{"product_id":"buy-now-isbn-9780262543309","title":"Buy Now","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAmazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In \u003ci\u003eBuy Now\u003c\/i\u003e, Emily West examines Amazon’s consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eWest shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand’s focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand’s image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon’s ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon’s workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon’s brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West’s innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today’s economy.\u003cbr\u003e Figure List ix\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments xi\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction: Buy Now--The Branding of Convenience 1\u003cbr\u003eI Distribution 27\u003cbr\u003e1 A New Kind of Distribution Brand 29\u003cbr\u003e2 The Box: Distribution Fetishism and the Materialities of Ecommerce 51\u003cbr\u003eII Culture 81\u003cbr\u003e3 From Bookseller to Behemoth: The Platformization of Retail 83\u003cbr\u003e4 Speak for Service: Alexa, Surveillance, and Automated Intimacy 107\u003cbr\u003e5 Watch Now: Ubiquitous Media and the Commoditization of Culture 139\u003cbr\u003eIII Image 169\u003cbr\u003e6 Amazon.Amazon: Normalizing Monopoly 171\u003cbr\u003e7 American Ubiquity: Amazon's Platform Imperialism 195\u003cbr\u003eConclusion: Confronting the Costs of Convenience 219“West brilliantly documents how the global master of one-click shopping, ubiquitous surveillance, and monopoly power became a serious threat to democracy, the climate, and a humane workplace.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eVincent Mosco, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Smart City in a Digital World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“How did Amazon get to its high perch of digital retailing, and how does it stay there? In interrogating this question through a number of insightful lenses, Emily West’s \u003ci\u003eBuy Now\u003c\/i\u003e raises fundamental issues about commerce and consumer politics in the twenty-first century.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Joseph Turow, author of\u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Walle\u003c\/b\u003et\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003eBuy Now\u003c\/i\u003e is an indispensable resource for thinking through, struggling with, and questioning our relationships with Amazon. West provides an astute and urgent analysis about how the ecommerce site has subtly pervaded our everyday lives in the past twenty-five years—and how big tech attempts to shape our collective futures.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eSarah Banet-Weiser, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and University of Southern California; author of \u003ci\u003eAuthentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eEmily West is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and coeditor of \u003ci\u003eThe Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e ","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305187692773,"sku":"NP9780262543309","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262543309.jpg?v=1767723230","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/buy-now-isbn-9780262543309","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}