According to Business Insider, new company Likester's Adcenter is revealing "surprising and depressing" trends in what people like on Facebook.
Putting aside the obvious privacy concerns (because who really needs to talk about privacy on facebook AGAIN), what struck me about this latest iteration of behavioural advertising is how close it is coming to creating an entire composite of a person through their preferences - my identity is getting fleshed out on line in direct proportion to the extent to which I choose to support brands.
In a lot of ways, this isn't that different from the meatworld. I have strong memories of my ninth grade back pack (army surplus baby), which was marked up with all of my favourite bands in thick black and blue permanent marker (sonic youth; nirvana; bikini kill) - and true, I did spend money on their albums and tshirts and shows, and this communicated those aspects of my identity to other kids. It also communicated other things about my consumer (and no doubt also moral) choices: in that sense "sonic youth" was a complex signifier for converse sneakers, thrift store shopping, coen brothers movies appreciating etc etc.
But I guess the main point of difference now is that online you have to write yourself into existence, there is no you outside of that (although for kids coming up today I imagine they can't imagine a time when they didn't exist online - I'd be interested to know how that impacts on the sense of self). So the entirety of the communication of self is what you can write on your hyperlinked backpack (or facebook wall) - so what does it mean if that information is being used by advertisers to set up a marketing profile for you (and, importantly, others 'like' you) and communicated to corporations so they can better sell to you?
It seems fairly sinister to me (especially as Facebook toys with lowering the age of its users) - and I also can't quite get my head around how to think about the fact that we opt in to this system. I like things on my Facebook (bruce campbell, julia kristeva, slate magazine, etc); and likester itself appears to have a social networking function wherein their likester affinities program tells you what ELSE you might like based on your Facebook profile (could be useful in a video store. Oh, wait). So why are we choosing to commodify our identities in this way? Are we so keen for a better shopping experience that we want to make it easier for stores to target us? Or is there something more complicated going on when we merge our articulation of identity with commericialism?
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