It's Not Just Your Privacy, It's Your Personhood

By Jonathan Collyer, Reader Supported News

23 May 13

e are at or near the dawn of two new powerful forces in society: Targeted Marketing and Augmented Reality. It is not just your privacy that is at stake.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. track your online actions. They in turn are backed up by scores of "Data Brokers," companies that specialize in knowing if you are pregnant, on a diet, and what kind of car you own. The goal of the targeted advertiser is to interpret data to match advertisers to consumers. That's where the money is.

"Augmented Reality" is a live, direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input like sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Basically, the real world is transformed into a canvas on which digital information is displayed. While a variety of augmented reality apps are available on smart phones, the adoption of devices like Google Glass are soon going to make augmented reality a part of your entire day.

Before we jump into a discussion of near-future marketing and the effects on personhood, let's lay down a few intellectual stepping stones. What does it mean to be a person? An individual? A conscious being? An autonomous entity? Choose your favorite definition, or choose not to choose. We all have an intuitive sense that we make our own decisions and can be held accountable for our own actions.

Here's the existentialist's problem (at least one of them). We didn't choose to live in a world with constant war or starvation. Yes, perhaps we could do more to change it, but at the moment we were born, the world had its problems, and plenty of them. Likewise, before we could walk or stand or say our own name, we had learned to hold a spoon and wear a shirt. We had learned the meaning of "no." All the objects of technology that came before our birth, all the concepts, words, and cultures were there to greet us with all their intentions and hidden meanings. Did you choose to wear a blue shirt if you were a boy or a pink dress if you were a girl? Did you invent the knife, the fork, and the plate that you now require to eat a meal? Before you can even write your own name, your environment and culture have already shaped your perception.

Joseph Campbell describes a coming of age ceremony in New Guinea, where throughout a child's life he has been taught to fear men wearing masks as though they were gods. When the child becomes an adolescent, he is forced to fight one of the men wearing a mask: to fight a god. The man in the mask relents and lets the child win, at which time the mask is removed and placed on the child. As Joseph Campbell says, "Now the mask there is not defeated, and simply said, 'It's just myth.' Instead the mask represents the power that is shaping the society and has shaped you. And now you are a representative of that power."

We intuitively know this is why teenagers "act out," listen to loud music, and wear extreme clothing. They are in effect creating for themselves a modern version of the ceremony Joseph Campbell so aptly describes. They are becoming a representative of the power that shapes the world. In spite of all the influences and outright brainwashing that our contemporary culture immerses us in from birth, when a child becomes an adult, he takes full responsibility for the person he's become. He has the power to reject, reshape and even create a new path.

Now let's talk about the present and future of personhood in the age of targeted advertising and augmented reality.

Online advertising measures both clicks and impressions. A click is obviously when you choose to select an advertisement, while an impression is simply the fact that the advertisement appeared on the page. Google is the largest online advertising network. Their advertising revenue in 2012 was 43 billion dollars. Google alone makes more money from their online advertising business than all US print publications combined. That's a lot of clicks, but it is an order of magnitude more impressions. The trend is accelerating. Every year there are more and more clicks and impressions. My one-year-old daughter has seen more ads (while watching ducks quack or kittens meow on youtube) than my parents likely did by the time they were teenagers.

Every time you do a search or check your email or visit a web site, information is being gathered on your behavior while a voracious periphery of advertisement clamors for your attention. Perhaps you "just ignore it," in which case it simply enters your subconscious as yet another jingle or meme to bounce around the dark side of your brain. We've grown up with television. It can be sinister, but it's nothing new. The difference is this: a traditional television has no personal relationship with you. You turn it on or off, change the channel. It doesn't care if you watch the news or sports. This is not how targeted advertising works.

In the targeted advertising world, every ad you see is the result of a choice you make, a search you run, a web site you visited, or some piece of data that has indicated you are receptive to a particular pitch. I recently shopped online for a drafting table as a birthday gift for my wife. I visited a web site that sold only drafting tables. When I went onto my Facebook page later that day, I had to cover up the ads in the right column when my wife walked by, because there were several advertisements for drafting tables. It would have ruined the surprise.

The information used to target you is not only gathered when you are at a computer. The smart phone offers up a wealth of information to the marketer. Your phone's GPS tracks your travel and even knows which items you look at in a store. Even your phone's camera can be a source of information.

Now let's go for a walk with Joe. Joe lives in the year 2020. When Joe turned 14 in 2014 his parents bought him his first pair of "Google Glasses" (officially known as Google Glass). Joe loves his Google Glass, downloads all the latest apps, and doesn't know what he would do without Facebook. The Glasses let him shoot video of whatever he sees and livestream it to his friends. He can display a computer-like interface on any surface and make choices by moving his hands or even just his eyes.

Joe can't always afford to buy the "no advertising" version of those apps (if there even is one). So, Joe's walk down the street is considerably more informational and commercial than ours would be. There are maps and arrows pointing to local coffee shops or stores. There are pop-ups showing twitter posts from people nearby. There are video advertisements playing on any flat surface like benches and walls. Anything that can be displayed on a television can and will be displayed in the Glasses. Only Joe's ads are overlaid on top of whatever Joe is seeing in reality, and they are reacting in real time to enormous amounts of Joe's personal information.

In every moment, in every life experience, Joe is surrounded by dozens of impressions of talking, singing, blinking advertisements filling his subconscious with all manner of varied input, and filling his conscious mind with dizzying numbers of choices. The world is transformed into a commercial experience. Joe takes it all in stride. The ads are continually tailored and fine tuned to match his life experience. Many of them are creative and entertaining. What's the big deal?

We do not necessarily choose the thoughts that enter our mind. When a dog barks or a car door slams we are jolted to react to a world we do not control. Our conscious and subconscious fears and desires produce a physical and mental reaction. But when Joe hears a dog bark, his Glasses serve as an interpretive intermediary layer. What the bark means to Joe is no longer the only question. We must first ask what the bark means to the army of marketers who plaster Joe's vision with ads for dog whistles or blood pressure medications. But what if there is no real dog? What if the barking is a clever "augmented reality" advertising campaign? At what point have we gone full circle, to become creatures for whom the real tangible world is merely a background on which a manufactured reality plays out?

If every ad Jo sees is the result of a choice he once made (or some complex profiling algorithm) and every choice he makes is heavily influenced by thousands of advertising impressions integrated into his lived experience, can Joe still claim to be an individual, or is he an automaton of a marketing collective? How do you transition from being a child to an adult, how do you assert your autonomy, when you are constantly reacting to conscious and unconscious stimulation that defines the world you live in and the narrow ways in which you can interact with it?

Rather than receiving the proverbial "mask of the gods" to shape society and shape yourself, Joe receives the opposite: a permanent paternal relationship where the gods of marketing lead the pseudo-child from one consumer moment to the next. Every attempt at a conscious choice feeds back into defining the world you are presented through the filter of the augmented reality/targeted marketing gods.