Personalization

New media technologies keep coming—biometric mobile telephones, geotracking, fitness monitors, ovulation predictors—and along with them more avenues through which to link the personal and the technological. Personalization is, in many ways, a keyword crucial to understanding the contemporary historical and cultural moment. Personalization is enabled by technologies, embedded in infrastructures, valued by enthusiasts, targeted by discontents, coveted by marketers, and central to contemporary debates about late capitalism. This entry is a genealogy of personalization in relation to its technological and ideological iterations. First, it discusses the origins of the term personalization in a variety of disciplines, moments in