The Worst Decision of My Life

     We all make decisions that we later find unbearable. Maybe it is a serious life decision that we regret, or maybe it is just an awkward moment that we wish had never taken place - but we can all locate low points in the plateau of our lives. However, I believe that at the age of fifteen I have already made the mistake that will define the entirety of my existence. Several months ago, I made a decision so despicable, so strikingly irresponsible, a decision so wrong that it struck me to my very core: I followed the NBA on Instagram 
     It was a moment of weakness, and one that stands our like a sore thumb in the tapestry that is my life. I found myself drawn towards the nightly highlights and recaps of games that appeared on the Instagram - I was seduced into making a decision that would create a flow of advertising so heavy it would define the next several months of my life. Immediately after following the account, my Instagram was flooded with advertisements for basketball related items; shoes, shorts, game tickets, sweatshirts, basketballs, hoops, Gatorade, and countless others. What had been a pristine landscape of art (memes) had been irreversibly tarnished by advertising. 
     However, it didn't stop there. The ads began to appear everywhere - Twitter, Facebook, Google, when I shopped, and even in the mail. I can only imagine that the salespeople at the National Basketball Association were forced to open a second headquarters in order to accomodate the flood of propaganda that they thought I desired. This is my most vivid experience with narrowcasting - ads that I had never seen before suddenly appeared on my periphery everywhere I went online, all because I had shown some interest in the NBA. I found this sort of targeted advertising rather predatory; salespeople had located a desire of mine, and immediately began in the process of squeezing profit value out of it. One could easily argue that the process of extracting value from desire is an inevitable part of capitalism - but I believe that the sort of targeted attack displayed through narrowcasting represents a more personal turn in the markets, and a turn that should not be supported. It is one thing to manufacture and advertise a product - it is a whole other thing to design ads to send to the phone of a 15 year old that have been outfitted with my name and a model who looks startlingly like me. The former, is an inevitability. The latter, however, should not be accepted as an inevitable development of the market. 

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Comments

  1. Elli ArzbaecherDecember 16, 2017 at 6:42 PM

    I completely agree with you that this concept and execution of narrowcasting in advertisement and tracking search history to send ads to specific people is predatory. It puzzles me how enough people thought that it was a good idea in order to implement, and I wonder how the people implementing this technique are even allowed to do so. I feel violated and like my privacy is being stolen by companies for the sole reason of trying to advertise to me. It's completely unbelievable and I think people should get some say in how their information is taken and used and the ability of others to expose them to personalized advertisement.

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    1. Jacob DeanDecember 16, 2017 at 7:41 PM

      (In case it isn't clear, this comment is responding to the above comment and not the post)

      I agree that the sort of aggressive narrowcasting described in this post is irritating, but I am a bit puzzled by your outrage. This technique was implemented because it is effective (or companies believe it to be so) and it is allowed because the government understandably does not prohibit it. In addition, narrowcasting does not steal your privacy. Whatever information corporations are using to target you with advertisements was given to them by you. You do have control over whether you follow an Instagram account, and companies are not stealing something from you by using using this action you have taken to focus their marketing efforts. Finally, how exactly would you propose to curtail "the ability of others to expose them to personalized advertisement."? I presume the answer is government regulation, but how precisely would such regulation be structured to prevent narrowcasting but still allow corporations to advertise?

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    2. UnknownDecember 17, 2017 at 2:45 PM

      Not all of the information that companies have was willingly given to them by the consumer - corporations like Target often create profiles of consumers based on notions of individuals that are brought about by purchasing history, etc. In other words, things are assumed about the consumer, but not voluntarily given. To this extent, I disagree that the entire process is completely consensual.

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