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StacyAdelmanFirstPaper 6 - 10 Nov 2011 - Main.StacyAdelman
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> | Commodifying Participation
Beneath the veil of content, YouTube is a system that exists merely to quantify the viewer's viability as a consumer. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote presciently in The Culture Industry and Mass Deception (a chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment) that, to the culture industry, people appear "as statistics on research organization charts, and are divided by income groups into red, green, and blue areas; the technique that is used for any type of propaganda." Since their book was published in 1947, these "research organization charts" have only become more sophisticated. YouTube displays viewers' demographic information for advertisers, including not only breakdowns of age, ethnicity, and household income, but also in terms of profiles ranging from "male audiences 18-34" to "viewers earning more than $100,000." By far the biggest advance that the internet brings is the ability to aggregate information from third party sites about a user's previous activities. By partnering with services like BlueKai, YouTube? is able to promise advertisers the ability to present potential consumers with a product that they, only moments ago while using an entirely different site, have demonstrated interest in. The most powerful promise of this hyper-advertising is its sheer adaptability. In providing advertisers with detailed statistical analysis of the effectiveness of their adds, including click through rates and conversion, YouTube facilitates the next stage in the evolution of commodification, where advertisements have fully ceased to be static broadcast and have become closer to cognizant beings. It seems unjust that individual interiority, the cost of such improved and progressive advertising, should be so readily paid. | | | -- StacyAdelman - 20 Oct 2011 |
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All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
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