refer a friend: children and viral marketing

On August 22 the Center for Digital Democracy, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and 15 other consumer and youth advocacy groups filed a series of complaints with the Federal Trade Commission alleging breaches of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The complaints call on the FTC to investigate a number of companies - including General Mills, McDonalds, Viacom and others - for unfair and deceptive marketing practices which encourage children to engage in viral marketing.  Specifically, these campaigns allegedly  induce children to 'refer-a-friend' to receive promotional material from the companies. In so doing, the children are invited to submit both their own personal information and the personal information of their friends, without parental consent, which the complainants argue is in direct violation of COPPA.

While it is the products involved which have riled up a number of the complainant groups (news coverage has focused in particular on the fact that these companies are 'selling sugar' to kids), the complaints raise the thornier issue of what's at stake in the privacy protections provided by COPPA. Of course, it seems to be fairly black and white that we want to minimise children's exposure to junk food marketing, and that if we can do this at the same time as preventing companies from exploiting technologies' ability to collect data on them it seems like a win win.

But this characterisation overlooks the very real impact COPPA - and, in particular, the parental consent provisions - actually have on children's right to privacy. If we think that children should have a meaningful right to privacy, subjecting it to parental oversight is always going to be complicated. While parents may be best placed to act in the interests of their children, they are also best placed to undermine those rights. As a result, the panopticon of surveillance enabled by the web and legislatively ennobled by legislation like COPPA is taking away the ability of children to explore their world anonymously or, at least, in private. This has both overt (the ten year old boy who gets beaten by his parents for looking at something they disapprove of) and more insidious (an entire generation growing up with a sense of being constantly monitored) consequences.

At the same time, the marketing campaigns concerned involve another angle which is particularly troubling for the relationship between children and their digital identity: the incentive to 'refer-a-friend'. In so doing, these campaigns encourage kids to commodify the identity-markers (indeed, the identities) of other kids and 'sell' them (or give them) to corporations. Underpinning this practice is the inculcation of an idea that identities (your own and other people's) are saleable, that people are commodities. I can't help but wonder how that attitude will manifest when these kids are older.

Of course, a balance needs to be struck. Protecting kids from the ever expanding reach of the consumption machine is a noble goal. But we  need to make sure that in seeking to ameliorate one incursion we don't accidentally do more harm to young people's privacy, safety and sense of themselves.

teleportraiture

Janet Bruesselbach has produced a series of portraits via various online chat platforms (google connect, skype etc). I love the way these images turn the ephemerality of digital talk into something fixed and permanent; capturing these moments that are so fleeting. At the same time, to me her work insists upon the permanence of our digital world, reminding us that 'moments' online have lives that long exceed our own, stored, searchable and retrievable in an historically unprecedented way. As such, these images can be understood not only as images of people, but as portraits of the ghosts in the machine.

google effects: augmenting the reality of your face

Image source: http://criticsunknown.com/slideshow/google/

In March, google released a range of aps intended to 'enhance' the experience of its online chat forum, Hangouts. According to a recent article in Slate, the most popular of these aps is 'google effects', an application which enhances your experience of Hangouts by enhancing your appearance: it allows you to adorn your chatting visage with a range of masks which are digitally mapped to your face, moving when you move and "retaining proper size and orientation as you lean forward and back or sway side to side" so as to give the appearance that you are wearing them in real life.

As you can see from the image above, the masks are cartoony and over the top: they do not so much enhance your appearance (in the sense of making you foxier) as they do hide it. Seth Stevenson argues that it is this very disruption of the reality of your face that makes google effects so popular (and useful): it obscures the visibility of your facial expressions and takes the pressure off the need to look a particular way while interacting online. This, for Stevenson, ironically allows users to interact with less emphasis on visibility, rendering Hangouts more like traditional orality oriented forms of communication like the telephone.

While I agree that google effects may well lessen the pressure of online chatting (and possibly increase its utilisation)(who hasn't been put off skyping sometimes as a consequence of a bad hair day/desire to have the conversation on the toilet/etc), I think there is something else going on that is not just about reducing visibility and rendering Hangouts more like the traditional invisible talkiness of the telephone. Rather, google effects allow us to use masks as a graphical shorthand to communicate complex emotions - turning us into the fleshy manifestation of emoticons.

In this way, google effects foregrounds the prismatic nature of online identity: by adding an additional layer of artifice to the digital visage, it forces us to think twice about who we are, and implicitly evokes the fact that identity itself is artifice; that the layers of selfhood are unendingly constructed, that we are masks all the way down to the bone. In this way, google effects insists on a narrative of digital identity in which the emotion/emoticon is a simulacrum, dissimulating (in the baudrillardian sense) that there is nothing beneath the sign.

And just as a geographical map interprets (and imagines) territorial space, so to does the mask of google effects precede (and configure) online identity, replacing the parody of a real world mask with the pastiche of a prismatic digital self. This evolution of the performance of identity for the digital realm recalls Jameson's insistence that one of the defining features of postmodernism is the replacement of parody by pastiche. What, then, are the implications for digital identity of what I'm sure will be increasingly complex and 'realistic' (hyperrealistic?) augmentations of self? Is it simply empowering us to self satirise (or go to the bathroom while we chat) or will the avatarisation of self online have real implications for the way in which we understand and perform our identities in the webisphere (and beyond?)

And what of the content of the mask? At what point is an obama mask an obama mask, and when does it turn into an obama face? (yes, that is a true blood reference, with a little touch of point break thrown in for good measure). Will we see an explosion of efforts to trademark our face to prevent our online impersonation? At what point do the things that you say while wearing my face defame me?