April 25, 2003
Bleeech, personal advertising?
Finally, someone's coming 'round to some rational ideas on interacting with sites and advertising. Really personalized advertising (kottke.org).
In essence the idea is as you surf the sites will be able to interact with your 'to do' list and present you with customized materials. It's certainly an interesting idea. Quite quickly, however, a very ugly set of trust issues emerge.
I'm not convinced that working with existing advertising models is a good idea. Frankly, I think it's a horrendously bad idea. Mainly because the public has no idea what chicanery goes on behind the scenes in advertising. Were the public to know just how much their personal privacy is invaded every day they'd be up in arms. If the public thinks the record industry is fraught with abuses, wait'll they get a load of advertising. You're pimped out, demographically, six ways from Sunday by these folks... and you don't even know it.
So pardon me if I'm entirely skeptical that a system that works with these industries is ever going to be something I'd even come close to trusting. I'm not going to go so far as to say the whole mess needs to be chucked out, but I'm about this close.
Right now these industries actively depend on you having NO say in the process. What's to make me think they're suddenly going to turn around and give even the slightest bit of control (and profit)? To help you? Please, what kind of fools do you think we are?
Besides, haven't we had enough with all this technological development being made for little more than a way of pimping us another pair of overpriced, slave labor-made tennis shoes?
Maybe we're better off giving up on them entirely and focusing our energies on things that might actually HELP people. There's certainly money to be made doing this, don't get me wrong. I'm as interesting in making a living as the next person. But I'm more than a little sick of how the current systems pretend to function.
Altruistic systems are possible. Whether we can get there using current participants is another thing entirely.
