Some quotes from Dennis Knopf's You as In User: Audience Economics and the Web

"As it became crucial to pay attention to the customers’ demand,
the industries have developed strategies to satisfy the oversaturated
customers and their desire for uniqueness while still
keeping the efficiency of mass production. Through modularity of
the separate components, manufacturers can offer their customers
a limited yet flexible system of personalization, which is supposed
to communicate the possibility for individuality and thus lower
the degree of saturation. Consumers have the option to customize
an item in a way that expresses their own uniqueness – by combining
the preferred components to an individual furnishing."

"Personalization implies a persona: a profile is set up
to store all data about the customer and keep track of his/her
consumerism. Either the consumer provides the information him/
herself or a profile is derived from documented behavior which is
associated with either name, a phone number, screen name, customer
number, or any other identification – Marco Tannert
divides these into explicit participant profiles and derived
profiles"

"Since the media landscape of today’s society of the spectacle
as Debort described it is oversaturated with impressions and
advertisement, the consumers’ attention is becoming more scarce
and therefore more precious. When the attention received from
the potential customer is decreasing, the advertiser needs to
increasingly promote only products that are of interest to the
consumer – or at least in the appropriate way."

"Wether you’re looking at desktop applications
for creating text, still and moving image, sound and music compositions,
or at the function patterns of operating systems,
templates are commonly used as sample layouts and documents in
order to allow a perspicuous interaction between human and
computer for a simple and easy work flow. The approach of using
templates for easily producing websites on a large scale could be
compared to the production strategies of fordism where standardization
allows mass-production and makes commodities available
to a broad public, of course looking at it within its postmodern
appearance."

"The Web seems to foster the interchange of cultural assets
and an endless loop of produtcion; online communities have
created a new level of expertise by appropriating, interpreting,
and annotating cultural content and occupying a cultural competence
that seeks comparison. The Web as a platform for creating
content becomes most apparent when looking at projects where
the sum of contributions results in a collective product."

"When consumers
are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed.
And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People
gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests
better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some
narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).“

read the whole paper here