"Rifle-shot Targeting" (7 March 2011)

The Wall Street Journal has been running a series of articles on the data-harvesting and target-advertising industries and the tracking ecosphere: it's called, somewhat ominously, What They Know. Part of what they know, of course, is what we deliberately share, but a great deal of it is deduced by combining what we share with the unintended tracks we leave through our browsing and purchasing behavior.

Most people are far less integrated in their identity than the assumptions of tracking companies and social-media companies like Facebook allow for. By fusing behavior from different aspects of a person's personality and making recommendations or targeting ads accordingly, they can prompt some uncomfortable or embarrassing collisions, and at the same time, they supply a material, external basis for the diminishing of the self, of a reduction of one's messy and complicated being to a neat, computer-assisted synthesis. These companies hold up a mirror that shrinks us and encourages us to become what we see there, a coherent bundle of consumer desires.

A recent development, explained in the latest What They Know piece by Jessica Vascellaro, is that TV advertisers are seeking to retrofit the tracking technologies being perfected online to better target commercials to viewers. Ideally they would be able to show different commercials to different viewers during the same commercial break the way that a website can display different ads according to the information in your browser cookies and so on.

Some in the industry want "rifle-shot targeting," Mr. Morgan says, where people get "only those ads they care about." That's still well in the future, Mr. Morgan says.

I like how the targeting metaphor has been carried one step further to really hammer home how advertisers few us as prey, and would like to line us up in their sites to blow us apart with a perfectly aimed shell. Take that, Laura Archera Huxley!

The tracking methods involve data collected from DVRs and cable boxes; reading through Vascellaro's summary serves as a pertinent reminder that anytime you choose something on a digital network, no matter how banal or insignificant it may seem, it is tracked, and no devices are exempt.

Given a year of viewing data, Simulmedia can almost perfectly predict around 70% of what types of shows a given set-top box is likely to be tuned to, and when, Mr. Morgan says. He likens the process to helping advertisers "choke the shotgun blast and bring it in close," rather than scattering their ad messages widely.

Lovely. Sort of gives the lie to the pretense that advertisers are on our side, trying to help us find things we want. No, they are eager to "blast" us apart with a point-blank gut shot. I wonder whether the ad execs fear getting arterial spray on their suits.

A Historical Note on the Hipster (12 Jan 2010)

Five or six years ago a commenter suggested I read Hal Niedzviecki, a Canadian journalist who writes about pop culture and consumerism. I went ahead and ordered his 2000 book We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture and when it arrived, I promptly filed it into the nether regions of my bookshelves and forgot all about it. Yesterday, in the midst of a sweep for a bag of books I was putting together to take to the Goodwill store, I came across it again and started reading it.

I don't agree with everything in his argument -- he dismisses the Adornoesque view of popular culture and tends to champion cultural consumerism as an integral, inevitable mode of identity production -- and much of it seems to have been rendered obsolete by the emergence of Web 2.0 and social networking and the like. (He has to explain what an MP3 is and spends a chapter explaining the concept that listening to one Girl Talk song conveys much more thoroughly.)

What is interesting though is who he means by "we": a generational cohort he sees as obliged to define their identities solely in terms of pop culture: he calls this "lifestyle culture" and he seems to regard it as inescapable. "To negate pop culture is to negate the very foundation of our lives -- a foundation that is no longer found in religious instruction, in the moral precepts of the state, in the bosom of the family, but in the frantic embrace of a pop emancipation we crave despite, and because of, who we are." (No wonder he hates Adorno -- he rejects and argues for the "negation" of the very basis of identity as Niedzviecki is willing to conceive it.) Since we define ourselves in terms of our tastes and our familiarity with pop culture, we can't admit that it is trivial. Instead we inflate its importance even more as we prolong our adolescence and nostalgize over Saturday morning cartoons.

"Lifestyle culture," he claims, "is our last, desperate, pervasive attempt to rebel against those who seek to reduce us to cogs in the machine." If that was the point of lifestyle culture, it has failed spectacularly; our everyday lives are more integrated with the machine than ever; social networks are harvesting and reselling the details of our cultural cry of self, conveniently translated already by our volunteer labor into terms of brands and trademarks already on the market. (After all, Facebook's founder has declared the end of privacy. Everything we do is fair game for corporate exploitation.) We continually need to assert our own coolness, and our efforts fuel the evolution of new cool signifiers. We work the lifestyle treadmill.

It's shocking that this seemed a new phenomenon in 2000. By 2010, that cohort had become generally known as "hipsters," and everyone was coming around to agreeing that their moment had passed. Not because anything they did has gone definitively out of fashion, but because they truly have become a "we" -- the mode of identity-fashioning through pop culture has become too ordinary a thing to demand a special label. People who behave like hipsters did back then are just normal now.

But when Niedzviecki was writing, there was still such as a thing as a consumer "underground" in which devotion to pop obscurities was expressed in hand-mimeographed fanzines and home-taped mix cassettes and other arduous analog means. That culture was just beginning to die its digital death, and outlines of hipsterism -- the zine mentality without the trouble of zines, the proud consumerism without the effort of digging up trivia and the sacrifice of marginalizing oneself -- was just beginning to become recognizable. Hipsterism is born when the cultural underground dies. It stems from the "crisis in authenticity" -- which is to say, it emerges when authenticity becomes a commodity. The mainstream expands and flattens out, lulls us with promises of mass participation: The internet was basically a build-out of the mainstream, and a way for it to incorporate all the stuff that once was considered outre or unmarketable.

