we are aware of the negative consequences) and engineered (designed on purpose). Marketers are complicit in this engineering: through digital networks and big data they ubiquitously monitor and experiment on consumers. This knowledge is used to create ever-more addictive digital experiences enabled by devices, their platforms, and their content. In this article, the authors explore marketing's role in the rise of the phenomenon: from product design, through advertising and big data, to the dynamics of ubiquitous distribution and free pricing. The authors then turn to policy solutions and discuss how informing, guiding, and restricting can help ameliorate the problem and promote the public good. The article concludes by outlining multiple areas for marketing and public policy research.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available