Fernback, Jan. "Selling ourselves? Profitable surveillance and online communities." Critical Discourse Studies 4.3 (2007): 311-330.

This study critically examines the concept of empowerment through interactivity in online spaces, particularly focusing on 'community' sections of retail websites. Through discourse analysis, it investigates how these platforms claim to foster communal interactions among consumers while primarily serving commercial objectives. Drawing on Habermas's views on the commodification of social institutions and Foucault's theories on technology as a form of social control, the research suggests that the rhetoric of community on these websites is a strategy to attract consumers and achieve business goals, potentially also acting as a surveillance tool for data mining.