The meosphere and behavioral targeting (20 June 2007)

Why use the Internet to find out the world beyond your nose? Wouldn't that just ultimately be a waste of time? Aren't we all wishing for more sites about the topic that truly interests us, namely ourselves?

This seems as though it should be a parody, but it's not: In today's WSJ, Walter Mossberg's minion Katherine Boehret writes about Meosphere, a new website that prompts you to make lists about yourself so that you may then use the site to regard yourself, preen and plan for the future. The site bills itself as a kind of Web-based scrapbook where you can store memories and have dormant ones reawakened by prompts devised by Meosphere's staff and by the site's other users.

This free site is a lot of fun to use, not to mention addictive. Once you start checking off items in one list, you'll want to complete other lists to beef up your meosphere. And when friends and family share their meosphere with you, you'll learn things you never knew about them.

The idea here, as with every social networking tool, is that the site provides a central repository for signaling information about yourself that might otherwise be lost or underexploited -- we don't generally blab to strangers about our many fascinating experiences because we may have the strange idea that we are not universally and inherently fascinating at all times. Like booze or sodium pentathol, the site seeks to disinhibit us. (Writes Boehret, "Chances are that almost everyone you meet has done something fascinating, but it's not always easy for people to spit out these facts about themselves. Meosphere gives you a chance to do so, through the Web.") On the internet, no one needs have any scruple about putting themselves forward or to convert all their experience into ruses to impress other people. Even if we had no thought other than the experience itself as we did thing in our lives, sites like this one allow us to retroactively convert them into conspicuously consumed commodities.

So on the one hand, these sites supply encouragement for us to turn activities into identity-fashioning goods that signal our place in a consumer economy. We generally do this without thinking, regarding ourselves as little more than a catalog of belongings (our memories are objects belonging to us from this perspective) -- they bolster a possession-oriented subjectivity, rather than a process-oriented one. At the end of the day, it's not what you've done but what you have that makes you who you are. On the other, these sites supply marketers with extremely useful data in order to better target ads toward you. As Boehret explains,

Web sites know how valuable lists can be; wish lists and automatically generated recommendation lists provide encouragement for online shoppers.

When you are enticed to feed these recommendation generators, they become that much more persuasive in convincing you that you need more stuff than you imagined, a thought that many people likely find reassuring -- I'm always glad when I "discover" new albums I need to buy or books I need to read; future consumption plans make me feel like I have a purpose.

This article, from yesterday's WSJ details how thrilled companies are with what advertisers call behavioral targeting, "in which marketers analyze consumers' online activities to figure out who is most likely to be interested in its product -- and then place ads on whatever sites those consumers are visiting." Now, though advertisers love this technology, let's not forget that it's really for our benefit, helping to construct a more perfect meosphere:

"The future of digital media is less about distribution and more about understanding the audience's interests and being able to project that anywhere," says Bill Gossman, president and chief executive officer of independently owned behavioral-targeting firm Revenue Science.

The web is about projecting our interests, which couldn't in the end be anything but bound up with commercial interests -- what could we be interested in doing that wouldn't open up the possibility of selling us stuff, stuff that would extend our interests further? When we volunteer information on social networking sites, it's close to affirming the idea that we don't mind targeted ads, that we are in fact in a way soliciting them.

Modern life in Maricopa County (30 November 2006)

Whenever I come back from my annual Arizona vacation I feel a bit like a cliche from a David Brooks column, ready to patronizingly lampoon philistine provincial life and point out obvious atrocities like the local news broadcast (this just in: snow is cold; also: car chase in Dallas ends in collision), the ubiquity of paycheck loan kiosks (some retrofitted into Mexican restaurants that were themselves retrofitted into moribund fast-food chains), the relentless sprawl (it's practically filled the valley past the Maricopa County line to the south and well into Carefree to the north), and so on. I tend to be seduced by the idea that New York City is the capital of the free world and as its media center originates the cultural ideas that trickle out to places like Phoenix and Tucson. And sometimes this is true; one can see the hangover of trends that have already exhausted themselves back East.