Though often prescient about the incipient dilemmas of consumerist identity, Niedzviecki at times seems blind to how the proto-hipsterism he celebrates ("This process -- in which passive consumers become semi-active hobbyists and then, finally, full-blown creators -- challenges the gatekeepers of culture by asserting the power of the everyperson to be hos or her own critic and creator") would metastasize. He is hopeful about what would become the definitive hipster strategy, what he calls "noncompliant compliance" -- "intelligent, meaningful creative actions that nevertheless acknowledge the primacy of pop culture." Without an underground, there is no other choice, he argues. Maybe he's right about that, but that still sounds like a Baudrillardian fatal strategy to me. I see no upside to the "collapse of the underground" -- what the Frankfurt schoolers talk about as the negation of negation.

I wish I had Niedzviecki's optimism. But he is able to sustain it because he hadn't anticipated how mainstream media companies and culture industries would be able to adapt to the long-tailing and nichefication of audiences, how our identity seeking becomes free immaterial labor for corporations -- no matter how small-scale or insular it may seem. Piracy and peer-to-peer sharing has hurt their profits, but the amateur culture and brand co-creation Niedzviecki sees as somewhat subversive and hopeful has more or less been a boon for businesses and hasn't proven a haven from the hegemonic ideologies of consumerism. Alienation endures. Niedzviecki recognizes that lifestyle culture leads to apolitical narcissism: "cogent political activism" is difficult, he notes, "in an age where everybody wants to be their own personal cause, their own undergound myth, subject of their own fan club." That sounds like a description of Facebook to me.

With hindsight, it's easy to see how Niedzviecki misdiagnosed the problem. He was concerned that inundated with culture, we would lose our identity. He imagines us all as desperate to do something that "can't be decoded and marketed back" to us. We never receded into the mass; instead mass culture mutated to cater to us as individuals and we thrived on the way it could decode us. Identity, as that kind of decoding, has become ubiquitous, a compulsion. Our identity is at once more palpable and more fragile that it has perhaps ever been -- we have a rich and subtle language of objects with which to express it, yet no one seems to understand who we really are, and we keep trying to understand ourselves. We can't escape turning ourselves inside out and signing over our desire to consumerism to try to ease the dislocation, solve the riddle.

Where Nobody Knows Your Name and They Never Know You Came (2 Nov 2009)

I have a post up about the end of anonymity over at Generation Bubble. As I was writing it, half of it got deleted in a Word Press malfunction, so I'm afraid it became a little disjointed as I struggled to reconstruct what I had had before. My overarching point is that Web 2.0 innovations encourage us to eschew online anonymity and stay logged on as our actual selves -- fusing more completely our online and offline social lives. More important, when we conduct various transactions online, whether they are purchases or pleas for attention, they are associated permanently with that integrated identity, enriching the data that can be mined from it. Consequently, we begin to believe that we deepen our identity by contributing more data to the online archive, despite the fact that it is being exploited by the corporate interests who control the archives. We become more of person, with a more compelling identity, the more through our online presence mirrors our offline existence.

I argue that this is the completion of a trend away from the impersonal markets that once signaled freedom from sumptuary laws and class-based discrimination in the world of consumption, and toward the idea that what we consume should be precisely associated with who we are. An anonymous purchase is a pointless purchase.This begins as a nostalgic movement to restore communal meaning to a world made atomistic and alienating, to make social relations more relevant in a world that has been structured to isolate us (a complaint I've made a lot over the years here). But what happens when markets become non-anonymous is that we become reliant on consumption more than ever to mediate our relations with others, so that friendships happen only within the context of brand communities and branded social networks and shared affinities for the same products. (What economists Wolfers and Stevenson call hedonic marriage: "what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption.") The more transactions we make in the markets in which we can't hide our identity, can't pay cash, the more articulated our identities become. We "share" more and more in order to be.

An example of this process takes on a positive spin can be gleaned from this Amanda Marcotte post about karaoke and halloween. She argues that "Americans are increasingly putting a premium on fantasy and performance as valuable things" and that the popularity of karaoke, Halloween, performative video games like Guitar Hero, etc. are all manifestations of this. She notes that technology has helped usher in this change as well: "Social networking, blogging, etc. have created a huge incentive for people to put themselves on display, when previously they may have just kept their opinions mostly to themselves." It is that incentivizing that worries me; that is what masks the joys of anonymity, the concordant satisfaction with more local and unmediated forms of attention and affirmation. Marcotte is not worried about the mediation of social recognition, its conflation with commercialized self-display and personal branding, regarding instead the right to public performance as merely a more rewarding form of recognition.

Performing for others has almost completely lost its stigma, and thank god. The performer enjoys it, and the audience enjoys it (even if they’re waiting their turn). It’s a lot like sex---once the taboo comes off for you, you wonder what you were so worried about for so long.

If only everyone were so intent on enjoying the performances of everyone else and reciprocating attention. Marcotte makes it sounds like recognition never shades into passing judgment ("Performing gives you a place to figure out what your strengths are, instead of focusing on the shame of having weaknesses"); built in to her analysis is the assumption that these spaces of costume parties and karaoke parlors are nonjudgmental. But the less stigmatized this look-at-me behavior is, the more necesary judgment passing becomes. Online, ceaseless judgment is implicit, as the fantasy of broadening one's reach brings one into contact with strangers, whose affirmation takes on a greater value (i.e. "How refreshing it is to have strangers applaud blog posts than friends, who sort of have to say nice things").

