Ville Aleksi Aaltonen

Research Interests

Thesis: 'Making up a Mobile Advertising Audience'

My PhD thesis investigates how an advertising-funded mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) attempts to turn mobile network subscribers into an advertising audience. Organized as a telecommunications operator but adopting the business model of a commercial media, the empirical analysis revolves around the question how does the company produce its sellable asset, that is, the advertising audience.

The case reveals a technological discontinuity brought about contemporary information and communication technologies in media industry. In contrast to painstakingly sampling and obtaining observations on consumers' media consumption through various second-order monitoring technologies, the network infrastructure itself generates massive amount of behavioural data tokens. The work analyses how organizational practices are shaped by this data emanating from the network infrastructure, and argues that we need to go beyond constructivist and localist approaches in order to understand the arrangements within which essentially data-based practices happen.

• Further summary of current research
• Read the full thesis online (PDF - 696KB)

Supervisor

• Professor Jannis Kallinikos