Consumption and information: analysis of information practices in the context of mobile commerce based on apps and online social networks

Abstract

It considers the configuration of new consumption patterns based on mobile commerce and identifies the relationship between informational consumption, mediated interactions and consumption of goods and services. It takes the Airbnb, Amazon, iFood and Spotify applications as a reference and proposes, as a general objective, to analyze the informational practices carried out by organizations and consumers in applications for mobile devices in order to understand the specificities of such practices in the context of mobile commerce. The specific objectives are to describe the main stages in the development of consumer society in order to understand how new information and communication technologies affect its operating structures; to characterize the informational behavior and practices adopted by organizations and consumers in the context of m-commerce; to address the informational structure and modes of interaction between consumers and organizations triggered in the context of mobile applications and mobile commerce practices; to analyze the processes of producing, searching for and sharing information in the applications analyzed and in the online social networks associated with these applications, and;to identify and systematize the logic of recommendation services and their links with m-commerce. Methodologically, it analyzes elements of the information architecture of the apps considered, carries out a netnographic analysis of the virtual spaces where consumers interact and uses content analysis of the communication that exists in these spaces as a function of consumption. Among the main results, it finds that information produced by consumers is essential to the dynamics of mobile commerce; that the steps involved in purchasing products and contracting services are reduced based on prior knowledge of the users' profile; that information is important as an input for the efficiency of recommendation services, and; that there is a relationship between these services, the attention economy and the monitoring of information content produced by users/consumers.