That kind of nonjudgmental mutuality Marcotte posits seems less likely the further we move from face-to-face interactions toward mediated online interactions. Social networks and so on keep score of attention in measurable ways, heightening the stakes, and our physical isolation erodes the traditional mitigating forces of courtesy (which is where the stigma against performing, of hogging attention, arose from in the first place). The danger is that performance as a gift, a carefree act of self-forgetting, instead becomes an ongoing requisite act of self-definition. We perform ourselves all the time, then, and make it act of striving -- these performances I tend to equate with the identity-building rituals of consumerism.

Once we surrender anonymity, our consumption inevitably plays in various social hierarchies; we can't avoid being judged for it, can't avoid trying to use our transactions to enhance our social or cultural capital. The effort to escape the blank rational choice of impersonal markets, the sterile individualism, ends up making our economic behavior even more instrumental, as "economic behavior" now encompasses all our efforts at self-fashioning, which now happen in public, in real-time, in our online gambits for status. The best hope is that there are enough social hierarchies to play in that we can find one which matches our emerging predilections, validates us as winners. But ultimately the hierarchies themselves are made into metahierarchies to delineate the underlying class structure (inherited from the past, the same haves and have nots) once again.

I am wondering if it's best to strive for an anonymity at the expense of social participation and concretized selfhood, or whether there is some balance to be struck between the implied atomization of impersonal markets and voluntaristic social relations that are not ultimately reducible to identity posturing. Can we separate consumption and identity by having some alternative way to make sociality robust? Does this question even make any sense? Can we refuse to have an identity, in the branded-lifestyle sense, but still have a stable set of social relations? Can social identity be divorced from status competitions? As Marcotte warns, "Once you get a taste for performance and self-expression, it’s hard to give it up."

UPDATE: More from me on this subject here.

"Online monoculture" (31 March 2009)

Several months ago Tom Slee offered these "Theses on Netflix" (he modestly thinks that sort of title for a blog post is bombastic, but nothing could make me want to read something more -- maybe if he called it a "manifesto"). By serving as automated filters, these systems make reviewers and critics somewhat superfluous. "While bad reviewers and publishers would not be missed," Slee points out, "good reviewers and publishers are not only filters; they are also an active part of cultural creation." That is true, but the critical debate often takes place far away from the marketplace and the popular audience for most cultural products. And online there are more critical voices to be heard then ever, albeit at varying levels of professionalism. If anything, we are encouraged to produce opinions, to help make automated recommenders work better, have more data to feed on.

The surfeit of opinions, though, and more important, the surfeit of culture, makes filters more necessary as the demands on our attention become overwhelming. If we are intent on consuming more of what is available, we have less time to participate in such staid, slow-moving endeavors as having a critical debate about one work. There's too much pressure to move on to the next thing and broadcast an opinion about that. So our opinions will be pronouncements, and debate will perhaps become even more of an elitist activity, for those paid to conduct it in academia.

But the key point Slee makes in his theses, amid the recognition that these recommendation systems will become more and more central to cultural consumption, is that they are not neutral. They have the capacity to leverage small differences in initial popularity into huge disparities among works that may not be all that different when regarded objectively (assuming for the moment that an objective standard like that can be approximated). And more sinister, recommendation systems can become the disguise for payola-type schemes that make certain lucrative titles more visible. As Slee puts it:

Ownership matters. Given the variety of approaches, outcomes, and absence of clear "best" alternatives, and given the ability of recommender systems to shape the experiences of their users, there is ample room for ulterior motives to become embodied in the system. The incentives for the recommender and the recommendee may be different. The incentives for Netflix in a regime where they deliver physical DVDs (of which they have limited stock) may be to promote the back catalogue. When they deliver movies digitally (as they are about to) there may be no such constraint and they may be more tempted to promote existing blockbusters.

Slee followed up on this idea a few months later in this post, also with a great title: "Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche." He draws on paper by Daniel M. Fleder and Kartik Hosanagar to argue that online recommendations do not lead us to diversify our cultural experiences. The ideology of the "long tail" -- as Slee puts it, that "our cultural experiences, liberated from the parochial tastes and limited awareness of those who happen to live close to us, are broadened by exposure to the wisdom of crowds, and the result is variety, diversity, and democratization" -- turns out to be something of a hoax. Even though their is a wider field of culture available online, recommendation services work to block most of it out, not open our eyes to it. The parochial tastes once nurtured in isolation were what gave us our distinct niches, our peculiar tastes -- that's why local music scenes were distinctive 50 years ago, but are entirely homogenous now that music is conceived and sold for national audiences. Our taste is more readily massified by exposure to the algorithms that average out the tastes of as many participants as possible. Along the same lines, Slee's simulations suggest that we experience more diversity offline, whereas online we are subjected to "monopoly populism."

A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

Band as brand (29 Sept. 2008)

PSFK has a post about Of Montreal's eagerness to seize upon branding as a way to make money as revenue streams from intellectual property collapses. Like some sort of would-be futurist, frontman Kevin Barnes has even written a manifesto on the subject.

