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In this article, we use the term recommendation in order to analyze every apparatus aimed at guiding the Internet user toward a specific content, surrounded by an overabundant and profuse offer. For the purpose of the analysis, we distinguish four types of recommendation: on the one hand, editorial and contributive recommendation, based either on experts or users' judgments and opinions, and on the other hand, aggregative and personalized. The latter appear to be more and more central, based on users' online behaviour. With the algorithmic recommendation, alleged, declared or observed users' preferences form the material of predictive recommendation in apparatuses developed by different operators of legacy media. This step is the almost final one in a process of delinearization and individualization. However, despite its efficiency, this form of recommendation raises a number of questions. More than the risk of confinement and filter bubble, the biggest problem seems to be related to the oligopolistic power of a few players, controlling consumer behaviour data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using an actor–network theory approach, this article argues that the audience exists only from the moment it is circumstantiated and instantiated. To observe the audience, sociology thus needs to identify its practices, discourses and manifestations. This hypothesis is illustrated through a historical case study: the adoption of a new television audience measurement, the peoplemeter (a new audimeter machine nowadays widely used by professionals) in France in the late 1980s. It opens the technology’s black box at a time when changes forced actors to reconsider their collective and individual audience definitions. Through analysing the implementation of the peoplemeter, this article shows how a triple process of routine, consensus and trust led the actors to accept this new system. This process, it is argued, explains how actors translated a state of their own construction of the audience into a technological system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss the importance of television audience measurement (TAM) in human culture. TAM uses various approaches to solicit information from a focus group of television viewers. Results of the examinations, evaluations, observations and interviews television viewers are known as ratings. According to the authors, how these ratings are accepted depend on their accuracy and effects on human culture.

The article focuses on the role of advertising between producers and the buyers. Advertising has already been of assistance to sociology in its relationship to the manipulation of demand. All studies in the history of advertising in France insist on the "social unacceptability of the notice," the ancestor of advertising. An economic controversy opposed sceptics and aficionados of advertising, the latter being open to the possibilities of choice it can offer consumers, to the rationalization of their conduct, to time-saving. The advertising milieu itself is split between two extreme and contradictory beliefs, that can be found side by side in a single interview. On the one hand, there is the Mephistophelean fantasy of the over-weening power of the advertisement, this fantasy readily accepting the charge of manipulation made against it. On the other hand there is a sort of democratic confidence in the reassuring existence of an ultimate guarantee, or a moral regulation of this overweening power by the common sense of the people.