But this time I've returned enamored of a different cliche about the postmodernity of edge cities: that in fact Phoenix is an ongoing project in manufacturing the cutting edge suburban lifestyle, in pursuing and distributing the state of the art in middle-class amenities -- retail plazas with organic-food markets and parking lots with giant spaces -- and New York City is an antiquated version of modern life, one that's terminally threatened and holds on merely through the tenacity of tradition. Out in Arizona we rented a crossover SUV (the poetically named Chevy HHK) and drove the brand-new freeway loops and did a bunch of shopping and dining in new commercial developments on what used to be the outskirts of town. I felt like a character in a car commercial or something.

While everyday life in New York is a thicket of nuisances, dealing with crowds and lines and the ceaseless imperative to rush and put yourself first lest you never get what you're trying to do done, the ease and convenience of the quotidian in Arizona is palpable, which to me seems a product of the redundancy of shopping centers. Also the expanse of open desert space (while it lasts) allows one to take scorched earth policy toward communities -- when it ceases to be convenient, when it starts to feel encrusted with idiosyncratic necessities or complications, one can simply strike out for the latest development on the fringe and partake of the hottest enticements -- four-car garages, cathedral ceilings, etc. The driving forces of contemporary consumer capitalism -- novelty, convenience, the desire to feel independent from the impact of other's decisions -- seem to culminate in the dynamic system on display in Maricopa County.

For me this plays out as a kind of vacation listlessness, some of which must be blamed on my lack of imagination. But since so much of the region seems devoted to convenient transportation and shopping, I feel like there is nothing to do but drive around and shop. Sure, I could leave the valley altogether and go hiking or something but it seems easier to pivot from cable TV to shopping to dining to sleeping. Imagination itself is reconfigured as a nuisance; best to glide along without the trouble of it, finding fulfillment in the safe and predictable, in the pseudo-novelty of new franchises of chain stores and restaurants.

Update: Via The Economist's new blog comes this defense of chain stores by Virginia Postrel: "Chains make a large range of choices available in more places. They increase local variety, even as they reduce the differences from place to place. People who mostly stay put get to have experiences once available only to frequent travelers, and this loss of exclusivity is one reason why frequent travelers are the ones who complain." The idea behind this is that each chain represents some local brainstorm made national or global. (That ingenious idea to have all you can eat breadsticks is now available at the Olive Garden in your town.) Postrel argues that "the contempt for chains represents a brand-obsessed view of place, as if store names were all that mattered to a city’s character." A fair point, but it still seems to me that the ubiquity and density of chain stores evokes the criticism; the individual chains don't matter so much as the blanket they spread over a locale, rendering it familiar to travelers and encouraging the idea that interaction with any locale is primarily a matter of shopping. The contempt for chains stems from the fact that it blots out a city's individual character, which is not merely a matter of driving local companies out of business or obscuring what the local industries consist of.

Postrel and The Economist blogger (Megan McArdle) seem to want to emphasize the vanity of urban planners (and activist consumers) who reject chains as inauthentic and the sound sense of "ordinary Americans" who appreciate their virtues. Perhaps they are right; the development of cities such as Phoenix certainly seems to bear out their assumptions about what Americans prefer; Phoenix suggests what all American cities would be like if they could instantaneously rebuild according to current consumer preferences. And perhaps the accessibility of the various successful retail strategies of so many different chains at once accounts for my feeling of being intoxicated (if not incapacitated) by convenience. The corporate interests behind the chains are able to induce us to accept values amenable to the corporations' thriving because they offer us the least resistance and we as individuals are ultimately more flexible than corporations (which aren't as flexible as market theory typically proposes). What we lose is any interest in local idiosyncrasy, or the kind of complication that arises from tradition and history. Phoenix (appropriately named in this regard) allows us to believe that the community in which we live was invented to suit us personally -- it flatters our own vanity; the world, for me -- because it so compellingly convinces us to reduce ourselves to the consumer desires it is optimized to service.

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.