Once we’ve established a comfortable self-sense of our current identity, we want to parade it. We want to campaign for it. We want the whole world to know, “look look, this is me, how you like me now?”. To project our self identity into the outer and, to amplify the howl of our self expression, we have many tools at our disposal; our art, our clothing and hair style, the way we talk…, and, for a lot of us, the objects that populate our living spaces....

of Montreal has, from the beginning, taken great pains to always put a lot of thought and care into the art packaging for our records. We’ve always felt that the packaging was just as important as the music inside of it. We’ve worked within the constraints of conventional album packaging, and have tried to create something fantastically uncommon every time. Now, we find ourselves in the middle of an exciting epoch: A time, when new technology has shattered the conventional business model and has set a paradigm shift in motion. For some people in the music biz, this is terrifying. For us, it is a fucking miracle! While the kings are in a stupor, we are going to take full advantage of the changing guard.

It seems inevitable that music would become secondary to a band's ability to have a large-scale impact. To use some guru manifesto rhetoric of my own for a second, music longs to be intimate, local, small-scale, human, as befits its roots in unifying small communities with rhythmic rituals. Brands evolve from the demands of mass marketing, of packaging a lifestyle that allows individuals to transcend or reject the constraints of whatever community they might otherwise have to be attached to. As music's viability as a commercial product wanes, its original significance returns and it becomes a local and live phenomenon open to universal participation. Anyone can make music and share it, and the meaningful music of the future will be made by you or your friends. Bands can't simply be musicians anymore and expect to function in the mass market; they need to underscore the elements of brand marketing that have always been latent and make them the total package. They need to be lifestyle-promoting companies who happen to use sound as one of their tools.

But the music-identity nexus that Of Montreal wants to exploit to sell its "exceptional object" hinges on the product not being regarded as slick marketing but as the authentic outpouring of artists that people in subcultures want to emulate or experience vicariously. But who wants to experience vicariously the excitement of coming up with a hot new way of selling T-shirts and posters? Of his grand idea to make packaging more interesting than what is packaged, Barnes writes, "We hope this idea catches on and, in the future, square CD packaging will be abandoned forever and only interesting art objects will fill record stores." So in other words, he hopes record stores will in fact cease to be record stores and become either hipster knickknack shops or variants on Hot Topic.

The Numerati, by Stephen Baker (4 September 2008)

The advance of digital technology further and further into the nooks and crannies of our lives is based on an elementary trade-off. It supplies us with a great deal of convenience: It lets us communicate with one another wherever and whenever we want to; it provides us with instantaneous access to and limitless storage of media, everything from personal photos to films to most of the history of recorded music on a terabyte hard drive; it's capable of building in a level of redundancy in our lives, preserving what we might otherwise forget and protecting us from oversights -- if you lose tickets to an event, chances are the barcode on them can be canceled and new ones issued to you. And if your credit card number is stolen, chances are the bank will recognize suspicious purchases and notify you. But in exchange for all this convenience, we sacrifice privacy and spontaneity: We permit all our public actions to be cataloged and processed, and we make ourselves completely and instantly accessible not just to our friends and family, but to marketers who seek to guide our behavior in contexts that they can detect and analyze perhaps even before we have a chance to, and to the state, which may seek to stifle dissent before it has the opportunity to assemble and gather force. We become willing parties to our own reification, to our assimilation into the giant digital data machine. Obviously there is pleasure in this, not only in the expanded access to entertainment but also in the thrill of losing ourselves, of ceding responsibility, of having an all-powerful deity-like entity feed us what it thinks we need to know to be happy in whatever situation we end up in. In short, we have a easier time navigating the world as we experience it because it has been preformatted by powerful institutions. Unfortunately our interests are more or less tangential to these institutions, whose primary concern is their own survival and growth.

So, considering how technology threatens to render our wishes irrelevant even as it pretends to cater to them -- that is, to our desires boiled down to the need for convenience, to consume more faster and with maximum indiscriminateness -- it would seem diligent to regard technology's encroachments with circumspection and skepticism. Because information technology makes so much of our private lives public and because it flattens our experience into a universal code of ones and zeros that threatens to annihilate our sense of its uniqueness, it's natural and prudent to be ambivalent about IT and the dislocating change it incurs. But The Numerati, a new collection of profiles of mathematician data miners by frequent BusinessWeek contributor Stephen Baker, offers mostly token displays of such ambivalence. The book -- whose chapters explore how data about us can be used to make us the target for ads and political appeals, how it can be used to better surveil us at work and capture terrorists (or at least casino cheaters), how it can expose our health issues, and how it can predict the fate of our relationships -- is not really for skeptics. While occasionally paying lip service to privacy advocates, it is generally fawning in its coverage of the companies who sell their abilities to profile us in terms of what we might be susceptible to buy. It regards their invasive business practices as inevitable, the inescapable result of increased competition, and a reflection of the dubious proposition that consumer preferences dictate the direction of the economy. Companies need to spy on their own customers, the logic goes, in order to know what those customers will want just in time to provide it to them, maximizing whatever logistical competitive advantage can thereby be derived. "Retailers simply cannot afford to keep herding us blindly through stores and malls, flashing discounts on Pampers to widowers in wheelchairs," Baker warns in a typical passage.

But if you are not primarily worried about what companies can or can't "afford," the values implicit in the book may bother you. You might not celebrate as a company learns to shed its "barnacle" customers -- i.e. the ones that try to keep companies to their word and make them deliver on their promises. You might not be happy that shopping carts can persuade people to buy more at the supermarket than they otherwise would have. You won't cheer when a computer figures out who you voted for based on contextual clues, opening you up to a new slew of fundraising appeals. Baker seems to register just how dehumanizing and awful the world of surveillance and forced digitalization of our lives will be, but in the book, the craven instincts of the business journalist usually take over, and he presents corporate management's side as the final word -- our inevitable fate that we may as well start loving since we are powerless to alter it.

