Predictive Marketing: the trap of information personalization

Abstract

The present text discusses predictive marketing and the personalization of information. Personalization embodies the inaugural nature of post-modernity, as this idea develops the notion of self-enterprise the becoming of oneself. It emerges in a period of societal flexibility, high consumption of goods, and the assumption that this consumption brings pleasure, invoking the structure of hedonism through the logic of marketing seduction. A pragmatic reading of post-truth and algorithmic personalization is essential, based on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. The intention is to highlight, through the lens of C.S. Peirce, how internet users are organized by a method of belief fixation. Peirce asserts that the goal of belief is a state of calmness. Due to the pursuit of this stable position, users adopt the Method of Tenacity, according to which it is sufficient merely to hold a belief, regardless of whether it is well-founded, as long as it fulfills the purpose of belief, which is happiness. Thus, the text seeks to reflect on how this method strengthens the emergence of post-truth and its elements, Fake News and Negationism. Fake News is a discourse constructed with the purpose of manipulation, while Negationism is the sentiment of hatred and the struggle to weaken state and scientific institutions that aim to establish the production of knowledge.