Volume 17, Issue 7 e12716
REVIEW ARTICLE

The digitalisation of consumption and its geographies

Chen Liu

Corresponding Author

Chen Liu

School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China

Correspondence

Chen Liu.

Email: [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 05 June 2023
Citations: 1

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.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT

The author of the above titled paper hereby declare that the work included in the above paper is original and is an outcome of the research carried out by the authors indicated in it. There is no conflicting interest in this paper.