Think of the endless rows of workers threading together electronic cables in a Mexican assembly plant or the thousands of soldiers rushing into machine-gun fire at Verdun -- even the blissed out crowd pushing through the turnstiles at a Grateful Dead concert. From management's point of view, all of us in these scenarios might as well be nameless and faceless. Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday's story.

The examples cited here are bizarrely incongruous -- are we supposed to be happy to be compared to soldiers being ordered to march into certain death? is that at all comparable to Deadheads at a stadium show? and simply because a lot of people have gathered in one place means they have been ontologically reduced to a statistic automatically? But setting that aside, the phrase yesterday's story is enough to tip us off to Baker's teleological impulses, while his elision of management's point of view with that destiny, with the end of the story, with the point of view that shapes the story, is characteristic of the book as a whole. It is our fate to become numbers in the eyes of the powers that be, because it suits those powers that we be organized in that much-more-manageable fashion. But Baker would have us believe that history itself is responsible, not the institutions and those who profit by them.

The confusions about cause and effect then extend to the means of data collection. "When it comes to producing data," he declares, "we are prolific." This seems an innocuous enough statement, but it's totally backward. Our behavior is simply our behavior; to us it is lived experience, memory, sense stimuli. We don't "produce" the data, the technology that collects it transforms our lived experience into that data that institutions (corporations, the state) crave. It works to have us reconceive ourselves as numbers, as the sum of datapoints, and then presents its manipulations of that data as the means for our personal extension, even though we are now limited to the field it has defined. "Once they have a bead on our data, they can decode our desires," Baker notes, but it seems more appropriate to say that they encode it, trapping it in the mediated digital world. Amazon, for example, usefully tells us what we might want based on our behavior, and then buying the books it has suggested begins to seem a way of completing ourselves. The data -- the preexisting categories, the defaults, the automated processes incumbent in the systems that capture information -- has started to produce us.

The most obvious example of this is social networks, or the even more totalizing Second Life. These data-harvesting applications hope to encourage us to conduct our social lives in their petri dishes and behave in preconditioned ways the service providers can measure and exploit -- attaching ads and recommendations to social exchanges that in the real world would transpire with unencumbered spontaneity, with no commercial subtext. Online, though, our behavior -- now transformed into marketing data -- suddenly works, to those we "network" with, like a sales pitch -- a means to some other end rather than being autonomous. Our actions seems less real until they are posted and shared and processed to our maximum advantage with regard to the impression we would like to create or the number of page views we would like to garner. Our consciousness, when reduced to data out of convenience, becomes merely instrumental, something easily reprogrammed to accomplish various tasks. We can automate our social life or refashion our identities thanks to the tools the networks provide, but the thrill of lived experience vanishes to a degree, becoming more and more a matter of adjustments on the spreadsheet of self.

After Baker has misconstrued our role in turning ourselves into data, it's a short leap to claim that "the only folks who can make sense of the data we create are crack mathematicians." In other words, don't try to understand yourself; you need a math genius to tell you who you are and what your meant to do through your behavior. Statisticians are better managers of our datasets than we are, and they are better able to manipulate our data to see what it will yield -- to see what our true possibilities are. Apparently our own account of our hopes and dreams and intentions is irrelevant to the degree that it is not conditioned by what the math geniuses have calculated and made permissible. Once we are data, we are inscrutable to ourselves.

Not only does our reduction to data make us strangers to ourselves, but Baker goes so far as to opine that in the future, we will be "happy to pay for the privilege of remaining, to some degree or other, in the dark" about the selves that can be constructed from our data. He has in mind the disconcerting probabilities that we will contract diseases, but it applies plausibly to the whole range of knowledge that can be produced about us. When we begin to be overtargeted, we will need filters to discover our authentic reflection in the efforts to persuade us. We will want liberation from the self left behind by the trail we've blazed through commercial culture, as that identity is merely the one that shopping permits us to have. A more integral self will fight that commercially derived one for social space in which to manifest. But the hegemony of consumerism will require us to pay for that privilege of being able to conceive an authentic self independent of our data stream.

What can we do to thwart our being converted to data? Baker suggests a can't-beat-em-join-em approach, urging us to make spreadsheets of our achievements to demonstrate our worth. As digital data hounds become more thoroughly intrusive, we can probably count on the advent of services that would throw out false scents in our name, creating fake data trails to muddy the image of ourselves therein, to obscure our health concerns from insurance companies who would like to exclude us, and to mask our shopping proclivities to ensure that we don't suffer price discrimination or perhaps attract favorable discounts. Just as credit-score doctors learned how to game FICO, a counter-Numerati is sure to emerge to try and thwart their efforts to define us. Short of that, it will increasingly be to our benefit to conduct ourselves anonymously if we want to preserve any sense of self at all.

Face management (15 July 2008)

At Slate, Michael Agger narrates his efforts to put a flattering picture of himself online. This strikes me as a topic that gets more and more depressing the more one thinks about it, because it ultimately forces us to recognize the arms-race quality of self-advertisement.

Remember for a moment how much attention people used to lavish on the perfect quote for their e-mail signature. Now that self-conscious energy is applied to a photo. There's nothing inherently bad about the rise of Web head shots. They just turn what was once a space for burgeoning Cyrano de Begeracs into a space for burgeoning Brad Pitts.

When you expect to be judged by your photo -- in the context of countless other such photos -- and the technology exists to improve that photo, it becomes virtually incumbent on us to deploy that technology, present our visual selves in the most state-of-the-art way. We are forced to see our face as a brand or logo, and we must isolate and reify the qualities that we want to use to market ourselves, and in realizing we are marketing ourselves we must also recognize how we have devised these instrumental means of achieving our particularized goals. We say to ourselves something like, if I capture my face from the right angle, people will think I'm mysterious. If I relax while I take this picture, I might look natural. I might come across as authentic, as "real." Until I get the right photo, I am in danger of being unreal. I don't quite exist. And then you have to think about how sad that is, reducing our complexity to a pinpoint, or a desperate calculation, and having our being reduced to a lighting effect and a camera angle and a set of well-chosen props -- ontology as mise-en-scène.

But it is probably true that how we look forms the basis, the starting point from which people will get to know us, and it supplies the framework into which are actions and behavior are integrated. Managing how we develop social relations online provides a stronger feeling that we can manage the entire process -- provide the flattering picture as the launching point and then carefully groom the online profile to present ourselves as the attractive and appealing product we want to be. But then we are at the same time inviting people to consume us as a kind of reality-TV program, a well-edited entertainment product whose purpose is merely to please them and nothing more. When we objectify ourselves (with online photos and the like) we seem to be liberating others of having to conceive of a reciprocal responsibility toward us -- we want to be looked at and approval rests in that, and when we look back at others, we do it in a different time, with a different mind-set altogether. That is to say, social relations online don't occur in shared time; they are by definition managed, mediated exchanges even when the messaging is "instant."

Agger mentions a new site called Facestat, on which you can post a picture and have people evaluate it through a series of questions that are vaguely research-like.

To date, Facestat has collected 16,818,344 judgments on 126,090 faces. The people behind the site, a group of programmers called Dolores Labs, have played with the data in fun ways. They noted which pairs of tags tend to appear together—athletic and driven, gay and cowboy, old and sour, young and uninterested. They've also built a graphical explorer, with which you can follow the webs of adjectives for an entire afternoon. The promise of accurate "market research" hasn't been totally fulfilled. Looking around the site, I've found the crowd-sourced judgments to be fickle. For every person who thinks you're "not bad," there's another that thinks you're phony—or worse.

This seems to suggest that our efforts at face management are wasted. It may seem like we can better control how we will be perceived online, and it's almost irresistible to make the attempt, but other people will see what is useful for them to see anyway. So it may be that the illusion of control is the lure of posting photos online, and it ultimately has nothing to do with the results the picture yields. This may be true of social networks in general; they let us pretend we are controlling something that is inherently slippery and fluid. They allow us to forget about the contingencies of friendship by making specific friends and whatever specific response they are having to you beside the point. The trick works because we are able to prevent ourselves from seeing how the pools of eyes in the networks we construct for ourselves become mirrors.

The romantic appeal of the long-tail hypothesis (28 June 2008)

Tom Slee, the author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart (highly recommended), complains about The Long Tail in this post, noting all the effort wasted in debunking an idea that was, in his opinion, never much more than a hypothesis.

Face it. Chris Anderson now has people at Harvard Business School of all places spending their valuable time following up his idle speculations. He comes up with a half-baked idea, has basically no data to support it, and yet here are academics - smart people, with tenure, real jobs and things to do - actually spending their time following up these idle daydreams; acting as his research assistants. What a waste.

Slee links to this Harvard Business Review essay by Anita Elberse that examines Anderson's notions and finds that serving the long tail won't make much money for any businesses, and that the economics of superstars still reigns supreme. No one is going to start a winning business selling obscure goods to the handful of people who are interested in them. More likely, I would think, those interested people will find a way get the obscure goods free from one another, if they are digitally distributable -- especially since difficulties in securing rights clearances can inhibit many of these goods' distribution for sale.

But despite the data, it's hard for me to give up on the long-tail idea. It has a certain romantic appeal, as Elberse notes:

How much enjoyment is derived from obscure versus blockbuster products? We can all easily imagine the extreme delight that comes from discovering a rare gem, perfectly tailored to our interests and ours to bestow on likeminded friends. This is perhaps the most romanticized aspect of long-tail thinking. Many of us have experienced just such moments; they are what give Chris Anderson’s claims such resonance. The problem is that for every industrial designer who blissfully stumbles across the films of Charles and Ray Eames, untold numbers of families are subjecting themselves to the likes of Sherlock: Undercover Dog. Ratings posted by Quickflix customers show that obscure titles, on average, are appreciated less than popular titles.

It may be that we're allured by the notion that deeply individual tastes will be nurtured by the entertainment economy of the future, that the dream of having perfectly idiosyncratic taste will be fulfilled for everyone. And there will be a perfect marketing plan individually tailored for us all that will be so suited to us that it won't even seem like advertising. It will just seem like our wants being anticipated, the desired goods brought to us right on time. Such is the fantasy of individualism for its own sake, in the field of consumerism. With our identity riding on what we consume, we come to believe that there's something valuable about having unique tastes, but we don't actually pursue such a course in practice. When it comes to pop culture, for better or worse, its popularity alone is part of what makes it enjoyable, consumable. When the obscure good is consumed, it is usually an equally shallow effort to enjoy obscurity for its own sake, to use it as a badge, rather than because there is something compelling about the obscure thing itself. (This explains probably 75 percent of my record collection. That Terry Knight and the Pack record is not something I enjoy for the music.) Most of the time, what we want to consume in pop culture is the potentiality of participation in a public sphere that consists to a large degree in recognizing the same set of entertainment touchstones.

