That's what you're doing, you're signaling who you are as a consumer. It's so funny that the Internet has become a series of traps where you do innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference - "I like this thing" - and therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences. When you decide to "like" something you may feel you're innocently putting out your preferences, but actually you're delivering something of enormous value, which is indicating that you essentially like to be advertised to by this company. We are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don't have that already.Įvery time you click on a "like" button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that, and so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is. So you know, discovering the moment: Let's say you're someone's phone and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is, which happens to have paid whoever makes your phone, at the right moment. We already have our phones, but other wearables and those technologies are going to want to know when you're deciding things and then offer some kind of input, subtle or less so, on that moment. I think this is going to become more intense in the coming decade as we start to carry more and more technology with us. On how advertisers can use technology to target individual "moments" I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising. the Internet has become a series of traps where you do innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference - 'I like this thing' - and therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences. They started a very idealistic beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model. I think Google is the most profitable attention merchant in the history of the world. It doesn't have any natural limit, and we haven't found a place for the limit. We have a demand for growth that is insistent, and so advertising just keeps getting heavier and heavier and heavier. In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries, we had spaces that ads didn't leave, they stayed where they were on the page, they didn't float around over the text, and we're sort of lost on the Internet. On the pervasiveness of Internet advertising So I have sort of a plea to people who want to change these sort of things is, like, maybe just suck it up and start paying for more stuff. In other words, a lot of the websites are always serving two masters, they're both trying to get you entertained enough to stay there, or to click on things, but to also then make it a good platform for advertising. Generally speaking, when you pay for stuff it has more of your interests at heart. So we have this bargain that we made - and you can call it Faustian, you can call it whatever you want - that we have decided that we have to have everything for free, and I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.Īll Tech Considered Online Trackers Follow Our Digital Shadow By 'Fingerprinting' Browsers, Devices But then the payoff, or the exchange, is that then we also agree to stuff that is compromised, because it is always trying to get us to click on ads at the same time. This attention-merchant model has spread to so many areas of our life, where we're completely used to everything being free. I think back starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads. It's a bargain with some historical precedent. So much engineering talent and ability has gone into trying to make people click on things that I think we've almost lost the last five years of development. And some of this book is about the history, and we often say that ratings kind of ruined television in the 1950s, well, the quest for ratings looks dignified in comparison to the quest for clicks. It's very driven with the need to grow, to get more clicks and clicks and clicks. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Attention Merchants Subtitle The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads Author Tim Wu
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |