The digitalisation of consumption and its geographies

Abstract

As consumer cultures become increasingly digital and the digital/data has become more commodified, geographers have turned their attention to researching the ways in which consumption spaces, socialities and subjectivities are (re)produced by the digitalisation of everyday life. This article investigates the relationships between the digital and geographies of consumption based on a close reading of recent studies on the promises, possibilities, challenges, and flaws of the intersections of the digital and consumption in geography. It connects the digitalisation of consumption with the tradition of mapping and doing geographies of consumption that is concerned with the social life of thing, and opens a conversation on how subjectivities, spatialities, and socialities of consumption are reproduced by the changes in digital spaces and practices in the mundane. This article also points to the potential of a ‘follow the digital’ approach for establishing a dynamic and multi-sited understanding of geographies of consumption in the digital context.