Consumer Participation through Digital Valuation Practices? On the Sociology of the Infrastructures of Consumer Participation

Digital (e)valuation practices are a widespread phenomenon today. Consumers participate in them, sometimes directly, through stars and comments, sometimes indirectly, by training machine-learning recommendation systems through data traces. The article puts the question as to which opportunities consumers receive by this for articulation. Do these valuation practices support a consumer policy from below? Or is it consumer activation that intensifies post-democratic decay, insofar as it merely simulates political participation? To answer this, the article draws on the sociology of infrastructures and contends that evaluation practices take place in pre-curated, steering or nudging decision architectures. These contribute to post-democratic change when they hinder the retrieval of critical competencies through conventionalizing framing and strong simplification of valuation problems, thus endangering their reproduction.