The niche products that retailers can stock (but rarely sell) may have nothing but an alibi function -- they make us feel bnetter about consuming mainstream junk because we also know that we could buy something weird and idiosyncratic. As Elberse notes, "the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow." Consuming niche goods every once and a while serves as a palate cleanser for the popular stuff we have truly integrated into our social lives. A Godard of Fassbinder film now and then licenses a lot of Indiana Jones and Lost episodes.

The attention of last resort (13 Nov 2007)

It may be a generational thing, or a my-being-a-Luddite thing, but social networking seems to me to have less to do with being social and more to do with self-marketing. MySpace, when it started, was primarily a place to market your band; it was a means to mounting a commercial website without the HTML knowhow. Once people had personal websites, they could be drawn in with the allure of metrics, the thrill of measuring one's reach the way a marketer would -- how many hits you get, what kind of demographic you are drawing, how successful you are at getting target audiences to interact with your site, what you need to say or how much skin you have to show to attract more attention and things like that. The attention, in this realm, becomes a measurable kind of currency, whereas in the dreary real world, it's much harder to put a number on it -- you can't really count how often someone looks at you or answers your questions or has a positive thought about the way you have designed yourself.

So social networking is about quantifying the attention we can receive and finding some solace in that; real-world attention is a severely scarce commodity, but online the number of internet users, and the effectiveness of programmed simulacrums, make it seem limitless. It also can invert the sense of scarcity -- instead of their not being enough attention out there for us to attract, suddenly it's the attention that we can give that becomes treasured and scarce, a powerful feeling and one that is continually stoked by marketers in their attempts to flatter us with the attention they pay -- "Hey you -- yes, you, and only you. I have something I really want to show you. See? See, I knew you would like it. I know you so well!" The internet in general caters to our craving for instant attention -- it promises us the precise kind of audience we want at any time, andif that audience proves elusive, it supplies another conduit for the personal attention of last resort, advertising. If one is lonely and looking for recognition, targeted ads are better than nothing, and for the advertisers, nothing could be better than hitting someone when they are down and vulnerable.

It was only a matter of time before social networks became more explicitly about marketing, since they were already about measuring attention and influence and defining oneself as a certain sort of marketing target. This Economist article looks at the recent developments of integrating ads more smoothly with social networking sites, letting advertisers eavesdrop on the conversations among "friends" and interject themselves when it seems appropriate or lucrative. And Facebook itself will take the commercial behavior of its users -- buying something, participating in some brand's Facebook page -- and try to spread them across the user's network as a kind of advertising, mimicking word-of-mouth. It forces you to be a shill, unless you opt out, and it furthers the perception that people shop to be noticed. Shopping may inevitably be a social activity, but social networking sites are trying to make it the cornerstone of friendship. So one can share such momentous decisions as buying shoes online with friends as if were deeply significant personal news and thereby let people get to know you better -- since after all, we are what we buy and spending money is the only way we can signify we're serious about something.

Social-networking technology basically lets brands aspire to be mistaken for actual peers, things people can have relationships with, and it also encourages people not only to see themselves as brands themselves (the metrics component of social networks already encourages this) but also to monetize their personal brand and treat their friend groups as demographics to exploit -- as people primarily to market to with word-of-mouth recommendations, or automatically generated web notifications. This would be depressing if the groups on the networks resembled one's real-life circle of friends (which one presumes is built on trust rather than exploitation). But there may not be enough incentive for people to groom their networks to make them match their real ones, and the colonization of the networks by marketing reduces that incentive further. The article cites Paul Martino, a proprietor of an early social network, who argues that

the interpersonal connections (called the “social graph”) on such networks are also of low quality. Because few people dare to dump former friends or to reject unwanted friend requests from casual acquaintances, “social graphs degenerate to noise in all cases,” he says. If he is right, social-marketing campaigns will descend into visual clutter about the banal doings of increasingly random people, rather than being the next big thing in advertising.

Let's hope he's right.

Big-box-store Götterdämmerung? (24 October 2006)

I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I read somewhere that Borders, the book-store chain, was seeking new growth opportunities in opening smaller stores ("Borders Express") that sound a lot like the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton Booksellers mall storefronts that the big-box retailer originally stole market share from.

Originally, in what was the opening fusillade of the long-tail revolution, big-box stores opened to suit the modern customer whose needs -- yours, mine -- were far too recondite to be served by some puny mainstream mall store with its limited selection and plebian emphasis. At Borders I could expect to buy books by Althusser and Badiou; not so at Waldenbooks, where they were crowded out by the likes of Danielle Steele and John Jakes. The zeitgeist through the late 1990s was in keeping with this; customers needed superstores to accommodate their esoteric, unique-seeming needs in just about everything -- books, music, electronics, housewares, hardware, bedsheets, containers, gourmet foods, you name it. And the mother of all superstores, though approaching it from a different ideological angle, is Wal-Mart -- Wal-Mart doesn't cater to our special needs so much as provide one-stop shopping and a sense that the prices are unbeatably low, and these two things compensate for the inconvenience of dealing with the carnivalesque atmosphere, the crowds, the understaffed cashier lines and so on. (It was left to Target to merge the Borders ideology with the Wal-Mart ideology, and provide spruced-up commodities and design-y versions of utilitarian goods that invited us to imagine ourselves as curators of our own personal household museum.)

