pop intro notes

“the race to commercialize the internet is over. Advertising is the big winner.”

-Although this claim is more than a little the case, the course will propose/teach that, as important and profitable as it is, new media/the internet is now about WAY MORE than just advertising. But after the small, non-profit, beginning of things, advertising drove the expansion and diffusion and profit-making on the Internet.

“At its core, surveillance advertising uses data to try to find ever more effective ways to predict and influence people’s behaviors and attitudes”

“The massive data collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Surveillance advertising was created by marketers, technology start-ups, investors, and politicians, a coalition bound by the desire to commercialize the web as quickly as possible.”

-Where we find ourselves, the status quo was NOT NATURAL OR THE ONLY APPROACH. This is NOT THE WAY THE INTERNET IS. IT IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS MADE TO BE.

“the pervasive consumer surveillance at the heart of the internet’s advertising business model was out of control.”

-WAS AND STILL IS IN THE US. NOT QUITE SO MUCH IN THE EU AND OVERSEAS,
MORE IN CHINA AND OTHER AUTHORITARIAN COUNTRIES.

“Their business depends on manipulating behavior,” wrote the Financial Times’ Rana Foroohar. “It is a business model that causes endless collateral damage.”

-Readings from Zuboff and, especially, Couldry and  Mejias will point, especially to prediction and control leading to behavioral modification. 

Adverts and ad revenue (and profits) are now primarily online (though still big business in legacy media).

“Consumer monitoring is now effectively ubiquitous under what Julia Angwin calls a “dragnet” of surveillance. This system depends on an infrastructure of data collection and targeted messaging that undergirds nearly all modern digital media. Leading ad platforms like Google
and Facebook operate vast networks of surveillance that extend well beyond their own sites and applications. A study of one million popular websites found that nearly 90 percent collect and exchange data with external third parties of which most users are unaware.”

[play the tracking video]

“Despite the proclamations of self-interested proponents and well-meaning critics, many studies find that internet advertising is not all that effective at modifying consumer behavior”

This was also the case with advertising and legacy media. The guesses, then, were based on broad demographic analysis. The guesses now are based on dossiers of data about us. While the guesses might miss regarding specific adverts leading to specific purchases, the dossiers behind the guesses collect a WIDE RANGE OF DATA that can be used other than for/in advertising.

A lot of the “value” is derived from buying/selling/trading consumer/citizen information in the data marketplace. Hundreds of data marketplace companies deal info to/with un-told numbers of paying clients (thousands).

“Time and again, researchers have documented how the negative impacts of commercial surveillance disproportionately affect marginalized communities”

-WE ARE ALL TARGETED AND SUFFER, BUT SOME SUFFER MORE DAMAGE THAN DO OTHERS.

“One of the most troubling outgrowths of the Google/Facebook duopoly is that their market dominance has exacerbated a revenue crisis among U.S. news organizations.”

-DISRUPTION WITHOUT ADEQUATE REPLACEMENT. MORE THAN 2,000 PAPERS OUT OF BUSINESS, LARGLY REPLACED BY THE FACEBOOK FEED.
https://www.kimt.com/archive/report-more-than-2-000-newspapers-out-of-business-between-2004-and-2019/article_5355b062-4bf6-5d64-9925-eafd182d8ae5.html

This isn’t just disrupting legacy industries, this is mass extermination.
BTW: Not all by social media. Investment bankers as media owners has done a lot of the damage. 

Political forces got involved with tech developments and moved policy and law in favor of new media, largely without constraint.

[learn more? “A Guide to the ‘Legal Fictions’ That Create Wealth, Inequality and Economic Crises”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-katharina-pistor.html]

“In the absence of public activism, the state has reliably made media policy in service of private sector interests”

-essentially, no regulation, and for a decade, no sales taxation.

-advertising became marketing; marketing became the marketing complex; the marketing complex became the data marketplace.