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Author Talk - Emily West

"Buy Now"

Join us as we welcome Emily West to discuss her book, Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly.

Dr. Emily West is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research on digital platforms, consumer culture, and media appear in multiple academic journals and books, and she is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (2013). After growing up in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Emily West attended McMaster University and earned her PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, and receive messages on our smartphones about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, 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 has promoted the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers), West shows, to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. 

West unpacks how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on ourselves 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. Buy Now is the first book to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offering a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today's economy.

Signed copies will be available for $30 cash.

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