But perhaps the zeitgeist is changing, and consumers don't want big-box stores anymore. Perhaps there are cyclical movements in shopping environments as there are in fashion, and the particulars are ultimately just as arbitrary. We prefer something different for the sake of its difference after a while, and this plays out in the sudden exhaustion of a huge company's business model. The WSJ has a front-page article today about Wal-Mart, for the first time in many years, scaling back its expansion plans, as it appears it has saturated the market.

Wal-Mart's modest shift in strategy suggests the giant discounter, which has been increasingly constrained by its own size, may be heeding Wall Street's urging to pay less attention to growth and put more emphasis on returns. "This tells me that Wal-Mart is willing to look at their business model from a fresh perspective," said Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher. "They are not just mindlessly continuing on the same focus that they've had for years." The shift is also an acknowledgment of the pressures that have buffeted Wal-Mart from all sides this year.

So the relentless effort to drum up negative coverage of Wal-Mart is possibly starting to trickle down to average Americans, some of whom are now willing to work a little harder to avoid the Wal-Mart stigma. This is the consequence of the company's trying to expand into suburban, culturally more-liberal areas: "As it ventures beyond its rural base into urban markets, such as San Francisco's Bay Area, Boston and Chicago, Wal-Mart also is encountering heavy resistance from community activists and local politicians who object to its low wages and other employment practices and say it poses a threat to local businesses." The political blowback is an externality that perhaps hadn't anticipated, and suggests why our collective whining isn't entirely trivial. It may have the larger impression of creating a negative brand impression that makes it way back and erodes the company's core customer base.

Also, it may be that the company has filled the country with all the Wal-Marts it can handle, and now the tide must recede. "In regions like the South, where it already reigns, its new stores are increasingly siphoning sales away from older ones." It's comforting to imagine that there's a limit to how far the blandification of America can go, that this could mean the transformation of country roads into strips of giant warehouses of retail goods with their attendant parking lots might be coming to an end. But that's just a fantasy -- whether the boxes are big or small, the stores need will need brand names to comfort wary consumers and guarantee their feeling of having participated in something larger. The days when local idiosyncracy was generally tolerated has long since passed.

The demise of niche marketing (20 October 2006)

Via Mark Thoma comes this essay by economist and frequent NY Times contributor Hal Varian about the effects the ease of video production and distribution will have on entrenched old-media interests. Obviously YouTube makes it easy to distribute videos, made with increasingly cheap DV technology, to anyone who might be interested, and the fact that Google now owns YouTube implies that searching the morass of clips will only become easier. Such clips are at the far, far end of the long tail, sometimes produced and distributed for an audience of friends and family. Those who make these clips of themselves lip synching or of family birthday parties or what have you probably don't expect to make a living doing it, so the practice wouldn't seem to have any impact on commercial video producers.

But Varian explains the impact in terms of Ricardo's notion of economic rents: He points out that the salary of such stars as Tom Cruise "depend on the fact that large numbers of people will pay to see his movies. If, in the future, these people spend more time on YouTube and less time going to movies, Mr. Cruise’s compensation will probably fall." In other words, Cruise's salary doesn't determine the cost of producing movies any more than land rent determines the cost of producing agricultural products; it's vice versa. And what YouTube does is provide an easily accessed alternative that redirects some of our attention away from Hollywood and toward (for better or worse) videos of our friends' children and pets, or toward amateur filmmakers doing things so outrageous or clever that our friends forward them to us. Writes Varian: "Economic rent comes from scarcity. It is true that there is only one Tom Cruise, but it is equally true that there are only 24 hours in a day. The more time young people spend watching Lonelygirl15, the less time they will have to watch Mr. Cruise."

The same seems to apply to music -- the easier it is to make music with computer recording and editing software and distribute it via social networking tools like MySpace, the less pressing it is to consume Vivendi Universal's product. Social networks among youth are often knit by shared tastes in mass-media product, but the technological infrastructure is falling into place to permit them to become self-sustaining communities in terms of culture, to become virtual equivalents of what you used to see with small-town hardcore scenes (the kind of thing Maximum Rock and Roll once chronicled).

That's not likely to happen, however, since participation in mass events seems to provide a vicarious satisfaction of the yearning for massive amounts of attention -- the same function that network reality TV seems to serve. (We also seem to want to belong to a zeitgeist that transcends our small communities; perhaps this could change.) Varian suggests something similar when he echoes the prediction that the effects long-tail distribution will ultimately squeeze semipopular, middling culture: "Those actors, writers and directors who do not command the big audiences may well find it hard to compete for attention with the video blogs. True, the videos available there are often sophomoric. But there will always be sophomores to watch them."

What this may indicate is that the middlebrow, not-quite-popular stuff had been serving a placeholder function, it served to replace the community feeling that was decimated with the spread of television and the atomization of suburban America. In other words, semicommercial indie rock, independent film, literary fiction, little magazines and the bookstores and concert halls and coffee shops which supported and distributed such materials were the product of alienation within a specific sociohistorical formation. The niche such stuff served may be vanishing, as niches themselves become so specific as to dissolve into wholly sui generis idiosyncratic scenes made up of friends connected technologically.

The Internet (perhaps only in my Utopian fantasies, and in the face of the reality that in consigns individuals to sit alone facing a screen) is militating against that isolation, offering people sophisticated means to connect and to produce the kind of cultural material with which to facilitate bonds unique to the group they are in the process of creating with one another. Bands, writers, directors who might have broken out to small-time success may now never escape from the small group of personal friends they work to please, unless they manage to convince mass marketers that they can take their productions to that level, and make the sacrifices and compromises of impersonality and ideological conformity that such a leap requires.